The beauty of forgiveness is that it interrupts otherwise automatic processes. The antidote for irreversibility is forgiveness, which "serves to undo the deeds of the past" by releasing actors from the consequences of their actions. Knowing that our actions may lead to evil or unhappiness, why would anyone take the risk of action at all? Remarkably, Arendt finds the remedy to this predicament within the faculty of action itself. Since “men never have been and never will be able to undo or even control reliably any of the processes they start through action,” human beings are met with the disabling reality of processes whose outcomes are both unpredictable and irreversible. Forgiveness solves an important problem inherent to the activity of action. In The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt relates Augustine’s Christian concept of forgiveness to human action and agency. Only through this constant mutual release from what they do can men remain free agents, only by constant willingness to change their minds and start again can they be trusted with so great a power as that to begin something new. Trespassing is an everyday occurrence which is in the very nature of action’s constant establishment of new relationships within a web of relations, and it needs forgiving, dismissing in order to go on by constantly releasing men from what they have done unknowingly.
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