Sincerity in Medieval English Language and Literature by Graham Williams

Author:Graham Williams
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan UK, London

Forgiving in the Heart

For Anglo-Saxon England, there was little cultural frame for accomplishing reparation or reconciliation by expressing inward feelings via linguistic expression that would then be evaluated by an addressee as sincere or insincere as an essential condition of efficacy. Christianity ’s first cultural, ideological innovation in this respect was the suggestion that feeling contrite about sins could reconcile someone with their God. As I suggested in the previous chapter, ideas such as this stemming from divine omniscience, along with the concomitant linguistic ritual of confession, would have taken a long time to spread from monastic communities to the laity. And this latter point is significant because it is arguably only after the originally novel idea of affective reconciliation with God had taken root that the notion of affective reconciliation could then be generalized to interactions with others, i.e. the idea that if you feel bad about a wrong committed against someone else that saying as much to that person in itself should be grounds for them to forgive you. In this way, it is significant that the idea of affective forgiveness itself seems to have been something with limited scope in Anglo-Saxon culture.

The last chapter demonstrated how affective ideologies associated with devotional rituals , including confession, entered Anglo-Saxon culture, but what more specifically of the idea of reforming the hearts of the Anglo-Saxon laity apropos reconciling with one’s fellow Christians? The original ideological imperative for this was to do with divine law , and, as Foxhall Forbes (2013, Chapter 4) points out, fear of the Last Judgment was an overwhelming concern for Anglo-Saxon faith. Forgiveness from God for one’s sins was acquired via sincere confession, but the New Testament also emphasizes that it is God’s will that such forgiveness also be mirrored on Earth, for example in the Pater Noster , also summarized in Luke VI.37, Dimitte, et dimittemini (‘Forgive, and you shall be forgiven’).

Forgive is the word used in the Old English translations of the Pater Noster and the related verse from Luke . Yet the original sense of forgive in English was not affective, but pseudo-legal in the sense ‘to remit (a debt); pardon’ (OED ). Thus forgiveness was originally more of a social action with material consequences than an affective action, and historical reflexes for the utterance I forgive you were performative in that it relieved the addressee of a material or social debt. With the introduction of sin as a spiritual debt (again, a concept not current in traditional Germanic culture), the semantic remit of forgive(ness) gradually came to include affective condition s related to immaterial objects. Now when someone says I forgive you the reference is more often than not subjectively inward, i.e. it performs reconciliation as a social act by referring to how the speaker feels.

An intriguing example to do with forgiveness appears in Bede ’s account of the moral character and subsequent murder of King Sigeberht II (baptized c.653). In particular, he describes how the murderers killed the king for practicing the biblical injunction to forgive those who ask for forgiveness (III.

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