by Iris Murdoch
‘Surely there is a level at which one can view the argument as a piece of logic, following the deductive moves but not being touched religiously? I think so. But even at this level the argument may not be without religious value, for it may help to remove some philosophical scruples that stand in the way of faith. At a deeper level, I suspect that the 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 ... It would be unreasonable to require that the recognition of Anselm’s demonstration as valid must produce a conversion.’
Whether philosophical scruples are removed by exhibiting the Proof I am not sure. Malcolm connects religion with the idea of an infinite being. The scruples of the modern mind are in general likely to concern the supernatural aspects or ‘accidents’ of the traditional God, including his claim to be a person; and in removing these by a process of radical demythologisation the idea of experience must play a part. Those who do not want to save the traditional God, but want religion to continue, in a way not unconnected with its past, as an assertion of an absolute (necessary) moral claim upon humanity, will need to see the whole of human experience as indicating this.
This must bring us back to reflect upon the origins of Anselm’s Proof in Plato, where we can see the argument as one from the whole of experience, showing how the unique and special and all-important knowledge of good and evil is learnt in every kind of human activity. The question of truth, which we are indeed forced to attend to in all our doings, appears here as an aspect of the unavoidable nature of morality. Here, to speak of ‘religious language’ as something specialised, supposed to be expressive rather than referential, is to separate religion from the truth-seeking struggle of the whole of life. Religion is not a special subject or one activity among others. Art too is part of the struggle, art is not either photographs of facts or outbursts of private feeling. In understanding how great art utterly transcends this (version of the fact — value distinction) we exercise our general ability to distinguish what is illusory from what is real. Great art is just and true and deep in ways which are internally connected with its beauty. It inspires unselfish love, and can be seen, as Kant allowed beauty to be, as an analogon of moral good. Praise and worship are not just expressive attitudes, they arise in very various cognitive contexts and are themselves a grasp of reality. In prayer we wait for God (for the spirit and light of goodness) to be made manifest. One image of prayer is the artist who, rejecting easy false mediocre forms and hoping for the right thing, the best thing, waits. This too is an image (how constantly in this way the pictures interrelate) of all kinds of stilled attentive situations in work and in human relations where the waiting is intensely collected yet relaxed: ‘fearlessly passive’, to use Adorno’s phrase. Valéry speaks of the sunlight which rewards him who steadily contemplates the insuperable difficulty. What is awaited is an illuminating experience, some kind of certainty, a presence: a case of human consciousness at its most highly textured. Of course incoherent desperation can be prayer too.
I think that useless confusion arises from attempts to extend the meaning of our word ‘God’ to cover any conception of a spiritual reality. This move, which ‘saves’ the concept through a sort of liberal vagueness, clouds over the problem without solving it. ‘God’ is the name of a supernatural person. It makes a difference whether we believe in such a person, as it makes a difference whether Christ rose from the dead. These differences do not generally, or do not yet, affect whether or not people are virtuous; though wholesale loss of religious belief is likely to remove with it some of the substance of moral thought and action, which was provided for instance by prayer and church-going. Perhaps (I believe) Christianity can continue without a personal God or a risen Christ, without beliefs in supernatural places and happenings, such as heaven and life after death, but retaining the mystical figure of Christ occupying a place analogous to that of Buddha: a Christ who can console and save, but who is to be found as a living force within each human soul and not in some supernatural elsewhere. Such a continuity would preserve and renew the Christian tradition as it has always hitherto, somehow or other, been preserved and renewed. It has always changed itself into something that can be generally believed. Perhaps this cannot be brought about soon enough, that is before Christian belief and practice virtually disappear. To accomplish this leap it might also be necessary for philosophers to become theologians and theologians to become philosophers, and this is not very likely to happen either.
I have been talking as a neo-Christian or Buddhist Christian or Christian fellow traveller. The Jewish religion lacks, or is not burdened by, the attractive figure of Christ who appears in Christianity as a mediator, but might in some strict sense be regarded as an idol or barrier. It could be said that Judaism, the other great religion of the west, is already partly demythologised owing to a more strict observance of the Second Commandment. God is not visible or tangible. Yet what could be more present to us than the God of the Psalms? As the hart panteth after water brooks, so panteth my soul after thee, O God. Of course this is not to be lost, it is to be understood. There is a feeling among many religious believers and fellow travellers that it is time to say goodbye to the old literal personal ‘elsewhere’ God. I want to quote here from a Jewish thinker, Martin Buber, who describes an argument about God with another religious man. This man says to Buber, ‘How can you bring yourself to say “God” time after time? How can you expect that your readers will take the word in the sense in which you wish it to be taken? What you mean by the name of God is something above all human grasp and comprehension, but in speaking about it you have lowered it to human conceptualisation. What word of human speech is so misused, so defiled, so desecrated as this! ... All the injustice that it has been used to cover has effaced its features.’ Buber replies:
‘Yes, it is the most heavy-laden of all human words. None has become so soiled, so mutilated. Just for this reason I may not abandon it. Generations of men have laid the burden of their anxious lives upon this word ... it lies in the dust and bears their whole burden. The races of man with their religious factions have torn the word to pieces; they have killed for it and died for it, and it bears their fingermarks and their blood. Where might I find a word like it to describe the highest! If I took the purest, most sparkling concept from the inner treasure-chamber of the philosophers, I could only capture thereby an unbinding product of thought. I could not capture the presence of Him whom the generations of men have honoured and degraded with their awesome living and dying. I do indeed mean Him whom the hell-tormented and heaven-storming generations of men mean. Certainly, they draw caricatures and write “God” underneath; they murder one another and say “in God’s name”. But when all madness and delusion fall to dust, when they stand over against Him in the loneliest darkness and no longer say “He, He”, but rather sigh “Thou”, shout “Thou”, all of them the one word, and when they then add “God”, is it not the real God whom they all implore, the One Living God, the God of the children of man? Is it not He who hears them? And just for this reason is not the word “God”, the word of appeal, the word which has become a name, consecrated in all human tongues for all time? We must esteem those who interdict it because they rebel against the injustice and wrong which are so readily referred to “God” for authorisation. But we may not give it up. How understandable it is that some suggest that we should remain silent about the “last things” for a time in order that the misused words may be redeemed! But they are not to be redeemed thus. We cannot cleanse the word “God” and we cannot make it whole; but, defiled and mutilated as it is, we can raise it from the ground and set it over an hour of great care.’
(The Eclipse of God, pp. 17 — 18.)
This puts with moving eloquence the case for retaining the word ‘God’, as the name of that resource, that Thou to whom men turn for help or pardon in their loneliest hours. However, what is envisaged here is, as far as I can see, still a
n external supernatural person. Even put in Buber’s terms it is still the same consoling religious picture. We may hold dialogues or ‘dialogues’ with other people, with works of art, with animals, with symbolic figures, with parts of our own souls. Here we may well rightly cherish the powerful word ‘thou’. Indeed we can erect the concept of dialogue almost everywhere. But Buber wishes to invoke, in the midst of our human tensions, the external and familiar, really existing elsewhere, father figure. Buber’s words concerning the cry uttered in the loneliest darkness are very moving. Why can we not simply say ‘Yes’, as to a mystery? Yet I think it matters how we are to think, and how people now can think, about that imagined presence.
In 1931 Wittgenstein wrote some Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough. He also wrote, not appearing as part of the text, the following brief notes. ‘I think now that the right thing would be to begin my book with remarks about metaphysics as a kind of magic. But in doing this I must neither speak in defence of magic nor ridicule it. What it is that is deep about magic would be kept – In this context, in fact, keeping magic out has itself the character of magic. For when I began in my earlier book to talk about the “world” (and not about this tree or table), was I trying to do anything except conjure up something of a higher order by my words?’ This is the A. C. Miles-Rush Rhees translation. The last clause in German is: was wollte ich anderes als etwas Höheres in meine Worte bannen. The ‘earlier book’ must be the Tractatus, the book to come presumably the Investigations. (The fragment is dated by Rhees ‘not earlier than 1936 and probably after 1948’.) Das Höhere (Tractatus 6. 432) belongs with das Mystische (6. 44). (‘How the world is, is indifferent for what is higher ... Not how the world is but that it is is the mystical.’) I think bannen here should be taken also in a sense of segregate, meaning that the ‘higher’ is, not driven away, but kept (what is deep about magic is to be kept), captured, secluded, safe, away from the world, ‘indifferent’ to the world, indeed ‘spell-bound’. (To spell-bind is a possible meaning of bannen.) This also defines ‘world’ as not just a list of trees and tables but a realm, something itself enclosed and complete. So, the deep thing which resides in magic is protected by a magical enclosure. What, in general, would Wittgenstein have had to say about metaphysics as magic? A remark in Culture and Value (p. 75), speaks quizzically, looking back (to Notebooks and Tractatus), of metaphysics as something ‘seen against the background of the eternal’ (with moral and mystical as fundamental). There is very little (genuine) metaphysics, and it is difficult to generalise about it, certainly at the level of Wittgenstein’s remarks about magic. It can be motivated by religious passion, by science, by vast brilliant tolerant curiosity, by an obsessional desire to put things in order, or some or all of these (etc.). One might say a metaphysician must have nerve, the nerve for instance to rule by decree (by magic). Think of the sheer nerve of the Tractatus or of Kant’s great structure. But there is another way which consists of constructing a huge hall of reflection full of light and space and fresh air, in which ideas and intuitions can be unsystematically nurtured. ‘There are, indeed, things which cannot be put into words. They make themselves manifest. They are what is mystical.’ (Tractatus 6. 522; trans. Pears and McGuinness.) The metaphysical magic, the fiat, the confident shameless picture-making of ‘the earlier book’ magically segregrates what is higher in order to keep it (its own kind of magic) safe, to emphasise its separateness, its inevitably mystical character, its silence, its absolute lack of connection with science, that is with the empirical world. ‘My propositions serve as elucidations in the following way: anyone who understands me eventually recognises them as nonsensical, when he has used them – as steps – to climb up beyond them. (He must, so to speak, throw away the ladder after he has climbed it.) He must transcend these propositions, and then he will see the world aright. What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.’ (End of the Tractatus.) Philosophy then is to be a via negativa, like the road to the mystical God which consists of all that He is not, the satisfactions of the material world, and the illusion of its reality. (The Nothing of Nirvana in Buddhism, the Sun in Plato.) Wittgenstein’s via is of course, in relation to such comparisons, silent. The metaphysics of the Tractatus, which confronts other metaphysics, must be seen as nonsense. (Compare Plato’s myths which are not to be taken literally.) It is a teaching, a proper kind of magic. It is interesting however to see how often the word ‘mystical’ is allowed to occur. We are also reminded (not of course by Wittgenstein) of Kant’s ‘magic’ which removes God and the noumenal world, keeping them separate and safe outside the bounds of our knowledge, outside our ‘world’. Kant allows, as Wittgenstein does not, a direct line from what is higher in the form of the call of duty. Wittgenstein’s distaste for ‘duty’ is like that of Schopenhauer, who was inclined to allude freely to the mystical in a way in which Wittgenstein was not. The reference to the Tractatus serves as a comment upon why Wittgenstein was sufficiently annoyed with Frazer to spend time attacking him – in terms designed to protect what is deep in the magical (and the mystical) from the crude blundering explanations of the scientist. I quote from the Remarks:
‘Frazer’s account of the magical and religious notions of men is unsatisfactory; it makes these notions appear as mistakes. Was Augustine mistaken, then, when he called upon God on every page of the Confessions? ... Frazer says it is very difficult to discover the error in magic and this is why it persists for so long – because, for example, a ceremony which is supposed to bring rain is sure to appear effective sooner or later. But then it is queer that people do not notice sooner that it does rain sooner or later anyway. I think one reason why the attempt to find an explanation is wrong is that we have only to put together in the right way what we know, without adding anything, and the satisfaction we are trying to get from the explanation comes of itself ... We can only describe and say, human life is like that ... How could fire or fire’s resemblance to the sun have failed to make an impression on the awakening mind of man? But not “because he can’t explain it” (the stupid superstition of our time) — for does an “explanation” make it less impressive? ... Frazer cannot imagine a priest who is not basically an English parson of our times with all his stupidity and feebleness ... An historical explanation, an explanation as an hypothesis of the development, is only one kind of summary of the data – of their synopsis. We can equally well see the data in their relations to one another and make a summary of them in a general picture without putting it in the form of a hypothesis regarding the temporal development ... I can set out this law in an hypothesis of development [eine Entwicklungshypothese], or again, in analogy with the schema of a plant I can give it in the schema of a religious ceremony, but I can also do it just by arranging the factual material so that we can easily pass from one part to another and have a clear view of it — showing it in a “perspicuous” way [in einer “übersichtlichen” Darstellung]. For us the conception of a perspicuous presentation is fundamental. It indicates the form in which we write of things, the way in which we see things. (A kind of “Weltanschauung” that seems to be typical of our times. Spengler.) This perspicuous presentation makes possible that understanding which consists just in the fact that we “see the connections”. Hence the importance of finding intermediate links. But in our case a hypothetical link is not meant to do anything except draw attention to the similarity, the connection, between the facts.’