God’s Remembering and God’s Forgetting: Confession and the Forgiveness of Sins

Elizabeth King
delivered at the 2018 Atlantic Theological Conference, entitled “Memory: Its Persistence and Loss in Christian Community”.

Introduction

In an address to this Conference in 1986 on “The Ministry of Reconciliation,” Fr Crouse set out two guiding tenets for the consideration of sin, confession and forgiveness.[1] First is the double work by which we are both already and yet must also become the ‘friends’ of God, the interplay, that is, between the beginning of the divine-human friendship in Christ’s atoning sacrifice, and its growth and perfection in learning daily to die and live in him. This beginning and growth of the friendship between God and man is what the terms ‘justification’ and ‘sanctification’ ultimately mean and this is the larger context in which questions of sin and forgiveness belong. Second is the related fact that “we grow in penitence only as we grow in adoration.”[2] Penitence belongs inherently to the growth of the larger life of praise into which humanity is called as the creatures, or children, of God. It cannot be isolated from that larger life.

This paper will therefore consider confession and the forgiveness of sins through these two principles. Using Charles Williams’s books He Came Down from Heaven and The Forgiveness of Sins, it will first consider the beginning of the friendship between God and man through the particular image of the divine remembering and divine forgetting. The image of God’s memory–and it is indeed an image—is especially relevant to the activity of repentance, the act of confession, and the bestowal and receiving of forgiveness, not least because these things necessarily involve the human memory.

Few have focused so intently on telling and re-telling the story of the soul’s self-remembering, self-forgetting return to her Maker as has the great-hearted poet-preacher George MacDonald. None, I would argue, has done so more powerfully in images that speak to and call forth the child within, whom he believed we are each called to become. This paper will therefore look to his fairy tales, particularly to a moment of self-knowledge in The Princess and Curdie, as a way of considering further the growth of friendship between God and man.

The second of Fr Crouse’s principles, that repentance and adoration go hand in hand, is absolutely crucial for both Charles Williams and George MacDonald. Because of the co-inherence, or interconnectedness, of all of creation, and the place of the human within it, the penitential adoration of men and women has bearing on the return of the whole of the created order to its Source.

Friendship between God and human – its beginning, growth and end

We noted in passing just now that to speak of God as ‘forgetting’ and ‘remembering’ is to speak by means of an image. It is certainly an image central to the scriptural message of penitence and pardon, particularly as delivered through the prophets. “I will remember their sins no more” (Jeremiah 31:3-4); “I am He that blotteth out thy transgressions for My own sake…and will not remember thy sins” (Isaiah 43:25); “For, behold, I create new heavens and a new earth: and the former shall not be remembered, nor come into mind” (Isaiah 65:17). The penitent soul responds in kind: “Remember not the sins of my youth, nor my transgressions: according to thy mercy remember thou me for thy goodness’ sake, O Lord” (Psalm 25:7).   

In his book He Came Down from Heaven, written on the eve of World War II, Charles Williams wonders about the prophets’ emphasis on God’s forgetting in the light of His eternal nature:

But forgetfulness implies a temporal state; there can be no eternal oblivion of an act of which there is an eternal awareness, and the very nature of eternity is awareness of all…How can the High and Holy One forget? how can he refuse to know what has been? how can the eternity of heaven exclude from itself the knowledge of man’s knowing good in schism, and of good as evil?...It is not conceivable that the Omniscience should forget; it is not satisfactory that the redeemed should forget. If a corner of experience is to be hidden, the unity is by so much impaired.[3]

In this barrage of questions, we see how the question of God’s memory is not an idle one, but one which has direct bearing on whether or not friendship between God and human, as well as between human and human, is possible. The problem is taken up again and treated more fully in The Forgiveness of Sins, written three years later in 1942. There, Williams places the language of God’s ‘forgetting’ of sin alongside the principle that “it is the blood that maketh atonement for the soul” (Leviticus 17:11), that without the sacrifice of blood there is no forgiveness. ‘Forgetting’ is necessary in addition to the blood because the sacrifice of blood has itself become iniquity through human willfulness and self-deception.[4] God’s ‘forgetting’ does not negate the principle of blood sacrifice but runs alongside it pointing to the inner state of which the sacrifice is an outer expression. Williams then interprets the language of God’s ‘forgetting’ of sin in the prophets as sin’s ‘seclusion’. God conceals the sin within Himself so that “only he remembers it, and that only to himself; his mercy is to spare his people the recollection.”[5]

However, the ‘seclusion’ of man’s sin in God, while preserving the Eternal Omniscience from the anthropomorphism of forgetfulness, and mercifully preserving the human from destruction, would remain nonetheless an impairment to the unity which friendship between God and man assumes. For Williams, the meaning and end of both principles—remission through the sacrifice of blood and through the seclusion of the sin in God—must lie in the Incarnation as well as in the atoning sacrifice of the Cross. God’s willing to become man as the means of drawing all creation into Himself is implicit from the beginning.

Christ “became then Forgiveness in flesh; he lived the life of Forgiveness.”[6] In the consummation of this Life of forgiveness on the Cross and in the Resurrection, all is suddenly exposed:

The past was now exposed. [Christ’s] glory secluded the scars no more; therefore it did not seclude the sin that led to them…The Resurrection was the Resurrection of Forgiveness, but the sin which brought it about was no longer to be covered, even by and in God himself…Everything was to be known; God had secluded in himself so long as he himself remained secluded. But…the exposition of himself meant the exposition of all that was in himself—including the sin and the sacrifice he had deigned to become.[7]  

The wounds of love on the hands, feet and side of Christ’s risen body are the sign of the fact that in heaven nothing is forgotten: all is to be revealed and known. For Williams, drawing from the revelation of Lady Julian of Norwich, sin too is already known in heaven and is to be revealed and known, yes, but as transfigured, and thereby the cause of a joy unimaginable to our current condition. In the movement from God’s seclusion of sin within Himself, to its revelation with Himself on the Cross and finally to its resting place in the wounds of love, the great transformation of sin has already taken place and also continues to take place. “In God [the secluded sin] was hidden, but then[,] like all things in him[,] it was a hidden joy.”[8]  

This is to speak sub specie aeternitatis; this is how it looks from eternity’s perspective. This perspective is the one which calls out to the pilgrim soul, as the perspective of the theological virtues of faith, hope and charity.[9] Nonetheless, the temporal struggle of each person to receive this perspective and allow it to have its formative and re-formative work within remains. On the human side of the relationship, the image of God’s forgetting and remembering which the prophets stressed in their hammering at the stony heart,[10]  remains necessary for Williams as “a fact of the spiritual life.”[11] The soul must learn to forget the shame and guilt attaching to the sin, as these passions belong to the disordered state and have no part in forgiven sin’s transfiguration into a re-ordered good.

But the soul must also learn to remember who she herself truly is. The friendship between God and man depends upon the soul’s coming to know herself. To consider this further we turn to the soul-tales of the Scottish poet-preacher George MacDonald.

George MacDonald’s first book, Phantastes, written in 1858, is the coming-of-age story of a young man named Anodos, who wakes up one morning to find himself on the borders of Fairy Land. His unusual name means both ‘pathless’ and ‘upward way’ in Greek. MacDonald’s source for this name wonderfully appears to be Plato’s allegory of the cave, where ‘anodos’ signifies the soul’s ascent into to the intelligible regions.[12] ‘Anodos might be said to be the secret name of many of MacDonald’s main characters, for over and over again, in his essays,[13] fairy tales,[14] short stories and novels, he followed the paths of individual souls on their journey back to the God and Father of all. His whole life’s work might be summed up in the tracing of this trajectory. This fact in itself is instructive: like Augustine, though in another mode, MacDonald never tires of depicting the universal return playing out in particular lives. While the overarching pattern of pilgrimage remains largely consistent throughout his work, and the same images return again and again, they are not merely reiterated. In some stories, one stage might take longer than in another; one image might take precedence over another; but in all, the images and the pattern are brought to bear on each of MacDonald’s characters as best corresponds to his or her nature and capacity.

In his essay, “The Fantastic Imagination”, MacDonald wrote that “The laws of the spirit of man must hold, alike in this world and in any world he may invent…In physical things a man may invent; in moral things he must obey—and take their laws with him into his invented world as well.”[15] In his fairy tales and romances, then, everything pulses with the life of the spirit, the inner life, and what is often dispersed and veiled in his ‘ordinary’ novels is concentrated and vibrating in the fantasies. And so throughout his work we find an almost overwhelming number of powerful images of the decline into sin, the coming of self-knowledge, repentance and purgation which we could draw on. This is not to say that the tales signify in a strictly allegorical, or one-to-one correspondence kind of way. There are layers and layers which contain many meanings. This too is a result, and even an intensification, of the principle that the laws of the spirit of man hold between this world and all others. “Everyone…who feels the story,” MacDonald wrote, “will read its meaning after his own nature and development.”[16] And this does not only apply across different individuals; the stories may contain multiple meanings for the same person as deep calls to lower deep within. As an inheritor of the Platonic tradition, MacDonald understood the human person as a multiplicity, ever possessing the potential to identify through his or her activity and love with the animal, the human or the god within, and to experience Goodness according to the corresponding mode.[17]

Really, then, nothing will do but to read the tales for themselves, any or all of them, and to read and enjoy them again and again. Here I have time only to dwell on the beginning scenes of one tale, that of the miner-boy Curdie in The Princess and Curdie.

Published in 1883, The Princess and Curdie is a sequel to The Princess and the Goblin of 1872. The Princess and the Goblin tells the story of how the little Princess Irene and the miner-boy Curdie are thrown together in a mission to save the castle from an invasion of goblins from below. As a miner Curdie is well acquainted with the goblins, and not afraid of them, and he is able to spy on their underground plottings. Picking up the thread of this story, The Princess and Curdie tells us what happened to Curdie after the saving of the castle. The princess has left the castle with her father the King to return to court. Curdie is bereft, but everyday life eventually takes over. As the story begins we are told that he is “becoming more and more of a miner, and less and less a man of the upper world where the wind blew…he was gradually changing into a commonplace man.”[18] The problem is not being a miner—Curdie’s father is one too and is far from commonplace. Rather, it lies in Curdie’s relation to an element of his past adventures with the princess.

The Princess Irene had always been talking about her beautiful great-great grandmother, who lived in the uppermost tower of the castle, and who had been the one to send her on her mission with Curdie. She had even taken Curdie to meet her great-great grandmother in the tower, but where the Princess saw a beautiful room, a fire of red and white roses, and a great and beautiful lady, Curdie had seen “nothing but a bare garret, a heap of musty straw, a sunbeam and a withered apple.”[19] Despite the fact that the Princess’s conviction is corroborated by their adventures, after her departure Curdie becomes more and more doubtful about the reality they had both utterly depended on, that is, the existence of the great-great grandmother. With time, he “shrank from thinking about it, and the less he thought about it the less he was to believe it when he did think about it.”[20] This shrinking from his experience of an invisible reality is the reason why he is “not in a very good way,” and this state is likened to a “continuous dying”.[21]

All this changes one evening when he is walking home from the mine. He has his bow and arrow in hand, which he had recently made for himself. In the red glow of the sunset a beautiful white pigeon alights in front of him to preen itself. One moment he finds himself one with the pigeon, communing deeply with it, enjoying its beauty in its moment of rest; the next moment it falls, “broken-winged and bleeding from Curdie’s cruel arrow.”[22] Curdie’s initial response is to be chuffed at his success in hitting his target, but he is not prepared for the consequences:

With a gush of pride…he ran to pick up his prey. I must say for him he picked it up gently—perhaps it was the beginning of his repentance. But when he had the white thing in his hands…when he held it, I say, in his victorious hands, the winged thing looked up in his face…Curdie’s heart began to grow very large in his bosom. What could it mean? It was nothing but a pigeon, and why should he not kill a pigeon? But the fact was that not till this very moment had he ever known what a pigeon was…

its throbbing ceased. Curdie gave a sob: its last look reminded him of the princess—he did not know why. He remembered how hard he had laboured to set her beyond danger, and yet what dangers she had had to encounter for his sake: they had been saviours to each other—and what had he done now? He had stopped saving, and begun killing! What had he been sent into the world for? Surely not to be a death to its joy and loveliness. He had done the thing that was contrary to gladness; he was a destroyer! He was not the Curdie he had meant to be!

Then the underground waters gushed from the boy’s heart.[23]

With these tears welling up from deep within, he remembers why the pigeon should have reminded him of the princess, how she had told him that these animals belonged to her great-great grandmother. One had circled around them after their victory over the goblins was complete. Curdie is horrified to think that this might be the same pigeon. Suddenly, all of nature seems to turn against him, and he is paralysed, holding the dead bird in his hand. Time passes and the sun goes down. He is tempted to deny the weight of what he has done, to throw the bird down and walk away with a whistle, but just at this moment he sees the glow of a light from the direction of the castle. The pigeon flutters in his hand and in his great relief that it is not yet dead, he runs at full speed but with great care for the bird, to find Irene’s great-great grandmother.

In this passage we see how Curdie’s experience of beauty and unity in the white pigeon is immediately followed by the destruction of that beauty. It follows so swiftly upon his contemplative enjoyment that it seems he is not aware of his action until he sees the bird fall. But the unity he had just experienced opens up a line of communication, as it were, with the bird, such that he is careful to pick it up gently, and such that its wondering, wounded look is able to pierce his heart and common sense. And from here he is drawn further inward, to the precious memory of his experience with the princess, where they were by turns each other’s only hope, though ultimately upheld by the providential help of the invisible great-great grandmother. Irene had been Curdie’s eyes, mediating the great-great grandmother to him. In the princess’s absence, he is now thrown back upon this invisible providence. He finds the castle door wide open and the way to the tower makes itself known to him. This time, he finds an old woman sitting at her spinning wheel. As he brings the bird to her, she consoles it, and they talk. In this manner, Curdie’s confession begins. It begins with a consideration of the act of killing the bird; he is brought to admit that while he didn’t mean any harm, he also didn’t mean any good.[24] The old woman’s gentle questioning and the singing of the spinning wheel lead him to fall into a kind of trance. He wakes up to a further knowledge of himself:

Thank you, ma’am, for spinning it into me with your wheel. I see now that I have been doing wrong the whole day, and such a many days besides! Indeed, I don’t know when I ever did right, and yet it seems as if I had done right some time and forgotten how…I was doing the wrong of never wanting or trying to be better. And now I see that I have been letting things go as they would for a long time.[25]

The old woman tells him how glad she is that he harmed the pigeon because it brought him to see himself, and then promises him that she will heal it. He asks her how he might thank her and she says “There is only one way I care for. Do better, and grow better, and be better.” She hints that they will meet again, if he passes the trial, which is never to laugh or make fun of her when he hears tales about her, and then as he helps her to her feet she is transformed into a tall, strong and severe-looking woman, the great-great grandmother whom the Princess Irene had described.

The book opens with a long passage describing the outer aspect of the mountain, and its hidden depths. Similarly, Curdie’s tale from now on has both an outer and an inner aspect. Outwardly, he is sent by the great-great grandmother on a mission to save the Princess Irene, her father the King, and ultimately the kingdom from would-be usurpers to the throne. Inwardly, this opening episode in which he is called to remember who he truly is sets the stage for a journey that relies on forgetting himself in obedience and love.

While other of George MacDonald’s works stress higher stages of the upward way, its beginning motions are drawn in Curdie with particular vividness. His moment of self-remembering and the great-great grandmother’s gentle but deliberate exposure of the root of his blindness is in much the same spirit as Charles Williams’s emphasis on the primacy of a love that will know all. The growth of friendship between God and man requires self-knowledge on the part of the human, and that friendship is itself the context in which this self-knowledge is deepened, in confession before the compassionate, severe face of Christ.

 Penitential adoration: confession

“It is not because I am still in love with my shameful past that I wish to recall the deeds I committed then,” writes Augustine,

… Rather it is so that I may love you, my God. Out of love for your love I do this. With bitter regretfulness do I trace the evil and unprofitable paths I have trodden, that you may fill me with your sweetness, O God my Sweetness…that you may gather together the members that were torn apart and scattered piecemeal when I turned away from you, the One, and wasted myself in my pursuit of the Many…[26]

In her self-examination, the soul runs through her fragments, all the good thoughts, words and deeds she has willed distortedly, half-willed and willed excessively. She does this not in order to win God’s love, but in response to what has already been given in the generous outflow which is the nature of God Himself. Confession of sin becomes confession of love and praise, and seeks the return of the whole creature to the unity. As the end of the Confessions makes clear, this return is not limited to the individual confessing, but has an inherent relation to the groanings of the whole of creation. The whole of creation is waiting on the repentance of the sons of men.

We find a liturgical expression of this penitential adoration in the Benedicite, omnia opera, the song of the Three Children from the book of Daniel, which in the Book of Common Prayer can replace the canticle Te Deum Laudamus at Morning Prayer during penitential seasons. Ananias, Azarias and Misael sang this song, gathering creature by creature into their adoration, from the midst of the fiery furnace, where a fourth walked with them and shielded them so that they came out unscathed. Themselves bearing the guilt of Israel in captivity, theirs is also a song of penitence and indeed, even of a kind of substitutionary love. This is just one example of the inherent connection between repentance and adoration which may be found in the liturgy.  

In her Memorial, in which her journey of repentance is described in thirty steps, St Angela of Foligno, a thirteenth-century Italian Franciscan tertiary, shows the other side of this gathering up, this return of all creation:

And in a profound way all my sins were brought back into my memory as I was confessing them before God. I did pray all creatures (seeing how that I had offended them inasmuch as I had offended the Creator), that they would not accuse me before God… Then did it appear unto me that all creatures and all the saints did have compassion upon me…[27]

Not only is confession part of the great re-gathering-in of the created order; on the other side, the whole of creation in fact participates in the forgiveness of sins. Through the fact of the interconnectedness, the co-inherence, of all created things, the individual soul bears responsibility toward the whole of the created order. Angela’s vision is that, further, the whole of the created order is swift to have compassion on the repentant soul. In confession the groaning of the whole of creation finds itself articulated.

For Charles Williams and George MacDonald both, “reconciliation is the very life of heaven.” The friendship between God and man is to be a unity in which all is known, as it is already known in Christ risen and ascended. This friendship grows and is perfected through the soul’s inhabiting of the spirit of penitential adoration. Whether public or private, all forms of confession seek this inhabiting. This inhabiting has bearing on the return of all things to their God and Father. In Augustine, Williams, MacDonald and Angela, we have before us an invitation to enter the fiery furnace. We will find we are not alone.

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Notes

[1] Robert D. Crouse, “The Ministry of Reconciliation: Anglican Approaches”, Holy Living: Christian Morality Today, A Theological Conference held at the University of King’s College, Halifax, Nova Scotia, May 20th-23rd, 1986, edited G. Richmond Bridge (Charlottetown, P.E.I.: St. Peter Publications, 1987), 50-58. For a further account of the ancient inheritance of this understanding of the growth of friendship between the divine and the human as the context for the soul’s ascent to union, see Dr Wayne Hankey, “Visio: The Method of Robert Crouse’s Philosophical Theology”. Recognizing the Ancient Sacred in the Modern Secular: How the sacred is to be discovered in today’s world, A Theological Conference held at the University of King’s College, Halifax, Nova Scotia, June 26th-29th, 2011, edited Susan Harris and Nicholas Hatt (Charlottetown, P.E.I.: St. Peter Publications, 2012), 115-148.

[2] Robert D. Crouse, “The Ministry of Reconciliation”, 57.

[3] Charles Williams, He Came Down from Heaven and The Forgiveness of Sins (Berkeley, CA: Apocryphile Press, 2005), 39.

[4] Williams, The Forgiveness of Sins, 143. He quotes Isaiah 66:3: “He that killeth an ox is as if he slew a man; he that sacrificeth a lamb is as if he cut off a dog’s neck;  he that offereth an oblation as if he offered swine’s blood; he that burneth incense as if he blessed an idol. Yea, they have chosen their own ways, and their soul delighteth in their abominations.”

[5] Williams, The Forgiveness of Sins, 142.

[6] Williams, The Forgiveness of Sins, 145, 147.

[7] Ibid., 156, 159.

[8] Williams, The Forgiveness of Sins, 185.

[9] Robert D. Crouse, “Images of Pilgrimage: Paradise and Wilderness in Christian Spirituality” (Charlottetown, P.E.I.: St. Peter Publications, 1986), Chapter VI.

[10] Williams, He Came Down from Heaven, 39.

[11] Williams, The Forgiveness of Sins, 186, quoting Kierkegaard: “I must…have faith that God in forgiving has forgotten what guilt there is…in thinking of God I must think that he has forgotten it, and so learn to dare to forget it myself in forgiveness.”

[12] Republic, 517b5: …τὴν δὲ ἄνω ἀνάβασιν καὶ θέαν τῶν ἄνω τὴν εἰς τὸν νοητὸν τόπον τῆς ψυχῆς ἄνοδον τιθεὶς οὐχ ἁμαρήτσῃ τῆς γ’ἐμῆς ἐλπίδος, ἐπειδὴ ταύτης ἐπιθυμεῖς ἀκούειν.

[13] See “A Sketch of Individual Development” in A Dish of Orts (1893).

[14] On the inadequacy of this English word, see MacDonald, “The Fantastic Imagination”, in A Dish of Orts. The German term Märchen is more accurate.

[15] MacDonald, “The Fantastic Imagination”.

[16] “The Fantastic Imagination”.

[17] Contrary to Rolland Hein’s evaluation of MacDonald’s vision (The Harmony Within: The Spiritual Vision of George MacDonald (Grand Rapids, MI: Christian University Press, 1982), 53), MacDonald is working within and is deeply indebted to the Platonic tradition, as indeed are Boehme, the German Romantics, Coleridge and others from which he drew inspiration.

[18] George MacDonald, The Princess and Curdie (1882), 12. (Pagination refers to the 1994 Puffin Classics edition.)

[19] Ibid., 9.

[20] Ibid., 10-11.

[21] Ibid., 12.

[22] Ibid., 13.

[23] The Princess and Curdie, 15.

[24] The Princess and Curdie, 25.

[25] Ibid., 26-27.

[26] Augustine, Confessions X.2.3.

[27] Angela of Foligno, Memorial. Translated by Cristina Mazzoni (Cambridge: Boydell & Brewer, 1999), 25. Cf. Williams, The Forgiveness of Sins, 107.