Repent and Forgive Completely

At the beginning of Act 5, Scene 1 of William Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale, a courtier named Cleomenes tells King Leontes that he surely has repented enough at this point, and he really ought to "Do as the heavens have done: forget your evil; / with them forgive yourself." While one could attempt to weigh the wrongs done by King Leontes (including false accusation, blasphemy, two counts of attempted murder, and two counts of manslaughter) against the amount of penitence offered afterward (roughly 16 years of evidently daily repentance), attempting such calculations would completely miss the point. God wants us to repent and to forgive, and both our repentance and our forgiveness (even of ourselves) should be complete.

Naturally, the repentance and the forgiveness will not always progress at the same rate, but I propose it as my opinion that the latter need not be predicated on the former. The Lord will forgive whom He will forgive, but of us, it is required to forgive everyone, even ourselves, even if we still have repenting to do.

In light of that admittedly modern doctrine, I concur with the counsel of Cleontes. King Leontes should forgive himself for his wrongdoings, even as he continues to fully repent of them. Granted, I think he already had repented as fully as he needed to, but that's not for me to say. Such a matter is between the sinner and the Lord. Still, whether Leontes had completely repented or not, he should have at least begun to forgive himself. We need to repent completely, and we need to forgive completely, but I give it as my opinion that the order doesn't matter, at least not as much as King Leontes thought it did.