Aquinas and the Limits of Forgiveness: A Case Study in Anna Karenina

When I first read Anna Karenina, the character of Dolly stayed with me, nagging me to go back to her, to pay more attention to her. When I reread the novel, I found in Dolly, the secondary character and unacknowledged heroine of Tolstoy’s novel,[1] a paradigmatic example of what it means to see the world through the eyes of self-sacrificial love. She loves those who hurt her not in a way that ignores the transgression or grief, but rather in a way that chooses love over vengeance, selflessness over selfishness. Over and again, Dolly chooses to love her philandering husband Stiva, his wayward sister Anna, and her six children the way God loves them. I am going to suggest that Dolly is the literary exemplar of the perfection of charity. Her love exemplifies a Christian heroism, a love that is difficult if not impossible to emulate. It is a heroism that is too often overlooked in our age, given the real risks of victim blaming. I draw from Thomas to make these claims.

First, let me say a word about how Dolly loves her six children.

The work of raising six children without the constancy of a husband, a steady source of income, or even a comfortable home could not have been easy for Dolly. And yet, work she does. Arriving at their country house after Stiva had “prepared” it by reupholstering the furniture, Dolly patches up a ceiling leak in the children’s room, sets the plumbing to rights, and overall does what she can to make a long-neglected home habitable. This she does while meeting her children’s needs, in whom she finds “the only possible happiness” (262). They keep her from thinking of her husband “who did not love her” (262). Among all the worries of her children’s upbringing, she finds that

the children themselves repaid griefs with small joys. These joys were so small that they could not be seen, like gold in the sand, and in her bad moments she saw only griefs, only sand; but there were also good moments, when she saw only joys, only gold. Now in her country solitude, she was more aware of these joys. Often, looking at them, she made every possible effort to convince herself that she was mistaken, that as a mother she was partial to her children; all the same, she could not but tell herself that she had lovely children, all six of them, each in a different way, but such as rarely happens – and she was happy in them and proud of them (262).

She was able to recognize in her children specks of gold among grains of sand. A few days later, however, she comes upon Tanya and Grisha fist fighting, and cannot but see that “her children, of whom she was so proud, were not only the most ordinary, but even bad, poorly brought up children, wicked children, with course, beastly inclinations” (272). And yet she loves them. She fiercely tends to their secular, moral, and spiritual education. Dolly exhibits that rare parental gift of cherishing her children without deceiving herself about their virtues.

Now, we will turn to her love for Anna, the purported main character of the novel. While Dolly extends a courageous love for Anna in going to visit her when all Russian polite society has shunned her, she does so within the bounds of propriety. She does not bring her children into the home of a woman living with a man who is not her husband. At first, Dolly is swept up in envy of Anna’s life, the new love she shares with Vronsky, and the extravagant hotel-like luxuries of their home. But by the time she leaves, she yearns for her own home life with all its worries and scarcities. Dolly does not admire Anna for leaving her husband and son. And she notices Anna’s neglect of her daughter. But she visits Anna in friendship because she loves her, accepting her as she is, even as she suffers from her own cheating spouse. Dolly delivers the key line of the novel to Anna during this visit: “I’ve always loved you, and when you love someone, you love the whole person, as they are, and not as you’d like them to be.” Anna intentionally misunderstands Dolly’s meaning, and yet she delivers this truest of true lines back to Dolly, “’If you have any sins,’ she said, ‘they should be all forgiven you for your coming and for those words’” (614).

Finally, we turn to the character most undeserving of her love, her husband, Stiva. It is in Dolly’s forgiving of her husband’s repeated infidelity and his utter neglect of her and her children that we find the most heroic example of Christian love. When Dolly first finds out about Stiva’s infidelity, she is angry. She is jealous. She wants to abandon him. But she chooses to forgive him. As she says to Anna, “If you forgive, it’s completely, completely” (71). Dolly is not naïve. She knows what her husband does with his free time when he goes to Petersburg and leaves her to care for their children in the country.

During her visit with Anna, she realizes that Anna will not be able to keep Vronsky’s attention from other younger women. She remarks that Vronsky will find still better women, “as my disgusting, pathetic and dear husband seeks and finds them” (638). This is a heartbreaking line. Anna has mistaken love as a feeling, which, much like physical beauty, is fleeting. Anna insists here that she does not want children. That if they are not born, they will not be unfortunate, and she will not then be to blame. This reasoning is utterly foreign to Dolly, as she imagines just for a minute that her favorite child, Grisha, did not exist. This horrifies her. Dolly’s love toward her husband is not romantic. It is heroic. She will not sign the papers enabling him to sell the last parcel of her wooded land to feed his profligate lifestyle. She takes charge of the household with only the support of a housekeeper, and she plans for the coming out of her children under these trying circumstances. In the face of this, her husband sees her as a “worn-out, aged, no longer beautiful woman, not remarkable for anything, simple, merely a kind mother of a family” who ought to indulge his infidelity (3).

Dolly’s decision to love this philandering, superficial, and egotistical man makes her a model of loving in the perfect way that Thomas says is not required of anyone, and yet especially commendable in the rare instances when it happens. Stiva’s character is so masterfully written because the reader does not hate him. In fact, the reader is half-charmed by him, pities him, and yet is embarrassed by him. Dolly chooses the heroic path in this novel, not for her own happiness or enjoyment, but for the benefit of her six children. It is self-sacrificial love and forgiveness is its by-product.

This is a bitter pill to swallow. Should we all become like Dolly and put up with philandering spouses? My question does not turn on marital infidelity, but rather more generally on the radical call of self-sacrificial love in the gospel. Dolly is a terrific literary example because it is so uncomfortable to raise her up as an exemplar, and yet there is something acutely right about doing this. I worry that while our culture has deepened its protection of the victim and the vulnerable, we have domesticated the gospel call to self-sacrificial love. Let me explain.

Thomas Aquinas on Forgiveness

I am going to turn to Thomas here and argue that even though heroic love is not demanded of us, it is especially commendable when it does occur: when we truly love someone who does not merit that love, we are loving in exactly the way God loves us.

Right at the beginning of the Summa theologiae, Thomas suggests that the key to which one person sees God more perfectly than another in the beatific vision is charity, for where there is more charity, there is more desire, and this desire creates a readiness to receive the object desired (I.12.6). That is a pretty big deal. Those whose lives have been marked by love in this life will see God more clearly forever and ever in the next than those who have loved less radically. As charity is the key beatific happiness and thus, to Thomas’ theological vision, we turn to a brief overview of this virtue.

One of the three theological virtues, charity is a type of friendship, based on a communicatio or a sharing between God and the human person that is imperfect in this life, but perfected in heaven where faith and hope fall away and all that remains is charity (II-II.23.1). Aristotle thought friendship among unequals impossible.[2] For Thomas, the virtue of charity makes the impossible possible: friendship with God. It “tends to God first, and flows on from him to other things, and in this sense charity loves God immediately, and other things through God” (II-II.27.4).

How do we love others in charity “through God”? Aquinas distinguishes between ways in which friendship extends to a person: (1) friendship is reserved to one’s friends, to those who reciprocate love; or (2) friendship is extended to “someone in respect of another,” where it is on account not of the person himself or herself but another person. In choosing to love my husband’s uncle, I am loving the uncle for the sake of my husband. Outside of that marital relationship, I might not necessarily make that choice.

The trick is that when we are in relationship with God, we are called to love everyone as they are related to God. Let us look at this more closely. There is a pedagogy to this demand to charity, as the same is not demanded of everyone.

We grow in loving God, self, and neighbor in three stages. In the first, we concentrate on resisting sin and concupiscence. Charity here must be fed and fostered as it is vulnerable to sin. Most of us are on this level. At least I am. In the second stage, we progress in goodness, strengthening charity and adding to it. The third stage belongs “to the perfect who desire to be dissolved and to be with Christ” (II-II 24.9).

At the “beginner” level, we must not exclude the enemy from the set of neighbors who are loved in charity, so we pray for people in general. That is all that is demanded of most of us mediocre sinners (II-II.25.8). Thomas—forever the realist—recognizes that most of us are too weak to love the wicked without being influenced by them. Loving one’s enemy for God’s sake is not required for charity. It is not a necessary condition for salvation, and we should only be prepared to assist them in cases of urgency (II-II 25.8 and 9).

Only the perfect are strong enough to befriend the wicked without fear of being contaminated (II-II 25.6.ad5). Loving one’s enemy pertains to the perfection of charity. It is heroic. In fact, in his Commentary on the Gospel of Matthew, Thomas insists that as a precept we are only called to forgive enemies who seek that forgiveness.[3] To do more than that, to forgive our enemies rather than to pray in general for their salvation, belongs to the perfect.[4] It is of course true that we should all strive for perfection, so this should not be taken in a way that absolves any one of us. And yet Thomas’ moral vision accounts for growth in the spiritual life, such that each of us is held to a standard that respects differences in moral development.

The perfect extend love toward sinners and enemies, then, as recipients of their own invitation to divine friendship. They endeavor to see them the way God sees them, as persons in need of this friendship even as they actively reject it. Considered qua evil, evil people are to be hated, but considered qua human, they are the recipients of the invitation to divine friendship: “Since by their very nature they bear in themselves the image of God and are capable of receiving divine life, they are therefore to be loved from charity according to that nature.”[5] Even those who hate us are “not . . . contrary to us, as men and capable of happiness: and it is as such that we are bound to love them” (II-II.25.8). As recipients of the unmerited gift of divine friendship, the perfect more easily extend it to others. They look to sinners and the enemy the same way they look to all human beings, where they pray to become “fellow citizens of the heavenly Jerusalem” (#543).

There is a Christological reasoning at the center of this tall order. For Thomas, when we actually love our neighbor as ourselves, we end up loving our enemies. It is because we—as enemies of God—have been loved, that we, in turn, love our own enemies. Through sin, we become enemies of God; in Christ, we are invited into divine friendship. The “charity of the suffering Christ” took away sin by which we “became God’s enemies.”[6] Jesus, nailed to the cross, prayed for his executioners, “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do” (Luke 23:34). God reaches out to us in love—even as we reject him. As we encounter that love and are transformed by it, we reach out toward others in love—including those who reject us.

Being transformed by this divine gift is a long journey. It is because God has made the impossible possible for us, namely, friendship with himself, that we in turn are ultimately called to do the impossible: to forgive sinners and our enemies. As Herbert McCabe writes:

We can forgive enemies even though they do not apologize and are not contrite. But such forgiveness . . . does not help them, does not re-create them. In such forgiveness, we are changed, we change from being vengeful to being forgiving, but our enemy does not change.

Or not necessarily. We hold out the hope that just as we have been transformed by that divine gift, we can become the instruments of such transformation in others.

Conclusion

In Christianity, God continuously reaches out to human beings, making himself manifest in creation, in Scripture, on the streets of Galilee, on the Eucharistic table, and in the church community. Ultimately, Christianity is an invitation into friendship with him who is relationship. Benedict XVI claims that “being Christian is not the result of an ethical choice or a lofty idea, but the encounter with an event, a person, which gives life a new horizon and a decisive direction.”

In Christ, our sin is healed and the door to divine friendship is opened. No one falls outside this invitation. In this economy of gift, not only is friendship a gift received, but the act of receiving itself is an unmerited gift. It is because we have been forgiven of our sins, because God looks toward us with the eyes of loving mercy that we are called to do the same toward others.

The Christian conception of forgiveness emerges in this frame. Through no merit of our own, we have been healed of our sin, such that we are, in turn, called to give this gift to others, to forgive without limits, “seventy-seven times” as it says in the gospels (Matt 18:22; Luke 17:4). We are ultimately asked to view the world the way God views the world, through the eyes of forgiving love. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the Gospel command to love our enemies. In sin, we become enemies of God; in Christ, we are drawn into friendship with him. Having been elevated out of servitude and into friendship with God, we bear the fruits of this divine relationship in becoming friends with others, even our enemies. In a sermon given at Oxford in 1942, C.S. Lewis remarks, “There are no ordinary people.” In fact:

Next to the Blessed Sacrament itself, your neighbor is the holiest object presented to your senses. If he is your Christian neighbor he is holy in almost the same way, for in him also Christ vere latitat—the glorifier and the glorified, Glory Himself, is truly hidden.[7]

At the end of the day, Christians are called to love others as God loves us. Forgiveness is folded into this gift received and given. As Steven Pope writes:

To offer forgiveness in the face of so much human pain and anguish is, from a Christian standpoint, both required and heroic. It is required, in the most fundamental sense, because God loves all human beings, including even those whose acts are the most abominable. No human being is utterly beyond redemption.

It is heroic because to love as Dolly loves outreaches our regular human capacities. It is why we admire her. Christians believe that this is the love we have been offered in Christ. We are all Stivas—philandering, superficial, and egotistical. And yet the invitation into divine friendship awaits us. To accept this invitation is to stop acting like Stiva and instead to be transformed by love in the way Konstantin Levin is transformed by his love for Kitty. In the novel, we are granted just a preliminary peek in the early years of their marriage. It is left to us the readers to work out how to bring this transformative love into maturity.