Mystics and Ascetics

Chapter 3 of Matthew Bagger's 'The Uses of Paradox' is entitled 'Mystics and Ascetics', and is a water-well of deep adventure into the coincidentia oppositorum, touted by more than one mystic as being perhaps the eye to the Divine.

Starting with Hegel, who takes the meaning of a notion he calls 'the speculative' as closely paralleling the meaning of the word 'mystical' - a mysteriousness is captured, that defies the understanding. The mystical is a unity, bringing together the separation and opposition of determinations that are abstract positings of identity. In the mystical we see a constant sublating of the understanding, as it overturns and overturns into it's opposite. The rational, however contains those opposites as ideal moments within itself, and thus, Hegel says, because the speculative and the rational both contain within themselves their own opposites, both are mystical.

Bagger then introduces Pseudo-Dionysius as a mystic who starts out preoccupied with this idea that God is a creator. Emphasising God's transcendence, Pseudo-Dionysius pursues the insight that God cannot be a creature. This leads him to the notion that God's radical transcendence is indefinable, and this 'transcendent darkness remains hidden from all light and concealed from all knowledge'. But this transcendence is still limited - leading the mystic to paradoxically assert that God's transcendence also reveals his immanence - being both beyond, and within, all things capable of description.

This is what Nicholas of Cusa called the 'coincidentia oppositorum' - coincidence of opposites. God's transcendence is darkness, his immanence is light, and so Pseudo-Dionysius employs phrases like 'the ray of the divine shadow'.

(For those of you that know me well, yes, absolutely, I'm paddling happily in a pool of warm tropical ocean water, yep, right about now.)

So, two modes of theology are required - immanence requires names drawn from the created order, transcendence requires the denial of any name of God. While for Kirkegaard paradox was an instrument of asceticism (see ' Credo Quia Absurdum' post), for Pseudo-Dionysius, as for Hegel, paradox alleviates cognitive dissonance - we move past negative contradiction to be cognitively beyond assertion and denial. Per Pseudo-Dionysius, a more adequate mustikos (mystical) knowledge of God can be achieved through agnosia (unknowing), yielding to a state of henosis (ecstatic union). In paradox 'one is supremely united by a completely unknowing inactivity of all knowledge, and knows beyond the mind by knowing nothing'.

Jesus' incarnation recapitulates this paradox, where the trancendent puts aside it's own hiddenness and reveals itself in His human being. Scripture, in it's role as the inspired record of revelation, records transmits the Jesus' ecclesiastical hierarchy. Sacraments, offices and ranks, combined with instruction in their symbolic esoteric meanings alter the individual's violitional complex - that is, the person's beliefs, emotions, attitudes, perspectives and desires. Purgation of the catechumens, illumination of the scripture, the liturgy, the ecclesiology, and perfection through union in unknowing all act anagogically, cognitively training the individual in a developmental framework. As put by Pseudo-Dionysius, the goal of this hierarchy for each individual is:

'the continuous love of God and of things divine, a love which is sacredly worked out in an inspired and unique way, and before this, the complete and unswerving avoidance of everything contrary to it. It consists of a knowledge of beings as they really are. It consists of both the seeing and the understanding of sacred truth.... It consists of a feast upon that sacred vision which nourishes the intellect and which divinizes everything rising up to it'.


More to come.

Ref: Bagger, M. (2007). "The Uses of Paradox", New York: Columbia University Press, pg 30 - 35.