The 2006 Dom Helder
Camara Lecture
was delivered at
the University of
Melbourne on June 1st
by a theologian from
the University of St
Thomas in the United
States,
Dr William
Cavanaugh, under the title ‘The Sacrifice of Love:
The Eucharist as Resistance to Terror and Torture’
We publish some extracts here.
In my book Torture and Eucharist I describe the
Church’s response to torture and disappearance
in Chile, under General Augusto Pinochet’s
regime.
‘Torture’ and ‘Eucharist’ denote two different
types of enacted imagination. Torture and Eucharist
are not imaginary, in the sense of being unreal, but
rather are ways of seeing and narrating the world that
are integral to ways of acting in the world.
Torture is an extreme example of the imagination
of the nation-state. The nation-state is not just a
given, natural reality, but is a peculiarly modern way
of dividing up the world between fellow-citizens
and foreigners, friends and enemies.
The imagination of the state can evoke
compassion and solidarity for people we have
never met, as in the case of a rural Minnesota town
donating a fire truck to distant New York City in the
aftermath of the terrorist attacks of September 11,
2001. The imagination of the state can also convince
Minnesota farm kids to travel to the other side of the
world – Iraq – as soldiers and kill people they know
nothing about.
Torture is part of this latter movement – the
creation of enemies.
Torture is the ritual enactment
of the imagination of the state on the body of an
individual person. The effects of torture go far
beyond the body of the tortured individual. Torture
is a social, one might say ‘liturgical’, enactment of the
imaginative power of the state.
The Eucharist is the ritual enactment of the
redemptive power of God, rooted in the torture,
death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. In this
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a commercial jetliner is tortured to reveal the bomb’s
location.3
Opponents argue that information should only
be obtained without compromising our shared
moral principles.
What tends to go unnoticed by both sides,
however, is how few cases of torture actually
involve the extraction of information previously
unknown to the interrogators.
It seems that gathering information is only part
– maybe even a small part – of the story behind
the use of torture by the modern state. The rest of
the story has to do, I think, with fostering a certain
kind of collective imagination. One significant part
of that imagination is fear – not just among the
detainees themselves but in the subject population
as a whole.
As Michel de Certeau remarks, “The goal of
torture, in effect, is to produce acceptance
of a State discourse, through the confession
of putrescence”.4 The omnipotence of the state
depends on the manifestation of its other – the
Marxist or the terrorist – as filth. Such filth assumed
an important role in the (Pinochet) regime’s
morality play; witness one of the members of the
Chilean Junta, Admiral Merino, publicly justifying
the actions of the regime by referring to Marxists
as “humanoids”.5
Despite the troubling increase of government
surveillance under the current administration,
neither the U.S. nor U.S.-occupied Iraq is the same
kind of authoritarian regime imposed in Chile
under Pinochet. In general, people in the U.S. do not
fear to speak out. Nevertheless, fear is an important
dynamic in the War on Terror.
Fear is constantly stoked, but it is not the fear
of the state, but of the enemies of the state against
whom the state protects us. The tragedy of 9/11
is incessantly invoked, not so that history will not
be repeated, but so that – to the contrary – it will
continually recur in our imagination.
Torture is part of this theatre of fear. Terrorists are
our humanoids. It is not simply that the demonisation
of people as terrorists allows us to justify their
maltreatment (i.e. “why should we bother with
human rights when the enemy is subhuman?”).
4 Michel de Certeau, “The Institution of Rot,” chap. in Heterologies: Discourse on the Other (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 40-1. 5 El Mercurio, August 31, 1988, C4.
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that our children can live in the sunlight” 7 It is a dirty business, but those who “take the gloves off ” and “get their hands dirty” do so for a higher moral purpose. Indeed, and this is the crucial point, the moral purpose is made more righteous, is pushed to the extreme of righteousness, by the extremity of the act of torture itself. The threat against the nation must be extremely severe if such an extreme procedure as torture is used, and therefore the defense against such threats is invested with the highest moral seriousness. Only the most morally righteous nation could be trusted with the capacity to use torture for a good purpose.
This type of exceptionalism and amnesia is
not restricted to the United States alone.
The whole Global War on Terror in which
many nations participate depends on this type of
imagination. Consider what it means to be fighting
a war on ‘terror’. Terrorism is not really an ‘ism’; it
is not an ideology, but a tactic.
If we are fighting a war on terror, then there is
no need to consider the ideas, the aspirations, the
historical grievances of the people who oppose us.
We are simply fighting “terrorists”, people who
believe in nothing, other than the blowing up of
innocent civilians. History is erased.
We have no need of examining, for example, the
Western overthrow of a democratic government in
Iran and the installation of the Shah’s brutal regime
of torture – with full Western support. Muslim
fundamentalism is simply the irrational source of
terror. The Global War on Terror is thus inherently
amnesiac. When the enemy is imagined as crazy
people who believe in nothing more noble than
blowing up innocent people, there is no need to
examine one’s own historical sins.
I hope it goes without saying that I am not
justifying terrorism or making all acts of violence
morally equivalent. What I am trying to do is
to understand that the way that we imagine our
enemies can cut off any possibility of the resolution
of conflict. These dynamics are not limited to the
United States, but seem endemic to modern nation-states.
According to political theorist Carl Schmitt, “The
specific political distinction to which political
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Christ spoken after the words of institution is called the anamnesis. This is the Greek word used by the New Testament in rendering Jesus’ command “Do this in remembrance of me”. The Greek word anamnesis is the opposite of amnesia; it is literally an ‘unforgetting’.
The forgetting that the anamnesis seeks to
undo is the forgetting that takes place
whenever violence is justified, for the death
of the Son of God on the cross has shown all such
justifications to be a lie.
Catholic theologian Johann Baptist Metz has
written over the last thirty years of the passion,
death, and resurrection of Christ as a “dangerous
memory” that disrupts the forgetfulness of the
world.
According to Metz, the modern world is
entrapped in a linear view of history, such that the
past is forgotten in the onward march of progress
toward unlimited freedom and consumption. Those
who are left behind in this march – the poor, the
exploited, the non-Western subject who does not
believe in such things – are to be marginalised or
converted by force.
The dangerous memory of Christ’s torture and
death at the hands of the powers disrupts the march
of the powerful.
The order of excommunication had the effect of telling the truth in a society fogged in by lies
The unforgetting of the Eucharist involves
telling the truth. In 1980 in Chile under Pinochet,
the Catholic bishops issued a declaration of
excommunication for anyone involved, directly or
indirectly, in facilitating torture. Of concern were
not just the souls of the individual torturers, but the
greater sign value of the Eucharist for the Church
and the wider society.
What could be a greater forgetting than the fact
that both torturers and tortured approached the
same communion table? Amid the many sins of the
military regime, torture was singled out because of
its dramatic significance in the imagination of the
state.
The order of excommunication had the
revelatory effect of telling the truth in a society
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What would this solidarity of friends mean in
our own situation today, as we confront a world
of torture and terror? It would mean, I believe,
fi rst and foremost affi rming our primary loyalty to
the Body of Christ and not to the nation-state in
which we live. We are Christians fi rst, Americans
and Australians second.
This redrawing of imagined boundaries can
have a dramatic effect. It helps us to unimagine the
enemies that the nation-state has made for us.
The Body of Christ is an international body,
transgressing the boundaries of nation-states. In the
Catholic Church, we have popes who are German,
Polish, Italian, and so on to remind us that the
Church is beholden to no national agenda. The
700,000 Christians in Iraq are just as central to the
Church as we imagine ourselves to be.
This does not mean that we are only concerned
with the welfare of other Christians. Being a
sacrifi cial body means being open to love others,
especially our fellow children of Abraham. Our
concrete solidarity should be with victims of all
nations, the tortured and the disappeared, the
victims of bombs in backpacks and bombs dropped
from sophisticated aircraft.
Remembering all victims will help us to tell
the truth, both about others and about ourselves.
If we live inside God’s imagination, we will see
that even the people we most demonise as enemies
– fundamentalist Muslims, for example – are made
in the image of God.
In Roxanne Euben’s phrase, Muslim
fundamentalists are the “enemy in the mirror”
for the Western world. Our fear of Muslims
can tell us what we fear about ourselves.
But the Church cannot wait for the state to
change. To be the Body of Christ means not merely
to speak the truth to power, but to live the truth, to
embody the coming Kingdom. The Church is the
politics of Jesus, and must oppose the politics of the
world when it brings death instead of life.
We have much to learn from the example of
Chile, where the Church eventually realised that
the government was not listening, and decided
to act more concretely on its own. In our own
context, this might mean protest and concrete acts
of solidarity with the victims of our violence. It
would mean especially that Christians must simply
refuse to fight in unjust wars, and refuse to use
unjust means.
newman.unimelb.edu.au/camara
sacrifice, Christ overcomes the distinction of friend
and enemy, and reconciles us to God and to one
another. In my book I describe some of the ways
that the Church in Chile used the practice of the
Eucharist to resist the imagination of terror and
torture imposed by the military regime.
I lived and worked with the Church in a poor
area of Santiago under the Pinochet regime. I now
work at a university in the United States with a
comfortable middle-class identity. The two situations
seem worlds apart. But now I see the government of
the United States resorting to torture in its Global
War on Terror.
The Bush Administration’s legal justifications
for the abuse of prisoners have been the subject of
intense debate in the U.S. Here in Australia, the case
of Mamdouh Habib1 and the justification of torture
published by the head of Deakin University’s Law
School2 have sparked similar debate. Torture, it seems,
does not only find a home in medieval times or socalled
underdeveloped countries or brutal military
dictatorships. Torture has surfaced at the heart of the
liberal democracies’ War on Terror.
That torture is about the extraction of information tends to be the accepted story among both those that defend “aggressive interrogations” and those that oppose them. Defenders (such as Deakin University’s Mirko Bagaric) commonly use the “ticking bomb” scenario – a terrorist who has planted a bomb on
1 Mamdouh Habib is an Australian citizen who was held in Guantanámo Bay for three years before he was released without charges in January 2005. Habib said that he was tortured with electrical shocks, sexually assaulted, smeared with menstrual blood, burned with cigarettes, and told his wife and children had been killed. Upon his release, the Australian government took away his passport and announced that he would be kept under surveillance. 2 Mirko Bagaric and Julie Clarke, “Not enough (official) torture in the world? The circumstances in which torture is morally justifiable”; for a summary, see www.deakin.edu.au/ news/upload/torturedebate.doc 3 Bagaric and Clarke. For another example, Alan Dershowitz, Why Terrorism Works: Understanding the Threat, Responding to the Challenge (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002).
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Torture also helps to create the enemies that we need. Torture is a kind of theatre in which people are made to play roles, and thereby reinforce a certain kind of social imagination.
Torture reinforces an imaginative distancing between us and the tortured. Not only the actual torturer but the rest of society must guard against identifying with the tortured body. The sympathy we might feel toward another body in pain is cut off by the beastly extremity of torture. The tortured person is not like us. As Ariel Dorfman says, if we felt their pain, we could not go on living.6 So we make believe it is not happening, or call it an aberration, or think darkly, “They must have done something to deserve it”.
The extremity of torture helps to erase such gray areas by identifying all righteousness with the torturer
It is not as if the U.S. has a deliberate plan to make others hate the West. The point is more about our imagination. If we did not think of opponents of Western policies in the Middle East as enemies and backward fanatics we would have to reconsider our own policies, and consider the possibility that opponents might have some legitimate grievances. The extremity of torture helps to erase such gray areas, not only by reducing the tortured to subhuman status, but also by identifying all righteousness with the torturer.
This too may seem counter-intuitive, given the moral condemnation with which torture meets in civilized discourse, but those who torture tend to think of their work in extremely high moral terms. Torture helps guard the nation against diabolical threats. Torturers sometimes imagine their acts as a kind of moral self-sacrifice on their part – “What terrible things I must do in order to defend my beloved people!”
The private motto of the DINA, the Chilean
secret police, was “We will fight in the shadows so
6 Ariel Dorfman, “The Tyranny of Terror: Is Torture Inevitable in Our Century and Beyond?” in Sanford Levinson, ed., Torture: A Collection (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 9.
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actions and motives can be reduced is that between friend and enemy.”8 This distinction is what makes an action political.
The problem with liberalism, according to Schmitt, is that in its illusory search for peace and comfort, it threatens to deprive us of our enemies, whom we desperately need. If the state is deprived of enemies, then the friend-enemy distinction will break out into religious, economic, and cultural arenas, and chaos will reign. To have common enemies is the true source of political unity.
The ghost of Carl Schmitt continues to haunt the international stage. We can scarcely imagine common life without mortal enemies. Torture and terror give us the enemies we so urgently need. At the same time, the friend/enemy distinction tempts us to remember only the victims on our side, and never the victims of our own sins. We thus find it difficult to tell the kind of truthful narrative about our common life on which any imagination of peace depends.
If the state is deprived of enemies, then the friend-enemy distinction will break out and chaos will reign
Where do we look for the kind of truthful narrative we so desperately need in these times of rampant self-deception? I suggest that the Eucharist is the heart of Christian resistance to torture and terror. The title of my book Torture and Eucharist is jarring because we are not accustomed to seeing the connection.
If what I have said so far makes sense – if torture is a ritual drama that helps to create the enemies we think we need – then we can see the Eucharist as the ritual drama that helps undo this imagination. The Eucharist does not only help us see the world differently. It also creates a social body – the Church – that cuts across our loyalties to our various nation-states.
Torture is the ritual inscribing of the state’s
power upon a victim’s body. Where else
would we look for the Christian response
to torture than the ritual remembrance of the death
by torture of Jesus Christ – that is, the Eucharist?
In the Eucharistic rite, the commemoration of
the passion, death, resurrection, and ascension of
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fogged in by lies. As Bishop Jorge Hourton put it,
“When an entire society, because of the scandal
given by the authorities who are justly in charge
of the common good, has things so confused, so
hidden, so distorted… we are enveloped in a social
sin. Excommunication reveals it to us.”9
Excommunication is not the expulsion of a
person from the Body of Christ; it is a recognition
that the person has already placed him or herself
outside the body of Christ, and it is an invitation
to repent and come back into communion.
The Eucharist is the construction of a new sacrificial body
Social imagination is not merely a mental act.
The Eucharist is about the construction of a
social body – the Body of Christ – that is capable
of resisting the imagination of the state when
resistance is called for.
In the early Church, the term anamnesis was
not a recalling to mind, but a re-membering of
Christ’s body, that is, an action that knit together
the members of the Body of Christ. The Eucharist
is not a recalling to mind of Christ’s sacrifice, but
the construction of a new sacrificial body.
The Eucharist builds the Church, as Pope
John Paul II says, by both expressing and
bringing about the reality of the Body of
Christ.11 This image is used over and over by Paul.
The idea of individual bodies being members of a
larger social body is not new to Paul, but is found
in the ancient Greek idea of the body politic.
If it is the case that the Eucharist makes the
Body of Christ, then the Church does not
simply commemorate God’s “no” to violence, but
embodies God’s answer to violence in the world.
We do not simply offer sacrifice to God, but, as
St Augustine says, God “wanted us to be ourselves
his sacrifice”.12 We ourselves prefer to absorb the
violence of the world rather than to perpetrate
violence. For this reason, there is a close link in
many patristic writings between martyrdom and
the Eucharistic sacrifice.
9 Bishop Jorge Hourton, “¡Si no dejan de torturer, dejen de comulgar!,” in Combate Cristiano por la Democracia (Santiago: CESOC, 1987), 90. 11 Pope John Paul II, Ecclesia de Eucharistia, §21. 12 Augustine, Sermon 227, in Hill, ed., vol. 6, 255.