Glory
to God for All Things
Going
to Hell with the Terrorists and Torturers
By-Fr.
Stephen Freeman
In
988, Prince Vladimir of Kiev was Baptized and embraced the
Christian
faith. Among his first acts as a Christian ruler were to tithe his wealth to
the Church and the poor, and to outlaw capital punishment and torture. It is
said that the Bishops advising him counseled him that he might need to keep the
torture in order to rule effectively. This anecdote has always brought a wry
smile to my face, it seems so quaint. Of course torture is not quaint, nor is
it medieval. It is quite common in the so-called modern world and has recently
moved to the front pages as the US has pulled the veil of secrecy back from its
interrogation techniques in its war against terror. I have been interested to
watch the reaction to all of this on social media. Many friends have reacted
with moral outrage. Others, particularly those whose politics are conservative,
have posted supportive pictures and thoughts. Christians find themselves on
both sides of the question.
But
there isn’t really a question. Prince Vladimir was right and the bishops
advising him were scandalously practical. Their fear is apparently a modern
fear: what if the lack of torture doesn’t work? Our enemies are dangerous and
the lives of the innocent are at stake.
The
conversation surrounding all of this (it will disappear as soon as the news
cycle moves on) reminds me of several classical problems in ethics. All of them
pose the question, “What would you be willing to do to save the life of your
loved ones?” It is a tragic question, for in the scenarios of danger that
are always suggested, there is no choice that does not yield human suffering –
even unimaginable human suffering.
But
those nightmare scenarios are not always make-believe. The regular posting of
atrocity videos have made us all too aware of the nature of the game. I do not
offer a moral debate in this posting. Torture is wrong. Justify it if you will,
but it remains wrong. St. Vladimir was right and the bishops, however practical
their advice, did him a great disservice.
But
there is something of far greater value that is too easily missed in our
current round of hand-wringing. It is the dark places of the human heart that
we see and quickly cover in the wrangle of debate. It is a place where our
thoughts should linger. For the place of torture and the smashing angry
insanity that drives a plane into towers dwell in the same dark heart – and the
heart belongs to us all. Some will protest immediately that I am drawing some
kind of moral equivalency. One act is done to save lives, the other to destroy
them. But it is not any kind of moral anything that I wish to draw. Rather it
is our attention to the true character of the human heart.
There
is a morality that is practiced in our day-to-day life. It may include the
simple rules of etiquette and a host of other expectations. And for many
people, the observance of these rules are what constitute their notion of good
and bad. But there is often an abstraction that occurs within such moral
musings. Polite society shields itself from many of its immoral actions. The
violence of poverty is often covered with economic theory and political discourse.
For the child who suffers – these are just words. The general wealth of a
healthy standard of living grants the luxury of oblivion – the ability to
ignore the true cost of the luxury. This is true whether the cost is the
exploitation of slave labor in a foreign land or the torture of the enemy well
out of sight. And these are only egregious examples.
More
hidden still are the dark recesses of our own hearts. For the torturers and the
terrorists are just human beings. They were not spawned on an alien planet.
Whatever they know, they learned from other human beings. And though the dark
recesses of our hearts may often yield nothing more than thoughts and feelings,
we should remind ourselves that their true character is the stuff of which
torture is made. I am even more interested in the cold assessment of those 10th
century bishops who cooled St. Vladimir’s jets and offered their advice on
statecraft. For theirs is the calm, pragmatic mind within us all. There is a
chilly moral calculus that governs their advice. “The kingdom must go on, even
if it requires a little torture from time to time. The gospel is good and the
Baptism of the Rus is even better, so long as the Prince of the Rus doesn’t
forget that he’s a prince and do his job.” I fear the cool utility of such
reason far more than I do the uncontrolled passions within us. But it is right
and salutary that we should allow ourselves to look in the dark places of the
heart. Orthodoxy insists on proclaiming that the resurrected Christ first
descended into hades. There is no easy transition from the cool tomb to the
bright Sunday morning. There is the intervening and inconvenient reality of
true darkness.
C.S.
Lewis portrays a fanciful story of a bus ride from hell to heaven. Those in
hell (“the gray town”) are invited to remain in the bright, solid reality of
heaven. The conversations that take place in that delightful work (my favorite
Lewis) are very telling. They are the confrontation between morality and
reality, between the forensic model and the ontological. Heaven is so real that
its solid objects hurt the feet of the hellish ghosts. Their moralities appear
silly in the face of plain, solid being. The ghost of a wayward bishop protests
that he cannot stay in this new place, since he has a prior engagement in a
theological discussion group, where he is to read a paper – swallowed by hell
and his life is unchanged.
Our
own moralities are equally banal and empty, and we shudder and make excuses
rather than examine the true darkness of our hearts. Dostoevsky repeatedly
unmasked the emptiness of society’s morality. In the Brothers Karamazov, there
are four brothers, all sons of a father who is a drunkard and a thoroughly
disgusting human being. He is the definition of a
“Karamazov.”
None of the brothers appear, at first, to be like their father. One is a
greatly tormented romantic, his life filled with pleasures and excess. Another
is a cold, hard-bitten cynic who no longer believes in God. A third is a very
dark character, ultimately a patricide.
And
the fourth is an innocent, a virtual saint. But even he admits, “I am a Karamazov.”
And his brother says to him, “We are all insects.”
Dostoevsky
(and Lewis) do not write in such a manner in order to simply tear down the
pretense of public morality. But they know that our salvation cannot be found
within the little efforts of our moral strivings. They (Dostoevsky in
particular) dare to go into the darkness where Christ has entered and suggest
to us that we all have a share in that place.
We
are all Karamazov’s.
Entering
into that darkness and acknowledging its depths is not an effort to consign
ourselves to perdition or to embrace a doctrine of total depravity. It is an
effort to unite ourselves to Christ. The traditional name for this journey is
repentance. Moralism has all but destroyed the Christian understanding of
repentance, replacing it with good intentions and apologies. Our sin is
brokenness and is best seen in the darkest corners of the heart.
St.
Paul found Christ in the dark corner of murder and burning hatred. The heights
of his holiness are only rivaled by the depths of his sin. Tradition holds that
St. Stephen was a kinsman of St. Paul. The anguish of such sin is indeed a
“goad,” as Christ described it.
St.
Peter did not truly find Christ until his own encounter with cowardice. Always
the first and the loudest of the Apostles, probably easily recognized as a
leader by others, he was not given the care of Christ’s sheep until he found
Christ in the depths of his personal hades on the shore of Galilee. And the
resurrected Lord says to him, “Do you love me?”
We
must not ignore the public sins of our culture (torture) or the sins of enemies
(terrorists) who seek to destroy us. But if we are to stand honestly before
God, then we need to see the place that such things have in our heart. Do we
dare to speak and acknowledge the Karamazov within ourselves or do we pretend
that we are offended and shocked by the hearts of others.
If
we do not find Christ in hades, we will not likely find Him anywhere else.
Found
at http://blogs.ancientfaith.com/glory2godforallthings/2014/12/12/going-hell-terrorists-torturers/
