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 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 20/10/2015, SPi

The Great Riddle

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 20/10/2015, SPi
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 20/10/2015, SPi

The Great Riddle

Wittgenstein and Nonsense,
Theology and Philosophy

The Stanton Lectures 2014

Stephen Mulhall

1
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 20/10/2015, SPi

3
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 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 20/10/2015, SPi

Contents

Preface vii

Lecture One Nonsense and Theology: Exhausting the Options? 1

Lecture Two The Flounder and the Fisherman’s Wife: Tractarian
Ethics, the Mystical, and the Religious 23
Lecture Three Grammatical Thomism: Five Ways of Refusing
to Make Sense 42
Lecture Four Analogical Uses and the Projectiveness of Words:
Wittgenstein’s Vision of Language 61
Lecture Five Perfections and Transcendentals: Wittgenstein’s
Vision of Philosophy 81
Lecture Six Authority and Revelation: Philosophy and Theology 106
Epilogue 128

Bibliography 133
Index 137
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 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 20/10/2015, SPi

Preface

It was a great honour to be invited to give the Stanton Lectures in the

Philosophy of Religion in the Lent term of 2014. The invitation was also
particularly well timed from my point of view; for it arrived soon after
I had participated in the Aquinas Colloquium organized by Blackfriars in
Oxford during 2012, which had brought to my attention for the first time
the theological school or movement named ‘Grammatical Thomism’,
and given me a real desire to understand it better, and in particular to
understand the legitimacy of its claims to inherit Wittgenstein just as
much as Aquinas. So I would like to take this opportunity to express my
thanks to the organizers of the Colloquium, and in particular to David
Burrell and Janet Soskice, who also participated in it, and were extremely
generous in their response to my initial attempts to get Grammatical
Thomism into focus. I now appreciate far more than I did then just how
influential and much-admired David’s work is by theologians whose
judgement I respect; and I would be very pleased if these lectures not
only bring his work to the attention of a wider philosophical audience,
but remind theologians and philosophers of religion that lying behind his
well-known writings on the monotheistic religions of the book, and on
Aquinas, is a very powerful and distinctive conception of philosophy.
I would also like to thank the Electors to the Stanton Lectureship for
providing me with the opportunity to take the further steps in my
theological education that are recorded in the following pages. Eamon
Duffy was the Chair of the Electors, and a genial host at the dinner
following my first lecture: he, together with Sarah Coakley, Janet Soskice,
Tim Crane, Catherine Pickstock, and Judy Lieu, also provided gracious
introductions to each of the six lectures in the series. Despite my folly in
choosing to deliver the lectures during a full teaching term at my home
university, which sorely truncated the time I could spend in Cambridge
outside the two hours involved in delivering the lectures themselves and
answering questions from the audience, the Theology Faculty were
extremely generous hosts; and various members of the Philosophy Fac-
ulty also exerted themselves to make me feel at home. Amongst the
theologians, I would particularly like to thank once again Janet Soskice
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 20/10/2015, SPi

viii PREFACE

and Sarah Coakley, both of whom helped me with useful references and
pertinent responses as the lectures unfolded; I am particularly in Sarah’s
debt, since she made the time to read and respond in very helpful ways to
the initial drafts of the whole series. Amongst the philosophers, Tim
Crane, Arif Ahmed, Michael Potter, and Nicholas Boyle were welcome
faces among the regular audience members, and charitable in their
responses to my peculiar ways of doing philosophy, and of trying to
find fruitful guidance in this task from theological sources. I would also
like to thank Peter Harland, the Theology Faculty’s administrative offi-
cer, and his colleagues, who dealt efficiently and courteously with all the
practical matters arising from my tenure as Stanton Lecturer.
Although each of the lectures has been revised, and in some cases
significantly expanded, I have tried to retain the style and tone of their
original mode of presentation. Amongst colleagues who have taken the
time to read and respond to the text of my lectures outside the context of
their delivery, or have otherwise helped me to pursue lines of thought or
references related to them, I would particularly like to thank Cora
Diamond, Judith Wolfe, Stanley Hauerwas, Brian Klug, David Burrell,
Joshua Furnal, Martin Kusch, and Iain McPherson.
Lectures One and Two incorporate revised versions of portions of my
essay ‘Wittgenstein on Religious Belief ’, first published in O. Kuusela
and M. McGinn (eds), The Oxford Companion to Wittgenstein (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2012).
As with any and all of my academic duties, I could not have carried out
the responsibilities associated with this lectureship, or effected the trans-
formation of the lecture texts into a short book, without the domestic
support of Alison Baker, and the willingness of our two children (Ellie
and Matt) to go without access to the study (and its computer) for
significant portions of far too many days.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 20/10/2015, SPi

Lecture One
Nonsense and Theology
Exhausting the Options?

The starting point of this series of lectures was the recent discovery on
my part of an approach to the task of reflectively comprehending
religious uses of language that goes, or went, by the name of ‘Grammat-
ical Thomism’. The idea that there might be fruitful points of contact, or
even substantial areas of overlap, between Wittgenstein’s grammatical
investigations of mind and language and Thomas Aquinas’ treatment of
those same topics—call this ‘Analytic Thomism’—had long been familiar
to me, primarily through my familiarity with the work of Anthony
Kenny and Herbert McCabe. What was new (and deeply intriguing) to
me was the idea that a text such as the Summa Theologiae might be
fruitfully interpreted as, or at least controlled from the outset by, a
grammatical investigation of the nature and limits of (what McCabe
would call) the human capacity to know and name God, and that
McCabe’s way of carrying out this mode of reading Aquinas formed
part of a broader interpretative project to which the work of David
Burrell and Fergus Kerr (to name but two theological companions)
could be taken to contribute, with the groundbreaking work of Victor
Preller as an acknowledged inspiration.
It is my understanding that this project is now generally regarded as
being part of the history of theology rather than of its vital present—as
very much a project of the 1960s and 1970s, when Wittgenstein’s later
writings were at their most influential, and appeared to hold out to
philosophically minded theologians a sympathetic alternative to the
settled hostility of logical positivism—despite the fact that those associ-
ated with it continued their work well beyond that period, and their basic
orientation continues to receive occasional expressions of collective
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 NONSENSE AND THEOLOGY

respect.1 When I asked why the project had so quickly become passé,
I was pointed towards Francesca Aran Murphy’s book, God is Not a
Story, according to which Grammatical Thomism evinces all the vices of
Wittgensteinianism and none of the virtues of Thomas.2 I found Mur-
phy’s way of prosecuting the first of these charges deeply unconvincing,
for it depends not so much upon a reasoned rejection of a Wittgenstein-
ian approach as a failure to appreciate the nature of that approach, and of
the reasons its proponents have for adopting it; and since that misun-
derstanding continues to be broadly shared (not only within the phil-
osophy of religion), it may be worth taking a few moments at the outset
to address it.
Murphy’s critique of Grammatical Thomism appears to depend upon
a single idea, which then appears in a number of variations according to
the particular Grammatical Thomist text and author under critical
discussion—namely, that they all offer ‘a theory aimed at translating
metaphysical concerns [about God’s being] into concerns about the logic
of religious language’ (GNS, 89). This guiding characterization presup-
poses that concerns about the metaphysical essence of God and concerns
about the grammar of religious language are not only fundamentally
different but also contrasting or contradictory: according to Murphy, if
someone is analysing or otherwise reflecting upon our talk about God,
then she is not reflecting upon God’s nature or essence. From which it
follows that to translate reflections of the latter kind into reflections of
the former kind (or to interpret the latter kind of enterprise in terms of
the former) is not only to misrepresent genuinely metaphysical reflec-
tion; it is to eviscerate or etiolate it, by reducing a concern for the
ultimate ground of being to an anthropocentric, reflexive, and emptily
formal reflection on our means of representing reality rather than on the
reality we aspire to represent.
For Wittgenstein, however, elucidating grammar and articulating the
essence of things are not distinct tasks at all. On the contrary: according
to his later writings, ‘Essence is expressed in grammar . . . Grammar tells

1
As in J. Stout and R. MacSwain (eds), Grammar and Grace: Reformulations of Aquinas
and Wittgenstein (London: SCM Press, 1984)—a volume dedicated to the memory of Victor
Preller and his Divine Science and the Science of God: A Reformulation of Thomas Aquinas
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1967).
2
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007, hereafter ‘GNS’.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 20/10/2015, SPi

NONSENSE AND THEOLOGY 

what kind of object anything is (Theology as grammar).’ (PI,3 371, 373.)

A philosopher is characteristically interested in the essence of things—
not the facts of nature but rather the basis or essence of everything
empirical, the space of possibilities within which what happens to be
the case locates itself. But Wittgenstein suggests that essence finds
expression in the kinds of statement that we make about the relevant
phenomenon. What it does (or does not) make sense to say about
something makes manifest its essential possibilities, the kinds of features
it must possess if it is to count as the kind of thing it is, as well as the
kinds of variation of feature to which it might intelligibly be subject
without ceasing to count as that kind of thing. Hence, philosophical
inquiries into essence—call this metaphysics—can and must take the
form of grammatical investigations; the essence of things can be ren-
dered surveyable simply by a rearrangement of what any speaker already
knows—how to use words, what to say when.
Might not the thing’s essence nevertheless differ from our concept of
it, so that its true, underlying nature is not manifest in, but rather hidden
by, the grammar of our discourse about it? But grammar could only be a
false or otherwise misleading representation of what is really the case if it
is in the business of representing reality in the first place; and it is not.
Grammar articulates the terms in which a given kind of thing can
intelligibly be represented (truly or falsely). But if one regards those
terms as themselves representations of something, one is attempting to
conceive of a mode of discourse as if it were a particular discursive act—
as if grammar itself were a deployment of grammar, and clarifications of
meaning were descriptions of reality. It amounts to viewing the distinc-
tion between sense and nonsense as if it were a species of the distinction
between truth and falsehood; and that view embodies a misunderstand-
ing that will profoundly distort one’s metaphysical aspirations, in the
absence of a grammatical elucidation of the relevant distinctions
(between sense and truth, definitions and descriptions, representations
and their enabling conditions).
This is one familiar way of recounting the grammar of Wittgenstein’s
concept of ‘grammar’; and of course, simply recounting it does not
amount to demonstrating that the highly controversial conception of

3
Philosophical Investigations, 4th edition, trans. Anscombe, Hacker, and Schulte, ed.
Hacker and Schulte (Oxford: Blackwell, 2009), hereafter PI.
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 NONSENSE AND THEOLOGY

philosophy it engenders is right. But it does at least make clear that any
genuinely Wittgensteinian Thomist enterprise will not only reject Mur-
phy’s conception of metaphysical and grammatical investigations as
distinct or even contradictory, together with her privileging of meta-
physics over what she takes to be explorations of mere words; it will do so
for reasons having to do with a certain, well worked-out conception of
the intimacy of the relation between the grammar of a language and
reality. Since that fundamental methodological disagreement is never
properly identified or engaged with at any point in Murphy’s book, her
criticisms of the Grammatical Thomists will seem to them—as they seem
to me—to fail even to locate their intended target.
Even if one dismisses Murphy’s attribution of Wittgensteinian vice to
the Grammatical Thomists, however, that still leaves unaddressed her
second charge—that Grammatical Thomists lack the virtues of any
genuinely Thomistic theology. I certainly would not deny that one
legitimate theological ground for dismissing Grammatical Thomism
would be a lack of conviction in it as a plausible reading of Thomas
Aquinas (and of his Summa in particular)—an exegetical matter about
which I am very much not competent to adjudicate. As a philosopher,
however, I am constitutionally inclined to be as much interested in
possibilities as in actualities, and so to evaluate Grammatical Thomism
as one way in which a Christian theological enterprise might be coher-
ently and fruitfully conducted (whether or not its putative progenitor
ever did so conduct it). And as a philosopher for whom the later work of
Wittgenstein has been deeply influential from my undergraduate days,
I am particularly interested in whether this possible mode of doing
theology genuinely exhibits the indebtedness to Wittgenstein to which
its name also lays claim. Indeed, one way of characterizing the core
concern of this lecture series taken as a whole is as an attempt to show
that, however things may be with the Grammatical Thomist claim to
inherit Aquinas, its claim to inherit Wittgenstein is both well grounded
and—once those grounds are properly appreciated—such as to justify
the belief that it ought to be a serious contender in contemporary debates
in theology and the philosophy of religion.
Such a positive evaluation of the grammaticality of Grammatical
Thomism is, however, likely to encounter as much opposition from
informed Wittgensteinian philosophers as its claim to be a valid reading
of Aquinas has (it appears) encountered amongst Thomist theologians.
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NONSENSE AND THEOLOGY 

For as I began to read each individual Grammatical Thomist’s body of

work more systematically, and more systematically in relation to their
theological brethren, it became clear that one central point of resem-
blance between them lay in their willingness to characterize discourse
about God as nonsensical—more specifically, their willingness to take as
a touchstone of theological insight the awareness that language was
essentially incapable of putting us in touch with the reality of God,
given the fact that (as mainstream Christianity has always averred) he
is utterly transcendent with respect to the world we users of language
inhabit, and in relation to which our words attain and maintain whatever
meaning or sense they possess.
‘Nonsense’ is of course a pivotal term in Wittgenstein’s philosophy,
both early and late. For throughout his intellectual career he claimed that
the ‘problems’ characteristic of philosophy, to which its metaphysical
theory-building was intended to provide solutions, were in fact confu-
sions resulting from a misunderstanding of the logic of our language:
they signalled points at which speakers had lost control of their words,
failing to mean anything at all just when they believed themselves to be
communicating insights into the essence of reality.
To be sure, on the standard reading of the Tractatus Logico-
Philosophicus,4 Wittgenstein there allowed that certain kinds of violation
of the limits of sense were nevertheless ways of gesturing towards
ineffable insights; and the relevant kinds of strictly nonsensical utterance
centrally included evaluative propositions (both aesthetic, and ethico-
religious—what Wittgenstein called ‘the mystical’)—as well as the philo-
sophical propositions that made up the Tractatus itself (since they
attempted to delineate that which could not be otherwise—the essence
of language—and so could not be articulated in propositions whose
meaningfulness was supposed to depend upon their depicting a possible
state of affairs, hence one that precisely could have been otherwise). But
on the standard reading of Wittgenstein’s later philosophy, that idea of
ineffably insightful nonsense has been jettisoned altogether; hence it
comes naturally to certain Wittgensteinians to think that, insofar as
religion’s search for the transcendent pushes human discourse beyond
the limits of intelligibility, it results in sheer nonsense—the mere absence

4
London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1922.
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 NONSENSE AND THEOLOGY

of sense. On the other hand, the later Wittgenstein also claimed that
philosophy has no authority to subvert or reform our ordinary ways with
words, but must rather seek simply to describe them—that our forms of
life with language must ultimately be accepted; hence it comes naturally
to certain other Wittgensteinians to think that, insofar as religious
language-games are played, then religious forms of life are immune to
philosophical critique in general, and in particular to the charge of
lacking sense. This position is often described as one of Wittgensteinian
fideism (much to the chagrin of its proponents).
A recent example of the former way of inheriting the later Wittgen-
stein is Bede Rundle’s book, Why there is Something rather than Noth-
ing,5 in which he argues that a creator of the material world is not
required, since there is no alternative to its existence. In the course of
constructing that intriguing and sophisticated argument, he offers a
range of additional (and in my view rather less sophisticated) reasons
for questioning the coherence of traditional theism, all of which ultim-
ately turn on the Wittgensteinian vision of language and the conditions
under which it has sense that are outlined in his opening chapter, and
that are crystallized in the following passage:
Someone who insists that God, though lacking eyes and ears, watches him
incessantly and listens to his prayers, is clearly not using ‘watch’ or ‘listen’ in a
sense we can recognize, so while the words may be individually meaningful and
their combination grammatical, that is as far as meaningfulness goes: what we
have is an unintelligible use of an intelligible form of words. God is not of this
world, but that is not going to stop us speaking of him as if he were. It is not that
we have a proposition which is meaningless because unverifiable, but we simply
misuse the language, making an affirmation which, in the light of our under-
standing of the words, is totally unwarranted, an affirmation that makes no
intelligible contact with reality. (WSN, 11)

In the light of my current concern, it is striking that Rundle goes on

immediately to cite John Haldane’s rendition of a basic Thomist claim
about God (that ‘if there is a God identified initially as a first cause, then
that he is and what he is are one and the same reality’) as a theological
pronouncement so incoherent that it defies even grammar:
[T]he different ways in which the phrases ‘that God is’ and ‘what God is’ may be
completed show that any talk of the same reality is incoherent. That God is can be

5
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004, hereafter ‘WSN’.
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NONSENSE AND THEOLOGY 

said to be true, but not what God is, whereas ‘What God is is benevolent’ makes
sense, but not ‘That God is is benevolent’. (WSN, 11)

Here, Rundle echoes one criticism advanced in a much earlier Wittgen-

steinian critique of Aquinas (influential at least in philosophy, if not
theology)—Anthony Kenny’s The Five Ways.6 Kenny ends his discussion
of the Fourth Way by savaging this same Thomist claim:
Aquinas, in order to prevent God’s esse from being the applicability of a quite
uninformative predicate [because invoking an attribute common to anything
possessing substantial or accidental form], turns it into the applicability of a
predicate which is no predicate at all. What he says comes to this. When we say,
of anything but God, that it IS, we mean that for some F . . . it is F; when we say of
God that he IS, we mean the same except that no predicate may be substituted for
the F which occurs in the formula. God isn’t anything of any kind, he just is. But
this is surely complete nonsense. For the only meaning that attaches to a formula
such as ‘God is F’ is that if you substitute a genuine predicate for the dummy
letter F, you will get a meaningful sentence. If you forbid such a substitution,
you must delete the variable letter . . . and you are left simply with ‘God is . . . ’
which . . . is just an incomplete sentence.
The notion of Ipsum Esse Subsistens, therefore, so far from being a profound
metaphysical analysis of the divine nature, turns out to be the Platonic Idea of a
predicate which is at best uninformative and at worst unintelligible. (FW, 94–5)

Even those sympathetic to Wittgenstein might feel that both Kenny

and Rundle are remarkably quick to assume that the challenges to
intelligibility to which they point have simply been missed not only by
those inclined to employ them but also by those whose theological
employment it is to reflect upon such uses, and remarkably reluctant to
imagine why any intelligent person might nevertheless find some point
or purpose in such uses of words. If, however, one is sympathetic to
Wittgensteinian modes of doing philosophy, and in particular to his
methodological injunction against philosophical attempts to interfere
with our ordinary forms of life with language, one will have an additional
incentive to resist the admittedly powerful initial impression of sheer
nonsensicality that religious uses of language so persistently create, and
instead explore the possibility that this impression is indeed the result of
a failure to see the true nature of the mode of employment of words that

6
London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969, hereafter ‘FW’.
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 NONSENSE AND THEOLOGY

is at issue—a misperception of the actual grammar of the language-

games being played here.
The work of D.Z. Phillips is perhaps the most sustained philosophical
attempt to provide an accurate delineation of the grammar of religious
language in this vein—the second (and by far the most influential) of the
two ways of inheriting the later Wittgenstein that I distinguished earlier.
And in doing so, he confronts perhaps its most difficult challenge, by
acknowledging the persistence with which Biblical texts and protagonists
emphasize that God and his ways are beyond human understanding—as
when St Paul exclaims ‘how unsearchable are his judgements, and his
ways past finding out’ (Rom. 11:33), or the Psalmist says that God’s
‘knowledge is too wonderful for me; it is high, I cannot attain unto it’
(139:6). Phillips admits that it is tempting to gloss such texts as claiming
that human language is inherently inadequate to God’s nature and ways;
but he urges us not to succumb, because that claim is not obviously
comprehensible:
To say that language as such is inherently adequate or inadequate requires
finding sense in the idea of a complete language, such that looking at its
completeness (all that can ever be said), we can say that it, this complete
language, is either adequate or inadequate. Since the notion of completeness is
unintelligible, talk of the adequacy or inadequacy of a complete language is also
unintelligible. (FF,7 263)

But such a gloss on these words is not compulsory—it is, indeed,

indicative of a significant misunderstanding:
The first thing it is essential to note is that . . . the Psalmist and St. Paul are not
making statements about human language. Their expressions of religious mys-
tery are expressions in language. They are not telling us that, because of the
inadequacy of language, they cannot praise God. Praising God is precisely what
they are doing! . . . [They] are not telling us that God is hidden from them
because of the inadequacy of their language. Rather, they are showing us that
the notion of God, in their language, is that of a hidden God: ‘Verily thou are a
God that hidest thyself, O God of Israel, the Saviour’ [Isaiah 45:15]. (FF, 278–9)

In other words, ‘mystery’—like any other religious concept—is a concept

that is used by religious believers; so the philosopher interested in
understanding the role of mystery in religion need only delineate the

7
Faith after Foundationalism (London: Routledge, 1989).
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 20/10/2015, SPi

NONSENSE AND THEOLOGY 

place that expressions such as ‘God’s ways are beyond human under-
standing’ actually have in the human forms of life which employ them.
More precisely, ‘he must show the relation between such talk and facts
concerning the limits of human existence, ragged facts, which must not
be tidied up’ (WR,8 166). The facts Phillips has in mind are the blind
forces of nature, the transitoriness of fame, the unpredictable visitations
of disease and death: and religious believers respond to them in a
particular way—as:
things come from God’s hands, the God who sends rain on the just and the
unjust . . . Everything is ours by the grace of God . . . nothing is ours by right . . .
The natural world, and other people, are seen as God’s gifts, not to be appropri-
ated through domination by us. To think otherwise is to fail to die to the self, to
play at being God. (WR, 166–7)

On Phillips’ view, such reactions are not compulsory: where one person
speaks of God’s gifts, another may speak of luck, and a third of absurdity.
But those who speak in such ways are far closer to one another than they
are to those who seek to explain or explain away these facts (whether by
theodicy or science), because the former recognize that these limits are
the point at which explanation, and so understanding, runs out. When
such experiences elicit the question ‘Why?’, the questioner does not
really seek an answer, but rather reactions or responses which replace
the question; and the religious response is to seek to die to the desire for
answers, for an explanation. In other words, for Phillips, ‘when [believ-
ers] speak of that which passes understanding, they invite us to consider
the possibility of reacting to human life in a way other than by the
understanding’ (WR, 149).
Phillips’ refusal to saddle religious believers with the idea that God’s
ways are mysterious because we are trapped within merely human
limitations of reason and sense-making is admirable; so too is his
recognition that if we are to grasp the significance of talk of divine
transcendence, we must grasp its role in the life of those who employ
it. But illuminating though his remarks on that role may be, if they were
regarded as exhausting the function of such talk, then they risk leaving us
with a strikingly comprehensible account of God’s mysterious ways.
After all, the forces of nature and the unpredictable visitations of death

8
Phillips, D.Z., Wittgenstein and Religion (London: Routledge, 1993), hereafter ‘WR’.
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 NONSENSE AND THEOLOGY

and disease that Phillips cites as conditioning our use of the concept of
‘mystery’ seem perfectly unmysterious features of human life; and by
claiming that this concept marks the point at which life should not be
regarded as posing a challenge to our understanding at all (or at most the
challenge of recognizing the irrelevance of understanding), he so suc-
cessfully demystifies the notion of ‘mystery’ that he also threatens to
denature it.
More importantly, when Phillips rather dismissively says that St Paul’s
and the Psalmist’s talk about religious mystery are expressions in lan-
guage rather than statements about language, he seems to forget the
possibility that they might be both. It’s as if he believes that, since talk
about God’s mysteriousness is a kind of talk, then it can’t (on pain of
patent self-contradiction, and so the imputation of extreme stupidity to
those employing them) centrally include denials that words can be used
intelligibly to talk about God; so those apparent denials must be under-
stood otherwise—indeed, as having to do with something other than the
understanding. Whereas, in truth, since any religious utterances that did
concern the inherent powers of language in relation to divinity must ex
hypothesi be linguistic utterances, it can hardly constitute an objection to
taking St Paul’s or the Psalmist’s words as statements about language to
point out that they are expressed in language.
It is surely undeniable that, in the history of Christianity, theologians
reflecting on the nature and legitimacy of their community’s religious
discourse have persistently seen such ways of talking about God as having
troubling implications for our understanding how any and all meaningful
talk about God is possible. Phillips assumes that anyone who takes this to
be a genuine difficulty is committed to the unintelligible notion of an
absolutely complete language, one containing all that can ever conceivably
be said, and concludes that we must therefore gloss the notion of religious
mystery in terms other than those pertaining to language and understand-
ing. But even if we accept that this notion is unintelligible, and further
accept (pace Kenny and Rundle) that this does not simply provide further
evidence of the inherent dependence of religion upon nonsense, we might
still deny that theologians can only articulate a sense of God’s transcend-
ence of our language by invoking the notion of an absolutely complete
language. They might, for example, do so by denying that any actual or
conceivable forms of religious language (of the familiar concrete, finite,
sort) could possibly be adequate to God’s reality.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 20/10/2015, SPi

NONSENSE AND THEOLOGY 

This suggestion needs, and will later receive, much more elucidation;
and of course this aspect of Phillips’ work deserves a much more
extensive discussion than I have so far given it. But it will prove helpful
at later stages of my argument about Grammatical Thomism if
I continue our examination of this second way of inheriting Wittgenstein
for the philosophy of religion by shifting its focus to an exemplary (even
a notorious) paper by Wittgenstein’s student and friend, Norman Mal-
colm, entitled ‘Anselm’s Ontological Arguments’.9
Malcolm distinguishes two different ontological arguments in An-
selm’s Proslogion: one which presupposes that existence is a perfection,
and another which presupposes that necessary existence is a perfection.
Malcolm concurs with the general opinion that Kant’s critique decisively
refutes the first of these arguments, but he denies that it refutes the
second; for whereas it seems evident that ‘existence’ cannot be regarded
(logically or grammatically speaking) as greater or more perfect than
‘non-existence’, the same is not true of ‘necessary existence’ when com-
pared with ‘contingent existence’. On the contrary: Malcolm claims that
there are straightforward grammatical connections in ordinary language
between the ideas of contingent existence, dependency, limitation, and
imperfection, and hence between the idea of a perfect being—that than
which nothing greater can be conceived—and non-contingent or neces-
sary existence.
A being whose existence is contingent is one that might not have
existed; hence its actual existence must have an explanation—it must in
some way be dependent upon the existence and/or actions of something
else. A computer that requires a mains electricity source if it is to function
can intelligibly be said to be less great or more limited, hence less perfect,
than one that does not; hence, any being whose existence is dependent
upon something outside itself could not intelligibly be said to be a perfect
being, for it would then be possible to imagine something greater or more
perfect than it (namely, something which lacked that dependency or
limitation). Since the Christian tradition conceives of God precisely as
‘that than which nothing greater can be conceived’, it follows that God’s
existence must be non-dependent, non-contingent—that is, necessary.

9
Philosophical Review 69: 1960, reprinted in his Knowledge and Certainty (Englewood
Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1963), to which all references to this article, hereafter AOA, will be
keyed.
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 NONSENSE AND THEOLOGY

But unless the very idea of a necessarily existent being is incoherent, then
its existence cannot be an open (that is, a contingent) question: its non-
existence is simply inconceivable.
On Malcolm’s view, this idea of God’s necessary existence must be
accurately articulated before the question of its coherence can be
assessed. It certainly cannot be adequately captured in the following
formulation, so popular with Kantians: if God exists, then he exists
necessarily. For the antecedent clause takes away what the consequent
clause appears to allow, presenting what it acknowledges is a necessity as
if it were really a contingency; it amounts to a form of words which
subverts its apparent sense, and thus necessarily fails to be about what it
professes to be about. Insofar as it conceives of its subject matter as
something whose existence is a contingent matter, then whatever it
purports to pick out cannot be whatever the concept ‘God’ picks out.
In Wittgensteinian terms, such a formulation embodies an incoherent
attempt to speak simultaneously from within and without the relevant
religious language-game; its internal invocation of necessity attempts to
acknowledge the actual meaning of the religious believer’s words, but its
overarching commitment to contingency in fact gives expression to an
outsider’s incomprehension of that meaning. In terms closer to An-
selm’s: insofar as the atheist’s denial of God’s existence takes a form
which implies that what he claims does not exist might conceivably have
done so, then what he denies is not and cannot be what the believer
affirms when she says that God exists. Such an atheism is fated to miss its
target; it is not false, but inherently foolish—the expression of a concep-
tual confusion.
But can the very idea of necessary existence, and so of God’s necessary
existence, be coherent? Must not all genuinely existential propositions be
synthetic or contingent? Malcolm counters this suspicion by comparing
the proposition ‘God necessarily exists’ with the Euclidean theorem
‘There are an infinite number of prime numbers.’ For if we can say
that the latter asserts the existence of something in some sense, then we
can surely say the same of the former. What we need to understand in
each case is the particular sense of the proposition, more specifically the
differences between such ways of talking of existence and the ways in
which we talk of it in empirical contexts (which of course might them-
selves be various, e.g. ‘There is a low pressure area over the Great Lakes’
as opposed to ‘He still has a pain in his abdomen’). In short, ‘[t]here are
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 20/10/2015, SPi

NONSENSE AND THEOLOGY 

as many kinds of existential propositions as there are kinds of subjects of

discourse’ (AOA, 153).
Malcolm imagines a Kantian who argues that whenever I think of a
being as supremely or perfectly real, even as the supreme reality, the
question surely still remains whether it exists or not; then he asks
whether we would say the same in response to Euclid’s demonstration
of the existence of an infinity of primes. In the face of a proof of this
theorem, it would surely not remain an open question whether or not
there is an infinity of primes. Why, then, can we not say that, once
Anselm has demonstrated the necessary existence of a being greater
than which cannot be conceived, no question can then remain as to
whether it exists or not? If we understand the kind of proof with which
Euclid presents us, we understand the sense in which there is an infinity
of primes; and likewise, insofar as we understand the proof with which
Anselm presents us, we understand the sense in which there is a God—
the sense in which he exists necessarily.
Nevertheless, to clarify the specifically religious sense of the idea of
necessary existence, we must ultimately depart from our comparison
with mathematics, and focus on its distinctively religious employment.
Here, Malcolm cites Psalm 90: ‘before the mountains were brought forth,
or ever thou hadst formed the earth and the world, even from everlasting
to everlasting, thou art God’. He comments:
Here is expressed the idea of the necessary existence and eternity of God, an idea
that is essential to the Jewish and Christian religions. In those complex systems of
thought, those ‘language-games’, God has the status of a necessary being. Who
can doubt that? Here we must say with Wittgenstein, ‘This language-game is
played!’ I believe we may rightly take the existence of those religious systems of
thought in which God figures as a necessary being to be a disproof of the
dogma . . . that no existential proposition can be necessary. (AOA, 156)

Even if we accept the coherence of the notion of God’s necessary existence,

however, Malcolm accepts that questions would still remain about its
significance—its point or purpose. As he puts it, how can the concept
have any meaning for anyone? Why should human beings even form such
a concept, let alone participate in the forms of religious life surrounding it?
If we cannot answer such questions, Malcolm thinks, then our admittedly
coherent concept of God as a necessary being will nonetheless appear to be
an ‘arbitrary and absurd construction’ (AOA, 161). His own answer is that
the concept arises from recognizable experiential phenomena of human
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 NONSENSE AND THEOLOGY

life, certain kinds of psychological (more precisely, emotional) responses

to its vicissitudes. His primary example is that of guilt—a guilt so great that
one is sure that nothing one could do oneself, nor any forgiveness offered
by another human being, would remove it: a guilt greater than which
cannot be conceived. ‘Out of such a storm in the soul, I am suggesting,
there arises the conception of a forgiving mercy that is limitless, beyond all
measure’ (AOA, 160).
What, then, should we conclude about the relation of Anselm’s argument
to religious belief? Does it show that believing in God is rationally required
of us? The whole thrust of Malcolm’s paper thus far has been to suggest that
Anselm’s argument is indeed a deductively valid proof of God’s (necessary)
existence; but in its final paragraph, Malcolm declares that he
can imagine an atheist going through the argument, becoming convinced of its
validity, acutely defending it against objections, yet remaining an atheist. The
only effect it could have on the fool of the Psalm would be that he stopped saying
in his heart ‘There is no God’, because he would now realize that this is
something he cannot meaningfully say or think. It is hardly to be expected that
a demonstrative argument should, in addition, produce in him a living faith.
(AOA, 161)

The religious value of the argument is thus, in the first instance, negative—
it may remove some misplaced scruples about faith; but it would be
unreasonable to require that recognizing Anselm’s demonstration as
valid must produce a conversion. Indeed, Malcolm suggests, Anselm’s
argument ‘can be thoroughly understood only by one who has a view of
that human “form of life” that gives rise to the idea of an infinitely great
being, who views it from the inside not just from the outside and who has,
therefore, at least some inclination to partake in that religious form of life’
(AOA, 162). The relevant inclination here derives, Malcolm says, from the
emotions—the very human phenomena that prompt the construction
and inform the deployment of the concept that the proof aims to support.
And Malcolm concludes by asserting that this inclination is not an effect
of Anselm’s argument, but is rather presupposed in the fullest under-
standing of it.
If one thinks of the argument of Malcolm’s paper as exemplary of what
I have called the second way of inheriting the later Wittgenstein, then it is
not difficult to see why Wittgensteinian philosophy of religion conducted
in this vein has been charged with amounting to a philosophically
untenable version of fideism. I have gone into Malcolm’s argument in
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NONSENSE AND THEOLOGY 

such detail because I want to show both why it might appear to invite
such a charge, and why it in fact does not merit attack on these grounds.
Only when this is made clear will it be possible to see grounds for
concern about Malcolm’s approach, and so about the way of inheriting
Wittgenstein that it exemplifies, and that are at once better anchored in
his text and more directly pertinent to my engagement with Grammat-
ical Thomism.
In the fateful article which first advanced this criticism, Kai Nielsen
specified the unacceptable core of Wittgensteinian fideism as follows:
There is no Archimedean point in terms of which a philosopher (or for that
matter anyone else) can relevantly criticize whole modes of discourse or, what
comes to the same thing, ways of life, for each mode of discourse has its own
specific criteria of rationality/irrationality, intelligibility/unintelligibility and real-
ity/unreality. (WF,10 22)

The final paragraph of Malcolm’s paper certainly serves sharply to

differentiate the proper functioning of Anselm’s proof from that of
Euclid’s, and so presumably the notion of proof in religious contexts
from the same notion in mathematical contexts. For someone who
grasped the deductive validity of Euclid’s demonstration of his theorem
about prime numbers could hardly reject its existential implications
throughout number theory and beyond; whereas Malcolm appears to
accept such a diremption in the religious case. And this hangs together
with Malcolm’s general insistence on the need to distinguish religious
senses of terms from their sense in other contexts. Plainly, such a
pervasive emphasis on the logical distinctness of various modes of
discourse lies at the root of Nielsen’s sense that Wittgensteinians picture
our life with language as falling apart (at least analytically) into self-
sufficient linguistic compartments or subsystems.
Moreover, Malcolm’s distinction between appreciating Anselm’s argu-
ment as a piece of logic, and appreciating its fullest or deepest religious
significance, looks like an instance of a more general distinction between
the deliverances of reason and the deliverances of faith; and then the core
dogma of fideism will seem certainly to be in the offing (particularly
when Malcolm explicitly links his line of thought with Kierkegaard’s

10
‘Wittgensteinian Fideism’, Philosophy 42: 1967, reprinted in K. Nielsen and
D.Z. Phillips (eds), Wittgensteinian Fideism (London: SCM Press, 2005), to which these
page references are keyed.
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 20/10/2015, SPi

 NONSENSE AND THEOLOGY

claim that ‘There is only one proof of the truth of Christianity and
that . . . is from the emotions’11). For what at first seems to be an expos-
ition of a deductively valid rational argument for religious belief turns
out in the end to articulate a chain of reasoning that can only be properly
understood, let alone endorsed, from the perspective of faith. And
Malcolm invites further trouble by associating his first distinction with
another—that between viewing religion from the outside and viewing it
from the inside—and linking the latter with the perspective of a partici-
pant in religious forms of life. It is not hard to see why Nielsen might
read this as an invitation to conclude that the significance of religious
concepts can only be grasped by religious believers.
In truth, however, all of these apparent difficulties with Malcolm’s
position can be significantly eased. First, his insistence on the variety of
kinds of existential proposition is in fact counterbalanced (however
infrequently) by an acknowledgement of logical connections between
the relevant modes of discourse, insofar as each has its place in the
unifying context of the human form of life. After all, Malcolm does insist
that the religious idea of divine perfection has its grammatical counter-
part, and perhaps even its origins, in empirical contexts, when the
various dependencies and limitations of material objects and instru-
ments are under evaluation. And his concluding attempt to show that
religious concepts are not only coherent but also possessed of sense and
point depends precisely upon underlining their relation to elements in
the common fabric of human experience.
Second, Malcolm’s pivotal distinction between appreciating the logical
validity of the argument and appreciating its religious significance is not
a distinction between no understanding and genuine understanding: it is
a distinction between one level of understanding and another, deeper or
fuller level. The atheist who grasps the validity of Anselm’s argument
does indeed grasp one aspect of the grammar of the concept of God as it
is employed in the Judaeo-Christian tradition, and hence must (on
Malcolm’s understanding of the significance of grammar) to that extent
grasp the meaning of that concept. What he lacks is the deepest or fullest
understanding of it—a grasp of what he calls ‘the sense of the concept’
(AOA, 161), by which I take him to mean the point or purpose of using

11
The Journals, ed. A. Dru (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1938), section 926.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 20/10/2015, SPi

NONSENSE AND THEOLOGY 

it, which in turn he associates with an appreciation of the view of human

life that it serves to articulate. And Malcolm never says that this deeper
understanding is available only to participants in religious forms of life;
he claims rather that only those who have at least some inclination to
partake in such forms of life can attain it. One might well have such an
inclination without ever acting upon it: one might not only understand
that some human beings can suffer guilt of a kind greater than which
cannot be conceived, but actually suffer it oneself, without coming to
believe that there is a source of forgiveness commensurate with it. If so,
then in principle, both levels or aspects of a genuine understanding of
religious concepts, proofs, and practices are attainable by those who are
not practising believers, hence by at least one subset or category of
atheists.
Even if one accepts these defences, however, real difficulties remain;
and these difficulties are not only worth taking seriously from a Witt-
gensteinian perspective, but also turn out to have a particular bearing on
my current concern with Grammatical Thomism. In particular, if it is so
important to a deeper understanding of Anselm’s argument and the
concept it supports to appreciate the specific sense, the distinctive
point or purpose, of their religious uses, then Malcolm’s article does far
less to encourage that deeper understanding than it initially appears to
do. I don’t just mean that his invocation of unforgivable guilt and despair
are merely gestures towards an account of the point of religious concepts
(although they are, as Malcolm recognizes); one cannot, after all, do
everything in one journal article. I also mean that Malcolm’s general
manner of elucidating Anselm’s argument about God—by comparing it
with other, non-religious modes of discourse on existence and necessity—
creates the appearance of generating a genuinely substantial or positive
account of the grammar of religious discourse only by implicitly exploit-
ing lines of continuity between religious and non-religious uses of words
that it must then officially deny.
For example, Malcolm repeatedly emphasizes that the religious sense
of claims about God’s existence should be sharply distinguished from
empirical existential claims; but his account of Anselm’s argument
attempts to clarify the grammatical link in religious discourse between
God’s perfection and his necessary existence primarily by invoking a
chain of grammatical links (between imperfection, dependence, and
limitation, on the one hand, and perfection, independence, and absence
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