Theology as Straw: An Essay on Wittgenstein and Aquinas

The miracles of nature … . (The blossom, just opening out. What is marvelous[herrlich] about it?) We say: “Look, how it's opening out!”[CV, p. 64]¹

Just let nature speak & acknowledge only one thing higher … [CV, p. 3]

[I]f one thinks of God as creator, must the conservation of the universe not be a miracle just as great as its creation, – yes, aren't the two one and the same?[PPO, p. 215]

I want to connect those three passages from Wittgenstein with two of the “great, essential problems”² that were of seminal importance for Aquinas, and indeed for many of his ancient and medieval predecessors: What is the being (esse) of beings (entia)? Why anything at all?

The Presocratic “physicists” who founded the western philosophical tradition must have marveled at the sheer being of the dynamic, ever-changing world around them, asking what makes it to be what it is essentially, and answering: phusis, i.e., nature. Whatever exists by nature has come to be from preexistent materials, develops “in accordance with its nature,” and finally perishes. The marvel of the blossoming flower is a good metaphor for the wonder out of which our western philosophical tradition developed. But is the being of what exists by nature to be equated with being as such? Aristotle's answer was no. For, in addition to works of art, whose being depends on what exists by nature, there must (to borrow Wittgenstein's phrase) be “one thing higher.” This answer was of course seconded and deepened by his greatest disciple, St. Thomas Aquinas. Aquinas also argued that the one supernatural (world-transcending) reality on whose being everything else always depends, could only be “Subsistent Existence Itself”, and then went on to identify this “Ipsum Esse Subsistens” with the God worshiped in the three great monotheistic religions.

This paper contends that a partnership (a limited partnership³) can be worked out between Wittgenstein and Aquinas, one dedicated to reviving for modern times questions that were center-stage for Aquinas and other pre-modern philosophers, but which have generally been “elbowed aside” in modern times. In my view, and I think that of Wittgenstein, our aggressively scientistic modern Weltanschauung tends to underestimate the importance of distinctively “non-scientific”(aesthetic, ethical, and religious) forms of thought and inquiry – to minimize their contribution to a sound human understanding of ourselves and of the world in which we have our being.³

1. Viewing the World as a Limited Whole

The world can be viewed as “the totality of facts” (TLP, 1.1) – or as a single, limited whole:

To view the world sub specie aeterni is to view it as a whole – a limited whole.

Feeling the world as a limited whole – it is this that is mystical. (TLP, 6.45).

If the cat is on the mat, that is one of the myriad facts making up that totality of facts which is the world. Seeing the cat on the mat requires good eyesight. But seeing the totality, of which “the cat on the mat” is a part, as a whole requires seeing an aspect of things not immediately apparent to the senses.

“It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists” (TLP, 6.44). The experience of this “thatness”⁴ of the world is the same as “the mystical feeling” of seeing the world (i.e., whatever is the case) sub specie aeterni (“as it were from a point outside it”), as a single, bounded whole.

In his Wittgenstein on Ethics and Religious Belief, Cyril Barrett connects the emergence of monotheism with the dawning of this “mystical” way of viewing the facts of the world:

As long as the world was regarded as divided into facts … it was natural … that religion should be polytheistic … To limit the gods to one God entailed regarding the world as a single, limited whole, related as a whole to God. [p. 138]

The God of monotheistic faith “does not reveal himself in the world” (TLP, 6.432), i.e., among the concatenation of objects that make up the facts of the world; and so, believing in God entails “seeing that the facts of the world are not the end of the matter” (NB, p. 74). God is not to be thought of as “a being among beings,” comparable to one of the Homeric gods.

The monotheistic belief in a world-transcending deity comes to light (as I think both Wittgenstein and Aquinas would say) mainly in what monotheists are not prepared to say about him. Imagine a polytheist shaking his head over what his monotheist friend tells him about his faith and exclaiming, “I’ve no idea what it would it be like for the God you speak of to exist!” The monotheist, if true to his faith, will not respond with a description of “the world with God” and a contrasting description of “the world without God.” For that would suggest that the existence of the God he believes in is a fact on the same level as “the facts of the world.” Wittgenstein puts this point as follows:

[W]e might say: There can be a description of what it would be like if there were gods on Olympus – but not: ‘what it would be like if there were God’. And this determines the concept ‘God’ more precisely. [CV, p. 94]

Although monotheists often talk as if their God were in the world, as if his existence were just one fact among others, what they really mean comes to light in the fact that they would reject any significant description of what it would be like for God to exist, as opposed to not existing. For any significant description would have to be of a world in which God just happened to exist, i.e., a world in which God's existence would be part of the totality that constitutes the world. And that wouldn't be the transcendent God they worship.

2. Seeing the World as a Miracle

“Viewing the world as a limited whole” is closely related to wondering at its existence, being amazed that anything exists. Wittgenstein, in his “Lecture on Ethics,” refers to it as “seeing the existence of the world as a miracle.” And what he means by “miracle” here is, I think, captured in Aquinas's definition of “a miracle” as “a direct work of God, unmediated by any secondary agent.”⁵

Aquinas points out that the word “miracle” is derived from mirari, i.e., “to be astonished.” The “signs and wonders” in the Bible are extraordinary events; anyone would be astonished to witness such things, or perhaps even just to read about them in a trusted, “sacred” source. They are meant to astonish and thereby elicit attention. Remarking that such miracles are, “as it were, gestures which God makes,” Wittgenstein adds the following illustration:

As a man sits quietly & then makes an impressive gesture, God lets the world run on smoothly & then accompanies the words of a Saint by a symbolic occurrence, a gesture of nature. It would be an instance if, when a saint has spoken, the trees around him bowed, as if in reverence. [CV, p. 51]

Of course not all who read about (or even witness) “signs and wonders” will respond to them as “gestures of God.” And, while Wittgenstein was not (unlike Aquinas) one to believe that such extraordinary things as are reported in the lives of the saints actually happen⁶, he did speak of the ordinary event of a blossom opening up as a miracle, “a miracle of nature” (CV, p. 64).

As commonly used, “being extraordinary” is a necessary (though not sufficient) condition for being a miracle. But for Wittgenstein as well as Aquinas, a miracle is essentially anything that exists through the direct creative activity of God. So they would speak of the very being of the world and of everything in it as miraculous.⁷“Seeing the world as a miracle” is consequently a matter of “seeing the ordinary as extraordinary” And this requires noticing a commonly unnoticed aspect of things — their “being”⁸ or “thatness.”⁹

To view the world, or something in it, as a miracle is to see it as created, and to see it thus is to see its very being as “God at work.” Creation, as Aquinas was keen to emphasize, is essentially God's continuous activity, and not, primarily, something God brought into being a long time ago. And he would surely have sensed a kindred spirit in the following striking entry from a 1937 journal of Wittgenstein's:

It is strange that one says God created the world & not is creating, continually, the world. For why should it be a greater miracle that it began to be, rather than it continued to be? One is led astray by the simile of the craftsperson. That someone makes a shoe is an accomplishment, but once made (out of what is existing) it endures on its own for a while. But if one thinks of God as creator, must the conservation of the universe not be a miracle just as great as its creation, – yes, aren't the two one and the same? Why should I postulate a singular act of creation & not a continuous act of conservation – which began at some point, which had a temporal beginning, or what amounts to the same, a continuous creating?[PPO, p. 215]

Compare that with the following from Aquinas's Summa Theologiae:

[T]he being of every creature depends on God, so that not for a moment would it subsist, but would fall into nothingness were it not kept in being by the operation of the Divine power … // The preservation of things by God is not through any new action but through a continuation of that action [“creation”] by which he gives being … [ST, I. q.1 a.104]

Aquinas supplies this analogy (which I paraphrase): The being of creatures is to God (the ultimate source of their being) what light in the air is to the sun that gives it light. Just as there is no light in the air apart from the continuing action of the sun, so there is no world apart from God's creative action. (Note that “light in the air” is a better simile for the world's existing due to God's continuous creative causality than, e.g., heat in a kettle of water due to a burner. For the water will retain for a while the heat it received after the burner is turned off, whereas the disappearance of light in the air is simultaneous with the removal of its cause.)

Aquinas would have felt very much at home with the questions from Wittgenstein's journal, and responded to them in way indicated by the passage quoted above. These were, of course, very important matters for Aquinas. But we may wonder what importance they could have had for Wittgenstein, famous or infamous as he is for his negative remarks about metaphysics. My suggestion is that he saw them as powerful expressions of a humanly important way of looking at ourselves and our world, one he felt to be misunderstood and unfairly marginalized in modern times. Had he not perceived (what might be called) their existential relevance, I suppose he would have rejected theological questions and answers as the “empty chatter” of metaphysical pseudo-science. (“A religious question is either a question of living or it is empty chatter”[PPO, p. 211]).

That the creation theology he championed is of no mere academic interest is not something Aquinas would have had to emphasize to his audience. But it is certainly something Wittgenstein would have had to emphasize to his. Imagine Wittgenstein presenting his remarks on creation to members of the Vienna Circle and following that up with a dramatic reading from one of the few books he seems to have cherished, St. Augustine's Confessions. I’m thinking of the passage from Book Ten where the young Augustine imagines himself asking the things he sees around him, as well as Anaximenes's “air” and the other Presocratic “principles of nature,” whether any of them¹⁰ might be the God for whom he has been seeking. When they answer NO, he presses them to tell him something about God, whereupon “they cry out in a great voice: He made us!”“My question,” Augustine explains, “was my gazing upon them, and their answer was their beauty.” Imagine now the following dialogue between W, Wittgenstein and V, one of the “scientific philosophers” in the audience:

V (complaining about what W had just read): But that's just poetry! If Augustine's claim is that there must be some being beyond the world that made it, then, if we are to understand him, we need to know what possible evidence he’d accept as disconfirming his hypothesis.

W: Be serious! Whatever Augustine's doing, it's not proposing an hypothesis!

V: So, are we to understand him as merely expressing the same feeling that could have been expressed without the “poetic” metaphysical jargon?

W: We might say that you and Augustine are speaking from the perspective of two very different metaphysical systems. But then we need to emphasize that such a difference is no mere difference in ways of talking. There is also the difference in the way you look at the world and our problems.¹¹ I think the scientific-technological Weltanschauung dominating our modern civilization inclines us to belittle ways of looking at things such as Augustine's – for instance by calling them “merely poetic.” And that's an inclination I feel called upon to resist.

Whereas the Weltanschauung of modern science and “scientific philosophy” (i.e., logical positivism and much analytic philosophy) relegates aesthetic, ethical, and religious ways of thinking and doing to the sidelines of “the merely emotive,” that of ancient and medieval philosophy included them as central to the development and maintenance of a sound human understanding.

People nowadays think, scientists are there to instruct them, poets, musicians etc. to entertain them. That the latter have something to teach them; that never occurs to them. [CV, p. 42]¹²

[T]he use of the word ‘science’ for ‘everything that can be said without nonsense’ already betrays [our over-estimation of science]. [CV, p. 70]¹³

3. Explanations Come to an End Somewhere

Wittgenstein characterized his experience of the fact “that something is” as mystical and called it his experience par excellence. But it didn’t, for him, pose a riddle to be solved (TLP, 6.5). Now Aquinas was surely no less profoundly struck by the “thatness”– what he called the “esse”– of things. For him it did pose a real question demanding some – admittedly extraordinary – sort of explanation.

If an apparently healthy person suddenly drops dead, that obviously demands a causal explanation. But what is it about the existence of the world that demands such an explanation? I think the gist of Aquinas's answer can be stated as follows: There is nothing in the world around us, or indeed in any reality we can conceive, whose very nature it is to exist; so there must be something “outside” the world (something transcending our understanding) that exists of its own nature and accounts for the existence of all else – and this we call “God.”

An interesting thing about this solution to “the mystery of existence” is that it doesn't really get rid of the mystery.¹⁴ I don't think Aquinas himself knew – or indeed even believed he knew – what he was talking about in speaking of “a being whose very nature it is to-be (esse).” But Wittgenstein – in contrast, I think, to most philosophers – would not see this as a defect. For him, the important thing about Aquinas's “explanation” would be that – unlike ordinary, “straight” explanations – it may actually function to express, and indeed deepen,“the mystery of existence.”¹⁵

I propose reading Aquinas's “proofs of the existence of God” not so much as attempts to refute atheism but as part of faith's effort to understand itself.¹⁶ Seen in this way, their audience is not (or not primarily) religiously neutral metaphysicians but believers, believers whose God, as contrasted with the gods of the pagans, is “the creator of heaven and earth.” This biblical God is “the source of all being”– the Lord whose worship requires a grateful acceptance of the existence of the world as a whole, and the ascription of a measure of intrinsic goodness to everything it contains.¹⁷ The pagan gods, by contrast, were not thought to be the source of everything real; for although their worship was in part an expression of reverence for the elemental powers of nature and the human virtues of wisdom and courage, it did not include reverence for the being of things as such.

In “Flag of the World,” Chap. 5 of Orthodoxy, G.K. Chesterton describes an attitude to the existence of world as a whole that I think brings out something of what's involved in the monotheist's “reverence for the being of things as such,” namely what Chesterton calls “cosmic patriotism.“ The cosmic patriot's acceptance of the universe is, he explains,

a matter of primary loyalty. The world is not a lodging house at Brighton, which we are to leave because it is miserable. It is the fortress of our family, with the flag flying on the turret, and the more miserable it is the less we should leave it. [p. 67]

Interestingly – especially in view of a similar remark by Wittgenstein¹⁸– Chesterton refers to suicide as “the sin” and calls it the ultimate expression of “cosmic anti-patriotism.”

“[I]t seems to me that our attitude towards life can be better expressed in terms of a kind of military loyalty than in terms of criticism and approval” (ibid.). On Chesterton's view, we are not to “put God on trial, “as if he were a moral agent subject as we are to rules of right and wrong. This is the view beautifully expressed in the Book of Job and forcefully defended by Aquinas. And – as suggested by the following lines from a conversation he had with Maurice Drury in 1951 – also Wittgenstein's view:

Drury: I mentioned some passages in the Old Testament that I find very offensive. For instance the story [2 Kings 2:23–24] where some children mock Elisha for his baldness. “Go up, thou bald head.” And God sends bears out of the forest to eat them.

Wittgenstein (very sternly): You mustn't pick and choose just what you want in that way … . Just remember what the Old Testament meant to a man like Kierkegaard. After all, children have been killed by bears

Drury: Yes, but … ought [we] to think that such a tragedy is a direct punishment from God … ?

Wittgenstein: … That has nothing to do with what I am talking about. You don't understand, you are quite out of your depth.¹⁹

I think Aquinas would pronounce much the same judgment on the way many recent philosophers frame “the problem of evil.”²⁰

4. Theology as Grammar

Even if we follow the common judgment that Aquinas's cosmological arguments fail as the demonstrative proofs he claimed them to be, I submit that they are nevertheless of religious importance.²¹ They are particularly valuable as ways of connecting cosmological wonder of the sort Wittgenstein felt (“not how the world is but that it is”) with the God of monotheistic worship. Thus understood, they are contributions to what Wittgenstein calls “theology as grammar” (PI, sec. 373).

Chesterton is helpful in making out what it might mean to call theology a grammatical activity.²² In Orthodoxy, Chap 4 (“The Ethics of Elfland”), he explained how, as a child without any religious instruction, he developed a bit of natural theology for himself. He tells us that he wanted to have someone to thank, not only for the presents in his Christmas stockings, but also for the feet he put in his stockings every day, and that out of this desire he came up with the idea of (what he later learned to call) “the Creator of Heaven and Earth.” As perhaps for all devout believers, “believing in God” was for Chesterton “grammatically” (i.e., conceptually) inseparable from a certain “gratitude for the gift of life.”²³ But the “Giver” he came to thank functioned not as an explanation of his life—or not in the way generous parents accounted for the presents in his Christmas stockings—but as an expression of what he called cosmic gratitude. “Life is a gift; all gifts have a giver; therefore, there is a giver of life”: perhaps Wittgenstein would have preferred this humble, if obviously question-begging, Chestertonian syllogism to a rigorously formulated cosmological argument – preferred it because it's less likely to be read as justificatory in intent.

Wittgenstein's student and friend, Rush Rhees, remarked that “all theology can do is try to indicate, perhaps even with some sort of formal proof, what is the correct way of speaking about God.”²⁴ This echoes the view of theology Wittgenstein claimed to have found in Luther, that it is “the grammar of the word ‘God’.” On this view, when a would-be Jewish or Christian believer is taught “Know ye that the Lord he is God; it is he that hath made us and not we ourselves” (Psalm 100: 3), he is not thereby learning something about God.²⁵ Although that knowledge may come later, the immediate aim of the instruction is the “grammatical” one of imparting something of the use of the word “God” as it figures in the stories and teachings through which people come to learn the biblical way of viewing themselves and the world.

Theology needs to be put in its proper place as a servant of the life of faith, lest it become a deracinated master of the life it was meant to serve. Learning theology is to be thought of as preparation for actually engaging in the language games of worship and prayer, and for “experiencing the presence of God” in one's life.

For the devout believer the reality of God normally “goes without saying”: that there is a God is part of the system of reference in terms of which he assesses his life.

That, at any rate, is how I interpret Wittgenstein's view of theology. In referring to theology as grammar, I think he was implying that while it has its importance, in the end it doesn't matter at all.²⁶ Perhaps Aquinas had something like that in mind when, near the end of his life, he referred to everything he had written as straw.

5. Faith, Reason, and “Seeing”

Growing up in a family where God is taken seriously, a child readily accepts God's presence and influence because of his reliance on the word of his parents. Similarly, an adult marvels at “the starry skies above him” and readily regards the cause of such wonders as something transcending human experience. The first example is of an act of human faith, the second an act of reason -- that is, of informal, non-demonstrative reasoning. Non-demonstrative as it is, since it exhibits no necessary connection between its premise and conclusion, the inference in the second example is to be ascribed to reason rather than faith.

Neither faith nor the sort of reasoning exemplified above could possibly ground the kind of certainty (scientia) attaching to what Aquinas, following Aristotle, called a “demonstration.” Although he certainly thought that demonstrative reasoning could make the truth of the proposition “God exists” compelling to the intellect (as it were, clearly visible to “the eye of the mind”), it is doubtful to say the least that he thought the reasonableness of the ordinary religious man's confident belief (fides) in God depends on whether anyone actually has “scientific knowledge” that the God he believes in really exists.²⁷

It appears that, for Aquinas, reason (in the form, not of demonstrative syllogisms, but of informal, “plausible” arguments) in conjunction with faith (as trust in parental instruction and consensus gentium) are enough to make it at least not unreasonable to assent to the proposition, “God exists.” But he would add that, to be fully reasonable, the proposition will have to be assented to sub specie bonum, i.e., as something worth believing in itself, and not, say, just out of a desire to please others.²⁸

Would Aquinas agree that the kind of certitude characteristic of the mature, devout believer is grounded in something even deeper than human faith, informal reasoning, and prudential considerations (the promise of a deeper happiness)? I think so. This “something deeper” only comes, I would say, when, in the course of a devoted “practice of the presence of God,” the believer comes (“by the grace of God”) to experience himself and the things around him as effects of a transcendent First Cause. This was referred to earlier as “seeing the world as a limited whole. “ But is it really a kind of seeing or experiencing? I think Aquinas, as well as Wittgenstein would answer yes to that, but I’m sure they would want to sharply distinguish the “seeing” or “experiencing” in question here from both sense perception and intellectual apprehension.²⁹

Aquinas would also want to sharply distinguish all the “seeing” available to us here below from the “Beatific Vision” granted the blessed in heaven. (Now we see God as mediated by his creation; then,“face to face.”) For Aquinas, heaven just is the unmediated experience of the Divine Existence itself.³⁰

It is said that Thomas, in his final days on earth, was given, as it were, a sneak preview of what God had in store for him in heaven. If so, it certainly is no wonder that he was moved to compare all the theology he had written to straw. For “the object of the heavenly vision will be the First Truth seen in itself … [and] hence not by way of a [theological] proposition” (ST, II- 2 q. 1 a.2)³¹

According to his friend Rush Rhees, Wittgenstein thought he could imagine himself, after his death, standing, in some “queer” bodily form, before the Judgment Seat of God.³² He thought of himself as a wretched sinner and of God as a fearful judge. But it seems he never received that “redemption through Christ” he yearned for.³³– a redemption that gave Aquinas the hope of a happier meeting with his Maker.³⁴