There’s such a thing as premature forgiveness. We needed resentment, he said, as it was resentment which identified and underlined the wrong.

The Sunday Philosophy Club by Alexander McCall Smith. Page 174.

“Isabel did as Grace suggested, and wrote a brief letter to Cat. She apologised for the distress she had caused her and hoped that Cat would forgive her. But even as she wrote, Please forgive me, she realised that only a few weeks before she herself had said to Cat, There’s such a thing as premature forgiveness, because a lot of nonsense was talked about forgiveness by those who simply did not grasp (or had never heard of) the point that Professor Strawson had made in Freedom and Resentment about reactive attitudes and how important these were—Peter Strawson, whose name, Isabel noted, could be rendered anagrammatically, and unfairly, as a pen strews rot. We needed resentment, he said, as it was resentment which identified and underlined the wrong. Without these reactive attitudes, we ran the risk of diminishing our sense of right and wrong, because we could end up thinking it just doesn’t matter. So we should not forgive prematurely, which is presumably what Pope John Paul II had in mind when he waited for all those years before he went to visit his attacker in his cell. Isabel wondered what the pope had said to the gunman. “I forgive you”? Or had he said something very different, something not at all forgiving? She smiled at the thought; popes were human, after all, and behaved like human beings, which meant that they must look in the mirror from time to time and ask themselves: Is this really me in this slightly absurd outfit, waiting to go out onto the balcony and wave to all these people, with their flags, and their hopes, and their tears?