The Forgiveness
If you followed the final thoughts of the film ‘The Garden of Afflictions’, you will have no difficulty understanding what I’m going to explain next. If I emphasize the importance of forgiveness so much, it is not only because it is the center and the top of Christian revelation, but because I personally meditated on the subject not from a religious or theological point of view, but metaphysical, and then I adopted as a formal thesis of my philosophy the conviction that it is one of the essential keys to the very structure of reality as a whole.
In the film — as in many classes — I explained that there is no intermediary between being and nothing: whatever has entered the sphere of being for an infinitesimal fraction of a second can never return to nothing, because it has never been in it and, on the contrary, it always belonged to the sphere of being. If we try to conceive of the passage of time as a total structure of possibility, we understand what eternity is, in the sense of Boethius: the current and simultaneous possession of all moments. Therefore, whatever happens in the temporal sphere is contained in eternity once and for all. This is the absolute irrevocability of the happening. Nothing returns to nothing, because out of nothing, nothing came.
Now, in the whole sphere of universal happening, from subatomic particles to the totality of galaxies, and even crossing all the supracorporeal and spiritual worlds that may exist, there is only ONE type of fact that, once occurred in time, can be excluded from eternity. They are our sins. Sacramental forgiveness erases sin from the record of being. Divine forgiveness is not just a suspended punishment, but an annulment of the fact, a total and definitive UNHAPPENING. Correlate to the ‘ex nihilo’ creation, forgiveness returns to nothing what has never been in nothing. Forgiveness is the work of divine freedom and, in this sense, transcends the entire structure of universal possibility. Whoever has the opportunity to participate in this miracle, in whatever form, should make the most of it, because nothing in this world will give, as far as human strength is concerned, a more luminous understanding of the mystery of existence.
[Translated from here]