Monastic-Ascetic Silence

Monasticism as well as its more sharply contoured manifestations, the orders of the Catholic Church, rarely come into the focus of modern sociology, and when they do, a clear narrowing of the topic to the concept of formal and total organization can be observed. >> monasticism

Whatever one may think about this theoretical prescription in view of long noviciates, probationary periods, possibilities of resignation or voluntariness of vows, it in no case captures the self-description of such systems and is probably not able to explain the peculiar circumstance that religious orders after their charismatic foundation typically oscillate between decay and revitalization.

Not at all observable from this perspective is the phenomenon of monastic-ascetic silence, and this may be the reason why it has received only a minimum of attention so far, surprising enough, considering how irritating for sociologists intentional non-communication as a structural component of social systems should be. The usual reference to the fact that Silence has always been ubiquitous in religious contexts does not explain why it is specifically addressed in almost all monastic rules, why it is practiced in most orders at least during certain times of the day, and why, in the case of orders of strict observance, it is even encountered as a life-dominant practice (allowing speech only in special cases). >> silence life

The following work attempts to observe the monastic >tibi silentium laus< sociologically. This excludes possible emphasis in the face of very intense forms of life. It is a matter of perspective-bound explanation of an apparently asocial phenomenon, not of belief or disbelief, not of reconstructions of self-descriptions that owe their orientation to this code. Blindnesses are thus at play on both sides. Fortunately, one can still know this and does not have to assume ignorance, if observers, because they observe, necessarily fade out what means its constitutive for the system, which is observed, in its self-observation/description.

At the beginning of the analysis there is a very abstract consideration. In a theo-logical, theo-symbolic version, it refers to the this-worldliness of the other-worldliness, which is inherent in all Christian religion and cannot be transcended by human means, a paradox, which is symbolized in the Christian world in the scandalon of the cross, in that horizontal-vertical tension, the vertical of which, indicating transcendence, is constituted only in the horizontal, i.e. intramundanously. What is sensually present in the cross refers to the schema immanence/transcendence, which functions as a code in the religious system. >> immanence transcendence paradox

Codes refer to the problem of how self-referential, autopoietically closed systems, which reproduce themselves recursively by accessing their own elements with the help of those very elements, can nevertheless be open. This is made possible by a duplication technique which endows every meaning that can be processed in the system with the possibility of its negative version, by a yes/no difference which, as a sorting function totalizing as it were, makes everything that happens in the system as an operation of the system classifiable according to yes or no.

In this form codes conditionally belong to the context of the differentiation of social systems. Differentiation, once underway, specifies in a recurrent way what the code must be able to do, what requirements it must be able to fulfill. The increase in performance (as an increase in selectivity) finally allows the specification of what is possible in the functional system, what is not possible, what can be treated or what is to be faded out. In what codes negate, they keep the world open and are insofar universal; in what they affirm, the structures and processes of the system condense, but this in such a way that they are kept in contingency by the always possible position of the countervalue.

Contact with what religious semantics itself transmits has suggested identifying the immanence/transcendence schema as the code of the religious system. This coding, like any coding, when applied to itself, becomes paradoxical. The schema itself is immanently constituted. The unity of difference is found in the left side of the code. The duplication of the world produced by the code always runs back into immanence, moreover – and this seems very important – into the side of the code that opposes the preference gradient towards transcendence. Codes always have a side that is preferred: One would rather be right than wrong, rather have than not have, rather truth than untruth, rather be together with the beloved against the world than without him in the world. >> immanence transcendence paradox gradient

In the case of religion, this asymmetry becomes dramatic because whenever you want transcendence, you get what you don't want: Immanence. The effect is the negative occupation of immanent world, which, no matter how much one may pedal, holds in itself every communication related to transcendence, every thought related to transcendence. Structures and processes oriented toward transcending immanence are immanent structures and processes, in the case of transcendence-related communication devastatingly this-worldly social systems. Religion systems form, one could say, behind the back of transcendence-related communication. The non-preferential world is continually produced, and in this sense the paradox of the unity of the immanence/transcendent schema [Immanenz/Transparenz; sic!] is catalytic, and in this sense it produces the typically Christian Suffering from the world. One can make this paradoxical figure sensuously tangible by means of the stagyriths, the column saints, who – ascending into the vertical – seek to escape what they – fleeing – produce themselves: the abstruse, the inescapably consistent hirsuteness of the column. >> religion paradox unity immanence transcendence transparency suffering

The thesis that can follow these considerations is: Apotaxis (flight from the world) is paradoxical effect and itself paradoxically constructed. It inevitably produces what it wants to avoid; it repels itself from immanence and produces it just with it. The direction towards transcendence is in one go a way from the world and the production of what is fled from. This can be read as the impossible possibility of Christian existence and from it - under dramatophilic conditions - psychic profit of its own kind.

More soberly one can venture the prognosis that around apotactic phenomena, running counter to their intention, world will condense in non-preferential form. Christianity, insofar as it is a system and makes use of the code immanence/transcendence (or its Preadaptive Advances), generates apotaxies for itself, which in turn turn into world, and it therefore seems to be no coincidence that the flight from the world of early Christianity generates exactly those structures and processes which we are used to call sect, monasticism or orders. That then, as one can anticipate, the paradoxes accompanying these movements reappear in their own context of invisibilization leads to our actual object: the monastic-ascetic silence. >> preadaptive advance

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LUHMANN, Niklas and FUCHS, Peter, 1997. Reden und Schweigen. Suhrkamp.