He was insulted, in writing, by the most respected man in the nation — accused of treason and threatened with a coup — while he was in exile fighting for his life. His reply is four words that ought to be carved over every door where people argue: "I am not angry."
Immovable on the Thing That Mattered
Before the famous letter, you have to see what kind of man received it — and the first thing to know about Pahoran is that he was not a pushover. He inherited the judgment-seat from his father Nephihah (Alma 50:40), and almost at once he was tested by the king-men: a faction of the wealthy and high-born who wanted to alter the law, tear down the free government, and set up a king (Alma 51:5). They had numbers, they had status, and they leaned on Pahoran hard.
He would not move.
But Pahoran would not alter nor suffer the law to be altered; therefore, he did not hearken to those who had sent in their voices with their petitions concerning the altering of the law. (Alma 51:3)
This is the bedrock under everything that comes later. On a matter of principle — the law, the liberty of the people, the constitution his fathers had built — Pahoran was immovable. No amount of pressure from the powerful could make him bend the thing that was not his to bend. He put it to the voice of the people, abided their verdict, and held the line for freedom even when holding it was dangerous (Alma 51:6–7). Remember this when the letter comes, because it is the half of Pahoran that makes the other half astonishing. He was not gracious to Moroni because he was soft, or conflict-averse, or unable to stand his ground. He had already proven he could stand against anyone on earth when the cause was right.
The Letter He Did Not Deserve
Then the war turned against the Nephites, and the capital itself fell into rebellion. The king-men, led by a man named Pachus, drove Pahoran out of the judgment-seat. He fled to the land of Gideon with the loyal remnant, raising what force he could to take the government back (Alma 61:3–5). He was, at that moment, a legitimate ruler in exile, fighting on two fronts, doing everything in his power for his country.
And it was then — while Pahoran was bleeding for the cause — that Moroni's letter arrived. Moroni, starving at the front, his soldiers dying for lack of the support he assumed the government was selfishly withholding, wrote the chief judge one of the angriest letters in scripture: he accused Pahoran and the government of sitting in thoughtless stupor (Alma 60:7), charged them with neglect that bordered on treason, and threatened to abandon the front, march on Zarahemla, and clean house by the sword (Alma 60:24–30). Every word of it was sincere. Every word of it was also wrong — aimed at exactly the wrong man, who was at that moment suffering the very treason he was being blamed for not preventing.
Put yourself in Pahoran's place. You are the wronged party. You have lost your capital, your seat, and nearly your life to the rebellion, and you are fighting to get them back. And the nation's hero sends you a letter calling you a traitor in a stupor and promising to come kill you if you don't shape up. The human response writes itself: How dare you. Do you have any idea what is happening here? Where were YOU? Pahoran had every fact, every justification, and every right on his side to fire back.
"I Am Not Angry"
He did not. His reply (Alma 61) is, sentence for sentence, one of the noblest documents in the Book of Mormon, and its heart is this:
And now, in your epistle you have censured me, but it mattereth not; I am not angry, but do rejoice in the greatness of your heart. (Alma 61:9)
I am not angry. He sets the insult down as if it weighed nothing — it mattereth not — and then does something even harder than forgiving: he looks straight past the false accusation to the love that produced it and praises that instead. He understood, instantly, that Moroni's fury was the fury of a man who could not bear his soldiers dying — that the same heat scorching him in the letter was the heat that had been holding the whole nation's line for years. So Pahoran did not answer the error. He answered the heart, and named it great.
Then he calmly told Moroni the truth he was missing — I have been driven from the judgment-seat; behold, Pachus reigns in my stead; I have not been neglecting you, I have been fighting for my life (cf. Alma 61:3–5) — and instead of demanding an apology, he asked Moroni to come and help him:
Therefore, come unto me speedily with a few of your men, and leave the remainder in the charge of Lehi and Teancum … and let us go forth against the dissenters. (cf. Alma 61:15–18)
No grudge. No defense of his honor. No score to settle. A wrongly-accused man turning his accuser into an ally in the same breath that corrected him. And it worked — Moroni came, they joined forces, they crushed Pachus and the king-men and restored the free government together (Alma 62). The reconciliation that saved the nation happened because the man who had every right to be offended simply refused the offense.
The Rare Shape of His Greatness
Here is what makes Pahoran worth a portrait, and it is the thing most of us get exactly backwards. We tend to be flexible about principles and rigid about slights — we'll compromise the important thing to keep the peace, and then nurse a personal insult for years. Pahoran was the precise inverse. He was immovable on principle and unwoundable on pride. On the law, the liberty of his people, the constitution — he would not yield an inch to the most powerful men in the land. On a personal insult, even a grave and public one, even from a position of total vindication — he would not take an ounce of offense. He knew the difference between the things that must never bend and the things that must never matter, and he had them sorted in exactly the right order.
That ordering is the whole secret. The same firmness that made him hold the line against the king-men made him able to let go of Moroni's insult — because a man that secure in the thing that matters has no need to defend the thing that doesn't. His refusal to be offended was not weakness; it was the overflow of a strength so settled it had nothing to prove. The greatness of your heart, he called Moroni's — but the phrase is the truest description of Pahoran himself.
He would not bend the law for the most powerful men in the nation, and he would not take offense from the most respected man in the nation even when that man slandered him in writing while he bled in exile. Immovable on principle, unwoundable on pride — and he had them in exactly the right order. Handed an accusation he could have answered with a war, he answered it with four words and an invitation, and the nation was saved because one wronged man refused to be wronged.