Augustine & Wittgenstein & Drury & Tolstoy

[Jane]

According to Drury, what Wittgenstein found in Kierkegaard
and
also in Augustine was a 'negative theology'. This theology
is already
adumbrated in the last lines of the Tractatus—now so often
quoted that they
may seem trite—that 'whereof one cannot speak, thereof one
must be silent'.
Drury's primary intention in publishing his journal was to
alert us to
Wittgenstein's views on the nature of religion—and its
importance, so
understood, in impelling him to live a decent life. In doing
so, Drury also
alerts us to the surprising depth and extent of
Wittgenstein's acquaintance
with classical religious thought and to the remaining
ganglia of the religious
sensibility of a man once known to his fellow-soldiers as
'the man with the
gospels'.

Wittgenstein was radical in his views on the basis for
Christian faith. When
Drury and he discussed the fundamental texts of the
Christian tradition, they
could agree that the Old Testament canon was 'no more than a
collection of
Hebrew folklore' [C., 100]. However, Wittgenstein disagreed
with Drury's view
that the New Testament books had to be a historical record;
it did not really
matter, he thought, whether Jesus was a historical figure or
not. Indeed, as he
later put it, it would be impossible for him 'to say what
form the record' [C.,
164] of the miracle of God becoming man should take.
Nevertheless, he could
not relate to the person revealed in St. John's Gospel and
preferred St.
Matthew's Jesus. Similarly, he could not see that St. Paul's
epistles were 'one
and the same religion' [C., 165] as that of the
Gospels—although he changed
his mind about that later in life. If religious belief is
not grounded in historical
fact, neither can it be based on rational considerations—as
the contemporary
Cambridge theologian, F. R. Tennant, was trying to do (in
his Philosophical
Theology) by reviving the argument from design, for example.
Wittgenstein
did not accept that for a religious believer the existence
of God, could ever be
merely a probability (however high), as Tennant considered
it to be.
Wittgenstein wanted to steer his friend to Kierkegaard, whom
Drury had
already come across in quotations in the writings of the
Catholic modernist,
von Hugel. According to Drury, what Wittgenstein found in
Kierkegaard and
also in Augustine was a 'negative theology'. This theology
is already
adumbrated in the last lines of the Tractatus—now so often
quoted that they
may seem trite—that 'whereof one cannot speak, thereof one
must be silent'.
Drury's primary intention in publishing his journal was to
alert us to
Wittgenstein's views on the nature of religion—and its
importance, so
understood, in impelling him to live a decent life. In doing
so, Drury also
alerts us to the surprising depth and extent of
Wittgenstein's acquaintance
with classical religious thought and to the remaining
ganglia of the religious
sensibility of a man once known to his fellow-soldiers as
'the man with the
gospels'.

If religious belief is not based on historical fact or
philosophical (or indeed
theological) reflection, neither is it based on science.
James Frazer in The
Golden Bough, a book Drury obtained at Wittgenstein's
request in 1931, had
understood the primitive rituals he described as arising
partly from the
scientific errors of the peoples who celebrated them. This,
Wittgenstein said,
was itself erroneous. These rituals were created by
technically advanced
civilisations.



http://www.ul.ie/~philos/vol1/drury.html