Sir: John Casey's attack on the Christian doctrine of forgiveness
is hopelessly con- fused. The key to forgiveness is that one human forgives another in spite of what they have done, not because of it. Such is the burden of Luke vi, 32: 'If you love only those.who love you, what credit is that to you? Even sinners love those who love them.'
As Casey rightly points out, this is precisely the nature of Cordelia's forgive- ness of Lear, is which 'the question of merit, desert, justice is rejected altogether': but why is such forgiveness 'neither intelligible nor admirable'? Would it really have been more admirable for her to have abandoned her father for ever?
Her gesture of forgiveness was godlike rather than based on any humanistic logic; does not her choice of this toughest option make her worthy of out fullest admiration?
Edmund Lee,
106 Brookwood Road, London SW18.
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