We are in Holy Week, commemoration of the mythical outcome of the New Testament and one, who militates in the value of political pragmatism in the face of moral determination, perfectly embodied by Pontius Pilate, as we already told here, always remembers these days that the attempt The last step of the Roman governor to save the carpenter’s adopted son from a baseless sentence was to offer the people the possibility of pardoning him. Legend has it that Pilate, as was customary at the time, offered the crowd a choice between saving Jesus or Barabbas, a convict condemned to crucifixion for participating in a riot that ended in bloodshed, and that the crowd chanted the name of Barabbas, condemning the fate of the Nazarene. Although there is no historical evidence of the existence of such a character – not even of the supposed Jewish or Roman custom of pardoning prisoners at Easter – the parable is perfect to reinforce the moral of the New Testament: Barabbas is all of us with our many sins, and When Jesus pays with his life, he saves that sinner that each of us is. A little more or less.
The cinema, always ready to deploy sequels, decided to imagine what would have happened to the life of the poor unfortunate and in the Italian film titled Barabbas, which adapts a novel by the Nobel Prize winner Pär Lagerkvist, it narrated the adventures of the famous prisoner, played by Anthony Quinn , after surviving the Roman death row, an adventure that of course concludes in his conversion to Christianity. It is a narrative convention: the life of the forgiven must always dignify the grace received. In the Bible it appears before in the parable of the prodigal son and also, although only in spiritual terms, in the figure of the good thief. In the history of culture, this parable of forgiveness begins in the third book of Aeschylus’ The Oresteia, entitled The Eumenides. Orestes, persecuted for killing his mother to avenge his father, arrives at Delphi and takes refuge in the sanctuary of Apollo. The god Apollo advises him to return to Athens and submit to the human court where he finally obtains forgiveness.
That forgiveness after a cycle of blood, as Jordi Balló and Xavier Pérez explain in The Immortal Seed, is a restitution of law and order, the end of the cycle of mutual grievances. Faced with the intention of the Erinyes, the deities who pursue Orestes, to collect the blood shed with the blood of the fleeing, the law of Athenian democracy intervenes to banish the settling of accounts. The Oresteia, in which all the seasons of the blood cycles of gangster cinema appear, is also a text about forgiveness as an apology for civil politics. The forgiveness of Orestes strengthens Athenian democracy and restrains the wrath of the gods. Forgiveness empowers the one who grants it and binds the one who receives it, the hero subjected to remorse and the persecution of those who want to resume the bloody cycle, and resolves community legality, says Aeschylus.
Perhaps the story in which the type of power that forgiveness exercises is best appreciated is Victor Hugo’s classic Les Misérables, made into a film both from the literary original and from the musical by Cameron Mackintosh written by Claude-Michel Schönberg and Alain Boublil. . The story establishes a game of mirrors between two acts of forgiveness: on the one hand, at the beginning of the story, the bishop of Digne forgives the fugitive Jean Valjean for stealing his silver and tells him that he must become worthy of that forgiveness: his life has to be virtuous in the eyes of God. And that’s what he does, becoming a good man until he becomes mayor of Montreuil.
In the final stretch of the story, during the repression following the republican insurrection, it is Valjean who spares the life of his tireless pursuer, Inspector Javert. The famous song from the musical Stars is Javert’s great moment, when he becomes aware of the scope of forgiveness:
“How can I allow him to have dominion over me. The man I have persecuted gave me freedom and forgave me. He could have killed me, it was his duty. Mine was also to die and not to suffer this hell. He is the heaven of hell and he knows well that by allowing me to live today, death reigns in my being.”
Inspector Javert (spoiler alert) commits suicide by throwing himself into the dark waters of the Seine, unable to admit the grace received, because, as we have seen, the mercy of forgiveness elevates the one who gives it and puts the one who receives it into debt. That is the political weight that falls on Carles Puigdemont, having received forgiveness from the enemy State at the request of an amnesty promoted by his greatest adversary, Esquerra. Decide on the gift and debts. As the inspector sang before the ominous outcome:
“Have they see Valjean o Javert”.
