Forgiveness and modern narcissism

Recall the woman taken in adultery:

Then Jesus lifting up himself, said to her: Woman, where are they that accused thee? Hath no man condemned thee?
Who said: No man, Lord. And Jesus said: Neither will I condemn thee. Go, and now sin no more.
Again therefore, Jesus spoke to them, saying: I am the light of the world. He that followeth me, walketh not in darkness, but shall have the light of life (Jn. 8.10-12).

Only God, through Jesus Christ, has the power to forgive (see the Catechism of the Catholic Church, 1441-1448). And Christ, in virtue of His Divine Goodness, has bestowed this power on men invested in His apostolic ministry.

Now the abstract idea that is important here is that forgiveness is a relational act: at its most abstract, a man says that he is forgiven by someone else. It is this idea that is anathema to modern consciousness.

When things go wrong in the modern world, what we typically hear (from talk shows, self-help books, and well-intentioned but no less deluded friends) is that our first act should be to forgive ourselves. But how can this be?

There are two points here. First, forgiving oneself is incoherent. One can no more forgive oneself than one can singlehandedly engineer one's escape from a barren desert island. Second, the conceit that despite this impossibility we should forgive ourselves, be kind to ourselves, and as part of the act of forgiving indulge ourselves, is a particularly virulent manifestation of the narcissism rooted in the therapeutic culture of modern society.

The modern secular world is flat and undifferentiated. People are lazy, running into distraction to avoid silence, consuming in hopes of filling emptiness, and, because the culture is an arid plain, they come to endless fascination with the petty internal workings of the self. When persons reject or better, are purely indifferent to the idea that there are external realities, the only entity they have information about is themselves. It is the Cartesian impulse taken to its logical and perverse extreme: I think, therefore only I am.

And so modern man becomes his own judge and his own jury. He rejects responsibility for his actions, since each action is poised against a horizon in which he knows (because he knows nothing else) that he deserves forgiveness. It is a foregone conclusion. What then, is the point of acting one way or another, since one knows, ultimately, that it will be OK, that absolution is only as far away as one's own near-instantaneous decision to issue self-referential pardon that is accepted with an equally speedy and unthinking fiat? As we forgive ourselves, we wander deeper and deeper into the dark tomb of individualism, away from the light, from all points of reference.

Another name for this pathology is self-love. Here consider the words of St. Augustine: "Two different kinds of love have given origin to two cities, a heavenly city and an earthly one. Self-love, even unto contempt of God, gave origin to the earthly one; love of God, even unto contempt of self, gave origin to the heavenly one (De civ. Dei, 14.28)." The Church teaches us to love God, and in loving Him, that we are forgiven. So the words of St. John the Baptist, "Behold the Lamb of God, behold him who taketh away the sin of the world (Jn. 1.29b)." And, of course, the "what" we are forgiven of is our sin.

Sin is at the root of any consciousness rooted in reality. It is a two-pronged fact: we sin in acts and thoughts and in omissions, and we are sinful, stained in the order of nature through the sin of Adam. It is only in Jesus Christ, the new Adam, come to die for the world in order to save it, that we can hope to be forgiven, and in being forgiven saved. In the concrete knowledge of our helplessness our eyes turn heavenward to the boundless love of Our Divine Savior, and in the measure that we can return that love to Him, directly and in His creatures most of all our fellow men, we can act with purpose.

In loving God and others, and so manifestly not ourselves, we find true love. It is the kind of love that is directed outwards, which we shall never know on this earth whether we will recoup, that is the antidote to modern narcissism. We don't forgive ourselves because we can't, and in thinking that we can we hurt others, turning inwards, spiraling endlessly away from all that is good. Let us go first to the Confession, and then to each other, wholly powerless, knowing we have nothing but Christ, and that in Him we have everything.