Question: The Dialectic of Torture and the Process of Conversion

I found the following quote from a work on George Berkeley (Constantine Caffentzis' Exciting the Industry of Mankind) which I thought exemplified certain dynamics within modern theology. Here it is:

"Heidegger most clearly exemplified the the plus-question. He was the prime academic philosopher of the Nazis, and he clearly concluded that world domination required thorough effort at creating an elite which repudiated the 'positivist' values embedded in 'western' philosophy. His effort required a radical questioning of this tradition in order to rid the new world conquerors of any remaining nostalgia. He therefore commanded his students to violently question themselves. (His later disgust with the Nazis had nothing to do with 'humanitarian scruples'; on the contrary, he left party activity because the Nazis were not thorough-going enough for him.)

To carry out his task, Heidegger was undoubtedly impressed by his Catholic youth, his catechism and the routine of the inquisitor's interrogation. For the questions involved in inculcating and extracting statements of faith were not interested in 'information.' Indeed, in such interrogations, the sentence radicals [open ended questions like "who are you?"] are treated in a totally cynical way. For in the confession box, in the catechism school, or on the inquisitor's rack, the questions are meant to strike terror in the confessee, the catechumen, or the tortured; they are to make the subjects question themselves in order to destroy the interrogatees' resistant silence. They are not meant to reveal some hidden information but to create a new alethia (truth) relation between the power poles. One's 'most intimate secrets' are exposed under this kind of questioning; not in a statistical spirit, but as a sign of the submission due to the questioner qua representative of Being. 

Indeed, in seventeenth-century English, 'question' was synonymous with 'torture', and to read Heidegger is to experience all the tricks of mental torture. One is continually terrorized, made uncertain, mystified, and humiliated, given the sense of being lost and needing someone or something new to get one's bearings... the neologisms, the philosophical riddles, the complex grammar, the classical tags, the continual reference to death, anxiety, and (in the post-war years) nuclear holocaust are functional to the 'questioning' that Heidegger demands of his pupil-readers. 'We' must question ourselves as a matter of duty, if we wish to be part of the 'elite' in the Nazi universe of the 1930s or some more defuse regime after the Fuhrer's death. All who do not undergo the 'ordeal' at the hands of the 'master' are considered not-quite human or, equivalently, 'human, all too human.' After all, it is the voluntary decision to undergo the question that is the initial sign of one's superiority. The Heideggerian text is a rack full of deliberately confused and confusing questions which stretch the brain to submission-interrogative devices for a 'brainwashing' to reduce the psyche to a poor naked thing. Heidegger's critics, like Adorno, are quite off the mark; Heidegger's jargon is authentic enough...it is the jargon of the interrogator employing a simple, though quite fallacious logic appropriate to the boot-camp promises of the drill sergeant: you cannot learn to command unless you learn to obey." (C., Exciting the Industry of Mankind, 162-163)

What here Caffentzis adumbrates is how 'questions' may not be so much a means of discovery, but destructive creation. To anyone who has had any experience with military life, one understands the final line. It's also the same mechanism of cults: you must be destroyed in order to be saved, reconstituted as something else. And there's pride in this transformation. 'You' emerge from the torture rack as something better, stronger, maybe stranger.

Heidegger was interested in both Augustine and Luther in his reworking of theology in his crusade against ontotheology and metaphysics. For him, as many before, conversion was a violent wrenching, a harsh reorientation in a world that is itself opaque and disturbed. When you enter the world, it is not gentle but a being thrown. And thus all shifts, changes, turns are themselves violent and painful. Thus, redemption, the converstion to Being and becoming its shepherd in a world of miscues and blindness, comes through this question-answer transformation. One must pass through this threshhold in order to be something new and alive. One must suffer to overcome suffering.

There's something true to this paradigm, but it's not in the innate value of suffering as such. Rather, as St. Paul would say, in suffering we gain fellowship with Christ. We too bear the cross, we too die with Him, we too are buried, and we too are risen. And yet this suffering is not itself the conversion, but the conversion is oriented to "picking up your cross" and following the Lord. But there's a subtle difference between this and what Heidegger describes, resourcing contemporary Roman Catholic practices as they had developed from and through the Middle Ages.

It's a subtle distinction because I dislike the naive Enlightened evaluation of nature as "out there" and pure. Not only is it a lie (culture is natural and untamed nature can be ugly) but usually masks exploitation. Suffering should neither be put through the utilitarian calculator nor aestheticized as an innately beautiful act. Proverbs has a prayer to neither have too much nor too little, lest one forgets God or is turned to sin (respectively). In the latter, pain and suffering are not goods but become serious temptations. In Christ, suffering is given an out, becoming a means to enter into the fullness of life. But suffering has no intrinsic value and does not necessarily provoke nobility or virtue.

Caffentzis contrasts Heidegger to Berkeley's antimaterial idealism. For the bishop, the concept of "matter" (the sheer potentiality of primary attributes for Locke, Newton, et al.) was a path to atheism. Better to attribute the experience of the real to the active creation and governance of God. Through our lives God is constantly talking to, nudging, puzzling, suggesting to us. God converts us through questions, but not in the same way Heidegger framed things. Rather, for Berkeley, God lays out puzzle pieces and poses us with their incoherence, a mystery that naturally intrigues our minds as created and active minds. Deep cries out to deep. Berkeley's account is similar to C.S. Lewis' description of his conversion: it was like gently waking up from the sun's rays.

In contrast, Heidegger's description is not unlike Luther who saw a level of violence and warfare in his conversion. Luther believed God only came to him through anfechtung, intense inner suffering and convulsion. Of course, the importance of this conversion has a long debate, and how to best understand Luther's theologia crucis is contested. Later Pietists, looking to increase spiritual vitality among fellow Lutherans, systematized Luther's conversion experience as normative. To be a true Christian one must pass through the paralyzing fear of the Law, standing before God's withering gaze and the void, crumpled up as worthless trash ready for the flames. And from that experience, and that alone (I'm simplifying a bit), one is open to receive the grace of acceptance, forgiveness, and transformative love. Only after passing through these flames does one truly walk as a Christian. Of course, many found Pietist insistence upon this phenomenon as deeply destructive. Not only may it call into question the identity of Christians who had not experienced things this way, it also seemed to create a new spiritual elite. Moravians modified this Pietistic emphasis on suffering (allowing love/peace to go before internal anguish over sins, creating a rift with fellow Pietists. But from these Germans, as they migrated to England and English America, revivalism emerged. This conversion-driven piety inflamed American evangelism: from Whitfield and Wesley to C.G. Finney and beyond.

And while there's some truth in the above (i.e. the need for internal conversion and transformation), conversion as necessarily violent mishandles scripture. While St. Paul's confrontation with the risen Christ was shocking (Saul was blinded by divine light and confused by the question of Christ, "why do you persecute me?"), it was not particularly violent. There was no haunting, no account of inner doubt, no conscience afflicted with the Law. Romans 7 is quite clear that, when awakened to the problem, the Christian realizes a self (and world) at war with itself because of sin. Baptism, a divine sentence of death, ends the pattern of this-world and initiates a pattern of living fit for the-world-to-come. However, conversion does not require a prolonged affliction of conscience. The New Testament does not fundamentally describe the gospel according to Medieval categories. The question is not: "how do I find a gracious God?" These questions derive from other historical paradigms that are alien, if not hostile, to the New Testament's account. It is more of an external crisis than an internal one. The Law is not mainly about wounded consciences, but the failure of Israel to be a light unto the Gentiles. How could the people of God, sin sick and wed to death, be the means of God's reign over Heaven and Earth? Again, to be clear, it's not that this approach does not involve moral psychology. Rather, it's that salvation/damnation do not primarily revolve around the individual's conscience. Per the NT and the Second Temple Judaism that formed its context, baptism and conversion did not require any Lutheran-esque anguish.

The Heideggerian paradigm, whether through a Roman disciplinarian regime or through the law-gospel dialectics, rips up the soul to transform it. It is the doctrine of brainwashing everywhere, a brutal attempt to reach into the mind of the other. Of course, the purpose is salvation. The inquisitor's role in torturing heretics through interviews and physical pain was to save souls. Psychological warfare was an attempt to master how one could transplant a worldview into the head of another, re-coding their intuitions. Such is not simply shaming someone, but transforming them. This process is evil, the way men end up creating all kinds of monsters. Whether mindless zombies, ravenous werewolves, or predatory vampires, the process of conversion is a violent bite. In the hands of the inquisitor, this process is vile and dishonors Christ when associated with His name. God help us.