To Understand All

It is a drunk undergraduate who spouts the maxim “To understand all is to forgive all” in Evelyn Waugh’s masterful Brideshead Revisited.  If memory serves, the young man is hauling away Sebastian from Charles Ryder’s window, the former having just leaned across the sill to deliver what should never have come up outside his insides.  Sebastian, of course, makes an elegant apology to Charles, and so the friendship begins.

So, when I found the phrase again in Boylan some time ago, it had a familiar ring to it.  Boylan takes the phrase quite literally, and treats it as a good thing: if we understand our fellow men, he suggests, we will be charitably forgiving towards them.  This was more or less the way I understood the phrase in Waugh (and, indeed, perhaps before Waugh: for I fancy it was familiar even before that, though I could not name an earlier encounter).

Thus it was with some surprise that, googling the origins of the line (“a French proverb”), I found that two of my top results were denials of the very charity I had thought was central to its meaning.  An academic questions whether the old saw is true, with regard to ourselves or our neighbors; and Rod Dreher considers it “a warning about the dangers of too much empathy.”  Now it must be admitted that, in the context in which Dreher wrote those words, it is definitely possible to imagine an excess of empathy.  But I am not sure that the maxim is really about empathy at all.

To empathize, the dictionary tells us, is to participate in another’s feelings or ideas.  And one can certainly envision a naughty Frenchman suggesting, with a wink and a nod, that anyone who felt the way a certain young man is feeling would no doubt act as the young man acts—and suggest, accordingly, that anyone who feels with the young man ought to forgive him.  But of course, as Dreher points out, this would be wrong; and, as the psychologist suggests, we are not usually persuaded by such “arguments” anyway.  We are, fortunately, upright hypocrites.  In the words of W.S. Gilbert:

Oh I was like that as a lad!

A shocking young scamp of a rover!
I behaved like a regular cad.
But that sort of thing is all over!
I am now a respectable chap,
And shine with a virtue resplendent;
And therefore I haven’t a rap
Of sympathy with the defendant.

Knowing how bad a person is, because we were just as bad, really doesn’t—at least, really shouldn’t—lead forgiving them, much less to ignoring their faults (which is different from forgiving).  Parents do not stop disciplining their children because they remember what it felt like to throw a temper tantrum—au contraire, the better the memory, the more firm and consistent (not the more harsh or strict) the discipline will be.

But there is a difference between empathizing and understanding.  Understanding is a broader word, and in some senses means much the same as empathizing; but its particular sense, at least as Boylan uses it and as I understood it—the only sense in which the line “To understand all is to forgive all” has a really positive and moral content—is “to grasp the meaning of.”

Things have meaning with respect to a larger situation.  To ask “what does this mean” is to point away from the this, the boy, the sunset, or the street, at something larger: the ways of the city, in themselves and as they lead to larger cities; the revolution of the seasons and the growth of crops and warmth and an end to hunger at the close of the day; the desires of the father and mother and the perpetuity of the family and love and Socrates and immortality itself.  That is what we mean when we ask for meaning.  We want to know were we stand with respect to the whole.

The largest whole of all of course is God.  Dante’s picture gives us that, and intuition, and the Renaissance saw beloved of Browne that God is “a circle whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere.”  And so understanding—distinct from wisdom, which is of God, and knowledge, which is of truths in general—is that kind of human thinking which connects the things of earth to the things of God.  Synoptic.  Shakespearean.  Chestertonian.

And this is the sort of thing, I think, that can and should forgive badness, when Dreher’s “empathy” does but should not.  For understanding, true understanding that does not put oneself in relation to the sin, but puts the sin in relation to God, can at one and the same time estimate it at its true horror, and forgive.  For God alone has the synoptic vision that can make even sins “behovable”; and only in God can we forgive some things.  Indeed, it is perhaps only in God that we ought to forgive anything.

~~~

When I was thirteen, Mrs. Bennet was the most insufferable literary creation in the library.  Now that I am past thirty, I feel a good deal more forgiving towards her.  And I haven’t even a marriageable daughter!

Now that is understanding.