When we forgive, it seems that we fasten down some injury in the past in order to leave it there behind us. Sometimes we want or need to leave behind the person who wronged us, too. Hannah Arendt, in a striking discussion of the topic, thought of forgiveness as a unique remedy for the “irreversibility” of human action. For Arendt, a human action, a performance that reveals something about “who” the actor is, enters a web of human relationships and intentions “where every reaction becomes a chain reaction and where every action is the cause of new processes” and so cannot be undone. The full significance of this fact will be seen. Arendt argued that the “predicament of irreversibility” is met by forgiveness, which is itself an action. Forgiveness alone, she thought, is the action that releases us from the “boundlessness”of another action from which we otherwise “could never recover.” An otherwise endless and irreversible action is overtaken by another action with the peculiar power to forever set the former to rest.

It does not seem, though, that Arendt fully pondered the implications of the irreversibility and unpredictability of acts of forgiveness. Forgiveness, too, will have consequences that reverberate indefinitely in ways that may exceed our foresight and our control. This is one reason why an account of forgiveness needs to capture that part of forgiving that looks ahead hopefully to an uncertain future and not only the part that looks to settle something in the past.