Satisfy your demand for reason always but remember that charity is beyond reason, and that God can be known through charity.
The consensus among the Greeks, it seemed, is that ethical activity is grounded in care toward one’s own soul. If forgiveness is morally valuable, it is because anger gums up the gears of one’s own flourishing and distracts one from more noble pursuits, such as engaging in politics, grasping for honours, or achieving spiritual equanimity. One might express concern for another if their spiritual greatness matches one’s own, if both parties are equally worthy of honour and praise. But concern for the good of another in full knowledge of all their flaws—even in their wretchedness—is alien to the Greek moral imagination.
Having been disappointed by Greece in my search for how to forgive, I turned my attention to the East. The Buddhist tradition endorses a similar understanding of the need for withdrawing one’s anger for the sake of one’s own spiritual health. Here we find echoed the doctrines of (1) the self as the principal object of ethical attention and (2) self-purification as the ultimate goal of reflection. Entanglements with the world and with others get in the way of the individual’s journey toward enlightenment. If one is to be lenient toward the wrongdoing of others, it is simply because the karmic order of the world demands this kind of flexibility in order to be properly maintained. …
The goal here is a kind of system equilibrium at both the level of the whole and the level of the individual ego. My goal is to make the world have less hate in it, but the only way to do this is to have less hate in me. The specificity and particularity of another person disappears altogether, subsumed into a system that one carefully maintains like a rock garden.
…I had always been suspicious of Christianity as being somehow too good to be true, that it papered over the real ugliness of the world with a happy message about hope and love. As far as I could tell, we are alone in a universe that is slowly dying of its own accord, and all we can do in the meantime is stitch together beautiful stories of various kinds to build a shelter for ourselves from the cold indifference of the cosmos—but the indifference of the cosmos is what is real, not the stories we tell. Religion, I believed, is cowardice, retreat; courage demands facing the facts, owning up to the meaninglessness of things. And the central doctrines of Christianity, of course, are just so implausible: God and man at the same time? What could be crazier?
But then my friend suggested the Gospel of St. Luke. …
I didn’t immediately recognize the significance of what I read. After puzzling over Scripture for some time, I went back to my friend and reported that my mission had failed: I’d finally found evidence of forgiveness, but only in the Bible! What was I supposed to do with that? If the brilliant philosophers had overlooked something that only appeared later in the Gospels, troubling conclusions would follow. It would mean that our most important tool for discovering truths about the world had failed in one crucial respect—and if so, and we could not think our way to forgiveness on our own, it might have to come to us by some other route, arriving from somewhere outside of ourselves. Only after a few months of reflecting, and struggling, and fighting against the obvious like Jacob wrestling with the Angel, did I finally understand that what I had found was a little hole in the structure of things, a place where human reason—even at its greatest and most noble—had been unable to go. And it was through this tiny gap that I first caught a glimpse of God.