So anger is not just condemned: it seems to be counted as intrinsically
a vice. This would of course entail that a forgiveness preceded by anger
is not fully virtuous, it is just a remediation of a prior vice. And in
the famous discussion of love in 1 Corinthians 13, we find Paul stat-
ing, similarly, that love “does not become angry ( paroxunetai) and does not keep score of wrongs done.” It could not be clearer that this view
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rejects both conditional forgiveness and unconditional forgiveness as
fully adequate norms, recommending, instead, a love that bypasses
anger altogether.
Especially important for our purposes, since it deals with love in the
context of someone else’s wrongdoing, is Jesus’ parable of the Prodigal
Son in Luke 15, which is standardly understood as an example of forgive-
ness. The larger context does indeed contain a reference to forgiveness,
in the standard conditional and transactional mode. Two chapters later, Jesus says: “If your brother wrongs you, rebuke him; and if he repents,
forgive him. And if he wrongs you seven times in a day, and seven times
turns to you saying, ‘I repent,’ you shall forgive him” (17:3– 4).57 The two
briefer parables that precede the story of the Prodigal Son, however, make
reference only to loss, and to joy at rediscovery: the shepherd rejoices at
finding the lost sheep, the prudent housekeeper rejoices at finding her
lost piece of silver.
Now let us turn to the story of the son:
A certain man had two sons: And the younger of them said to
his father, Father, give me the portion of goods that falleth to me.
And he divided unto him his living. And not many days after the
younger son gathered all together, and took his journey into a far
country, and there wasted his substance with riotous living. And
when he had spent all, there arose a mighty famine in that land;
and he began to be in want. And he went and joined himself to
a citizen of that country; and he sent him into his fields to feed
swine. And he would fain have filled his belly with the husks
that the swine did eat: and no man gave unto him.
And when he came to himself, he said, How many hired ser-
vants of my father’s have bread enough and to spare, and I per-
ish with hunger! I will arise and go to my father, and will say
unto him, Father, I have sinned against heaven, and before thee,
and am no more worthy to be called thy son: make me as one of
thy hired servants. And he arose and came to his father.
But when he was yet a great way off, his father saw him, and
he was seized by a surge of emotion ( esplanchnisthē), and he ran,
and fell on his neck, and kissed him. And the son said unto him,
Father, I have sinned against heaven, and before thee, and am
no more worthy to be called thy son. But the father said to his
servants, Bring forth the best robe, and put it on him; and put a
ring on his hand, and shoes on his feet: And bring hither the fat-
ted calf, and kill it; and let us eat, and be merry: For this my son
was dead, and is alive again; he was lost, and is found. And they
began to be merry.
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Now his elder son was in the field: and as he came and drew
nigh to the house, he heard music and dancing. And he called one
of the servants, and asked what these things meant. And he said
unto him, Thy brother is come; and thy father hath killed the
fatted calf, because he hath received him safe and sound. And
he was angry, and would not go in: therefore came his father out
and entreated him. And he answering said to his father, Lo, these
many years do I serve thee, neither transgressed I at any time thy
commandment: and yet thou never gavest me a kid, that I might
make merry with my friends: But as soon as this thy son was
come, which hath devoured thy living with harlots, thou hast
killed for him the fatted calf. And he said unto him, Son, thou
are ever with me, and all that I have is thine. It was meet that we
should make merry, and be glad: for this thy brother was dead,
and is alive again; and was lost, and is found.58
We must carefully distinguish two points of view in the story: that of
the son, and that of the father. The son does resolve to confess sin and to
express contrition, and at least his words communicate this resolution. It is left utterly unclear whether the son is sincere. He has ample instrumental
motivation in his hunger, and the story suggests that he is going through
a calculation rather than really changing his life. The phrase translated
“came to himself,” much discussed by translators, might possibly allude
to a true self to which the prodigal is returning, but nothing in the story
has suggested a prior good self. The phrase would just as easily, I think
more easily, mean “contemplating,” “turning within,” “deliberating.”
But the son is in any case not the focus of the story. The focus is on
the reaction of the father, and this reaction certainly cannot be described
as forgiveness, whether transactional or unconditional. The father sees
his son coming from a great distance. He recognizes him. At this point he
cannot possibly know what the son is going to say or what his attitudes
are. He just sees that the son he has believed dead is actually alive, and
he is seized by a violent surge of strong emotion. The Greek esplanchnisthē
is a rare and extremely emphatic term, which means, literally, “his guts
were ripped out,” or even “his guts were devoured.”59 The father, then,
feels strong pangs— of a type of intense love that involves strong bodily
feeling, as might often happen with a parent who feels that his own body
and life are tied to this child. He runs to the son and embraces him, utterly without asking him any questions. There is no statement of forgiveness
and no time for forgiveness. Even after the son makes his statement of
repentance— after the father’s embrace— the father does not acknowledge the issue of contrition at all, but goes straight ahead with his joyful plans for celebration.
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Moreover, when the good son who has done everything right gets
annoyed at this celebration of his inferior brother, the father does not say,
“Look, he repented and I have forgiven him.” Instead— while reassuring
this son of his continued love and support for him, in words suggestive
of ongoing intimacy (“You are always with me”)— he just says, “I’m so
happy that he is still alive.” In short, there is no reference to forgiveness in this story, and no reference to contrition either, except in the possibly
unreliable statements of the son. To call the father’s attitude canonical
forgiveness, one has to impute something like the following thought pro-
cess to him: “I see my son coming. If he is coming back, this must mean
that he has learned his lesson and repented. Since he has repented, I will
let go of my anger and forgive him.” Even to call it unconditional forgive-
ness, we have to imagine the father thinking about his resentment, and
choosing freely to give it
up. But of course there is no such thought pro-
cess in the story, and no reference, even, to anger. Such a thought process
would have been that of a different father, more calculating and control-
ling. This father is taken over by love.
To understand this story, in short, we ought to put aside our ideas
of transactional forgiveness, whether Jewish or Christian, and even an
idea of an unconditional forgiveness without contrition, which would
still require the deliberate putting aside of anger. This story concerns the
depths and the unconditionality of parental love. What is so great about
this father is precisely that he does not pause to calculate and decide: he
just runs to him and kisses him. He has no thought for wrongs done to
himself; his only thought is that his son is alive.
Such a father might still, at some later time, talk to the son about
his life’s course. Unconditional love is fully compatible with guidance;
indeed, since the father wishes well to this son, he is almost certain to
give him advice so that his life will go better henceforth. The direction
of his emotion is Transitional: his love points to a future, and that future
will almost certainly contain advice. The initial impulse toward the son,
however, does not come from advice or calculation.
In the surrounding context, Jesus is speaking of God’s relationship
with sinners. At least the possibility is held out, then, of a love that is
itself radical and unconditional, sweeping away both forgiveness and the
anger that is its occasion, a love that embarks upon an uncertain future
with a generous spirit, rather than remaining rooted in the past.60
Such a picture of divine and human love is offered, almost two
millennia later, in our other dissident Judeo- Christian text, Mahler’s
Resurrection Symphony.61 I call the work Judeo- Christian because Mahler,
a Jew, converted to Christianity for social reasons, though he remained
quite heterodox in his religious attitudes, particularly in relation to the
Christian majority.
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Anger and Forgiveness
A deliberate continuation of a long Christian tradition of ponder-
ing an “ascent” of love, Mahler’s work— with texts partly borrowed and
mostly written by himself— deals with the Last Judgment and the Dies
Irae, in what Mahler understood to be a radically subversive manner.
Although Mahler never remained content with the verbal programs he
wrote for his symphonies, he was repeatedly drawn to such verbal for-
mulations. Here is the account of the final movement of the symphony
that he wrote for the Dresden performance of 1901:
The voice of the Caller is heard. The end of every living thing
has come, the last judgment is at hand and the horror of the day
of days has come upon us. The earth trembles, the graves burst
open, the dead arise and march forth in endless procession. The
great and small of this earth, the kings and the beggars, the just
and the godless, all press forward. The cry for mercy and forgive-
ness sounds fearful in our ears. The wailing becomes gradually
more terrible. Our senses desert us, all consciousness dies as the
Eternal Judge approaches. The last trump sounds; the trumpets
of the Apocalypse ring out. In the eerie silence that follows, we
can just barely make out a distant nightingale, a last tremulous
echo of earthly life.
A chorus of saints and heavenly beings softly breaks
forth: “Thou shalt arise, surely thou shalt arise.” Then appears
the glory of God! A wondrous, soft light penetrates us to the
heart— all is holy calm. And behold— it is no judgment— there
are no sinners, no just. None is great, none is small. There is no
punishment and no reward. An overwhelming love lightens our
being. We know and are.62
There are many reasons to connect this symphony with Mahler’s ongo-
ing suffering from hostility and misunderstanding at the hands of the
dominant, and strongly anti- Semitic, Christian music- culture of Vienna
in his day. Indeed, he records that the inspiration for the final movement
came to him while attending the funeral of Hans Von Bülow, an anti-
Semitic German conductor who had been particularly hostile to him. So
the context, at any rate, is one in which we might expect forgiveness to
play a role. We could even say that it is Mahler’s attempt at a Requiem
Mass. (A lifelong conductor of opera and symphonic music, Mahler was
intimately familiar with this genre.)
Whatever is “happening” in this final (fifth) movement, however, it
is radically unconventional in the Christian culture of the Requiem Mass.
As Mahler’s biographer Henri- Louis de La Grange says, with understate-
ment: “It has been pointed out that the very concept of resurrection is
essentially foreign to the Jewish faith, but the idea of a last judgment with no judge and no recognition of Good and Evil is just as unorthodox for a
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Christian.”63 (Note a crucial misstatement: Mahler does not say that there
is no good and no evil; rather, that there is no judgment dividing people
into “sinners” [damned] and “just” [saved].)
Immediately before the fifth movement, in the short fourth move-
ment, whose entirety is a song, entitled Urlicht (“Original Light”), Mahler has dramatized the journey of a child who sets out on a quest to allevi-ate human need and suffering. This child comes to a “wide road” (and
note that the road of sin, in traditional Christian metaphor, is the one
that is wide). An angel appears and tries to “warn her off” ( abweisen) that road. But the child now bursts out passionately, “Oh no! I will not allow
myself to be warned off!” ( Ich liess mich nicht abweisen). This drama, and the accompanying music— in which the child’s outburst introduces, for
the first time in the movement, characteristic Mahlerian chromaticism—
alludes to Mahler’s own contest with Christian music- culture, and the way
in which the “angels” of that culture warn him off from a path of emo-
tion and unconventional creativity that he feels he must take. (This “path
of sin” was also identified, by Mahler’s enemies, with the “Jewishness in
music” that Wagner had already famously repudiated.)64 Setting what is in
effect his own dramatic first- person point of view for a passionate contralto voice,65 Mahler alludes to themes of androgyny and receptivity that surface
often in his writings, and expresses his refusal to yield before convention.
At the same time, he insists that his unconventional journey is motivated
by compassion for human need. He will not abandon that quest.
The refusal, however, is not angry: it is just determined. The child
says, I’m going to go my own way and not permit you to stop me. (I’m
tempted to call its spirit Transitional.) The music expresses passionate
longing, but not any sort of resentment.
Thus, when we arrive at the last movement, which Mahler connects
with his enemies through the story of Von Bülow’s funeral, we should
expect no conventional resolution, no standard Dies Irae as in the many Requiem Masses Mahler knew and conducted. We do indeed
find, in
both verbal program and music, the first part of the Dies Irae: the fear, the urgent plea for forgiveness, the last trumpet. But then something fundamentally different happens. Mahler gleefully draws our attention to
this surprise. There is actually no judgment after all, only a chorus of
people singing softly. There is no punishment and no reward, only an
overwhelming love. “We know and are.” The ensuing text, sung by the
chorus and two solo female voices, draws attention to the fact that the
ongoing creative life of the loving person, including its passionate erotic
love (“the hot strivings of love”), is its own reward.66
Here, we might say, is the Prodigal Son in eschatological form. But
this would be subtly wrong, for there is actually, it turns out, no eschatol-
ogy here either: there is a replacement of eschatology by this- worldly love.
There is no heaven, no hell, no judgment at all. Just love and creativity.
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Where, if anywhere, is forgiveness in this world? The theme of
wrongdoing and opposition was introduced into the story of this sym-
phony by Mahler himself, and no doubt he was strongly inclined to
anger against Von Bülow, who had been especially hostile to him at a
crucial stage in his career, when he was trying to get his First Symphony
performed. Having struggled to find a way of ending this Second
Symphony (including, he says, a search through “all of world literature,
including the Bible”), Mahler tells us that he finally came up with the
idea for the closing movement while listening to the choir sing an ode
by Klopstock at Von Bülow’s funeral. But in reality the Klopstock ode
is a banal set of pieties, and Mahler keeps very little of the original text, writing most of the words himself, and all the music. So it seems pretty
clear that the profound meaning of the Klopstock ode lay more in its
occasion than in its content: there is something about overcoming resent-
ment going on.
How, though, is anger overcome? It is like the father in the story: the
anger simply disappears, and love surges up.67 The persona whom
Mahler depicts as the “hero” of the symphony doesn’t ask for apology,
and he also doesn’t decide to forgive without apology. He simply goes
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