"Sins cannot be undone, only forgiven"
About this Quote
A composer who built a career out of rewriting the past is an unlikely messenger for moral finality, which is exactly why Stravinsky lands the line so cleanly. “Sins cannot be undone, only forgiven” rejects the fantasy of a moral rewind button. It’s not therapeutic reassurance; it’s a hard boundary. You can’t unbreak what you broke, you can’t un-say what you said, you can’t unmake the harm. The only available movement forward is relational, not mechanical: forgiveness, if it comes, is granted, not engineered.
The subtext feels Stravinskian in its discipline. His music often treats disruption as irreversible: once a rhythmic rupture happens, the piece doesn’t pretend it didn’t. It absorbs it, reorients around it, makes the new order out of the fracture. That aesthetic maps neatly onto the ethical claim here. “Undone” implies control and cleanup; “forgiven” implies humility and dependency on someone else’s judgment. The sinner can repent, repair, and change, but the ledger can’t be erased by effort alone.
Context matters: Stravinsky lived through revolutions, world wars, exile, scandal, and reinvention. In a century obsessed with reinvention narratives, this line resists the PR version of redemption. It refuses the modern habit of treating wrongdoing as a branding crisis solvable through optics. Forgiveness is not an outcome you can produce; it’s a grace you can only ask for. And sometimes, you don’t get it. That’s the severity - and the honesty - that gives the sentence its bite.
The subtext feels Stravinskian in its discipline. His music often treats disruption as irreversible: once a rhythmic rupture happens, the piece doesn’t pretend it didn’t. It absorbs it, reorients around it, makes the new order out of the fracture. That aesthetic maps neatly onto the ethical claim here. “Undone” implies control and cleanup; “forgiven” implies humility and dependency on someone else’s judgment. The sinner can repent, repair, and change, but the ledger can’t be erased by effort alone.
Context matters: Stravinsky lived through revolutions, world wars, exile, scandal, and reinvention. In a century obsessed with reinvention narratives, this line resists the PR version of redemption. It refuses the modern habit of treating wrongdoing as a branding crisis solvable through optics. Forgiveness is not an outcome you can produce; it’s a grace you can only ask for. And sometimes, you don’t get it. That’s the severity - and the honesty - that gives the sentence its bite.
Quote Details
| Topic | Forgiveness |
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