Gods Forgiveness and Memory-Volf

7/28/2019 Gods Forgiveness and Memory-Volf

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Gods Forgiveness and Ours:M emory of Interrogations,Interrogation of Memory

MiROSLAV V O L F *

The author recounts his own experiences of protracted interroga-tions bij the secret service in the former Yugoslavia to illustrate thechallenges of remembering rightly wrongs endured. The challengefacing individuals and whole cultures is this: not just to rememberwrongs endured, and nam e them publicly as we are so often en-couraged, but to remember them rightly, which is to say to re-inember them in a way that heals wounded persons as well astheir relations to others, including their relation to the perpetra-tors. At the heart ofthe proposed way of remembering rightly isthe memory of Christ's passion and resurrection. This idea, onlysketched in the article, is developed in the author's book The Endof Memory: Remembering Rightly in a Violent World.I have a confession to make: I was once considered a national se-curity threat and a likely source of incriminating information aboutother peop le who w ere also suspected of posing a threat to the secu-rity of my home country. No wonder then that the photos of mis-

treated Abu Ghraib detainees in Iraq shocked me so much. I stillrem em be r w he re I was wh en I first saw the images of tlieir naked, hu-miliated, and sexually abused bodies and of a person hooded andhooked to electrical wires standing helplessly with arm s stretch ed outas though in an enactment of a modem-day crucifixion. Terrible astliese windows into tortu re by the Am erican m ilitary we re in tlieir own

* Miroslav Volf is tlie He nry B. W right Professor of Systematic Theo logy at Yale


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214 Anglican Theological Reviewright, they also flooded my mind with scenes from my own m uch lesssevere interrogations of mo re than twenty years ago.Charges and Threats

It was the year of our Lord 1984, though to me it seemed morelike the year of his archenem y. In th e fall of 1983 I was sum m one d tocompulsory service in the military of then-communist Yugoslavia.T he re was no way out of it. I had to leave beh ind my wife a nd a soon-to-he-horn Ph.D. dissertation to spend one year on a military hase inthe town of Mostar, sharing a room w ith forty or so soldiers and eatingstuff like cold goulash with overcooked m ea t for hreakfast at 5:00 a.m.But as I stepped onto the hase, I sensed that danger, not just discom-fort, awaited me.

I had h een trained in the West in a subversive discipline that stud-ies everything in its relation to the one true God, who is above allworldly gods including those of totalitarian regim es. I was writing adissertation on Karl Marx, whose account of socialism and how toachieve it could only serve to de-legitimize the existing socialism theYugoslav military was defending. I was the son of a pastor whom thesecret police regularly visited over the years to make sure tha t nothin gseditious was going on in his churc h. My wife was an Am erican citizenand therefore, in the eyes of my commanders, a potential CIA spy. Iwas innocent, bu t Big Bro ther would be watching m e. I knew that. Ijust didn't know how very closely.

Unbeknownst to me, most of my unit was involved in spying onm e. One soldier wo uld give me a politically sensitive book to read, an-other a recent issue of Newsweek or Tinw, while a third w ould get hisfather, who worked for the Croatian magazine Danas, to give me asubscription. All this was designed to get me to talk about religion,ethnic belonging, politics, the militaryanything that would exposemy likely seditious proclivities. I had a Greek New Testament withm e, and some soldiers pretended to be interested in discussing itscontents, a topic prohibited on the base. I was named the administra-tive assistant to the cap tain, otherwise an attractive job but given to meso that I would spend most of my time in a single room that was


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G O D ' S F O R G I V E N E S S A N D O U R S 2 15summoned for a "conversation." "We know all about you," said Cap-tain G. He was flanked by two other officers, their faces expressionlessand m enacing at the sam e time. They had plenty of "proof' of my sub-versive intent ions and activities. A file half a foot thick lay on th e C ap -tain's desktranscripts of conversations I had had in my office,reports of what I had said to this or that solider elsewhere, photos ofme entering buildings in town, sometimes taken from somewherehigh above. Obviously, they knew a great deal ab out m e. And they didnot seem to like any of it.

Like the court in Franz Kafka's The Trial, my interrogators wereabout to pull out "some profound guilt from somewhere where therewas originally none at all" ' I engaged in religious propaganda on thebase; I must therefore be against socialism, which in Yugoslavia waslinked officially with atheism. I praised a Nazarene conscientious ob-jector for acting according to his principles; I must therefore be un-derm ining the defense of our country. I said som ething unkind aboutTito; I must therefore be an enem y oft he peo ple. I was ma rried to anAm erican an d had studied in the West; I must therefore be a spy T hecharges should have bee n em barrassing for the interrogators: it is re-stricting freedom of speech that is morally repre hen sible, n ot engag-ing in it. And in pa rt the charges we re simply silly. Is every expa triateAm ertcan a potential spy? Bu t the officers w ere sm ug and utterly seri-ous: I must be out to overthrow the regime. They sensed rightly thatthe seams holding Yugoslavia together were at their breaking point.An enem y could be hiding und er any rock, beh ind any bush .

Th reats followed th e charges against me: eight years in prison forthe crimes I'd com m itted. I knew what that m eant. H ad I bee n a civil-ian, I could have counted on the help of competent lawyers and pub-lic opinion, both within the country and abroad. But I was in tliemilitary, so the re w ould be a closed m ilitary tribuna l. I wou ld have noindependent lawyer. To be accused was to be condemned, and to becondemned was to be ruinedunless I confessed, and "confessed asquickly as possible and as com pletely as possible."^ Un less I told themeverything they assured me they already knew, I was doom ed. A nd soit we nt, session after session, week after w eek. Ex cept for Capta in G.,


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216 Anglican Theological Revieiowho was always present, new interrogators kept coming, their ranksreaching all the way up to that of gene ral.

All of this attention gave me a sense of importancethe kind ofimp ortanc e felt by a fox being h un ted by a king and his entou rag e w itlitheir fine horses, sleek hounds, and deadly weapons, rather than by alowly, clumsy peasant. One overwhelming emotion drowned almostall others: fear. Sometimes paralyzing fear fear tha t makes your bodymelt, not just your soul tremble. Though I was never physically tor-ture d, I was firmly held in my interrogato rs' iron ha nd and com pletelyde pe nd en t on their cruel mercy. The y could do with me anything theywanted, and the frigid glow of their eyes as they pummeled me withthreats told me that they would relish seeing me suffer. I did not fearso much the imprisonment with which they threatened me; I fearedthe seeming omnipotence of evildoers. It felt as though a ubiquitousevil eye was watching me, as though an evil mind was twisting for itsown s inister purp oses w hat th e evil eye saw, as thou gh an evil will wasbe nt on torm enting m e, as though a powerful, far-reaching han d lay atthe disposal of tha t will. I was trap pe d and helpless, with no groun d ofmy own on which to stand or to resist. Trembling before false gods ofpower run amok, I was somebody, all right. But as a person, I wasnothing.Memory of Abuse

The conversations stopped as abruptly as they had begun andwithout an explanation. After my term in the military was up, securityofficers m ade a lame a ttem pt to enlist m e to work for tliem. "Con sid-ering what you've don e, we have treate d you w ell," an officer told m e."You know what you deserv ed. You can show your gratitude by work-ing for us." Gratitude? For months of life stolen by interrogations?For all the torment? For fear, helplessness, and humiliation? For col-onizing my interior life even after I was discharged from the military?For causing me to view the world through the lens of abuse, andmonth after month suspect a dagger hidden in many a bouquet offlowers? "You want gratitude for that? And gratitude expressed inworking/or t/ou, on top of it? You must be insane," I thought to my-


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G O D ' S F O R G I V E N E S S AND O U R S 217to the torture and suffering that many others have undergone at thehands of tormentors, especially those schooled in Red Army meth-ods.^ There was no prolonged isolation, no sleep deprivation, nohunger, no painful body positions, no physical assault or sexual mis-t reatment. Yet for awhile my mind was enslaved by the abuse I hadsuffered. It was as though the sinister Captain G. had moved into thehouseh old of my mind and ensconced himself right in the m iddle of itsliving room and I had to live with him.I wanted him out of my mind, right on the spot and without atrace. But there was no way to forget him. He just kept returning totha t living room and interrogating me over and over again. I knew thatit would not be wise to forget anyway, even if I could, at least not rightaway. Psychological and political reasons spoke against forgetting. Sogradually I pus hed him a bit to the side and made arrangements to livemy life aro un d h im. W hen little else was going on, he would catch myeye and make me listen for a while to his charges and threats. Butmostly I had my back turne d to him, and his voice was drow ned in thehustle and bustle of everyday activities. The arrangement workedrathe r well. It still does so well, in fact, th at now he is confined to thefar corner of my dark basement and reduced to a dim shadow of hisformerly robust self.

My success at sidelining the Gaptain, however, left the mainworry abou t my relationship to him almost untouc hed. T hat worry hadsurfaced as soon as the interrogations started. I was being -mistreated.So how should I respond? The way I felt like responding was onething. I wanted to scream and curse and return in kind, and a bitworse. In his novel The Shoes of the Fisherman, Morris West reportsthe musings of the interrogator Kamenev: "Once you have taken aman to pieces under questioning, once you have laid out tlie bits onthe table and put them together again, then a strange thing happe ns.Ei ther you love him or you hate him for the rest of your life. He willeither love you or hate you in return.'"* I don't know what my inter-rogators felt for me, but I felt no love for them. Only cold, enduring

'^ See, for instance, first-person accounts of in ternment and interrogations byArthur London (The Confession, 1970) and Elena Constante (The Silent Escape.


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218 Anglican Theological Reviewanger that even vengeance, had it been possible, would not alter. ButI sensedmaybe more subconsciously than consciouslythat if Igave in to what I felt, I would not be responding as a free humanbeing. I would be reacting as a w oun ded animal. And it did not m atterw heth er that reaction hap pen ed in the physical world (which was im-possible) or in my imagination. To act as a human being is to honorfeelings, even the thirst for veng eanc e. B ut it is also to obey m oral re -quirements stitched by God into the fabric of our humanity. Fear-ridden and humiliated as I was, I was determined not to lose what Ibelieved was best in our shared hu manitylove of neighb ors, even ifthey prove to be assailants.

Th e m ore severe the wron gdoing, the m ore likely we are to reactrather than respond, to act toward wrongdoers the way we feel likeacting rather than the way we should act. Would I have clung to theprinciple of loving one's enemies had I been as severely abused asthe Abu Ghraib detainees or treated even worse? I might not have.The immense force of the abuse might have overwhelmed my capac-ity even to entertain the thought of loving my abusersof wishingthem well, of seeking to do good for thein, of endea voring to establisha hum an bo nd w ith th em . Would m y inability have altered my obliga-tion, how ever? It would not. It would simply have postpo ned the ful-fillment of my obligation until some power beyond my own hadretu rne d m e to myself as a person created in the image of the enem y-loving God.

To triumph fully, evil needs two victories, not one. The first vic-tory happens when an evil deed is perpetrated; the second victory,when evil is returned. After the first victory, evil would die if the sec-ond victory did no t infuse it with new life. In my own situation , I cou lddo nothing about the first victory. But I could prevent the second.Gaptain G. would not mold me into his image. Instead of returningevil for evil, I determined to try to heed the apostle Paul by trying toovercom e evil with good (Rom . 12:21). After all, I myself had be en re -dee m ed by the God who in Glirist died for the red em ption of the un-godly. And so, once again, now in relation to Gaptain G., I startedwalking and stumbling in th e footsteps of the enemy -loving Go d.How then should I relate to Gaptain G. in my imagination now


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G O D ' S F O R G I V E N E S S A N D O U R S 2 19transgressions; according to your steadfast love remember me, foryour good ness' sake, O Lo rd" (Ps. 25:7). W hat would it mean for meto rem em be r C aptain G. and his wrongd oing the way I prayed for Godto reme m ber me and my wrongdoing? H ow should the one who lovesremember the wrongdoer and the wrongdoing?Th at is one o fth e cen tral issues th e Gh ristian faith urge s us to ex-plore in regard to wrongdoing, memory, and reconciliation. It is to re-member the wrongdoing suffered as a person comm itted to loving thewrongdoer. M any victims believe tha t they have no obligation wha tso-ever to love the perpetrators of wrongdoing and are inclined to thinkthat if they were to love such perpetrators, they would betray ratherthan fulfill their humanity. From this perspective, to the extent thatthe w rongdo ers are truly guilty, they should be treate d as they d eserveto be treated^with th e strict enfo rcem ent of retribu tive justice. I un-derstan d the force of that position. At some level I am te m pte d by it.But were I to share it, I would have to give up on the most beautifulflower of our God-given humanitythe love of the enemy, love thatdoes no t exclude justice bu t goes beyo nd it. I wo n't argue he re for thisstance. I will simply assume itthough I will say enough about it toward off a frequent m isunderstandin g that would confuse love with amu shy sentimentality unc onc erne d with the d em ands of justice.^

Here I cannot explore all that is entailed in remembering as theon e who loves. I will instead elab orate th e kinds of questions raised bya victim's remembering in accordance with the commitment to lovethe wrongdoer. I will continue to refer to the example of my owninterrogations for the simple reason that these experiences have im-pressed upon me most personally and forcefully the issue of forgive-ness, memory, and reco nciliation in which we G hristians are obliged toemulate the God we serve.Remembering Rightly

The injunction "Remember!" directed at victims and the widerpopulace alike has become almost ubiquitous in Westem culture.


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220 Anglican Theological ReviewWhen I first encountered this injunction after my ordeal in 1984, Itook it to be superfluous to my interior hfe. I rem em be re d all too well,and I didn't need anyone to encourage m e to do so. I deem ed the in-junc tion to rem em be r perilously insufficient, however, if it was simplyurging me to make public what happened to me in secret^whichseem ed to be the m ain intent of the injunctions prop one nts.

To rem em be r a wron gdoing is to struggle against it. Th e enth usi-asts of "memory" got that much right. But it seemed to me that therewere so many ways in which I could remember wrongly that the in-junction verged on being dangerous. I could remember masochisti-cally (to use the phrase coined by Milan Kundera in the novelIgnorance) by remem bering only those things from the incident thatmake me displeased with myself. Or I could remember sadistically,guided by a vindictive desire to repay evil for evil. Then I would becom mitting a wrongdoing of my own as I was struggling, with th e helpof mem ory, against the wrongdoing co m m itted against me . I would begranting evil its second victory, its full triumph.So from the start, the cen tral question for m e was not whether toreme mb er. I most assuredly would rem em be r and m ost incontestablyshould reme m ber. Instead the central question was how to re m em be rrightly. How should I rem em ber abuse as a person c om m itted to lov-ing the w rong doer and overcom ing evil with go od?And what does "remembering rightly" actually involve? Thesketch of the answe r to which I gradually worked my way after my or-deal would take a who le book to explain.^ But note h ere that wh atever"rightly" ends up meaning, it cannot refer to just what is right for meas an individual. It must mean also what is right for those who havewronged others, and for the larger community. The reason is simple.Remembering rightly the abuse I suffered is not a private affair evenwh en it hap pen s in the seclusion of my own m ind. Since other s are al-ways imp licated, re m em be ring abuse is of public significance. Le t metake in turn each of these three relations in which the one who hasbeen wrong stands.


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G O D ' S F O R G I V E N E S S A N D O U R S 2 21First, ther e are aspects of remem berin g rightly that concern pri-marily the wronged person. Their impact on others is indirect. Couldthese months of abuse that live on in my memory be somehow ren-dered meaningful? Could my hfe be meaningful even if those experi-ences were remembered as meaningless? What location would thememory of abuse occupy in my interior life? Would Captain G. con-tinue to sit in my living room? Would I succeed in moving him to aside* room or locking him up in a basem ent?Such questions about the relationship between the memory ofabuse and the victim s space are closely linked with questions aboutthe relationship between the memory of abuse and the victim s inte-rior time. How much of my projected future would Capttiin G. colo-nize, given that the memory of abuse kept projecting itself into myanticipated future? Would he define the horizon of my possibilities?Would he and his dirty work shrink to just one dark dot on that hori-zon and possibly even d isappear from it entirely? Th ese k inds of ques-tions about remembering rightly I had to answer apart from myrelationship to Captain G. But the way I answered them would shapemy relationship not only to him bu t also to every social enviro nm ent inwhich I found myself.Second, consider tlie relationship of the memory of abuse to thewider social setting out of which th e ab use arose o r to which it mightbe applied. From the beginning, I did not experience my interroga-tions simply as an isolated case of mistreatment. My experiences im-mediately became an example, and they continued to function as anexample in my memory. But what were they an example of ? Of a per-vasive form of human interaction tliat is often hidden behind the veilof civihty, bu t is ready to show its ugly face as soon as the social pea ceis sufficiently dis turbe d? Of socialism showing its tru e n atu re , the waysome people think of September 11, 200 1, as showing the true natureof radical Islam? Were my interrogations an example tliat I would bewise to emulate in some sense, while of course making certain that Iwound up in Captain G. s shoes, not in my own unlucky pair? If I re-membered my interrogations as a window into the brute power thatrules the world, would I have remembered rightly? Or would I have

remembered wrongly by first focusing on tlie negative and then al-


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222 Anglican Theological ReviewAlternatively, maybe my interrogations were in a deep sense atodds with the way the world is constituted, an example of our worldgone awry. W hat framework w ould I ne ed to bring to the m em ory ofCaptain G. s misdeeds so that I rem em be red them as an evil anomalyin a good world, rath er tha n as a symptom of a world beyon d good andevil? In what overarching accoun t of reality wou ld I need to insert hismisdeeds to remember them as something worth fighting againstand worth fighting against not primarily with reactive blows but withthe pow er of goodness?Mostly, however, the struggle to remember rightly my ordeal of

1984 was not about my own inne r healing or about how I should act inthe larger social environment. It was about the struggle to do justiceand show grace to Captain C. and his many helpers. So, third, whatdoes i t mean to remember rightly about the wrongdoer? Whether Iremembered publicly or privately, what I remembered concernedhim profoundly; after all, I was rem em be ring his wrongd oing. To helpmyself be fair, I imagined Captain C. s observing and listening in as Iremembereda difficult decision, given how unfair he had been to-ward me. In my imagination I also gave him the right to speakanother difficult decision, given that his terrorizing had reduced myeloquence to a stammer. I did not give him the last word, mind you.But n either did I give it to myself. Knowing how faulty m em ories g en-erally are, and being aware of victims' proclivities and blind spots, Iwould no t fully tru st even myself. Th at last wo rd is to be spoken on theLast Day by the Judg e who knows each of us be tter than we know our-selves. Before then, the Captain would be allowed to speak and Iwould listen^with ears attuned to detect any attempts to whitewashhis crimes . Still, I would listen to his protes ts, corrections , and em en-dations about the way I rem em bere d him and his wrongdoing. D uringinterrogations, he repeatedly twisted my truth and reduced me tonothing. In contrast, I should listen to his truth and honor his person-hood as I sought to tell rightly the story of his m istreatment of m e.

D id he in fact do to me what I re m em be r his having do ne? If mywo und ed psyche passed on to my m em ory injuries that he did not in-fiict, or exaggerated those he did, would I not be wronging him, irre-spective o ft h e fact that it was he who overwhelmingly wrong ed m e?


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G O D ' S F O R G I V E N E S S A N D O U R S 2 23in my words and deeds intentions that I never had. The devil was notin facts, large or small, but in their interpretation. It was as though awarped mind was reading a plain text and coming up with the mostbizarre interpretations tha t somehow man aged to account for the facts.

If I was not careful as I remembered the ordeal, I could take myturn by spinning what Captain G. had said and done to me. For in-stance, I could isolate his deeds from the po litical and military systemin which he worked and attribute the whole extent of the abuse to hisevil character. More charitably, but equally untruthfully, I could makehim disappear in the system and relieve him of all responsibility. Thesystem was tormenting me, not the Captain; he was merely its inter-changeable arm. Or I could suggest that he was truly doing evil andenjoying it as evil precisely because the system legitimized it for himas par t of a grea ter good. Perha ps h e m ight have feared t he revival ofthe animosities in Bosnia between people of different faiths that hadled to atrocities during World War II, with new atrocities following onthe heels of old ones^which is, arguably, what in fact happened lessthan a decade later. Many other ways of interpreting Captain G. s ac-tions are conceivable, and choosing amon g them should not p roce edsimply according to my preference. To misconstrue here would be tocomm it a wrongd oing of my own.But to remember wrongdoing truthfully is already rightfully tocond em n. And cond em n I did. But what is the right way to co nd em n?How d oes one seeking to love the wrongd oer con dem n? In the C hris-tian tradition condem nation is an elem en t of reconciliation, not an iso-lated independent judgmentnot even when reconciliation cannotbe ach ieved. So we con dem n most prop erly in th e act of forgiving, inthe act of separating the doer from the deed. That is how God inChrist condemned all wrongdoing. That is how I ought to condemnCaptain G.'s wrongdoing.

"One died for all"including me. Wrapped up with that piece ofgood news is a condemning accusation: I too am a wrongdoer. Howdoes the history of my own wrongdoing figure in my condemningm em ory of Gap tain G .? Not at all? Th en I would always stand radicallyoutside the company of wrongdoers as I remember his wrongdoing;he would b e in the darkness and I in the light. But would tha t be right?


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224 Anglican Theological ReviewShould I not also try to remember his wrongdoing in the contextof his whole life, which m ight exhibit a good deal of virtue? In m em -ory, wrongdoing often does not remain an isolated stain on the char-acter of those who com m itted it. It spreads over and colors the ir e ntirecharacter. Must I not try to contain that spreading? How could I con-tain it if I didn't remember Captain G. s virtues along with his vices,his good deeds along with the evil ones? Occasionally during my in-terrogations I seem ed to see a warm sparkle in his otherwise icy eyes.Was this some genuine goodness trying to find its way out from un-derneath the debris of his misdeeds, sealed over by the crust of thewarped system for which he worked? Should I remember those mo-ments of seeming goodness, however dubious they were? Further-more, what effect, if any, does the death of Christ to save the ungodlyhave on Cap tain C . as an abu ser? C hrist "died for all," says th e apos tlePaul; therefore, in some sense "all have died," not just those who be-lieve in Christ (2 Cor. 5:14). Captain C. too? Then how should I re-member his abuse, given that Christ atoned for it? Or does Christ'satonem ent have no im pact on my mem ory of his wrongdoing?If On e died for the salvation ofall, should we no t hop e for tlie sal-vation of all? Should I actively hope for Captain G.'s entry intothe world to come? Moreover, Christ died to reconcile human beingsto one an other, not only to God. W ere Captain G. and I then reconciledon that hill outside the gate of Jerusalem? Will we be reconciledin the N ew Jerusalem , or m ust I at least ho pe tha t we will be ? If so , mymemory of wrongdoing will be framed by the memory and hopeof reconciliation between the wrongdoer and the wronged. What

consequences would this have for the way I should remember hiswrongdoing?The banquet is an image the New Testament frequently uses todescribe that reconciled world. Could I picture myself sitting withCap tain G. at the table and feasting with laugh ter and cam arad erie? Avery scary thought, but not an impossible scenario. What would itm ean to rem em be r his wrongdoing now in view of such a pote ntial fu-ture? W hat wou ld life in the world of perfect love and perfect enjoy-ment in God and in one another do with the memory of abuse? WillI still remember the wrongdoing then? If so, for how long? Why


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C O D ' S F O R G I V E N E S S A N D O U R S 22 5Difficult Decision

In a sense, the most m om entou s decision for all of us as we thinkabout wrongdoing, memory, and forgiveness is to pose tlie originalquestion: How does one seeking to love the wrongdoer rem em be r thewrongdoing rightly? Th at decision was the m ost difficult to make. It isnot that I agonized abo ut w heth er or not this was the right decision. Ibelieve it was. The problem came in sticking with it. When I grantedthat I ought to love Captain G.love not in the sense of warm feelingbut in the sense of benevolence, beneficence, and search for commu-nionmuch of what I wrote in the book followed, at least in roughoutline if not in detail. But every time I wrote abou t loving Cap tain G.a small-scale rebellion eru pte d in my soul. "I love my parents and rel-atives; I love my wife and children; I love my friends; I love pets andwild geese. I might even love nosy neighbors and difficult colleagues,but I don't love abusersI just don't and never will," screamed theleader of my internal insurrection. And at times it would not havetaken m uch to m ake me switch sides except that loving those wh o dome harm was precisely the hard path on which Jesus called m e to fol-low him , a path that reflects m ore tha n any oth er th e na ture of his C odand mine. Failure to follow on that path would be to betray the Onefrom whom, through whom, and for whom are all things. It would bea reckless sq uand ering of my own soul.


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Gods Forgiveness and Memory-Volf