“The Power of the Poor in History”: The Role of Testimony in Liberation Theology and Russian Realism

Abstract

The article analyses the correlations between Latin American liberation theology and 19th-century Russian novel. Drawing on Bakhtin’s concept of the ‘threshold chronotype’, it contextualises the aesthetic and theological language of Russian novels and liberation theology as expressions of the same ‘chronotope’ situated on the periphery of capitalism. The article argues that the violence and degradation of the Russian chronotope, from which the historical force of the poor emerges, are comparable to the violence that will later define the boundaries of representation in Latin American liberation theology. This serves as the basis for exploring how the concept of testimony, as a process of restitution of the victims’ memory, informs the theological and aesthetic grammar of liberation theology and Russian novel.

1. Introduction

To Alexandre Cabral and Edson Fernando: names whose saying signifies community.

Liberation theology and Russian realism are part of the same chronotope (Bakhtin 1981). Both experience displacement in relation to the «security of the peoples of Europe behind their borders and the walls of their houses, assured of their property» (Levinas 1996, p. 57). The perspective of the poor is the thread that connects the theological and aesthetic meanings of these two phenomena forged on the periphery of capitalism: a view of the world from below that challenges aristocratic representations of art and religion. Through an aesthetic and theological approach that foregrounds the profound life of the people, Russian novels and Liberation theology share a similar representation of the past as “historical memory of the poor.”

The power of the poor in History1—the theological language that shapes the spirituality of liberation Christianity—is a messianic device that provides an escape from the fixed and insubstantial nature of modern life—the opaque time of the bourgeois novel that moves, as Bakhtin argued, within the «petty-bourgeois provincial town with its stagnant life» (Bakhtin 1981, p. 247). The formalist ideal of aesthetic and religious consciousness that emerges from this idyllic or biographical chronotope, “which flows smoothly in the spaces—the interior spaces—of townhouses and noble estates”, provides a sense of property that creates a metaphysical “intersection” between time and space. In contrast, the reality of poverty and abominable violence in Latin America and Russia—the space from which Bakhtin extracted what he called the «chronotope of the threshold»—reveals a difference unrelated to the notions of foundation and property. A difference detached from the manifestation of a «world capable of being constructed», which manifests the «transcendental apperception» of «security of European peoples» and their capability to subject—like Hegel and all Western metaphysics—space to time.2

Defined by Bakhtin as a “space of crisis and rupture,” the “chronotope of the threshold” translates into an experience of exposure and vulnerability in life. Comparable to Levinas’s analysis of a “a world in pieces” (Levinas 1995, p. 20), this chronotope constitutes the reality from which liberation theology and Russian novels will draw their ethical and religious discernment of the world.

The first part of the article, titled “Paideia,” analyzes the meaning of “Bildung” on the periphery of capitalism. It describes the reality of a Russian and Latin American chronotope within a horizon devoid of biographical time and trapped by the paralysis of institutionalized violence. Understood as a process of discerning nihilism, the concept of Paideia in the Russian and Latin American peripheries moves away from the metaphysical horizons of the Western chronotope, achieving an experience of unfinishedness that is devoid of the conceptual apparatus of Western metaphysics. In this scenario, the “trash and rubbish” that accompany Dostoevsky’s Adolescent, a bildungsroman devoid of foundation or property, are interpreted as fragments of a reality marked by an “initial flaw,” as described by Nabokov. Nabokov’s thoughts on the “strangeness” of Gogol’s realism are particularly relevant here since the “root of that strangeness,” the “initial flaw,” lies in the origins of Russian modernity: “the chief town in Russia had been built by a tyrant of genius upon a swamp, and upon the bones of slaves rotting in that swamp” (Nabokov 1961, p. 11). This violence is the “initial flaw” that shapes the “strange atmosphere” of a chronotope devoid of the meaning of a world of landowners, “a world understood on its own”, as Bakhtin put it, the mirage present in family photographs that feeds the fictions of Western life—a photograph that nourishes “el alma y las pasiones burguesas”, which, for Carlos Mariátegui, a reader of Russian realism, “son un tanto inactuales” (Mariátegui 2022, p. 276).

Roberto Schwarz’s essay, Misplaced Ideas, provides the conceptual framework for my analyses, which, while recognizing the risks inherent in the essay form, strive to establish a link between Russian and Latin American nihilism. Following in Schwarz’s footsteps, I would argue that the initial flaw that shaped the strangeness of Gogol’s worlds, “Russian serfdom or its vestiges,” finds parallels in the “unpolitical and abominable fact of slavery” in Latin America (Schwarz 1992, p. 47).

“The system of ambiguities growing out of the local use of bourgeois ideas—one of the keys to the Russian novel—is not unlike the one we described for Brazil. The social reasons for this similarity are clear. In Russia, too, modernization would lose itself in the infinite extent of territory and of social inertia, and would clash with serfdom or its vestiges—a clash many felt as a national shame, although it gave others the standard by which to measure the madness of the individualism and progressomania that the Occident imposed and imposes on the world. The extreme form of this confrontation, in which progress is a disaster and backwardness a shame, is one of the springs of Russian literature. Whatever the difference in stature, there is in Machado something similar, something of Gogol, Dostoievsky, Goncharov, and Chekhov”.

(Ibid)

Confronted with the barbarism of colonial nihilism intensified by the abominable violence of military dictatorships, liberation theologians faced the same “shock of adaptation to modern civilization.” The young liberation theologians inhabited a chronotope that was foreign to the “transcendental apperception” of European aesthetic and theological formalisms. In many ways similar to the Russian realists, they sought discernment in the brutal reality of the lives of the poor. In this context, my goal is to highlight the creative legacy of a theology that deviated from Western formalisms and sought discernment amidst what remained of the “terrible uprootedness” caused by “European colonial methods.” (Weil 2005, p. 47). This creative deviation from Northern ideas provided the context for discerning nihilistic violence—a reality that escaped the conceptual frameworks of metaphysics, which collapsed under the test of Latin American reality. Through an elective affinity with Russian realism, which resisted “the madness of individualism and progressomania that the Occident imposed and imposes on the world,” (Schwarz 1992, p. 47) liberation theologians found discernment in the “deep-flowing life of the people,” which “remain subterraneously almost intact” (Weil 2005, p. 47) in Russia and Latin America. The discovery of this subterranean meaning of a reality foreign to the conceptual universe of landowners—the power of the poor arising from the vertigo of the periphery—is interpreted as a shared experience connecting Latin American theology and the aesthetics of Russian realism: the periphery’s vertigo is the “underworld” without fictitious mirages, where the poor find power and hope on “a light-hearted journey through the land of the dead.” (Bakhtin 1983, p. 41).

After situating the meanings of Russian and Latin American nihilism, the article analyzes the theological procedure of Latin American theologians, like the young Gutiérrez, who was inspired by the paths opened up by Carlos Mariategui and Ernst Bloch, and sought, in the experience and testimony of the poor—“experts in boundless suffering”—a lesson on how to find hope and not succumb to despair, on how to overcome nihilism through labor of building community.

2. Paideia

The boom in Latin American fiction and the rise of liberation theology have brought the works of theologians and artists such as Gabriel García Márquez and Gustavo Gutiérrez together within the same chronotope (Pagan 2003). Shaped by the same Latin American ethos, these theological and aesthetic approaches offer a worldview that closely resembles the reality depicted in Russian literature.

The aesthetic procedures of ontotheological deformalisation, as seen in magical realism, suspend the meaning of transcendental illusions that are responsible for creating fixed moral identities. Unlike the provincial happiness and idyllic world of rural landowners—as seen in Anna Karenina’s mimetic representation of European lifestyles—the experience of deformalization in Russian and Latin American novels is characterized by the syncopations and feverish crises of a consciousness deprived of biographical time. The bildung forged on the periphery of capitalism, the theme of Dostoevsky’s The Adolescent, lacks the sense of form characteristic of a “damaged childhood,” as W. Benjamin shows us in his notes on The Idiot—which convey the tragic paideia experienced by a youth subjected to violence and disintegration (Benjamin 2011). The nihilism of the periphery is the space where «characters dissolves before the child’s lack of language» because there is no horizon of possible meaning. In the poorly lit, bloodstained streets of Latin American and Russian peripheries, youth is “pure pain.” This pain, emanating from a violent and disorderly reality, hides a “secret thirst for order and beauty” (Dostoevsky 2003) [блaгooбpaзия], as Dostoyevsky wrote in The Adolescent.

Within this ethos of violence and unfinishedness, aesthetic and theological education means discerning a world deprived of ontological purpose—a place where all things are subject to indeterminacy and impermanence. The violence that Dostoevsky describes as an experience of “eternal smashing “[вeчнaя лoмк] is a symptom of this discernment and a sign of Russian modernity as experienced by an adolescent surrounded by “trash and rubbish”, out of which «nothing has come in the last two hundred years» (Ibid). The phenomenology of existence in a world without a world—as exemplified by the “children of accidental families” [ceмeйcтвa cлyчaйныe] populating the “broken world” of Russian novels—falls within the confines of an obscure reality that Bakhtin refers to as the “chronotope of the threshold” (Bakhtin 1981, p. 48). The Bakhtinian chronotope is a space of contingency that dissolves ontological boundaries. It is a place where reality becomes overwhelming, disrupting the relationship between man and the world and opening a «rift between the rational order and events» (Levinas 1995, p. 20).

The ordinary time of customs found in modern realism—the representation of a reality subject to conventions, as seen in European realism from Balzac to Proust—is a depiction of a demonic world based on an experience of aesthetic or theological narcosis. This is also the world of Russian realism, in which everyday life is confined to the sphere of the aristocracy and the illuminated perimeter of Nevsky Prospect. The reality of the abstract beings that populate this “convention-suspended” world is maintained by lanterns lighted by “the devil himself,” which, as Gogol showed us, give everything an «illusory contour» (Gogol 1999, p. 278).

Gogol’s Petersburg tales, which Donald Fanger classified as a “kind of saison en enfer,” (Fanger 1998, p. 120) reveal the demonic dimension of a world deprived of substance. To a certain extent, Gogol’s art anticipates Proust’s ‘amoralism’, depicting a world reminiscent of Sodom and Gomorrah, where according to Levinas, ‘everything is vertiginously possible’ (Levinas 1996, p. 120). By moving beyond the boundaries of Nevsky Prospect, Gogol’s literature escaped the cyclical and ordinary time of customs and the aesthetic limits of European realism, introducing a fantastic realism through which “la réalité se déroule comme un rêve” (Levinas 2009, pp. 406–7) (reality unfolds like a dream). Gogol’s deviations from the «fashionable sections of the capital, which are traditionally celebrated in literature and art, to situate the action of his stories in shabby buildings and outlying sections» (Fanger 1998, p. 120), reveals a Sodom and Gomorrah deprived of the scintillation and charm of small excesses that, later, will offer the texture of what Levinas called Proust’s “amoralism.” The singularity of Gogol’s realism lies in the unspeakable violence of a de-ontologization, wich denies the poor the glittering horizons of an aesthetic or theological narcosis—which flows smoothly in the spaces noble estates. The images we see through “Gogolian eyes” convey the ontological deprivation of bodies that experience a violent proximity to death, something that could not easily be found in the horizons of European realism. In this sense, Proust’s assessment of the difference between Victor Hugo’s and Baudelaire’s verses illustrates the chasm separating the glamour of his Parisian Sodom and Gomorrah from the spiral of violence and smell of death in the peripheries of Gogol’s fantastic realism.

À côté d’un livre comme Les Fleurs du mal, comme l’oeuvre immense d’Hugo paraît molle, vague, sans accent! Hugo n’a cessé de parler de la mort, mais avec le détachement d’un gros mangeur, et d’un grand jouisseur. Peut-être hélas! Faut-il contenir la mort prochaîne en soi, être menacé d’aphasie comme Baudelaire, pour avoir cette lucidité dans la souffrance véritable, ces accents religieux dans les pièces sataniques.

(Proust 2015, p. 15)

As Bakhtin wrote, drinking and laughter are the only possible forms of narcosis in Russian Sodom and Gomorrah, which enable “the light-hearted journey to the underworld, the land of the dead” (Bakhtin 1983, pp. 34–50). The violence of the Russian chronotope, from which the historical force of the poor and their secret hunger for beauty will emerge, is the same violence that will later shape the boundaries of representation in Latin American realism and liberation theology. Whether in the Russian or Latin American peripheries, Macondo, or Gogol’s fantastical Petersburg, devil had won his rebellion against God, and he was the one who sat on the heavenly throne (Garcia Marquez 1971). In these two worlds of unfinished forms and accidental families, the figure of the decadent poet or Westernizing theologian plunges into the abyss of a shifting reality. into the realm of a Sodom and Gomorrah without false lights or poetic redemption. Here, all aesthetic and theological formalisms gravitate toward laughable and misplaced ideas (Schwarz 1992).

3. Nihilism

In his notes and comments on liberation theology, the Orthodox theologian Olivier Clément offered an interpretation that sought to understand, through a morphology of nihilism, the reality faced by liberation theologians. For him, while ‘in the West, nihilism goes by the names of “drugs”, “gnosis” or “hedonism”, in Latin America it is called “violence” (Clement 1985). Clement’s distinction can be analyzed in light of the contemporary difference between “European nihilism” and “colonial nihilism,” the latter being, according to Brazilian thinker Alexandre Cabral, “the historical condition that allows Europe to be nihilistic” (A. M. Cabral 2023, p. 19). Within the horizons of such a distinction, hedonism, gnosis and opium could be defined as the names of decadence and ennui in European nihilism, while violence, in addition to being a material condition of nihilistic decadence in Europe, must be the name of nihilism in a Latin America riddled with the violence of coloniality. Interpreted as a phenomenon distinct from European nihilism, Latin American nihilism is characterised by the capacity to “de-ontologize” certain existences and by the original violence that enables, as Cabral argued, the idiosyncratic emergence of “topologies of non-being.” Nihilism as a phenomenon that, through violence, creates places for those who cannot be, a phenomenon that makes possible the paradoxical constitution of topologies of non-place” (Ibid).

The violence that gives substance to Latin American nihilism, when considered in the context of colonialism and Latin American dictatorships, is the same violence that characterised Russian nihilism: a violence that results in the deontologization of existences stripped of being, knowledge, and power. From the standpoint of a “ a world in pieces,” these peripheral zones of capitalism foreshadow, to a certain extent, what Levinas, in 1947, designated as the « rift between the rational order and events ». These modern peripheries reflect the unbridgeable gulf between European Bildung and the immeasurable horror of Russian and Latin American reality. Against the vertiginous backdrop of this kind of reality, the ideals imported from Europe and traditionally upheld by the ‘dominant native elite’ and ‘superfluous’ individuals are rendered misplaceds and useless when confronted with the abominable ‘colonial slavery’ and its residual effects. The violence of the experience of human subordination, for which “the world is not given,” lacking the “bountifulness of terrestrial nourishment,” defines the violent horizons in which the “genuine village nihilist” of Russia and Latin America moves, driven by an instinct for disorder and chaos (Dostoevsky 1919, pp. 31–43). This ‘deprivation index’, which challenges the ‘meagre resources of European realism’, is the reality that fuels the ‘spiral of violence’ of a nihilistic youth—as in García Márquez’s Macondo, they know that « elections » are a farce and that «violence is the only effective thing».

Russian and Latin American nihilism has no connection with any kind of aesthetic, individualistic, or Gnostic narcosis, and, as Olivier Clement’s morphology of nihilism suggests, in Latin America nihilism “goes by the name of violence”. Although indirectly, Clement’s judgment on liberation theology reflects the disorientation of a youth paralyzed by violence, a disorientation that resembles, as Benjamin wrote, “the cave-in of a giant crater” (Benjamin 2011, p. 279). The disorientation of a Latin American youth deprived of a childhood who does not know what to do and who exudes the emptiness resulting from an existence subjected to the violent vertigo of dictatorships—the acrid smell of nothingness emanating from bodies thrown into an endless spiral of brutality and violence. The violence of this chronotope recalls Raskolnikov’s nightmare about his own childhood. A nightmare depicting a fragile mare, paralyzed and whipped to death in front of an eight-year-old boy for failing to carry the weight imposed on her—the “unconscious” symbol of institutionalized violence that permeates the Russian and Latin American periphery. Institutionalized violence that tortures and kills, as an exercise of power reminiscent of a servile institution and colonial slavery: “Finish her—My own property” (Dostoevsky 1998, p. 56).

The claim that Latin American nihilism ‘goes by the name of violence’ encapsulates the reality of a chronotope devoid of ontology, into which young pastors newly arrived from European seminaries were abruptly thrust. Living in the bloody and violent daily life of dictatorships inherited from the colonial past, young theologians faced the same fate as Russian youth deprived of nature and childhood, the reality of a carnival hell in which bodies are subjected to endless violence by those in “uniforms and ranks.” What should be done in the face of “institutionalized violence,” which has transformed Latin America into a fantastical landscape and revealed the absurd intensity of violence under military and imperial dictatorships? The discussion between Serguei Sokólvski and Arkadi Makaróvitch in The Adolescent could, without deficit of realism, have been that of young liberation theologians, newly arrived from some small professorial town in Europe and confronted with the unspeakable violence of Latin American reality:

“You and I have been overtaken by the same Russian fate, Arkady Makarovich: you don’t know what to do, and I don’t know what to do.”

(Dostoevsky 2003, VII-III)

The question What should be done?—which permeated Russian nihilism and the works of Chernyshevsky, Tolstoy and Lenin—also pervaded the broken world of young Latin American theologians. To these young people, the political and theological catechisms of a Europe—that had already become a small province of reality since the 19th century—appeared as misplaced ideas echoing a profound “divergence between events and the order of reason.” Trapped in a spiral of violence, the young pastors confronted the empty reality of a people whose eyes reflected the violence present in the nihilistic Latin American catechisms, as described in Fernando Vallejo’s novel La virgen de los sicarios: «Claro que Dios existe, por todas partes encuentro signos de su maldad».

4. What Is to Be Done?

No theological or political formalism would survive the “reality test” that everyday life in Latin America imposes on liberation theologians. The need to bridge the chasm between reality and ideals accompanied the theological task of Latin America, which, like nineteenth-century Russian literature, was engulfed by violence that transcended the ‘meagre resources of European realism’. From this perspective, Olivier Clément’s remarks on the challenges facing liberation theology highlight the disorientation of Latin American thinkers, who reacted impatiently to the inevitable «shock of adaptation to modern civilisation» (Clement 1985).

Clement’s analyses present important nuances, especially with regard to the adjustment of ideas between the center and the periphery faced by Latin American theologians who sought discernment on the question: What is to be done?. He identifies three main trends among liberation theologians that supposedly reflect the successes and failures of young theologians who sought to adapt to the formal theological principles of hegemonic Christianity. For Clement,

“The various “theologies of liberation” are extremely diverse […] The first of these, best represented by Hugo Assman […] has elaborated a veritable « machine gun theology » and tries to indoctrinate candidates for the priesthood in the fine art of guerrilla warfare. The second and most important current groups men such as Gustavo Guttierrez, Leonardo Boff, Segundo and Galliea: who reject Marxism as a system, but who regard as indispensable certain elements of «Marxist analysis». A third current, represented especially by Lucio Gera, is closely associated with this option for the poor.”

(Ibid, p. 63)

Clement’s analyses were published in 1985, still in the heat of the Sandinista Revolution and with the recent memory of the martyrdom of Dom Óscar Romero on 24 March 1980, which was preceded, in 1977 by the assassination of Father Rutilio Grande—both victims of the death squads of the El Salvador dictatorship, which represented the typically Third World alliance between a local elite and foreign capitalism.

The portrayal of Hugo Asmann’s work as “machine gun theology” can be read as part of a vast set of representations of a “European subject” who, by referring only to himself and “his own place,” reinforces the image of a homogeneous “other.” A founder of the Ecumenical Department of Investigations (DEI), which became a gathering place for resistance to military dictatorships in Latin America, Hugo Assmann’s career represents the creative disorientation of a youth who, amidst the most brutal violence, sought a path of political and theological discernment of Latin American reality3. For liberation theologians, the question ‘What is to be done?’ was part of a fervent attempt to escape complicity with a violent reality that reduced Christianity to an ideological force responsible for strengthening the local elite’s ties to foreign capital4.

‘The priesthood in the art of guerrilla warfare’ should be understood as an expression of the theological impatience of a youth seeking to confront indescribable violence. The fine art of guerrilla warfare for young pastors should be examined in light of Dom Helder Câmara’s concept of a ‘spiral of violence’, which he introduced in the early 1970s: it was a symptom of theological impatience, seeking ways to avoid passive submission to the complete disintegration of the people. Sharing elective affinities with Russian novels, this impatience represents the disorientation of young seminarists such as Alyosha, who would eventually abandon monasteries to become revolutionaries, wandering the world as feverish architects of “machine gun theology.” Following in the footsteps of Chernyshevsky, as well as the horde of revolutionary priests and pastors who founded the DEI alongside Asmann, some of these former seminarists realised that the Gospels had already provided an answer to the question, ‘What is to be done?’, and it should be interpreted in light of the violence and paralysis of the Latin American reality they were prisoners. Thus, through their own bifurcations and singularities, Russian and Latin American nihilism should be read as symptoms of the same violence: the priesthood in the fine art of guerrilla warfare should be experienced, for young theologians, as an ascetic vocation, a monastic experience that, as Rakhmetov taught, seeks to be the “salt of the earth’s salt” (J. S. Cabral 2024, p. 103).

Gutiérrez’s analyses of the liberation movement are therefore fundamental to understanding the revolutionary impatience that shaped political and theological affects in South America. The viewpoint of the Latin American theologian, who wrote in the 1970s “in the midst of a full-blown process of revolutionary ferment,” touches on circumstances and peculiarities that often escape the conceptual judgments of theological laboratories. For Gutierrez,

To characterize Latin America as dominated and oppressed continent naturally leads one to speak of liberation and above all to participate in the process. […] Indeed, liberation is a term which express a new posture of Latin Americans […] After a period of disorientation, an intense process of political radicalization began […] This radicalization has brought about a reaction—both domestically and overseas—on the part of the defenders of the established order. This has in turn frequently led to working outside existing institutions and legal norms and to clandestine, even violent political activity. The reaction becomes even more belligerent and in many cases resorts to severe and brutal forms of repression. The effect is what Dom Helder Camara refers to graphically as “the spiral of violence » […] This is a complex and changing situation which resists schematic interpretations and demands a continuous revision of the postures adopted. Be that as it may, the untenable circumstances of poverty, alienation, and exploitation in which the greater part of the people of Latin America live urgently demand that we find a path toward economic, social, and political liberation. This is the first step towards a new society. […] There is, however, no monolithic orientation. Nevertheless, the search for indigenous socialist paths continues. In this field the out standing figure of Jose Carlos Mariategui, despite the inconclusiveness of his work, continues to chart the course. “We certainly do not wish,” he wrote in an often-quoted text, “for socialism in America to be an exact copy of others’ socialism. It must be a heroic creation. We must bring Indo-American socialism to life with our own reality, in our own language. This is a mission worthy of a new generation.

(Gutiérres 1973, pp. 89–91)

Gutiérrez’s testimony is important. It dismantles the formalism of those who only know how to speak “like a book.” Gutierrez’s translation of liberation as “a new posture of Latin Americans” could not be understood through historical and theological formalisms, which describe reality based on conceptual frameworks. For readers of Olivier Clément’s essay, Hugo Assmann’s complex personality will be inextricably linked to the image of a ‘machine-gun theologian’. The différance of the young Brazilian theologian, who clearly escaped Clément’s lack of realism, appears to European readers as dissolved in the conceptual totality of a historical-theological formalism. It is impossible not to recall the prefaces to War and Peace here, in which Tolstoy describes the difference between the procedures of the historian and the artist: the first subordinates «all the actions of an historical personage to the one idea he has ascribed to that person», while the second finds the very singleness of that idea incompatible with his task of portraying a man (Tolstoy 2010, p. 1311).

Gutierrez’s theological realism, “which seeks to situate itself in time and space, to exercise its creative potential”, does not have, like Russian realism, “Western European counterparts,” and should be read as testimony to a reality that “resists schematic interpretations” (Gutiérres 1973, p. 89). Rejecting any and all schematic interpretations of reality, Gutierrez’s work touched on the experience of incompleteness and inconclusiveness, which, like Carlos Mariátegui’s thinking, found in Latin America a sense of community that could not be measured by external criteria. Against the backdrop of Latin America’s unfinished reality and the burning question, ‘What is to be done?’, the influence of Mariátegui on Gutiérrez’s thinking is significant. Mariátegui’s creative deviations from orthodox Marxism and his quest for “indigenous socialist paths” share strong parallels with Russian realism and its divergences from Western models5. Likewise, Gutierrez’s classification of Paulo Freire’s work as an “experimental work”—which the theologian considers to be “one of the most creative and fruitful efforts that have been implemented in Latin America”—reflects the fundamental trait of a theological realism that draws its “religious accents” and ‘lucidity’ from “suffering,” rejecting [like Baudelaire?] the formalism of theodicies and the lessons derived from the poetic boredom of a European gros mangeur. Commenting on the work of Paulo Freire, he writes:

By means of an unalienating and liberating “cultural action,” which links theory with praxis, the oppressed person perceives—and modifies—his relationship with the world and with otherpeople. He thus makes the transfer from a “naive awareness”—which does not deal with problems, gives too much value to the past, tends to accept mythical explanations, and tends toward debate—to a “critical awareness”—which delves into problems, is open to new ideas, replaces magical explanations with real causes, and tends to dialogue.

A defining feature of Latin American theological thought is its resistance to formal theology, which “runs the risk of remaining purely verbal and external”. The “shock of adjustment to modern civilisation” has always accompanied the challenges faced by liberation theologians, who have always been urged to respond to the abstractions arising from hegemonic Christianity. The conceptual patience evident in Gutiérrez’s work highlights the challenge of engaging with a ‘naïve or cynical consciousness’, a viewpoint incapable of transcending the hermeneutical circles that have traditionally equated the essence of Christianity with the ‘transcendental illusions’ of a ‘humanist civilisation’. The theologian’s dialogue with the Church reveals how the theological language of hegemonic Christianity shaped the meaning of colonial and institutionalised violence. In this regard, Gutiérrez’s reflections are very enlightening.

Some years ago, a pope who is beyond any suspicion of “horizontalism,” Pius XII, then Cardinal Pacelli, said that the Church civilizes by evangelizing. And this assertion was accepted without opposition. In the contemporary Latin American context it would be necessary to say that the Church should politicize by evangelizing. Will this expression receive the same acceptance? Probably not. To many it will seem offensive; they will perhaps accuse it of “humanizing” the Gospel message or of falling into a deceitful and dangerous “temporalism. This reaction can be explained in part by the fact that there are still many who—lacking a realistic and contemporary conception of the political sphere—do not wish to see the Gospel “brought down” to a level which they believe is nothing more than partisan conflict. But the more severe attacks will doubt less come from those who fear the upsurge of a true political consciousness in the Latin American masses and can discern what the contribution of the Gospel to this process might be. When it was a question of “civilizing,” they had no objection because this term was translated as the promotion of ethical, cultural, and artistic values and at the most as a very general and uncommitted defense of the dignity of the human person. But “to politicize,” “to conscienticize”—these terms have today in Latin America a deeply subversive meaning. Can we say that the struggle against the “institutionalized violence” endured by the weak and the struggle for social justice are therefore less human, less ethical, less “civilizing” than the promotion of moral, cultural, and asthetic values which are bound to a given social system? Girardi is correct when he says that “institutionalized violence generally goes along with institutionalized hypocrisy.”

(Gutiérres 1973, pp. 269–70)

The understanding that “institutionalized violence generally goes along with institutionalized hypocrisy,” as Girard shows from his analysis of Dostoevsky, provides the context that lies at the root of the latent impatience that fuelled the affects of liberation theologians. Despite his patience and efforts to adjust to modern civilization, Gutiérrez’s work reflects the experience of a theologian who was more than just a spectator of Latin American violence. And under no circumstances, as Tolstoy wrote about Russian realism, can his testimony be framed in any European form. Set against the backdrop of a period of revolutionary upheaval, his testimony acknowledges the armed resistance of young pastors as a response to institutionalized violence perpetrated by “defenders of the established order.” (Gutiérres 1973, p. 268)

The lucidity of Dom Helder Câmara, who interpreted the armed revolt as a reaction to institutionalized violence, offers the ethos of a Latin American way of thinking that suspended a “naive awareness” and thus denounced and rejected “institutionalized hypocrisy.” In his text Spiral of Violence, Câmara critically dismantles all judgments arising from verbal pacifism, which invariably represents the lack of realism of spectator consciousness.

“let us have the courage to ask ourselves: does not no-violent action serve as a tranquilliser? Apart from armed violence, has un underdeveloped country any chance of tearing itself out of underdevelopment?”

(Câmara 1971, p. 41)

Far from being an advocate of armed violence, Câmara’s thinking was rooted in Latin American reality. Thus, a conceptual operation that subordinates the historical person to a universal a priori, destituting affections in favor of an idea6, could not be sustained. Helder Câmara’s considerations confront us with a reality that, even as early as the 1970s, showed the entire Liberation Church as a prisoner in a basement suffocated by violence, where pacifism and armed struggle were symptoms of the disorientation of a youth mutilated by the same pain and revolt. For Câmara,

More serious still for the priest than being put in prison is not being put in prison, but seeing in prison all around him militant laymen who have simply echoed the evangelical message. In such a climate, is it not obvious that the young above all are going to abandon the violence of the peace-lovers, go underground and try to prepare for armed revolution?

(Câmara 1971, pp. 49–50)

Dom Helder foresaw the widespread suffering and spiral of violence that would culminate in the martyrdom of Óscar Romero. Romero was assassinated for leading a church caught in a cycle of ‘established violence’, fuelled by ‘monolithic and obsessive anti-communism’. Following Óscar Romero’s assassination on 11 December 1981, the El Mozote massacre turned El Salvador into a “land of death,” killing hundreds of men, women, and children. Amidst this Latin American carnage, the testimony of Rufina Amaya, the sole survivor, emerges as a spark of rebellion—a historical memory that has resisted the “institutionalized violence” responsible for the deaths of thousands of innocent people. Rufina Amaya’s testimony, presented to the Inter-American Court of Human Rights in October 2012, provides context for remembering a massacre that killed “more than 75,000 members of the Salvadoran population”7. The realism of the piece, based on the testimony of an indigenous woman who was the sole survivor of the massacre, speaks for itself.

At approximately 8 a.m. on 11 December 1981, the mass execution of the people gathered in El Mozote began. At noon, after concluding the murder of the men assembled in the church, several soldiers entered the home of Alfredo Márquez—where the women and young children were—saying “today, you the women; we have already released the men, only you are left. We are going to take you out in groups, because we are going to send you home in groups, to Gotera, to wherever you want.” Following this, the women were taken out in groups of around 20 individuals, from the youngest to the oldest, and they were obliged to leave their children behind them, some of whom were newborns. They took the groups of women to different homes, including that of Israel Marquez, where they were machine gunned. In the home of Israel Marquez, 31 clusters of bone fragments were recovered (12 adults, 4 children under 3 years of age, and the remainder impossible to identify), and ashes from a fire. As to the sex, most were from female individuals; however, their identification and the cause of death were indeterminate, although it can be inferred from the ballistic evidence that, before being burned, the individuals were murdered with high-speed firearms. As acknowledged by the State and established by Tutela Legal del Arzobispado in its reports, the younger women were taken to the outskirts of the village, especially to “Cerro El Chingo” and “Cerro La Cruz”, where members of the army raped them before murdering them. Then, the younger children, who had remained in the house of Alfredo Márquez, were executed, some in the house and others in and outside the convent. At that time, according to Rufina Amaya’s testimony, “the screams of a child could be heard who cried and begged for his mother,” so “a soldier ordered: ‘[g]o and kill that bastard’; they did not kill him properly,’ and shortly afterwards there was a shot and nothing else was heard.”Most of the children were killed inside the convent, a cottage located next to the church, which was then set on fire. More than 95% of the 143 individuals identified were children, with an average age of 6 years old. The people found in the convent died there or their bodies were deposited there when they still had soft tissue. Consequently, it was concluded that at least some individuals were killed in the convent and burned there, owing to “the abundant signs of fire on all floors of the dwelling. As acknowledged by the State and established by Tutela Legal del Arzobispado in its report, the bodies of all those who were killed were piled up in several homes, which were then set on fire by the soldiers. Similarly, they set fire to the church, where there were injured people who were still alive, because screams and cries could be heard8.

The testimony of the El Mazot massacre is similar to Chapter XVII of Hadji Murad in its realism. Rufina Amaya’s testimony, like the «Tartar plant» of Tolstoy, should be understood as a practice of remembrance, a procedure that restores historical memory and provides an alternative narrative from the victims’ perspective. Against the backdrop of the screams of a child who cried and begged for his mother before being murdered and burned, Dom Helder’s question may be capable of dismantling the reassuring pacifism that arises from a provincial chronotope. Câmara’s point of view, “Let us have the courage to ask ourselves: does not no-violent action serve as a tranquilliser?…,” occupies the same chronotope that led Alyosha to answer Ivan’s question and abandon, in the name of singular suffering, any possibility of refuge in a theodicy or formalism that could cool the impatience of an [armed] revolt.

He hunted him down before the mother’s eyes, and the hounds tore the child to pieces! The general, it seems, was afterwards declared incompetent to administer his estates. Well… what should be donne about him? Shoot him for the satisfaction of our moral feelings? Speak, Alyosha! «Shoot him!» Alyosha said softly, lifting his gaze to his brother with a somehow pale, twisted smile. «Bravo!» Ivan cried out in some kind of ecstasy. «If even you say so, it means… You’re a fine monk» So that’s the kind of little devil that is sitting in your heart, Alyosha Karamazov!

(Dostoevsky 2011, p. 210)

In Latin America, as in Ivan and Alyosha’s Russia, anger lies at the root of the collapse of a naive consciousness that seeks to understand the facts.9 The Need for understanding, arising from a naive awareness, invariably led to the forgetting and obscuring of reality, to the erasure of the victims’ memory in the name of present harmony and the theodicies of a traditional religions, which, as Paulo Freire wrote, “tends to accept mythical explanations” (Gutiérres 1973, p. 92).

5. Testimony

Amidst the nihilism that has murdered and continues to murder men and women subjected to unspeakable violence in the Latin American peripheries, Liberation Theology found its source of discernment in restoring the testimony of the poor, while rejecting the “transcendental illusions” of a theodicy that erases the historical horizon of the victims. Jon Sobrino’s confession that «for us, Galilee is El Salvador» (Sobrino 2000, p. 100) provides a religious perspective that, by restoring the memory of victims, challenges the current political harmony and the theodicies of traditional religious grammar. In light of El Salvador’s historical reality, liberation Christianity reinterprets traditional theological language in a manner similar to Dostoevsky’s rewriting of Christianity10. Gutiérrez’s reflection on a “spirituality of liberation,” rooted in the testimony of a “first Christian generation” of Latin Americans, is closely linked to the revolt that rejected, on behalf of the victims, the “superior truth of Western civilization.”

“Living witnesses rather than theological speculation will point out, are already pointing out, the direction of a spirituality of liberation. This is the task which has been undertaken in Latin America by those referred to above as a “first Christian generation.”

(Gutiérres 1973, p. 208)

Interpreted from the historical reality of El Salvador, the meaning of Christianity does not lie in the realm of “theological speculation,” but is embodied in the historical memory of the poor and in the topologies of a “non-place” resulting from nihilistic violence. These “non-places” are now reinterpreted as “sacred spaces,” inhabited by living witnesses who symbolize the “irruption of something almost eschatological into reality.” (Sobrino 2000, p. 115). As Gutiérrez argued, the testimony illuminates a hope ‘rooted in the heart of historical practice’. This is why, as Jon Sobrino wrote, there is a need to ‘sacralise the martyrs’, putting their lives and works into words and shaping an experience of the restitution of memory that brings liberation theology closer to the narrative procedures of testimonial literature.

“The little hospital and cathedral, the rose garden and chapel of the UCA in El Salvador, where Dom Oscar Romero and the Jesuits were killed and buried, have become holy places of pilgrimage. The same is true of El Mozote, where hundreds of people were massacred and where a little monument has been raised bearing the words: “They are not dead.” They are with us, with you, and with whole human race. The same is true of Las Aradas, where a cross was erected to commemorate the peasants massacred on the Sumpul River on the border with Honduras, and in many lesser-known places.”

(Ibid, p. 103)

The victims are not dead. They live on in our memories and in the collective memory of humanity. Through this collective remembrance, they speak to us, challenging any theodicy or harmony that seeks to justify or forget the violence they suffered. The victims’ historical memory returns as a testimony to spectral justice, which, like Akaky Akakyevich’s unfinishedness, does not allow the living to live in peace11. What Gutiérrez and others called ‘liberation spirituality’, which is found in the poetics of testimony, is a device for constructing a ‘metareality’ that survives the destruction of reality. In this sense, liberation theology is part of a cultural testimonial turn marked by the catastrophes of the 20th century, a turn that offered new acoustic devices capable of restoring a memory that would otherwise be subjected to the “triumphal procession in which the current rulers step over those who are lying prostrate” (Benjamin 2003, p. 391). The narrative procedure of the sacralization of victims—as described by Jon Sobrino in reference to the memory of El Salvador and the children of El Mazote—inscribes theological language in an experience that does not derive its content from the normativity of theological tradition. Rather, it derives from a phenomenological analysis that recovers the memory and testimony of the victims. The “audacity” in the phenomenological analysis of these experiences, which are vehicles for the “irruption of something almost eschatological in our reality,” (Sobrino 2000, p. 114) defines the theological turn toward victims in Latin America liberation theology. Rooted in the testimony of victims like Rufina Amaya, this inversion restores the tears of a murdered child and embodies the hope born of the unfinished historical struggle of the poor.

“Reality unveils itself as it is: injustice generating poverty, violence, lies, and death. On the other hand, reality also shows itself through that which generates hope, compassion, justice, and love.”

(Ibid, p. 115)

The realism claimed by “liberation spirituality” necessarily implies broadening the meaning of religion, making it possible to break down the boundaries of traditional theological grammar, as seen in Russian realism and, later, in Benjamin’s gesture of restitution and Bloch’s hope. As Gutiérrez acknowledged, the expansion of liberation theology’s theological grammar follows the path opened by Ernst Bloch: “Where there is hope, there is religion” (Gutiérres 1973, p. 217). Rooted in historical praxis, hope emerges as the foundation of a narrative procedure that sanctifies the memory of victims. This theological procedure inscribes a poetic experience of anti-nihilism in the violent reality of Latin America, overcoming nihilism through a labor that is capable of building community. Gutierrez’s statement that “we need a ‘spirituality’; theological categories are not enough” underscores the necessity of a spirituality of liberation and should be understood as a demand to restore the memory of the victims. This approach positions liberation theologians as para-textual agents of a testimony that has contributed to the deepening of democracy in Latin America12. Even today, this testimony challenges both hegemonic Christianity and a human rights framework rooted in the ideology of bourgeois individualism, which is designed to apply only in the Global North13.

Gutiérrez’s reference to Bloch’s philosophy highlights a ‘spirituality of liberation’ that draws its strength from the reality of an ‘unfinished world’. The unfinished nature of the world—the “birthplace” of hope—is based not on a promise, but on the concrete historical experience of a being that is pure labor. The «truth of being» as «labor», as Levinas points out, denounces as «purely ideological the notion of a being that would be real for all eternity» (Levinas 1998, p. 36). As a praxis that presents the truth of being, labor is a condition of hope that “takes time seriously” and understands by future «that which really has not come to pass and which does not preexist it self in any way» (Ibid, p. 37). This theological praxis forms the basis of a ‘spirituality of liberation’ which, via the «unexpected breach opened by Bloch» (Gutiérres 1973, p. 16), has transcended the eschatology of traditional religion and the ontology of being-for-death. For Bloch, the meaning of hope reaches the unfinishedness, enabling an experience that is not paralyzed by the nothingness of death: “the nothingness of utopia is not the nothingness of death, and hope is not anguish.”’ (Levinas 1998, p. 36). Levinas’s emphasis on the Jewish elements of Bloch’s philosophy, such as “the world to come” and “the incomplete world,” touches on an essential feature of liberation theology, which draws its strength from an “experience of unfinishedness” or a “pedagogy of the unfinished”14 dedicated to a “world to come.” The ontological fissure inherent in Bloch’s philosophy calls into question the veracity of a chronotope that disregards the «nodes that interrupt the continuity of time»—understood as the experience of the ‘deformalization’ of a «singularity delivered of its own self-control» (Levinas 1995).

Through “the breach unexpectedly opened by Bloch”, we can say that liberation theology drew inspiration from the ontology of libertarian Judaism—a form of messianic utopianism closely associated with the works of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. The feverish crises and syncope resulting from a “damaged childhood,” as Benjamin described it, are part of an “experience of unfinishedness” that shares the same chronotope. In this chronotope, the children of chance in Russian or Latin American contexts disrupt the continuity of time through which history renews itself—as hope.

Against the backdrop of this experience of de-formalization, captured by the audacity of a phenomenological practice that describes such experiences, we find the singularity of a spirituality of liberation that transcends nihilism through a hope capable of building community. In this regard, Gutierrez’s testimony is very illustrative.

“In El Salvador, I have often seen how peasants, experts in boundless suffering, do not succumb to sadness, but are capable of celebrating.”

(Gutierrez 1983a; Sobrino 2000, p. 124)

Gutierrez’s confession finds a new loci theologici in liberation theology: the historical power of the poor. The communal experience of peasants who do not succumb to sadness, despite being experts in boundless suffering, reflects the private reality of a life that appears as pure exposure and nakedness. Gutiérrez’s testimony captures the reality of people who find in their capability to build community a strength to overcome nihilism—nourishing the foundation of a hope that allows a «light-hearted journey to the underworld, the land of the dead» (Bakhtin 1983, p. 41). In Latin America, as in Gogol’s Russia, the figure of the “democratic seminarian without a family,” who “combines Latin wisdom with popular laughter,” can perhaps be found in the experience of young pastors, like Gutierrez, who rewrote the gospels in light of everyday experiences of violence.

Bakhtin’s analysis of Gogol’s work reveals a common theme connecting Russian and Latin American realism: a shift away from normative, abstract language and toward a “worldview” that is “not a system of conceptual formulations, but the speaking life itself”. The memory recovery process that shaped liberation theologians’ praxis, which recognized the reality of a «life outside uniform and rank», emerges as a democratic imperative that disrupts and renews the experience of the present. For liberation theologians, too, the “return to the living popular speech is vital,” because, as Bakhtin wrote, «only memory and not oblivion can move forward. Memory returns to the beginning and renews it» (Bakhtin 1983) 15. The inversion that Bakhtin finds in Gogol—the “negation of all abstract and immovable norms”—defined, through the infinity of paths and elective affinities that connect the peripheries, the praxis of liberation theologians. This inversion can be understood within the context of the “nodes” that, for Bloch, “interrupt the continuity of time”. The return to the memory of the poor—the “audacity” of Medellín and its theologians who found hope in a phenomenological analysis of the victims—provided an anti-nihilistic experience that also shaped Russian realism.

Levinas, an heir to the Russian chronotope and an ongoing interlocutor of Latin American liberation theology, described the potential significance of the historical power of the poor, as observed by Gutiérrez through his experience with peasants in El Salvador.

“In the obscurity of pure facticity, in the desert of being and its indetermination into which the subject is thrown, hope is introduced […].

The ultimate meaning of subjectivity would thus be entirely ecstatic. Not by way of intentionality becoming conscious of being, but by the práxis that produces it, and by which the subject is in its entirety work [oeuvre]” (Levinas 1998, p. 39).