Claims and Debts Revisited

In my meditation on Weil’s reading of the line “and forgive us our debts as we also forgive our debtors” continues to linger with me. I think it does so because it is so easy to read her meditation as a self-forgiving abdication of historical memory. It would be so easy to read it as a complete denial of seeing the world through the lens of debits and credits. This would seemingly require us to ignore the past as a whole and absolve ourselves of any complicity with injustice. This is a conventional Christian position that makes the mere asking of God for forgiveness into a total and complete wiping clean of the slate. The life I live would thus be seen as completely free of any debt that I owe to the past because my relationship with God is completely between us and allows me to ignore how my life is built on what has come before me. Here we have the ascetic ideal made way too easy and not at all aligned with the example of Jesus.

This makes no sense, and to read Weil this way equally makes no sense. Most of what Weil has to say about “and forgive us our debts as we also forgive our debtors” is a meditation on the second part of this line: we renounce our claims to repayment for either wrongs done to us or for generosity that we have shown to others. In short, we must not see the world as owing us anything. But this does not work in reverse. We do not demand that the world and others to whom we may have done wrong forgive us. Rather, when we ask God to “forgive us our debts,” God only returns partial forgiveness — we are still on the hook for our participation in the past whether we are talking about personal wrongs we have done ourselves or the weight of history that has given us privileges built on the oppression of others.

Admittedly, this is a tough argument to tease out of her text, and it is easier to find elsewhere in her writings. This partial forgiveness is essential to understand, even though it is undertheorized in her meditation on the Our Father. I’ll cite two passages where I think it is possible to tease out what she means. I will italicize to emphasize certain aspects that help with the teasing out:

To have forgiven our debtors is to have renounced the whole of the past in a lump. It is to accept that the future should still be virgin and in tact, strictly united to the past by bonds which are unknown to us, but quite free from the bonds which our imagination thought to impose upon it. It means that we accept the possibility that no matter what may happen, and that it may happen to us in particular; it means that we are prepared for the future to render all our past life sterile and vain. (162)

For to ask him to forgive us our debts is to ask him to wipe out the evil which is in us. Pardon is purification. God himself has not the power to forgive the evil in us while it remains there. God will have forgiven our debts when he has brought us to the state of perfection.

Until then God forgives our debts partially in the same manner as we forgive our debtors. (164)

In the first passage, it should be clear that the perspective is the imaginary debts owed to us. Seeing the universe and others as owing us a debt must be renounced. Yet is should also be clear that a connection of the future to the past remains — the future is “strictly united to the past by bonds which are unknown to us.” We cannot exonerate ourselves from this bond; it is very real. Her point, I believe, is that renouncing our claims on history to do right by our individual selves is to renounce “the bonds which our imagination thought to impose upon it” — it is not to renounce that there is an actual historical past that makes a claim on us. To renounce our imaginary claims on history is to make it possible for us to recognized the real bonds that are there though “unknown to us.” It is, as such, a preparatory act that makes attention possible.

The second passage emphasizes only the partial forgiveness of God. You cannot simply walk into the confessional and ask God to exonerate you from the sins of the past — either the sins you directly committed or ones that you have inherited. This would be a form of Christian forgiveness that disassociates the penitent from the world and licenses him/her to ignore how our lives may have been built on the oppressions of others. It is the ultimate expression of the ascetic ideal as a cutting off of one’s responsibility for what he/she does in this world. Again, here is a form of Christianity that is way too easy. Such a form of personal and complete forgiveness simply for the asking would have been antithetical to Weil. It is, as I said above, the ascetic ideal without the hard effort of ascesis.