The End of Memory

Some time ago, I was asked to participate in a symposium sponsored by Fontbonne on the subject of memory.  A colleague and friend suggested that I take on a recent work by Miroslav Volf from Yale Divinity School entitled The End of Memory: Remembering Rightly in a Violent World.  I'm scheduled to present my talk on 21 October as part of a panel focused upon "memory and religious imagination."  Here's what I'll be presenting.

The End of Memory:  Does Volf Have It Right?

Memory often inspires religious imagination.  Collective memories have so inspired religious imagination that these memories have come to form, in many respects, the sacred texts through which the stories, teachings, and worship practices of a religion are conveyed from one group to another.  And as memory inspires religious imagination, so too, imagination calls us to remember – to remember what has happened, what has been said, and what has been done.

With a keen understanding of this mutual interworking of memory and religious imagination, Miroslav Volf, a contemporary theologian on the faculty of Yale Divinity School, endeavors to answer two vital questions in his 2006 work entitled, The End of Memory.  They are questions that both address the core of human experience and test the limits of memory and imagination.  They are questions presented to all who pray “forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.”  They challenge everyone who confesses that “I look for the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come,” and these questions especially confront those who take seriously the command to love their neighbor as themselves even when their neighbor is their enemy. 

The questions are these:  how should we remember wrongs suffered, and for how long should we remember them?   The quite widely accepted responses to these questions are: “We must never forget” and, “always remember wrongs done to you!”  These are the admonitions that resound throughout our day and age.  They call not only victims to remember past wrongs done to them, but also place an obligation upon all who would seek to assure that such wrongs shall never again be allowed to grow unopposed into atrocities of evil.  While Volf’s approach affirms this very valid and necessary goal, he challenges popular thinking about remembering wrongs and reaches very different conclusions.

Now at the outset of our consideration, we must observe that Volf does not ponder these questions as a mere academic inquiry of an ivory-towered theologian.  Rather, he approaches his task out of the depth of his own experience of suffering.  In the early 1980’s, Volf was a victim of oppressive interrogations and psychological abuses at the hands of his homeland’s military investigators who accused him, during his compulsory national service, of being a traitor and a spy against the socialist regime in Yugoslavia.  Throughout his work, Volf revisits his own memories of the wrongs perpetrated upon him by an officer he refers to only as “Captain G.”  In a very real way, we are invited to walk with Volf on his journey to put into practice what he learns in response to the questions of how and how long one is to remember wrongs suffered.  As we do, we might reframe Volf’s inquiry to ask: can religious imagination take us to the end of memory?

Just as Volf is honest about his past experiences, he is also upfront about the core convictions that shape the answers he offers to these questions – answers he describes as “grounded in the Christian faith” (43).  He sets forth his faith convictions in the following propositions:

“First, we don’t just happen to be in the world as products of chance or necessity; the God of love created each one of us, together with our world.

“Second, we are not in the world just to fend for ourselves while pursuing lives filled with as little pain and as much pleasure as possible; God has created us to live with God and one another in a communion of justice and love.

“Third, humanity has not been left by itself to deal with the divisive results of our deadly failures to love God and neighbor – a fissure of antagonism and suffering that taints all human history and scars individual lives; in Christ, God entered human history and through his death on the cross unalterably reconciled human beings to God and one another.

“Fourth, notwithstanding all appearances, rapacious time will not swallow us into nothingness; at the end of history God, who took on our finitude in Jesus Christ, will make our fragile flesh imperishable and restore true life to the redeemed, so that forever we may enjoy God, and each other in God.

“Fifth, the irreversibility of time will not chisel the wrongs we have suffered into the unchangeable reality of our past, the evildoer will not ultimately triumph over the victim, and suffering will not have the final word; God will expose the truth about wrongs, condemn each evil deed, and redeem both the repentant perpetrators and their victims, thus reconciling them to God and to each other (43-44).

In the next portion of his work, Volf lays out a four-fold path in response to the question: how are we to remember wrongs suffered.  Put succinctly, he suggests that to remember rightly, we must remember truthfully, so as to heal and not harm, in a way that promotes learning and growth, within the moral framework of two primary meta-narratives of sacred memory – the Exodus of the Jews from Egypt and the Passion of Christ.  That path, though, is fraught with challenge.  To begin, remembering anything truthfully is a difficult task. 

We must guard against false memories even as we guard against bearing false witness.  Indeed, Volf maintains that there is a moral obligation to remember truthfully and that it is “part of the larger obligation to speak well of our neighbors and thereby to sustain and heal relationships between people” (63).  In light of this obligation, he asserts that “truthfulness constitutes a just use of memories and it constrains their misuse.  Truthfulness is also an important element of inner healing – of learning how to live with the past without its wounds being kept open by the blade of memory” (71).

It is then “healing” that marks the second dimension of right remembering.   That healing is initially nurtured by integrating the remembered wrongdoing into our life-story as we find and give such memories positive meaning.  Right remembering, though, moves us beyond individual, inner healing to seek the healing of others.  This step toward the other is possible when the memories of wrongs to not define us.  We remember not just as those who have been wounded, but, embodying an identity of new life, we remember as those who are committed to loving the wrongdoer and seeking reconciliation.  Volf maintains that “we cannot experience full internal healing from a wrongdoing suffered without “healing” the relationship with the wrongdoer” (83).

Volf readily admits that “remembering truthfully” and “remembering so as to heal” are insufficient in themselves to advance us toward reconciliation.  We must also move beyond what might be termed “literal” memory to the exemplary use of memory.  Exemplary memory pushes us beyond the concern for our own individual well-being to concern for the other – to the realm of the common good.  Exemplary memory makes “use of lessons of injustice undergone . . . to fight injustices taking their course today” (89).

Caution, though, is needed here.  If we are to use such lessons from past wrongs rightly, we must use them not just to motivate the fight, but, as the prophet Micah commands, “To do justly and to love mercy” (Micah 6:8).  Volf observes, “The memory of wrong suffered can teach us to struggle justly against injustice only if it is accompanied by a principled opposition to injustice” (92).  The basis for such opposition may be found in a larger moral framework.  For Volf, it is located in the meta-narratives found in the Jewish and Christian scriptures – what he calls “the two central events in redemptive history – Israel’s exodus from Egypt and Christ’s death and resurrection” (93-94).

These two sacred memories provide the moral framework within which we may rightly remember wrongs suffered.  The sacred memory of the Exodus and the Passion shapes identity for the one participating in this memory by their regular re-actualization in the practices of the Passover Seder and Holy Communion.  In these ways, sacred memory is embraced and deployed in the community of faith.  Sacred memory also defines a horizon of expectations as it turns our view from the past to the future and to the presence and work of God. 

“The memory of the Exodus and Passion is not primarily the memory of an exalted example of human victory over suffering and oppression.  [Rather,] it is primarily the memory of God’s intervention in behalf of humankind” (102).  Volf further suggests that lessons from these meta-narratives may be applied to the ordinary memory of injustice in several ways; for example, “Remember wrongs so that you can protect sufferers from further injury; remember them truthfully so as to be able to act justly, and situate the memories of wrongs suffered into the narrative of God’s redemption so that you can remember in hope rather than despair” (115).

For Volf, the lessons of the Passion memory are significant.   First, this memory teaches us to extend unconditional grace since we have been the recipients of such grace.  Second, it teaches us that we must affirm as valid the claims of justice.  Grace does not disregard justice.  In the Passion, Christ himself took on the punishment that justice demanded.  Thus, in order for the wrongdoer to receive the forgiveness offered in grace by the one wronged, the wrongdoer “must acknowledge their actions as wrongdoing, distance themselves from their misdeeds, and where possible, restore to their victims what [their wrongdoing] took away” (121).  Third, the Passion memory instructs us to aim for communion [in] a fully reconciled relationship.  “By forgiving, we take one crucial step in a larger process whose final goal is the embrace of former enemies in a community of love” (122).

Next, Volf turns to the more difficult challenge confronting us when we ask: “How long are we to remember wrongs suffered?”  He characterizes his exploration on this latter question as a “thought experiment” – that is, “not a straightforward argument for a position but an argumentative exploration of a possibility” that he describes as “very much in sync with what Christian tradition claims about redemption, both now and in the future” (142, n. 34). 

His experiment does not merely seek to explain what might happen if the memory of wrongs suffered is brought to its end.  Rather, it also proposes a way of life as its attempts to imagine one aspect of living out the full measure of the Christian creed.  In theoretical terms, he argues that memories of wrongs will not come to the minds of those who, in the future, enjoy God completely and enjoy one another in God.  In practical terms, the more refined question he pursues is this:  What would it mean to give a wrongdoer the ultimate gift – the gift of non-remembrance of the wrong done? (142, n. 32)

Admittedly, this would be a very strange gift.  Wrongdoers do not deserve it, and those who have suffered are not obligated in any way to give it.  Rather, Volf suggests that the gift is given “to imitate God, who loves wrongdoers despite their wrongdoing” (142).  There is, however, a significant limitation upon non-remembrance of wrongs.  It presupposes both that the one who suffered wrong has forgiven and that the wrongdoer has changed his mind, admitted his offense, received the offer of forgiveness and mended his ways (143).  Thus, this gift will only be provisional in the here and now.  It can be given irrevocably only in what the ancient creeds of the Christian tradition call “the life of the world to come.”  

At this point in his exploration, Volf acknowledges that he has not as yet given this gift to his own wrongdoer, Captain G – the person who subjected him to repeated interrogations and deprivations during Volf’s compulsory stint in the Yugoslavian army.  Ironically, in the very book in which he advocates an end of memory, Volf has memorialized his own wrongs suffered.  Yet, his failure to give this gift does not concede that the granting of it is impossible or even undesirable.  Rather, his own admitted shortcomings demonstrate that the gift of non-remembrance is not simply an act of the human will but is instead a divine gift that flows to us from the promise of a new world to come.  Isaiah prophesied of God’s intention when he wrote:

For I am about to create new heavens and a new earth; the former things shall not be remembered nor come to mind.  But be glad and rejoice forever in what I am creating; for I am about to create Jerusalem as a joy, and its people as a delight (Isaiah 65:17-18).

Thus, the forgetting of wrongs happens as a consequence of the gift of a new world.  Here we might rightly ask Volf whether the future non-remembrance of wrongs in the world to come has anything to say to us today.  His answer would be yes, because life in the world to come shows us how reconciliation reaches completion: “the wrong is both condemned and forgiven; the wrongdoer’s guilt is canceled; through the gift of non-remembrance the wrongdoer is transposed to a state untainted by the wrongdoing;” and both the wronged and the wrongdoer, bound in a communion of love, “rejoice in their renewed relationship” (149).

Volf concedes that this sort of “complete reconciliation” rarely happens in the here and now.  “In a world marred by evil, the memory of wrongdoing is needed mainly as an instrument of justice and as a shield against injustice.  Yet every act of reconciliation, incomplete as it mostly is in this world, stretches itself toward completion in that world of love” (149-50).  Thus, only those who are willing to let memory of wrongs slip ultimately out of their recollection will be able to remember wrongdoing rightly now. 

In this present world there remains an obligation to remember.  Such remembering is part of the pursuit of justice for the victims of evil acts.  As long as the evildoers remain evildoers and have not been brought before the ultimate Judge, the wrongs they have committed will have to be remembered (204).  But, Volf argues, that in fulfilling this obligation, Christians who take there faith seriously will aim at forgiveness and reconciliation. 

Forgiveness and reconciliation are also tied to the letting go of memories.  This non-remembrance, though, only makes sense after the victim has been redeemed; the perpetrator transformed and after a relationship between them has been redefined through reconciliation.  As long as reconciliation has not taken place, the obligation to remember wrongs stands.  Volf observes that “not only does memory serve justice; memory and justice serve reconciliation” (205).

But memory does have a limit.  It is not remembering “always.”  It is not “never forgetting.”  There will be an end to memory of wrongs when memory reaches its completion in the world to come.  Volf admits that if he did not hope in the world to come, he would embrace the “eternal” remembering of wrongs suffered.  But, because he believes that God has and will completely forgive in the world to come all who accept that gift, forgiveness is a possible way of life in the here and now. 

When we forgive those who have wronged us, we echo God’s unfathomable graciousness.  Just as God did for us in Christ, so too, when we forgive, “we decouple the deed from the doer, the offense from the offender.  We blot out the offense so it no longer mars the offender.  That is why the non-remembrance of wrongs suffered appropriately crowns forgiveness” (208).  By non-remembrance we overcome the past evil with the good of forgiveness and reconciliation.  Wrongdoing is thus consigned to its proper place – nothingness, and memory of wrongs suffered comes to its end (214).

Does Volf have it right?  Is the path he imagines the road to remembering wrongs rightly that will indeed bring us, though tentatively and provisionally in the here and now, to the end of memory?

            I hope so.