Editorial: A Note on Truth and Reconciliation

In a recent review which I published in Sophia1 of Professor Philip C. Almond’s Heaven & Hell in Enlightenment England,2 I dwelt rather on a passage of comment by Almond on Archbishop Tillitson’s opinion that, à propos Hell, ‘God was obliged to fulfil his promises of rewards, he was under no moral obligation to carry out his threats . . .’: Almond notes, ‘In effect Tillitson was extending to divine justice a principle which had become fundamental in English criminal law by the late seventeenth century, and common after the development of transportation in 1718, that of Royal pardon from capital punishments,’ (Almond pp. 156–157) I noted that transportation to Australia, from 1788 on, was banishment to a made-up Hell. The people who founded Australia a year before 1789 had perhaps come late to the Enlightenment; they certainly brought none of it with them. Our current law of mandatory detention of asylum seekers suggests that we have never quite caught up, yet, with fraternité in the French Revolution’s hopeful triad.

The penal settlements as little Hells is a theme in Robert Hughes’s The Fatal Shore, titled from a convict ballad: ‘The very day we landed upon the fatal Shore / The planters stood around us, full twenty score or more; / They ranked us up like horses and sold us out of hand / They chained us up to pull the plough, upon Van Diemen’s Land’, (circa 1825–30).3 John Mitchell an Irish Gentleman Convict in Van Diemen’s Land, 1850–1853, referred to tracts of the island as ‘The Gardens of Hell.’4 Richard Flanagan’s Gould’s Book of Fish: a novel in 12 fish5 turns Van Diemen’s Land from ordinary nastiness to a lantern lecture by Hieronymus Bosch organized by The Theatre of Cruelty lot. Flanagan’s book, published in 2001, has been called ‘the first great novel of the twenty-first century’.

For the new Millennium, Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s principle of Truth and Reconciliation, may both work as politics, and shift the eschatological paradigm, from Royal punishment to Royal pardon.

A Protestant Minister friend of mine once remarked to me over lunch, ‘I don’t see how God can deal mercifully with Adolf Hitler, but I must believe that He can.’
Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s Truth and Reconciliation policy lifts the available notions of the four last things into a quantum shift; one at least hopes this to be so. The dedication of Richard Holloway’s On Forgiveness: how can we forgive the unforgivable?6 to Archbishop Tutu marks a change in human models of the, obscure-to-Kant, idea of immortality a change for the better.

Denounced by Rome as ‘Modernism’ by a Holiness of the Nineteenth Century whose name escapes me, modernity had better now take itself seriously, before the ludicrous-Ludo of post-modernity makes discourse into a long, long weekend’s Marx’s Brothers Revival, with no hope of closure, until the projector catches fire. Desmond Tutu is modernity working on the ground, in strife-torn Africa: and in the mind, shifting paradigms. We are indebted to this modernity, and should defend it. The project of the Enlightenment is alive and well, but needs our help. Current fundamentalisms are a threat to all.

Kant seems right that about immortality we can only speculate: and Marx is right that each speculum which we have has a material-cultural conditioning. One model of immortality may be a post-posthumous working through, as, e.g. a psychoanalysis, enabling us to see both what we had really done, and how we had already been done, and how each fed into the other. Eternity is long enough to allow Hitler an interminable analysis. Probably needed, unless Eternity itself runs out of Time. The rest of us may get better, and so out, sooner.

On Purgatory, a Catholic Mystic once suggested in my hearing that re-incarnation might be a form of it. He was modern enough to recognize the wisdom of India, and to hope somehow to weave it in with Catholic Orthodoxy, of the post-Vatican II sort: of which there is not much about in official circles at present. But ‘God moves in mysterious ways . . .’ as it says in the Hymnal. Ansi soit il!

My own model of Purgatory would be a kind of wandering in the sort of landscape that Austerlitz moves in in W.G. Sebald’s eponymous novel.7 Sebald does not produce closure: Dante’s Purgatorio does in an assurance of final deliverance. Now that both authors are in the hereafter, they may negotiate ‘the sense of an ending’.8

Truth and Reconciliation, possible imperfectly here before, ought – on my suggestion – become the very stuff of a hereafter. One might venture that as the Atonement has been so mysteriously made – ‘folly to the Greeks’ – so it may be prodigiously effective; just, perhaps, because of the ‘foolishness’ which we cannot yet comprehend.

Endnotes

1. Sophia, vol 41, no 2, 2002, pp. 87–92.

2. Philip C. Almond, Heaven & Hell in the English Enlightenment, Cambridge University Press, 1994.

3. Robert Hughes, The Fatal Shore: a history of the transportation of convicts to Australia 1787–1868, Great Britain: Collins-Harvill, 1987.

4. Peter O’Shaughnessy, ed. The Gardens of Hell: John Mitchell in Van Diemen’s Land 1850–1853, Sydney: Kangaroo Press, 1988. The title phrase is to be found on, p. 29: see also pp. 79–80, 86, 110.

5. Richard Flanagan, Gould’s Book of Fish: a novel in 12 fish, Australia: Picador, Pan Macmillan, 2001.

6. Richard Holloway, On Forgiveness: how can we forgive the unforgivable?, Edinburgh: Canongate, 2002.

7. W.S. Sebald, Austerlitz, trans. Anthea Bell, London, Hamish Hamilton, 2001.

8. Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending, New York: Oxford University Press, 1967.