Symbols and Signals

[P]eople at different historic periods are more or less sensitive to signs as such. Some people are deaf or blind to non-verbal signals.–Mary Douglas

 I've started reading a book called Natural Symbols by Dame Mary Douglas.   I heard about this book several years ago from James Hitchcock in Recovery of the Sacred.    He wrote in his 1974 preface:

The "success" of a liturgy cannot be judged simply on the basis of the subjective reactions of the participants. Liturgies can be rendered "effective" in a variety of ways which do violence to the fundamental meanings that Catholic liturgy is supposed to convey. It is partly by a failure to attend to meanings as well as to forms that the present condition of liturgical confusion has been allowed to develop.

The author is by profession a historian, not a liturgist or an anthropologist. Much of the thought contained here was originally stimulated by a historical investigation into the folk religion of Elizabethan England. A large debt will also be obvious to what is perhaps the most important liturgical book of the post-conciliar period, Mary Douglas' Natural Symbols. Had that work appeared before 1965, recent liturgical history might have been happier.

Mary Douglas was a fairly influential anthropologist, a Catholic.   The Benedictine prior of Monastery of the Holy Cross has written a few posts on her thought.   Of the quote at the top, he writes:

(Douglas) is saying that human sensitivity to “signs” depends on one’s historical situation. This quotation appears early in Natural Symbols, a book she wrote in response to the widespread rejection of ritual and symbol in the late 1960’s. She was also writing as a concerned Catholic, for whom ritual was a a life-affirming part of her experience. Finally, she wrote as an anthropologist, who had the opportunity to witness the use of ritual in other cultures, and to reflect on the purpose and effect of ritual in building social ties and shared meaning. Natural Symbols is a book that attempts to demonstrate the connection between three levels of experience (listed here from most to least general and abstract): 1) our system of belief about the world, society, God, and evil; 2) the way in which belief is communicated by and shapes society and the control it exercises (or fails to exercise) over us; 3) our experience of being a body, and the ways in which we use our bodies to communicate our shared (or unique) beliefs about the world and our place in it.

I think the reason Douglas's work is considered important to Catholics in the aftermath of Vatican II is that the last gasp of modernism seemed to blithely ignore what Flannery O'Connor has called "Mystery and Manners" in favor of a rationalistic kind of verbalism, which has left us vulnerable to lots of post-modern confusions.

Prior Peter writes:

Mary Douglas convincingly demonstrates that the type of symbolic behavior depends on (and in turn influences) the community structure and belief.....

So we have three mutually influencing ideas, from the most interior and intellectual (belief), through the exterior and bodily (symbolic communication), to the most public and collective (structure). Tinkering with any one area will change the others in subtle ways, though Dame Mary strongly suggests that we can predict relatively well just how these changes will play out.

To point out the insufficiency of verbalism is not to dismiss the value of language.   It's rather, to place it into its context.   There is far more to say on this topic, but I'll leave it for now with a quote from the abstract on Rings and Rationalism -- I haven't read the book, but the quote seems pertinent:

Tolkien’s work provided a compelling, if subtle, counternarrative to the claims of scientism and rationalism that dominated much of the twentieth century.

This goes deeper than Tolkien’s fondness for forests and distaste for mechanization. The great evils in his stories are defined by their desire to dominate and control, subjugating the weak to their ends. Thus, the chief moral struggle in his work is not the physical war against the unabashed evil of the Dark Lord and his monsters. Rather it is in the hearts of those who are tempted to join with that evil, or to adopt its methods and mindset of domination. Tolkien’s work is not a warning against power as such, but against domination. And rationalism (as distinct from reason) is a means and excuse for this unjust dominion. It is an attempt by the intellect to grasp the whole of reality, and thereby bring it under control. Temptation to this may begin from a desire to do good, but this is perverted by the arrogant assumption of control.