Purity, Danger and Paradox

The final installment from Chapter 3, 'Mystics and Ascetics' from Matthew Bagger's 'The Uses of Paradox' begins with Mary Douglas.

Mary Douglas explores what she calls ‘a sociology of the uses of logic’, delving into an apprehension of what is ‘right and necessary in social relations’. Searching for stability and psychological consonance, we see people vest nature and reason with the authority to regulate social discourse.

Douglas parallels societies responses to hybrids and anomalies that arise in the classification of animal to the attitudes to outsiders held by those societies.Those that view the incorporation of outsiders as enriching will venerate the outsiders and view them as auspicious, while a social group that finds it’s external boundaries threatened by outsiders will abominate anomalies and view them as dangerous.

The biases that form around these beliefs by outsiders enlist emotional energy – abominable beasts shock and viscerally offend, sacred mediators, on the other hand, evoke awe and reverence. If we categorise ‘paradox’ as one of these taxonomic anomalies, we reflect the different responses that can be seen in attitudes towards paradox that are held by the mystics and ascetics. As an encountered ‘alien’, paradox can be brought within the recognised boundaries of the cognisable, or be left beyond the pale.

Bagger’s theory is far more psychological than Douglas’ functionalist thesis, and Bagger proposes that the availability bias of cognitive psychology is evident in human attitudes towards paradox. As could be expected to occur in line with the human capacity to, well, think, experimental evidence shows that merely drawing attention to the potential cause of an event will increase the likelihood that people will identify that potential cause as an actual cause of an event.

In regards to attitudes to anomalies, then, the more subjectively important the external boundary is to a person, the more it is available to their consciousness, and so a generalised attitude to paradox (paradox as an ‘outsider’) could be expected to include that paradox as a threat, which leads to an orientation towards cognitive asceticism, where the dirty, unclear thoughts of paradox get cleaned up, or shipped out.

Note in this context paradox becomes extraordinarily useful for legitimating a social vision, because paradox now functions to exemplify the dangers (or at the other end of the spectrum, rewards) of crossing social boundaries.

Bagger proposes that in order to preserve his argument, he must establish that 1) correlations do exists between attitudes towards outsiders and attitudes towards paradox and 2) demonstrate the direction of causality as running from the attitude to outsiders to the attitude to paradox.

Pseudo-Dionysius’corpus is purported to provide just such evidence – Pseudo-Dionysius argues that God’s powers of purification, illumination and perfection are symbolically reflected in the hierarchy of angels and the hierarchy organising the church. The church, as an image of the Divine, is divided into distinctive orders and powers to reveal that the activities of the divinity are preeminent for the utter holiness and purity, permanence and distinctiveness of their orders. He actually argues that the threat of pollution protects the conformity of the orders, and so for Pseudo-Dionysius, the cosmic order serves to legitimate a social order revealing that his mystical theology does not differ in reflecting his social preoccupations.

The whole purpose of the ecclesiastical hierarchy and liturgy of the church is to initiate people. Salvation can only occur through divinisation, which consists as much as possible of being ‘like and in union with God’. So the very reason for having the social group becomes to bring others into the group, carefully controlled, of course, if the group is to retain it’s character. Pseudo-Dionysius dogmatically reminds us that the ‘impure’ people would defile the sacred teachings – deacons, in fact, are charged with the task of purging the uninitiated, and maintaining the external boundary of the group. The deacons are given responsibility of the doors, and postulants must submit to total purification before they can be allowed to come into the presence of the sacred.

Pseudo-Dionysius views paradoxes congenially – a sacred cognitive mediator that provides occasion for union with the divine. His mystical cognitive practice transforms the self by invoking awe and reverence at the moment of realisation of the immanence of God in all of creation, decentering selfish desires and promoting an identification with God’s wider perspective.

While for Pseudo-Dionysius positive attitudes to incorporation of outsiders produces a bias that views paradox as revelatory, Kirkegaard’s focus on boundaries and limits requires in his understanding that unless one confronts the possibility of offence at the Christian paradox, one is not essentially Christian. Paradox for Kirkegaard arouses emotion that we could identify as expected in approaching the abominable. The paradox is not merely vexing, it is horrible, appalling and offensive. Kirkegaard yokes this to his ascetic suffering – indeed, for Kirkegaard, paradox becomes the pus that hagiographers insist Catherine of Siena chose to drink – both try to overcome offense to transform themselves in relation to God.