3 November 2022

An Observation on Purification

“The church officials who refused to look through Galileo’s telescope were guilty of willful ignorance.  The phenomena he claimed to have discovered can only be experienced by way of this procedure.  To reject his claims without employing the proper method is to violate all the canons of intelligent inquiry.  Similarly, to dismiss metaphysical propositions before employing our only means of understanding and evaluating them is to be obstinately ignorant.

“The greatest of the ancient and medieval metaphysicians taught that metaphysical knowledge is accessible only to those who practice purification.  Their conceptions of the process and the state of purification differ, but the variations are minimal.  Most descend from Plato’s Phaedo and emphasize the life of virtue.  According to this tradition, the virtues are purificatory acts.  The soul that has been purified through habituation to the intellectual and moral virtues is a soul prepared to receive metaphysical truth.  There is no other way: if you want to see distant physical objects up close, you must employ a telescope.  If you long to acquire metaphysical knowledge, your soul must be pure.”

(Mark Anderson, Pure: Modernity, Philosophy, and the One, Sophia Perennis, San Rafael, CA, 2009, page 71.)

1. I wonder if Anderson, when he writes ‘to dismiss metaphysical propositions before employing our only means of understanding and evaluating them’ is referring to the emergence of analytic philosophy in England in the early twentieth century.  I’m thinking specifically of people like A. J. Ayer who argued that metaphysical statements were ‘meaningless’ and that, therefore, analytic philosophers did not have to consider them.  It was a daring strategy and one that I still find frequently used among contemporary atheists in the anglosphere.

2. Anderson’s point is, I think, fairly easy to understand.  Suppose that a young man is learning how to play the piano and is studying with a good teacher.  The teacher notices that the young man has become more distracted, looks more unkempt, and that the young man’s skills are either not improving or maybe even declining.  After careful observation the piano teacher concludes that the young man is consuming too much alcohol and also, perhaps, is using recreational drugs.  The teacher takes the time to inform the young man that it is necessary to have a healthy diet and that drug use interferes with concentration and diminishes physical capacities as well.  This kind of advice is based on the idea of purification.  In a similar way, Anderson is putting forth the idea that the metaphysical ascent requires purification in order for such assent to be efficacious.

3. There are types of purification.  I tend to see them as focused either on body, speech, heart, or mind.  That’s not a specifically Platonic way of looking at them, but it is a tool I have used to understand these practices.  In Platonism purification is also an aspect of what are called ‘civic virtues’, and therefore has a social dimension as well.  In our hyper-individualistic culture that aspect is easily missed; I missed it for a long time and still grapple with how the civic virtues should be a part of spiritual life.  It’s not a minor issue; for example Socrates argued against an attempt to free him from jail in part because Socrates had consistently taught that members of a polis, in this case Athens, should follow the rules, customs, and laws of that polis.  If Socrates abandoned that teaching at the end of his life that would be seen as hypocritical by many.  This kind of argument is difficult for moderns to comprehend; we tend to be much more highly critical and much more unwilling to go along with civic institutions. 

4. The bodily practices of purification are types of asceticism.  The civic purification is to be a good citizen.  The purification of speech is something I brought in from my Buddhist practice of right speech; that it is not sufficient to say something simply because it is true, it must also be helpful.  Purification of the heart is the cultivation of empathy, sympathy, compassion, and love, as well as practices like prayer and the experience of wonder.  The purification of mind and soul is to cultivate an awareness of higher hypostases and, ultimately, to return to The One, The Good, The Beautiful, to that which is eternal.