Abstract
In the Preface to Regret, Paul Griffiths, formerly Warren Chair of Catholic Theology at Duke University, writes that the Catholic theologian's task is first to write about God and then to be interesting, but since theology is the work of speculating from doctrine, “it is no part of the Catholic theologian's remit to be right” (xi). Regret, like all of Griffiths’ work, is interesting because of the interplay between speculative creativity and orthodox restraint. The book is an advanced reflection on the wish that things might have been otherwise. It should interest graduate students in theology and pastors who appreciate forays into Latin etymology.
The body of the book, comprising chapters 4 through 8, is a delineation of what Griffiths calls the “otherwise-attitudes.” There is a chapter each on lament, remorse, contrition, confession, and repentance. The particular labels do not matter much; English speakers rarely disambiguate these terms as precisely as does Griffiths here. What matters to Griffiths is clarifying the phenomenological range of attitudes that one can have toward lamentable features of the past, and displaying their theological significance. Since our attitudes to past lamentables are constrained by our understandings of time, sin, forgiveness, and redemption, there is a properly Christian grammar of the otherwise attitudes. For example, the person who says they have no regrets is “certainly someone not much formed as a Christian,” not to mention a fool (128). More seriously, those who counsel pacific acceptance of suffering and death are thinking within a Stoic or Buddhist grammar of the otherwise attitudes. Properly catechized Christians, by contrast, adopt toward such lamentables attitudes that participate in God's—or as Griffiths consistently prefers, the LORD's—healing transfiguration of the devastated world.
Each of chapters 4–8 relies on literature, poetry, or biography to paint a phenomenologically rich portrait of the otherwise attitudes. Here is a summary. Lament is the entry point to regret, but it is not quite regret because lament need not wish otherwise. Remorse is a species of regret: the remorseful person wishes something past were otherwise. However, remorse is self-focused; in remorse, one wishes one's past action otherwise because it is a source of suffering (usually shame) for oneself. As such, both lament and remorse are, from the Christian perspective, insufficient attitudes toward lamentables. In contrition, one wishes the past were otherwise because of the damage one's sin has wrought. Contrition is at the heart of Christian regret, because in contrition one looks away from oneself for the first time, to the damaged other. As soon as one truly regrets the damage done to another, every obstacle to confession is removed. In confession one publicly avows one's contrition, making possible forgiveness. Finally, in penance, one responds to the gift of forgiveness by acting to redress, however imperfectly, damage that has been done.
But can there really be redress? The past is past, the damage done. Central to Griffiths’ Christian theology of regret is the proposal that contrition to the LORD does not merely acknowledge the past; it invites the LORD's healing transfiguration of the past. “All you have to do is turn to the LORD with the sincerely contrite thought, ‘I would it were otherwise,’ and it is” (124). Contrition does not erase the past but transfigures it, just as the resurrection did not erase Jesus’ wounds but transfigured them into features of his body glorified.
Griffiths says the remit of the Catholic theologian is such that, in all likelihood, some of the book's claims are false. I think that is so for several claims in the opening chapters. In the first chapter, Griffiths claims that Christians must say both that God regrets and that God cannot regret, and that the wish to adjudicate this apparent contradiction is a temptation of “pagan, not Christian, thought” (14). I do not see why, especially since earlier in the chapter Griffiths approves glosses on scriptural attributions of divine regret that achieve just such an adjudication: divine regret in scripture is a feature of the LORD “as the LORD seems to us” (6) and “from the perspective…of time's passage” (7). In the second chapter, Griffiths claims that “the grammar of Christian thought requires” that both of the following claims be maintained: “the LORD heals all damage” and “there are apparently instances of damage that remain unhealed” (31). I cannot find an argument for this view, and I cannot agree that a Christian, especially a universalist like Griffiths, is required to hold it.