Salvation can be found only in memory," wrote Elie Wiesel in The Kingdom of Memory. Bitter lessons of history have taught him that "the memory of death will serve as a shield against death."

Yet in many parts of the world, includin g my own native land, the former Yugoslavia, the memory of death serves as an agent of death, keeping resentments and hatreds alive and burning. Here damnation, not salvation, seems to spring from memory.

No final reconciliation will take place without the redemption of the past, and the redemption of the past is unthinkable without forgetting. Indeed, only those who are willing ultimately to forget will be capable of remembering rightly.

After we have repented of hatred and forgiven our enemies, after we have made space in ourselves for them and left the door open, our will to embrace them must allow the one final, and perhaps the most difficult, act to take place if the process of reconciliation is be complete. It is the act of forgetting the evil suffered, a certain kind of forgetting, I hasten to add-a forgetting that assumes that the matters of "truth" and "justice" have been taken care of, that perpetrators have been named, judged, and (one hopes) transformed, that victims are safe and their wounds healed, a forgetting that can therefore ultimately take place only together with the creation of "all things new."

Could I be serious in suggesting "forgetting" as the final act of redemption? Do not victims have excellent reasons for never forgetting injustices suffered and hurts endured? There is no need to look far to find reasons. The subdued joy of the perpetrators over the loss of memory is the best argument for inscribing the narratives of their misdeeds in stone. Indeed, we have an obligation to know, to remember, and not to keep silent. If the victims remember rightly, the memory of inhumanities past will shield both them and all of us against future inhumanities; if the perpetrators remember rightly, the memory of their wrongdoing will help restore their guilty past and transform it into the soil on which a more hopeful future can grow. Yet, if we must remember wrongdoings in order to be safe in an unsafe world, we must also let go of their memory in order to be finally redeemed, or so I want to argue here.

My argument will make sense only if we give up the prejudice that "remembering" is always good and "nonremembering" always bad. The prejudice is understandable because remembering does the kind of work for us in day-to-day living that forgetting could never do. "Don't you remember?" may be a legitimate reproach, whereas "Didn't you fail to remember?" strikes us as nonsensical. Should we then conclude that the less we forget the better? When it comes to such things as phone numbers of our friends, this is indeed so. But when it comes to the complex ongoing relationships between friends, complete restitution of the past is not only impossible, but its very thought is terrifying. Memory is much more complex than simple retention; its opposite is not oblivion. Instead, retention and oblivion function as two interrelated aspects of the larger phenomenon of memory; the remembering of some things entails the forgetting of others, and the forgetting of some things often takes place by the remembering of others. We remember what matters to us and forget what does not; and only what we remember can matter to us whereas what we forget cannot. Within the framework of historical memory, "remembering" and "nonremembering" are two intertwined ways of reconstructing our past and thereby forging our identities. The enemy is therefore not so much the "forgetting," but those who want to rob us of the right to decide for ourselves what to forget and what to remember as well as when to do so. 1

How might "forgetting" of the evil suffered shape our identity and our relation to the other? In what way can it be redemptive? Memory of evil is a shield against evil, I said. Notice, however, the double function of the shield: it protects from violence by inserting itself between me and the enemy; it shelters by redoubling the boundary between the self and the other. The memory of the wrongdoing superimposes on the image of the other a narrative of transgression; even a forgiven sinner is still a past sinner if her sins are not forgotten. If the wrongdoing does not recur, the narrative of transgression will recede in the background and allow the human face of the other to emerge, which will in turn cast the narrative of past sin in a new light. But as soon as a new wrongdoing occurs, the narrative of transgression will spring into the foreground, its large letters, printed in bold, eclipsing the human face of the other. Vivid or clouded, the memory of exclusion suffered is itself a form of exclusion-a protective exclusion to be sure-but an exclusion nonetheless. In my memory of the other's transgression, the other is locked in unredemption, and we together are bound in a relationship of nonreconciliation.

The memory of the wrong suffered is also a source of my own nonredemption. As long as the past is remembered, the past is not just past; it is an aspect of the present. A remembered wound is an experienced wound. Deep wounds from the past can so much pain our present that, as Toni Morrison puts it in Beloved, the future becomes "a matter of keeping the past at bay." "All things and all manner of things" cannot be well with me today if they are not well in my memory of yesterday. Even remaking the whole world and removing all sources of suffering will not bring redemption if it does not stop incursions of the unredeemed past into the redeemed present through the door of memory. Since memories shape present identities, neither I nor the other can be redeemed without redemption of our remembered past. "To redeem the past . . . that alone do I call redemption," remarked Nietzsche profoundly in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. 2

But how can the past be redeemed when "time does not run back"? How can we undo our past wounds so as to make whole our broken selves? How can we separate evildoers from their past evil deeds and be reconciled with them? "Powerless against that which has been done," how, we could ask, using Nietzsche's image, will we roll away the stone called "That which was"? To accomplish the redemption of the past, Nietzsche himself suggested the superhuman act of transforming every "It was" into an "I willed it thus" by the force of "the creative will." Yet the kind of metaphysical miracle Nietzsche has to perform in order to teach the will to "will backwards" and "be reconciled with time" will strike most as a failed trick of a magician. In order to enable the will to "break time and time's desire," he must devise a whole dark theory of the eternal recurrence of all things, which makes even Zarathustra look "like a man seized by extremest terror"! No, for the will-even for the kind of "creative will" that Nietzsche celebrates-the past will forever remain its "most lonely affliction."

The more usual way of redeeming the past is not by willing but by thinking, by an interpretive act of inscribing the tragedy of the past into the precondition of a nontragic future. Redemption of the past is here modeled on theodicies. In the trajectory of Augustinian thinking, for instance, one could reason something like this: Much as all the dark shadows in the world "harmonize" with patches of light and contribute to the beauty of the world when the whole is seen from the ultimate perspective of the Creator, so also all the ugliness in my life contributes in some inexplicable way to its future beauty. Evil serves some larger good, and we "no longer desire a better world," as Augustine puts it in Confessions (VII, 13). Yet none of the attempts at redeeming past suffering through thinking is able to redeem all of it, and most have the odious consequence of making the suffering itself all the more justified (or at least sanctioned), the more successful they are. More important, even if thinking can deny evil, it cannot remove pain; it triumphs not "over real evil but only over its aesthetic phantom," as Paul Ricoeur puts it. 3

The problem of suffering, whether past or present, cannot be addressed as a speculative question. Life in this world, says Juergen Moltmann in The Trinity and the Kingdom of God, mean s living with the "open question" of suffering that springs from the "open wound of life in this world"-and "seeking the future in which the desire for God will be fulfilled, suffering will be overcome, and what has been lost will be restored." 4 The only adequate response to suffering is action.

But though action can do much about suffering in the present, it can do nothing about the past experience of suffering. When the tears have dried up, and death and pain are no more, what will happen with the memories of the wounds suffered and of the inhumanity of those who inflicted them? When God restores what has been lost, how will the experience of loss be restored? As long as we remember the injustice and suffering, we will not be whole, and the troubling and unanswerable "open question" that craves resolution in an impossible harmony will keep resurfacing. The response of action, even the eschatological transformation, to the problem of past suffering will not suffice. Even in God's new world, we will either have to look back and see "sense" or be deeply troubled by the "non-sense" of evil.

Will we be able to see "sense"? No, the "non-sense" of at least some suffering is eternal; all the "work of thinking" must finally fail and evil remain a "permanent aporia," as Ricoeur argues. 5 Yet, in the glory of God's new world-especially there!-the non-sense of past suffering will be insufferable-as insufferable as would be its "sense."

If both "non-sense" and "sense" are unacceptable as noetic stances, could then the only way to "solve" the problem of past suffering be the nontheoretical act of nonremembering, 6 just as the only way to overcome the present experience of suffering is the nontheoretical act of re-creation? After arguing for the "aporetic aspect of thinking about evil" and suggesting "the response of action to the challenge of evil," Ricoeur immediately adds that "the action alone is not enough," because suffering keeps rekindling the questions "Why?" "Why me?" or "Why my beloved child?" To deal with these persisting questions he suggests that we do the "work of mourning."

The suggestion is helpful, but it does not go far enough. Even after the work of mourning is done, the questions will remain if the memory remains. Passing through the stages of mourning, we must ultimately reach the stage of nonremembering-in the arms of God. For Ricoeur, however, the final stage of mourning is not forgetting but "loving God for naught." If we reached that point, he argues, we would "escape completely the cycle of retribution to which the lamentation still remains captive, so long as the victim bemoans the injustice of his or her fate."

But would we be fully redeemed? Since "loving God for naught" would not remove the pain from the past or right the injustice already committed-no heaven can rectify Auschwitz-we would love God in spite of such pain and injustice. And if the suffering remains in the past, the lament over the suffering will remain, at least in the form of an unredeemed sadness over injustice that could not be undone. Only nonremembering can end the lament over suffering that no thought can think away and no action undo. 7

In a nutshell, my argument is this: Since no final redemption is possible without the redemption of the past, and since every attempt to redeem the past through reflection must fail because no theodicy can succeed, the final redemption is unthinkable without a certain kind of forgetting. Put starkly, the alternative is: either heaven or memory of horror. Heaven will either have no monuments to keep the memory of the horrors alive, or it will be closer to hell than we would like to think. For if heaven cannot rectify Auschwitz, then the memory of Auschwitz must undo the experience of heaven. Redemption will be complete only when the creation of "all things new" is coupled with the passage of "all things old" into the double nihil of nonexistence and nonremembrance. Such redemptive forgetting is implied in passages in Revelation about the new heavens and the new earth. "Mourning and crying and pain" will be no more not only because "death will be no more" but also because "the first things have passed away" (21:4)-from experience as well as from memory, as the text in Isaiah from which Revelation quotes explicitly states: "the former things shall not be remembered or come to mind" (65:17; cf. 43:18). 8

(continued in next article)

Copyright (c) 1996 Christianity Today, Inc./Books & Culture Magazine

September/October 1996, Page 12

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