"It is in pardoning that we are pardoned"
About this Quote
A clean moral judo move: the person with the power to forgive ends up the one who needs forgiveness most. Francis of Assisi folds the social logic of his era inside out. In a medieval world built on debt, penance, and hierarchy, pardon wasn’t a soft feeling; it was a legal-theological mechanism. Sins were accounted for, absolution was mediated, status was reinforced. Francis takes that entire economy and reroutes it through an interior circuit: you don’t earn pardon by presenting your résumé of suffering, you discover it by giving up your claim to be owed.
The line works because it refuses the fantasy of moral self-sufficiency. “We are pardoned” is passive on purpose: grace arrives, it isn’t manufactured. But the trigger is active: pardoning. The subtext is bluntly egalitarian. To forgive is to admit you’re implicated in the same human mess as the person in front of you; the moment you stop performing as judge, you rejoin the crowd that needs mercy.
Context matters. Francis’s spirituality wasn’t courtroom theology; it was street-level discipleship: poverty, proximity to the despised, peacemaking in an age of crusade and civic vendetta. Forgiveness here is less about overlooking harm and more about renouncing the right to retaliate, to keep the injury as currency. Psychologically, it’s also a critique of pride disguised as righteousness: resentment offers the thrill of purity. Francis suggests the opposite is true. The soul doesn’t get cleaned by scrubbing someone else; it gets cleaned by letting go.
The line works because it refuses the fantasy of moral self-sufficiency. “We are pardoned” is passive on purpose: grace arrives, it isn’t manufactured. But the trigger is active: pardoning. The subtext is bluntly egalitarian. To forgive is to admit you’re implicated in the same human mess as the person in front of you; the moment you stop performing as judge, you rejoin the crowd that needs mercy.
Context matters. Francis’s spirituality wasn’t courtroom theology; it was street-level discipleship: poverty, proximity to the despised, peacemaking in an age of crusade and civic vendetta. Forgiveness here is less about overlooking harm and more about renouncing the right to retaliate, to keep the injury as currency. Psychologically, it’s also a critique of pride disguised as righteousness: resentment offers the thrill of purity. Francis suggests the opposite is true. The soul doesn’t get cleaned by scrubbing someone else; it gets cleaned by letting go.
Quote Details
| Topic | Forgiveness |
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