It is only at the end of Regret: A Theology, Paul Griffiths’ strange and wonderful new book, that the gloves come off: “Someone who has no regrets,” Griffiths writes, “is someone who is not fully human and certainly not someone much formed as a Christian” (128). If there is nothing in this world you wish otherwise, “you are a complacent fool” (129). Regret is not at all a polemical work; it is governed from beginning to end by rich attention to the actual experience of regret. But one suspects that Griffiths was moved to write this book in no small part by frustration with those currents in contemporary culture, especially their Christian variations, that attempt to do away with regret. We cannot and must not.
It is the book’s method that makes it strange. It is a forthrightly theological work—“a speculative theological depiction of what it means to wish things otherwise” (xi)—yet it engages only occasionally with other theologians (and almost no theologians at all among the living). It is focused on psychological phenomena, yet it does not so much as mention a psychologist. It is erudite and meticulously argued, yet it does not include a single footnote. These are not necessarily criticisms, though I imagine some readers might find themselves frustrated by such absences. They are signs, rather, of Griffith’s dedication to a different sort of approach, one both “grammatical” (xii) and phenomenological. His goal is to sort through what must and can be said about the experience of the “otherwise-attitudes” within the language of the (mainly Catholic) Christian tradition.
The book divides into two main sections (though Griffiths does not explicitly divide them in this way). The first three chapters are dedicated to fixing some conceptual parameters for the way that Christians talk about regret; the remaining five chapters are dedicated to developing a taxonomy of otherwise-attitudes. The first part is good, but it is the second part that makes the book wonderful.
Each chapter in the first section—“The LORD’s Regrets,” “Faults,” and “Time”—gently defuses a potential objection to talking about regret at all. First: is it right to ascribe regret to God (or, as Griffiths prefers to style the divine name, the LORD)? And if not, does the Christian have any grounds for talking theologically about regret? Second: if God brings goods out of our mistakes, perhaps even the greatest goods, ought we really to regret them? And third: if our mistakes are stuck in an unalterable past, is there anything but wallowing to be gained by regretting them? By addressing these questions first, focusing on close readings of the biblical witness and of the liturgy, Griffiths sketches a theological vision of regret—a vision of a God engaged with the timefulness of human experience, a God who acts to transfigure human destructiveness already within history, and a vision of time in which the past can become available for transformation in the present.
Within this frame, Griffiths identifies five distinct otherwise-attitudes, each of which leads into the next: lament, remorse, contrition, confession, and penance. Lament, Griffiths writes, is the “threshold” of regret (53). It consists essentially of the acknowledgement that something is terrible, but does not yet begin to imagine that things might be otherwise. For that reason, it can lead as easily to a consuming despair (“lament’s characteristic malformation” [59]) as to regret properly so-called. But passing through that door, we are brought next to remorse, “an active remembering of laceratingly painful things done in the past by the one remembering them in the present” (66). Remorse is passive; it is my own past coming back to gnaw at me. It is tempting simply to shut out that past, to forget it. Griffiths doesn’t deny that sometimes remorse can be so awful—“the Adequate of Hell,” Emily Dickinson calls it—that forgetting becomes necessary.
But the better path leads through contrition. Contrition is active, not passive, and begins to redirect one’s attention away from the one who did wrong (remorse alone tends towards solipsism) and towards the damage done. I come to see that if I had done otherwise, things might have been otherwise. That begins to wear away the pain of remorse, though it does not yet change the thing I did. The final two otherwise-attitudes, however, do change the thing I did—not by erasing or justifying it, but by transfiguring it. Confession turns my failure into an occasion for my own transformation, a way of removing some refusal or some silence that was blocking my ability to love. Confession is thus something done for the sake of the one confessing. Penance, on the other hand, is something done for the sake of the one sinned-against. In penance, I offer a gift to the person or people I wronged, so far as that is possible, and my own sin becomes part of a movement towards collective, even cosmic, healing.
This creative parsing of the otherwise-attitudes and their interrelationships is enough all by itself to make the book worth reading. It captures and contextualizes much recent worry about the narcissism of the experience of guilt—a word, by the way, surprising in its total absence—showing how that experience can and must be turned outwards without being repudiated altogether. And yet my brief summary still misses much of what makes Griffiths’ book fascinating: his conversation partners (mostly poets and novelists), his surprising subarguments (e.g., his claim that we ought to be contrite for the extinction of the dinosaurs), his idiosyncrasies (e.g., his commitment to dealing with the Bible exclusively in the Vulgate). Griffiths says in his preface that he makes no claim to being right; a theologian’s responsibilities are “first and last” to be “responsive to the triune LORD” and second “to be interesting” (xi). In at least this last task, and in much else besides, he has succeeded.
Brian Hamilton is an associate professor of religion at Florida Southern College.
Brian Hamilton
Date Of Review:
September 29, 2023
