5 questions with William Cavanaugh on torture
July 15, 2008
U.S. Catholic magazine interviews University of St. Thomas (St. Paul, MN) professor of theology William Cavanaugh on torture. Cavanaugh is author of Torture and Eucharist: Theology, Politics and the Body of Christ, Theopolitical Imagination: Discovering the Liturgy as a Political Act in an Age of Global Consumerism, and the recently published Being Consumed: Economics and Christian Desire. Torture and Eucharist is, hands down, one of the most important works of theology that I have read in years.
The full text of the U.S. Catholic interview is here.
H/T to David.
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Cavanaugh is certainly one of the major, up-and-coming theologians of our age. I’ve not had the time to really go through his works (there are limits), but everything I’ve looked over — or heard — has been superb.
Why do I fear that some-one in the crowd is going to come to torture’s defense?
Thanks for this post, Michael.
I really need to read more of this guy.
Nathan – Yeah, it’s just a matter of time. That, or we’ll get someone who will demand to know why U.S. Catholic didn’t ask him any questions about abortion.
MM – You would love Torture and Eucharist. I also recommend the following which are also on torture, giving you a taste of his project:
http://www.christiancentury.org/feat_article.html?articleid=112
http://www.vitaltheology.com/VTV3I6page3.pdf (PDF)
I really need to read more of this guy.
He is awesome!
Cavanaugh is great and not given to compromises. I’d put him in the same vein as Schindler Rowland and the Augustinian Thomists & radical orthodoxy school. He views life in the Eucharist as the alternative to the liberal tradition. Needless to say he would have no time for waffling around about Obama and the political enthusiasms of Vox Nova.
Cavanaugh is also obviously influenced by Latin American theology, Kevin. He’s a bit more complex that you make him out to be. And your last sentence is absurd.
Cavanaugh is a fine fellow, but I have qualms about his view of the State, as found in the anthology “Radical Orthodoxy”. He thinks the State has too much power and seems to yearn for a restoration of church control.
See http://www.religion-online.org/showarticle.asp?title=821:
“In his essay “The City,” William T. Cavanaugh observes that the Christian story of salvation insists upon the essential unity of the human race — in spite of humanity’s sinful tendencies toward individualism and violence. In contrast, the founding myths of the modern secular state — in Hobbes, Rousseau and Locke — are all parodies of the Christian story. They describe human beings as individuals who must defend their (private) property against the encroachments of others. This myth can become effective only if it obliterates the Christian story of universal human communion. Because it cannot abide a “transnational” church that might compete for the allegiance of citizens, it redefines religion as inward and private. The consequences of this redefinition continue to haunt us, both in our extreme individualism and in our reliance on violence. Time and again, Christians who seek to influence (and participate in) the state eventually succumb to the state’s version of salvation. As an alternative, Cavanaugh points to the Eucharist as the means by which Christians can escape individualism and violence, turning instead toward true peace and reconciliation.”
He thinks the State has too much power and seems to yearn for a restoration of church control.
He does think the state has too much power, but he thinks this is what states do. He actually does not want to restore church control of the state, though. Because he is so ecclesiocentric (in a good way), it can be interpreted as triumphalism, but I think that is a misinterpretation based on our inability to break out of liberalism’s political categories. He does not want the Church to take control of the state; he wants the church to enact its own subversive politics.
Although there are some resemblances, his take is different than the neo-christendom ideas of, say, Oliver O’Donovan. And although he appears in the inaugural book Radical Orthodoxy, his take is also different from John Milbank’s I think.
Theopolitical Imagination was an incredible little book.
Wow, that description of Cavanaugh’s “The City” just blew me away– because it ties in so closely with what I have been trying to argue on these pages about the fundamental unity of the human race and the problems of individual-based Enlightenment thinking. Does anybody have a link to this actual essay?
MM I don’t think the whole essay is available online. It’s included in a collection of essays called Radical Orthodoxy, edited by John Milbank, Catherine Pickstock, and Graham Ward. Some of the points, I think, were incorporated into Cavanaugh’s book Theopolitical Imagination. I don’t recall specifically, but some of the ideas might also be in the article “Killing for the Telephone Company,” here: http://www.jesusradicals.com/library/cavanaugh/telephone.pdf (PDF!!)
“And your last sentence is absurd.”
Michael, Cavanaugh is opposed to the Liberal Tradition. Many of the commentators on this site seek desperately to make their faith compatible with it.
“…the problems of individual-based Enlightenment thinking.” These problems are on daily display here.
Michael, Cavanaugh is opposed to the Liberal Tradition. Many of the commentators on this site seek desperately to make their faith compatible with it.
“…the problems of individual-based Enlightenment thinking.” These problems are on daily display here.
If you mean the libertarians, er – anarcho-capitalists, then I agree with you 100%, but there are only a couple of them here.
I mean everyone and anyone who looks for salvation through politics. And that seems like
quite a few here.
Libertarians and Socialists are merely opposite sides of the same coin and if you have more of the latter than the former, it only means your site is typically conventional. And I say that, knowing the first libertarian was the Devil.
I mean everyone and anyone who looks for salvation through politics.
Well, we’ve been unpacking statements like these on another thread (the recent James Cone thread).
You are right that Cavanaugh is more or less opposed to the liberal tradition, but he has written a lot about the relationship between “religion” and “politics” and how modernity created an artificial split between the two. Salvation is political. Of course, it is also more than political, but it is political. Your allergy against associating salvation and politics is not an allergy Cavanaugh shares.
Lest Nathancontramundi’s fear should be in vain: Cavenaugh speaks of “torture” as “one thing”. All penalty includes an element of torment. The escape from utilitarian reductionism is good, but the lack of clarity in definition–as though it were manifest by the use of one word, or by treating Chile as the Primal Instance–is not. Is solitary confinement torture? Is restriction on reading material torture? Can a severe penalty be merited by a terrorist that can be remitted if information averting the consequences of his own acts is supplied? Is that torture? I like Cavenaugh’s work. But in it there is, despite his rejection of enlightenment contractualism, a certain unwillingness to consider the primacy of the common good. If someone plans the murder of civilians, and those plans are operational, can that person as a just sentence for setting these plans in motion be made to suffer until information aiding the foiling of those plans be given? If so, how much, and in what way? Surely prison? Is that the only just sanction? How about a headache? Sleep deprivation? Why would 50 years in prison, or lengthy solitary confinement, be permissible, but not a week and a half of headaches and sleep deprivation? There is a certain idealization of the victim of torture: picking the Chilean case as one’s prime referent highlights this, as many innocent civilians were tortured. The word “torture” takes in a great deal of ground. Augustine and Aquinas thought of penalty as the deprivation of natural good contrary to the will of the one punished. Cannot part of the punishment of a terrorist murderer be the infliction of certain pains that will be remitted if the terrorist reveals the plans of which he has knowledge, plans that can be operationally checked? If so, what limits should be placed on such penalties, and what judicial safeguards to assure that only guilty persons who clearly have knowledge pertinent to containing the harm planned will be subject to them? Is administration of truth serums against the will of a known planner of terrorist events torture? How does a planner of mass murder acquire a “right” to be free of painful penalty that might actually have the medicinal effect of impeding the slaughter of innocents? By the way, do not assume that the author of this post considers the direct targeting of civilians by any agency to be justified–e.g., it seems prima facie true that Dresden and Hiroshima were acts of state terror. But here the concern is with the use of a word, and images drawn from one context, as though that were all the conceptual equipment needed to think reasonably about the issues raised under the rubric of “torture”. The questions asked in the video managed only to elicit what we all already have: a strong visceral hostility to “torture”. There is an undersea colony of serious theological and philosophical questions lurking here that are of great practical pertinence, all untouched by the iconic confusion of the sadistic torturing of a suburban socialist housewife with the hostile interrogation of a known planner of bombings who is withholding information about current operations under way. Some may wish to argue that penalty should not be related to the interrogation of such a person, and certainly some penalties are barbaric–but this requires more than bandying the word “torture” about. There is a rich Catholic tradition of thought about such things, and rhetorical totemism centered on the word “torture” isn’t very useful in penetrating it. The evil of torture as understood by the Church is largely in its *separation* from penalty, its corresponding destructive infinity hostile to the dignity of the person and to the limited authority of human agency to impose such suffering (remember C. S. Lewis’s criticism of replacing punishment with therapy), and its rank utilitarian employment. But it is possible to impose certain limited sufferings upon known terrorists precisely as penalties subject to remission insofar as aid is given by the terrorist in averting the harm that has been set in motion. Then the question is, what kind of suffering is in question? These are not spurious questions.
“Salvation is political. ”
Let me guess whose face adorns that bumper-sticker. Cavanaugh views modernity as offering it’s own rival sacrality. It’s political form but a depraved parody of the Eucharistic life complete with it’s own liturgies, Gnostic revelations and high priestesses.
His view is in direct opposition to the emotional investment so many make in the princes of this world.
Salvation is political. Save me, ye wielders of earthly power and prophets for strange gods. Save me.
I don’t know you, but you need to get some rest.
Nathan – There you go; right on time too.
Alan – Cavanaugh defines torture in the article.
Kevin – Cavanaugh has a broader definition of political than you do. Of course “his view is in direct opposition to the emotional investment so many make in the princes of this world,” but his point is that the Church is to embody another politics, an alternative to the politics of “ye wielders of earthly power.” This is a central point in his work — that salvation is political — and you seem to have missed it.
Expanding the definition of a word to accommodate other meanings when other sufficient words are readily available only increases confusion.
Cavanaugh is not “expanding” anything. To reduce the term “politics” to the activity of nation-states or politicians is silly. His broader definition of politics is hardly controversial in theology or political science.
Cavanaugh is great!
Actually Michael you missed it. Cavanaugh views politics as it is understood and practiced, as an impediment to salvation. Would a culture that places the Eucharist at the center of it’s existence have political consequences? Sure. But he does not try to force or craft politics onto Someone who transcends such confinement.
He would not find this blog sharing his view.
Well, I may have got the nuance of Cavanaugh’s position wrong, but he does seem to have a somewhat manichean opposition of modern Enlightenment State autonomy on the one hand and prophetic subversive Church on the other. I think it is basic to Christian maturity to accept the Enlightenment — an ongoing self-critical process which is at the basis of European and American democracy — and then go on to exert the prophetic Christian charism.
Cavanaugh views politics as it is understood and practiced, as an impediment to salvation.
As understood and practiced by whom? He points to sectors of the Church who understand and practice differently as examples of the politics he is talking about.
He would not find this blog sharing his view.
Obviously this blog includes a variety of perspectives. I imagine he would disagree with a good bit of what he would see here. But he would probably agree with some of it too.
VII – If my “manichean” you mean “Augustinian” then I think you’re right. I actually probably agree with you that certain aspects of the enlightenment should be accepted, but not all.
When you say “Augustinian” then of course one thinks of “Thomist” as the antidote, and it was the Aristotelean and Thomist sense of the dignity and autonomy of the political order that revitalized medieval Christianity and laid many of the foundations on which the Enlightenment would build. I don’t know what aspects of the Enlightenment are not to be accepted, since the Enlightenment is not a fixed set of theses, but a spirit — the spirit of humanity taking rational responsibility for itself — and this spirit has expressed itself primarily in the central institutions of our civilization, such as democracy and a rule of law that respects basic human rights and liberties. I don’t think we can stand outside the Enlightenment and pass judgment on it. The only effective alternative to the Enlightenment is the historic reactions against it, which generally took the form of a return to the Middle Ages. You might say that modern existentialism, surrealism, phenomenology, psychoanalysis, or indeed Romanticism before that, show up the limits of Enlightenment rationalism; but it seems to me that those movements actually advance the Enlightenment, since they free reason from the limitations of a narrow rationalism.
I like liberation theology, but let us remember it flourished in countries without a democratic government and the political culture of democracy. Radical and anarchic thinking is necessary in such conditions and may even be necessary in a radically corrupted democracy such as the USA can be seen as. But I would think a Christian social theorist should be especially concerned with building up a just and functioning democratic political order. Consigning the political order to the prince of darkness may have made sense in the over-heated world of early Christian eschatology, but today I think we do better to look to the broad, optimistic outlook of the Council that sees the travail of political struggle for justice and peace as part of the task of preparing for the coming of the Kingdom — or, in unbiblical phrase, of building up the Kingdom on earth.
“…the spirit of humanity taking rational responsibility for itself”
Sure as “ghosts within machines” born in isolation and unburdened by ties and obligations, living under a watchmaker God who is absent from the meta-narrative and daily life, while appetite and Will went unchecked. What a nightmare.
Kevin, of course it is easy to quote 17th and 18th century ideas that are now corrected, by the further progress of the Enlightenment itself!
” Sure as “ghosts within machines” born in isolation and unburdened by ties and obligations, living under a watchmaker God who is absent from the meta-narrative and daily life, while appetite and Will went unchecked. What a nightmare.”
This comment hardly does justice to the greatness of Descartes, Leibniz, the Enlightenment philosophes, and their inheritors such as Kant. If you want to diss the Enlightenment, then tackle it in its greatest thinking and its most enduring values. Real foes of the Englightenment do not hesitate to attack the myths of democracy, human rights, Reason, progress and glory in plunging us back into the dark ages.
V2,
I attacked the Endarkenment (sorry, but you don’t get to control the terms of the debate) at it’s core; a replacement of Christendom with a godless civilization. Yes, I love what it brought to us in terms of modern dentistry, but if that means enduring holocausts and perpetual war, then I say the trade-off wasn’t worth it.
Holocausts? Nazism, anti-semitism, are anti-Enlightenment. The nouveaux philosophes of the 1970s did try to claim that the Enlightenment produced Marxism produced Stalinism and so was murderous. Surely a tendentious view? The Enlightenment is the father of modern democracy. Marx, by and large, was also a great enlightened thinker, and we are beginning to realize how much we have missed him!
If Christendom had continued uncorrected you would have had holocausts too — have you forgotten the religious wars, inquisitions, anti-Semitism? The Enlightenment has made Christians more Christian, it seems to me.
A godless civilization… Again I believe you might learn from Harvey Cox about the blessings of the Secular City. Religious faith flourishes best in a wholesome environment i which secular values and liberties are respected for their intrinsic value. Vatican II realized this.
Before I laucnh off, just to say to the last poster, leaving aside the fact that Harvey Cox has shifted his positions on this more than the Vicar of Bray, I think your missing the point (although I am just as fond as Marx as you are, just the real Marx, and the real Lenin, and the real Trotsky, all opponents of the lazy stauts quo and voting Democrat!).
Cavanaugh’s point is that after 1648 we simply replaced killing in the name of Catholicism/Lutheranism/Reformed/Orthodoxy etc, with killing in the name of “America”, “Britian”, “Germany”, “France”, “Japan”, “Chile”, “Argentina” etc. The nation-state has become our church. Our fellow Catholics are supposed to be our brothers and sisters in Christ, with all that implies in terms of conduct towards one another. But in reality, if a bunch of men (and its mostly men, although women have been increasingly getting in on the act over the last three or four decades or so) who may not even be Catholics, and certainly have no hierarchical or magisterial authority whatsoever (remember coronation/inaugaration is not the eight sacrament: Gregory VII took care of that particualr little heresy), tell us to butcher each other in service of the false god “national interest” then we do so without hesitation.
Cavanuagh is trying to remind us that 1648 did not mark the beginning of the decline of religion, simply a change of religion, that in peacetime largely passes unnoticed.
You can’t cherry pick what you accept and what you reject from he Enlightenment legacy. It produced the French Revolution, the grandfather of State managed genocide and set the stage for worse calamities. Nothing in Christendom can measure up to the barbarism inflicted by the “armed doctrines” that mark the modern era.
Religious life does not flourish within cultures that produce bifurcated individuals living
fragmented lives. Or, are you content to defend the putrid state of our hollowed out culture.
The good news is the whole project is so denatured and contrary to the deep longing and aspirations of human beings that is collapsing form it’s own barren, infertile imagination. Don’t get me wrong, it’s blinkered ideologues will find refuge in academia and issue gems like this” I am just as fond as Marx as you are, just the real Marx, and the real Lenin, and the real Trotsky,…” anxious to sustain their fantasies. But. reality intrudes and the whole swindled is in free-fall.
You can’t cherry pick what you accept and what you reject from he Enlightenment legacy.
Actually, yes you can. Most people, in fact, do.
The 1975 U.N. Convention on Torture defines torture as any pain or suffering, physical or mental, inflicted by public officials for various reasons, including punishment, interrogation, and intimidation.
If this is truly Cavanaugh’s understanding of torture, which he seems to imply, then despite my inclination to approve of his thoughts, his argument is implausible and will do more to hurt the cause than help it.
If for Cavanaugh, public officials–who bear the “sword”–truly cannot inflict pain or suffering (physical OR mental) even to punish a convicted evildoer without it being torture, then his theory is absurd and must be rejected.
According to the definition he cites, when parents spank their children, they likewise would be “torturing” their children–except that they are not public officials. This is ludicrous. His definition of torture is obviously far too broad.