“To err is human, to forgive is divine”

“To err is human, to forgive is divine” is a line spoken to the dying Simon Kefas by the boy who cares for him. It turns a familiar moral maxim into a direct answer to Simon’s shame, linking the possibility of forgiveness to the wrongs he has committed and to the love and friendship he has both damaged and received.

The Deathbed Exchange

Simon is asked whether he wants forgiveness. He closes his eyes, shakes his head, and says he does not deserve it. His objection is specific: he is a stranger to the boy, and he took away people the boy loved. The boy answers with the maxim, refusing to make forgiveness depend on Simon’s claim to merit it.

The exchange is not an abstract debate about whether wrongdoing matters. Simon’s life has involved betrayal and violence, and he understands himself through that record. The boy’s reply acknowledges human error while placing forgiveness beyond a simple calculation of deservingness. Its force comes from the contrast between Simon’s self-condemnation and the compassion offered to him at the moment when he is dying.

The Photograph and the Diver

The boy explains that Simon was the Diver, someone who had always been with the people in the photograph but was not in it. He lifts Simon’s jacket and slips the photograph into his inside pocket, telling him to take it on his journey because those people are his friends. The gesture gives the maxim a material counterpart: forgiveness is accompanied by the return of a place, however complicated, within a circle of human connection.

Simon had believed himself to be a stranger who had taken away the people the boy loved. The boy instead names his presence and relationship to them, and the photograph makes that recognition tangible. The scene does not erase the harm Simon caused; it places that harm beside the friendship and belonging that he had also shared.

Simon’s Guilt and Repentance

Else’s later account of Simon’s past gives the deathbed appeal its weight. Simon had sold his soul to the Twin and recruited Ab Lofthus, whose family was in debt after the banking crisis, into the same criminal arrangement. When Ab became a threat to Simon’s position, Simon contacted the Twin and killed his best friend before Ab could kill him. Else describes this as the worst thing Simon did and says that Simon believed he had dragged Ab into the abyss.

After Helene died, Simon stopped being the mole and spent the rest of his life doing penance. He pursued corrupt police officers with a severity that left him lonely, but he regarded that loneliness as deserved rather than feeling sorry for himself. Else remembers his description of self-loathing as the hatred felt each morning when a person looks in the mirror. The maxim’s mercy therefore does not cancel repentance: it answers a man who has already spent his life confronting guilt and trying to make amends.

Forgiveness as a Recurrent Idea

Else’s relationship with Simon supplies another context for the line. When Simon tells her that she fixed him, she insists that he chose to quit gambling. He recalls that after he mortgaged their house behind her back and lost the money, she forgave him rather than leaving or imposing an ultimatum. He stopped gambling that day and never bet again; their promise to tell each other absolutely everything became part of what he understood as their salvation.

Else does not present love as something that simply rescues Simon from outside himself. She says that it was his love for her, not her love for him, that saved him: he saved himself. That distinction resonates with the deathbed exchange. Forgiveness can meet a person who believes himself undeserving, but Simon’s history also makes change, honesty, and responsibility part of the moral picture. The maxim brings these strands together without suggesting that forgiveness makes the past disappear.