“Torture is by far the most serious theological issue we face today.” - Adam Kotsko

This made me think immediately of Bonhoeffer, and my response is reproduced below:

“Torture is, in any case, generally an ineffectual means for discovering the truth; though, of course, this argument can have force only in cases where it is really the truth that is being sought for. But, quite apart from that, any physical torture inflicts the most extreme dishonour on the human being, and consequently engenders an intense hatred and the natural bodily impulse to restore this wounded honour by the application of bodily force. Bodily dishonour seeks to avenge itself on the body of the infamous tormentor. In this way the violation of man’s bodily freedom once again destroys the foundations of society”

– Bonhoeffer, D., _Ethics_ (London: Collins 1964), p. 185.

Some further comment is needed here.

First of all, it is not known that Bonhoeffer was himself tortured, although other members of his circle, and indeed family, certainly were (Bethge’s biography of Dietrich Bonhoeffer records one of them as saying that he did not mind dying, so long as he did not have to look again into the eyes of his torturers: “the depravity!”).

Bonhoeffer, who endured interrogations that he found “disgusting”, was undoubtedly afraid that he would be physically tortured, and his fear was both the physical terror that the thought of torture naturally induces and the concern, articulated in this passage, that he would be emotionally and spiritually compromised, by being driven to an extreme and murderous fury against his tormentors.

The word “dishonour”, appearing in this passage, is linked earlier on to “the right which is given with the creation of man” to “the preservation of bodily life…against arbitrary infringement of the liberty of the body”. Thus, “[r]ape is the use of the body of another for on’es own purposes…in opposition to it there stands the right of the human being to give or refuse his body in freedom”. Likewise slavery, and “arbitrary deprivation of liberty”.

Torture is thus one violation amongst others of the natural liberty of the body; but that liberty resides in the nature of the living person as a *creature*. This is confirmed in an earlier passage introducing the topic of “Natural Life”:

“Natural life is formed life. The natural is form, immanent in life and serving it. If life detaches itself from this form, if it is unwilling to allow itself to be served by the form of the natural, then it destroys itself to the very roots…Life in itself, in the strict sense of the word, is a void, a plunge into the abyss; it is movement without end and without purpose, movement into nothing…God desires life, and He gives life a form in which it can live, because if it is left to itself it can only destroy itself. But this form at the same time places life in the service of other life and of the world; in a limited sense it makes life a means to an end” (ibid, p. 149).

(It is tempting to try to relate the purposeless “plunge into the abyss” of life disconnected from its natural form to Nancy’s evocation of “evil’s hatred of existence as such…freedom’s point of annulment where its own unleashing devastates it, where its own incandescence devours it” (_The Experience of Freedom_, pp 128-9). But the distance between Nancy and Bonhoeffer’s framing of bodily life and privacy in terms of a divinely created natural law is perhaps too great.)

For Bonhoeffer, the immediate consequences of the unjust “violation of man’s bodily freedom” are shame and dishonour. He speaks of shame as the “natural feeling” in which “expression is given to the essential freedom of the human body in its sexual aspect”: its “unchanging essence, which is founded in nature”, is the “safeguarding” of that freedom, which “watches over the mystery of human corporeality”. Shame and dishonour call for restitution of the violated freedom over which they keep watch, and provide for social order in general: the social body is violated whenever the bodily freedom of any person is violated, and the terrible emotional violence of shame and dishonour is unleashed in response to this violation.

Bonhoeffer is particularly horrified by sexual shamelessness, the abandonment of all watchful concern for the body’s integrity: “The destruction of the sense of shame means the dissolution of all sexual and conjugal order, and indeed of all social order in the widest sense”. Here he seems perhaps remote from the progressive moral tenor of our time, which considers shame in its repressive aspect as a manifestation of social control over the body’s rightful freedom of sexual expression. At the same time, were not the horrors of Abu Ghraib compounded by the apparent shamelessness of the participants, and motivated by a desire to induce shame - intense awareness of moral and bodily violation, of “disunity” as Bonhoeffer says elsewhere - in their victims?

Bonhoeffer’s analysis puts on the table many of the categories we might feel drawn to use in thinking about the problem of torture in our society. It links the physical violation of individuals with the destruction of social order; it speaks of the rage and desire for retribution that arise when the victim of torture is physically dishonoured, and warns of the social price that must be paid for unleashing such emotions. It identifies a proper regard for the bodily freedom of oneself and others as constitutive of “social order in the widest sense”, and identifies the natural form of that freedom as one which “places life in the service of other life and of the world”. When the natural form of bodily freedom is broken, is it not precisely that relation to “other life” and to “the world” that is annihilated?