Book Review - Torture and Eucharist, William T. Cavanaugh

Torture and Eucharist: Theology, Politics, and the Body of Christ By: William T. Cavanaugh Oxford, UK; Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 1998 Book Report By: Marco Funk Christianity and Contemporary Culture 10.376/3 Harry J. Huebner Winnipeg Centre for Ministry Studies, CMU, AMBS Winnipeg, MB October 2006 Cavanaugh introduces the first part of his thesis for Torture and Eucharist on page two where he writes, “I present torture in the Pinochet regime as a social strategy, the effect of which is to discipline the citizenry into a complex performance scripted by the state. That performance atomizes the citizenry through fear, thereby dismantling other social bodies which would rival the state’s authority over individual bodies. I describe this not only as the violation of individual rights but as the very creation of individuals.” (2; emphasis his) The second half of Cavanaugh’s thesis is that the Eucharist was a practice with which the Chilean Catholic Church resisted this strategy of torture. Yet there was a difficulty; the problem with the Catholic Church ecclesiology in Chile was that it claimed society’s soul as its focal domain all the while handing over Chilean bodies to the state. (2) The split between soul and body, and thus the split between religion and politics, is highly problematic. Pointing to a previous article that he wrote1, Cavanaugh suggests that the split between religion and politics was invented during the wars of religion as a way of shoring up autonomous power for individual princes and their goals, thus creating the nation state. (4-5) After splitting the body from the soul, the state manages to assume the authority and responsibility for the protection of individual bodies while allowing the Church to function as the caretaker for the “soul of society”. In our modern situation, the state promises citizens protection from a prior violence. This promise is part of an imagination into which we as citizens are scripted into by the state, as a way of seizing complete loyalty to those institutions that protect our body. (9) This loyalty-to-the-state is seized not from a neutral space but rather a space occupied by various group loyalties and communities, including the Church. This is where Cavanaugh’s account of torture fits in. Whereas, torture is often treated as a horrendous violation against the individual and his/her rights, Cavanaugh sees torture as an attack not primarily on individuals but on social bodies. “Torture is not merely an attack on, but the creation of, individuals.” (3) He writes, “By absorbing powers from local bodies, the state is left as the de jure and de facto guarantor of rights. As in the case of Chile, denunciations of torture and abuses of rights are channelled into the very state that is responsible for the torture.” (4) As the citizens are individualized and directed towards loyalty to the state all the other loyalties and groups are devalued or attacked. The social formations that could protect persons from torture are disappeared leaving only the state to protect the individual, even as the state functions as torturer. Torture becomes a kind of liturgy. Cavanaugh quotes Alexander Schmemann in defining liturgy as, “an action by which a group of people become something corporately which they had not been as a mere collection of individuals.” (12) Seen in this way, liturgy promises to be a good practice for resisting the state that enacts a project of atomization; yet the state itself practices a “perverted liturgy”. (12) Through torture, the state reorganizes bodies into a new way of being; people no longer exist in communities but as individuals loyal to the nation state. The question then arises, if the state’s way of (dis)organizing people is through torture (atomization), how does the church’s own liturgy resist it? The problem, as we will see in the rest of Cavanaugh’s book, is when the Church fails to understand its Eucharistic practice as a scripting of bodies into the Body of Christ but instead as merely 1 `A Fire Strong Enough to Consume the House:' The Wars of Religion and the Rise of the State, Modern Theology 11, no. 4 (October 1995): 397-420 a spiritually uniting practice for the soul of the Chilean culture. The rest of Cavanaugh’s book tells us the story of the rise of Pinochet, his use of torture to atomize the citizenry, and the eventual Eucharistic resistance by the Chilean Church. This is done in three sections: Torture, Ecclesiology and Eucharist. In chapter one Cavanaugh begins wading through the horrific testimonies of torture he had heard while living among the Chilean people2. Accompanying these stories are valuable theological insights on what exactly was happening when the Chilean state would drag people off into the night for another round of torture. One such insight stands out, when Cavanaugh is able to pierce through the various testimonies, seeing the insidious design behind the practice of torture. He writes, “Torture may be considered a kind of perverse liturgy, for in torture the body of the victim is the ritual site where the state’s power is manifest in its most awesome form. Torture is liturgy – or, perhaps better said, “anti-liturgy” – because it involves bodies and bodily movements in an enacted drama which both makes real the power of the state and constitutes an act of worship of that mysterious power… The victim of torture is not made simply to take on the voice of the regime in imitation of its discourses. The victim serves a particular function in the drama, that of enemy.” (30, emphasis his) The reader is invited to see torture not as a practice that “uncovers and penalizes” certain forms of information (names, places, personal connections) but instead torture is a practice that creates its own information – a kind of narrative – which serves to shore up the loyalty due to Pinochet. (31) In telling numerous heart wrenching stories about torture and wicked deceit, Cavanaugh uncovers the narrative/information concealed by the state. “The key to (the state’s) project is individualization. Torture breaks down collective links and makes of its victims isolated monads. Victims then reproduce this same dynamic in society itself, with the net result that all social bodies which would rival the state are disintegrated and disappeared.” (34) It is here that torture can be seen to be an “ecclesial problem”. (71) COPACHI was one of those organizations that developed as the Chilean Church began discerning the real theological and sociological problem with torture – the destruction of rival social bodies, especially the Body of Christ. COPACHI was created for the purpose of providing help to those who suffered under the regime’s abuses; yet this organization became a way in which the Church began resisting the atomizing script of the nation state by actually functioning as a liturgical practice that cared for the bodies – no longer just the souls – of the Chilean people. The Church’s boldness and clarity in her criticisms against the regime slowly increased as the clergy began sensing the perverse nature of the performance being enacted on the people of Chile. Yet why did it take the Church in Chile so long to see the need for a reclaimingof-the-body in its ecclesial practice? In chapters three and four, Cavanaugh outlines the ecclesiological problems that led up to the Church’s initial inability to stand up to Pinochet and his torture. Outlining the history of the Catholic Church in Chile and its involvement in politics, Cavanaugh clarifies for his readers the theology and ecclesiology that eventually divided society into two: the realm of the soul under the domain of the Church and the realm of the body under control and protection of the state. Cavanaugh puts much of the blame on Jacques Maritain for providing a problematic ecclesiology that made this division between soul-and-body/religion-and-politics possible. Cavanaugh’s 2 Many of the stories in the book come from interviews by Cavanaugh himself description of this mistaken ecclesiology and its development is complex and requires careful attention that I cannot provide here. At the end of chapter four, Cavanaugh anticipates his final conclusion when he writes, “The church must see that its own disciplinary resources – Eucharist, penance, virtue, works of mercy, martyrdom – are not matters of the soul which may somehow “animate” the “real world” of bodies, but are rather body/soul disciplines meant to produce actions, practices, habits that are visible in the world. For the church to be a true social body it must reclaim not only its body but its soul from the state, and institute a discipline which is truly Christlike…” (197) In this way he moves from his discussion on ecclesiology to a discussion of the Church’s disciplined response to torture in the Eucharist. In the final two chapters, Cavanaugh presents his conclusions regarding a proper ecclesio-theological response to the practice of torture and individualization. The Church in Chile responded to the torture and programme of Pinochet’s state by enacting its own Eucharistic disciplines and practices like the COPACHI project. Could this resistance to the state be perceived as a way of reasserting the Church’s influence over society? Cavanaugh does not wish his project to be misconstrued as another grab at Christendom in which the Church forces itself on society as the disciplinarian in replacement of the atomizing script of the secular state. Instead, “Discipline in the church can only make sense as a Eucharistic discipline. The body of Christ is liturgically enacted, not institutionally guaranteed.” (221) In other words, Eucharist is a “voluntary” politics that makes the Church. In a quote that nicely summarizes the book as a whole Cavanaugh writes, “If torture is essentially an anti-liturgy, a drama in which the state realizes omnipotence on the bodies of others, then the Eucharist provides a direct and startling contrast, for in the Eucharist Christ sacrifices no other body but His own… The torturer extracts a confession of the unlimited power of the state. The Eucharist requires the confession that Jesus is Lord of all, and that the body belongs to Him.” (279) A deeper look at the language of human rights would increase the ways in which Cavanaugh’s thesis could relate to our North American context where individualism is deeply rooted in our self-understanding and where our ecclesiology also suffers from a body/soul – religion/politics duality. Yet Cavanaugh’s comments on human rights provide clues as to how his thesis might offer help to our Canadian context. One could inquire as to the severity of conformity in the Church’s language and practice with our culture’s individualism. Is salvation personal-communal or privateindividualistic? On another level you could ask about issues involving the Church’s charitable status and how acquiring this status requires a relinquishing, on the Church’s behalf, of certain communal understandings and practices. How does our charitable status affect our ability to draw lines around the body of Christ (or bodies in Christ)? On an even deeper level we could follow Cavanaugh’s thesis on atomization of the citizenry and see numerous parallels in our location. Our fixation on notions like individual choice and decision are good examples of how we are becoming more and more privatized as a people. Abortion is a matter of choice as opposed to a question of communal imagination and what it means for us to be welcoming of children. Our Child and Family Services program oversees the interests of many children that have no community to call home but are “children of the system”. The practice of divorce is managed by the state without reference to the ecclesial community that institutes marriage. Divorce becomes a question of how we manage the estates of two individuals, as opposed to divorce having something to do with the often-irresolvable mess of marital brokenness, infidelity to vowed love and communal disconnectedness. What is the Canadian script that we as Christians are being prodded into performing? To answer this question we require a kind of discernment that is enabled, I believe, through the honest worship of our Lord Jesus Christ who was also tortured. In worship we participate somehow in Jesus Christ… we touch him. As we “touch” Christ in the Supper, we are also touched and changed. Yet Jesus’ touch is not a hateful, torturing touch; it is delightful. It is orgasmic in the sense that the whole Body is involved. This Body is the result of a gracious reordering, a restructuring of statetortured-individuals healed into a new body – the Church. This touch may yet give us eyes to see the ways in which the Body of Christ is being attacked by the “fallen principalities and powers” that are the backbone in any torturing state. In Torture and Eucharist, Cavanaugh reminds the Church and the reader that this kind of worship – the theological “reading” of God’s action in our world and the contemporary embodiment of Christ’s own body in and through the Church – is our joyful privilege and duty as we face the body-slashing liturgy of the state.