STRUKTURA ZLA I OPROST

PRAŠTANJE, Zbornik, Split, 1995
SUMMARY
Forgiveness, as one of the possible responses to evil inflicted upon a person by another,
initially arouse uneasiness because it appears to be additional burden for the victim.
Therefor, forgiveness should first be understood as the victim's liberation from the state of
being riveted to the evil that has occurred. The only appropriate discussion of forgiveness is
that which starts from the victim and helps him emerge from the state of being a victim.
The clandestine nature of evil is manifested by the casting of a shadow of guilt upon
the victim or when the victim perceives evil as justifiable response to the evil endured.
The perpetrator of evil is most often himself the first victim of the evil he inflicts upon
his victim. From mutual fear of the victim and perpetrator, the perpetrator begins a cycle of
crime that tends to grow spirally. Evil perpetrated in response to evil consequently creates a
semblance of justification for the original evil.
Forgiveness is the only possible egress from the spiral of evil, liberating the victim from
compulsive vengeance and fixation upon the past, without relieving the perpetrator of
responsibility. To forgive means to bid farewell to additional evil and fixation upon the past.
The need for forgiveness, , although most often occurring negatively as the impossibility of
forgiveness, springs from the essence of the injured victim and the tendency toward recovery.
Its first goal is not to relieve the perpetrator of evil from responsibility but to provide
the victim with egress from suffering. Therefore, forgiveness does not occur primarily in the
relation of the victim to the perpetrator but is a process within the victim himself. The intimate
liberation of the victim from ties to the evil and the perpetrator, from hatred and compulsive
vengeance, is the first an most important step toward forgiveness as liberation.
Forgiveness does not occur at once. It is a process that cannot be exacted by will but occurs
as a gift to the victim, a gift the victim gives himself.
Forgiveness is not a moral obligation that is imposed upon the victim from outside but
a process of the victim's intimate healing from the evil endured and its s consequences.
Forgiveness is not necessarily connected with religious affiliation. However, in forgiveness
one can discern how faith leads to the primordial depths of humanness and how humanness
provides insight into the essence of religion.
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