*THE JUSTIFICATION OF BELIEF*

by T E *Burke*
University of Reading
England


ABSTRACT

     'Religion', according to Wittgenstein, says: 'DO
     THIS!  THINK LIKE THAT! but it cannot justify
     this ...'  This paper analyses Wittgenstein's
     remarks on religious belief in CULTURE AND VALUE,
     and considers the senses in which he is right in
     saying that religion can offer no justifications; it
     then goes on to show that this need not mean that
     the adoption of religious belief is something purely
     arbitrary or subjective.


There is a passage in CULTURE AND VALUE*1* in which Wittgenstein
wonders why even he is inclined to believe in Christ's
resurrection ('Even', presumably because there is so much in his
intellectual background that might be expected to engender
scepticism).  His answer is, in brief, that if Christ is simply
another dead teacher, then he can no longer help us; we are left
'orphaned and alone', to find what consolation we can in our own
wisdom, our own dreams and speculations.  But  Wittgenstein goes
on -
     . . . if I am to be REALLY saved, - what I need is
     CERTAINTY - not wisdom, dreams or speculation - and
     this certainty is faith.  And faith is faith in what
     is needed by my HEART, MY SOUL, not my speculative
     intelligence.

And then, a little later -

     It is LOVE that believes in the Resurrection.

 Our first reaction may well be to find it commendably,  even
poignantly, honest in a philosopher, of all people, to admit that
it is personal need rather than the weight of evidence that
inclines him towards belief.  At the  same time,however, even
though we acknowledge the needs of the heart and the soul, and the
importance of  meeting these needs, we may also feel some concern
over the needs of the 'speculative intelligence' - which, whatever
else it may be, is presumably that in us which asks for a REASON
TO BELIEVE.  What makes a belief attractive does not therefore
make it true.  And unless we have evidence that the Resurrection
of Christ actually occurred, are we not obliged, as rational
beings and 'honest religious thinkers', to withhold belief and
face the prospect, however disagreeable, that we may indeed be
'orphaned and alone'?    But, according to Wittgenstein, we miss
the essential point of religion if we try to make it a matter of
evidence or argument.  In his LECTURES ON RELIGIOUS  BELIEF*2* he
tells us roundly that, if there were evidence, it would 'destroy
the whole business'.  And earlier in the passage quoted from
CULTURE AND VALUE he is equally uncompromising -

     Religion says:  DO THIS! - THINK LIKE THAT! - but it
     cannot justify this and once it even tries to, it
     becomes repellant, because for every reason it
     offers there is a valid counter-reason.*3*

And, a few pages later, on a more specific issue of an historical
basis for Christian belief -

     Queer as it sounds: The historical accounts in the
     Gospels might, historically speaking, be
     demonstrably false and yet belief would lose nothing
     by this: NOT, however, because it concerns
     'universal truth of reason'!  Rather, because
     historical proof (the historical proof-game) is
     irrelevant to belief.*4*

Such statements, are, to say the least, disconcerting - especially
when they are set down in Wittgenstein's  characteristic take-it-
or-leave-it fashion, with little to explain what precisely he had
in mind or how he  arrived at them.  And some fairly obvious
objections arise.

  Wittgenstein appears to be telling us that to adopt a  religious
faith is to respond with blind obedience to a command - Do this!
Think like that! - for which no justification can be given.  The
convert is like a lost child taking without question the hand of a
stranger who offers help and comfort.  But if so, there is, to
begin with, an obvious risk of abuse and exploitation.  And  while
we might obey blindly a command to DO something, like taking part
in a celebration of Easter, there is an old problem whether we
could, even if we wished, obey  blindly a command to BELIEVE
something, like the doctrine of the Resurrection.  Or could we
really make a  commitment to any of the world's myriad religions
on the understanding that it has no more justification than any
other?

  It is perhaps worth noting that, as a matter of biography,
Wittgenstein seems never to have committed himself to any
religious creed.  But if he felt inclined  towards a belief in the
Resurrection, it can scarcely  have been only because it held out
a promise of help and security.  It has to be also because it was
FAMILIAR, embedded in the culture in which he had grown up, and
given authority by age and widespread acceptance.  But if he had
simply been told IN VACUO 'There is someone who has risen from the
dead and who is still alive in an  invisible realm beyond this
world and is able to help us from there', it is hard to imagine
that there would have even been an inclination to believe.  It is
much more  likely that Wittgenstein, like most of us, would have
dismissed such a thing out of hand.  If we believe what we
acknowledge to be absurd, it can surely only be when it is part of
a long-cherished tradition.  And if Wittgenstein ever contemplated
a leap of faith, it would have been for him, as for Kierkegaard
before him, not a leap forward into the unknown but a leap
backward into the familiar.

  But obviously there must have been a time when  Christian
teaching was NOT familiar and time-honoured. And had the first
apostles told their hearers 'Believe this, though we can offer you
no grounds for doing so', or even 'Believe this because it is
comforting and reassuring', it is hard to see how Christianity
would ever have got off the ground.  To have a claim to credence
they had to offer themselves as witnesses: '...we have seen and do
testify ...'*5*  They professed to have heard the words and seen
the works of Jesus, to have actually encountered the risen Lord;
and their  successors down the centuries have relied on the truth
of their testimony.  It is only a sophisticated minority, who have
despaired of finding sufficient justification in such testimony or
anywhere else, but still hanker after  belief, who adopt the
expedient of dispensing with  justifications altogether, and
making a virtue of it.

  The situation is of course different if we adopt the  kind of
radical re-interpretation of the Gospels which  sees them, in
their essentially religious function, not primarily as historical
narratives, but as pictorial or dramatic presentations of a
certain 'way of life' or a moral ideal.  We might then think of
the Resurrection  story, not as the record of an historical event,
but as a way of making the point that, despite the death of Jesus
and the apparent triumph of his enemies, his spirit - the response
to life and the values he exemplified - lived on  in the lives of
his followers.  If so, then we can indeed by-pass any question of
verification;  the historical  proof-game is irrelevant to belief.
If, as R B  Braithwaite put it in a much-quoted paper, religious
assertions are '. . . primarily declarations of  adherence to a
policy of action, declarations of  commitment to a way of
life',*6* then we do not need EVIDENCE to justify making them.
But the unavoidable  price to be paid for these advantages is that
we have to regard Jesus as, again, 'simply another dead teacher',
his spirit still alive only in the metaphorical sense in which we
might say that the spirit of Socrates is still alive.  He can no
longer, in any literal sense, hear us  or help us, and we are once
more 'orphaned and alone'. We cannot have it both ways, both the
comfort of the Resurrection literally understood and at the same
time a licence to dispense with all justification for our belief.


  Such reactions to what we have quoted from Wittgenstein  are
entirely understandable.  And yet there ARE serious difficulties
in the way of any attempt at justification. To begin with,
Wittgenstein is no doubt right to  emphasise that what we ask from
religion is CERTAINTY; and certainty as such has to be unaffected
by the to and fro of debate.  As he puts it in a later passage in
CULTURE AND VALUE*7*

     Religion is, as it were, the calm bottom of the sea
     at its deepest point, which remains calm however
     high the waves at the surface may be.

  But if we engage in the historical - or the theological - proof-
game, we are inevitably in the realm of the  tentative and the
provisional, where nothing is settled  once and for all.  An
argument may appear unanswerable FOR THE MOMENT, but there is
always the possibility that a new piece of historical evidence
will come to light, or that some thinker more thorough or
perceptive than  ourselves will spot a confusion or a fallacy.  A
faith that lives by argument is always liable to perish by
argument.  And we do not want something which can only be held on
a short lease, as it were, from one issue of the theological
quarterlies until the next.  In religion as such we seek the
immutable, something which stays the same, yesterday, today and
forever.

  But if we cannot achieve the certainty we seek by  rational
argument, is our only alternative an arbitrary decision to believe
without argument?  If so, then apart from the question of whether
it is psychologically possible to make such a decision, it would
seem that our certainty amounts to nothing more than a dogmatic
refusal to consider contrary evidence.  However, if the picture
that suggests itself here is of the convert announcing 'I have
decided henceforth to believe in the Resurrection of Jesus Christ
and I am wholly unconcerned about arguments over whether such an
event ever  happened or not', then it is, I think, a misleading
one.
No doubt there is an indispensable element of decision in any
religious conversion.  But it occurs in a  different way and, we
might say, on a different LEVEL from this.

  Let us suppose that, while still uncommitted to  belief, we
encounter a Christian apologist who IS  prepared to put forward
historical evidence for the Resurrection.  He argues for example
that nothing else will explain why the disciples of Jesus, who had
fled in terror before the Crucifixion, should thereafter rally to
form the nucleus of the Christian Church, and show such boldness
and resolution in doing so.  Or that it is  absurd to suppose that
the disciples, who were in a  position to know what actually
happened, invented the story of the Resurrection, and then faced
persecution and martyrdom for what they knew to be a lie.  We are
not concerned at the moment with the merits of such arguments or
of possible answers to them;  our concern  is rather with the
difficulty we should find in  accepting the conclusion, REGARDLESS
of whether we could point to any flaw in the arguments or not.

  As a condition of accepting that a Resurrection  actually
happened, we have first to accept that such a thing is POSSIBLE.
Not just a bare logical possibility, in the sense that 'X rose
from the dead' is not self- contradictory, but rather a
possibility that we are prepared to TAKE SERIOUSLY, prepared to
include among the range of explanatory concepts which we might, in
appropriate circumstances, employ.  Such a range, obviously, is an
essential part of our equipment for playing the historical proof-
game.  As historians we seek to explain events WITHIN THIS RANGE,
and we cannot, while  keeping to the rules of our game, go outside
it;  what is  not explicable in these terms simply has to be left
unexplained.  Thus for example in a television programme some
years ago about the practice of witchcraft, it was described how
in 1940, when England seemed in imminent danger of a German
invasion, the English witches held a special gathering and cast a
particularly potent spell on Hitler to prevent his ordering the
invasion - with, they later claimed, complete success.  Now an
historian of  the period might mention this as a curiosity; but if
he valued his reputation as a serious historian, he could not
suggest that witchcraft had, or might have had, any influence on
what happened.  Even supposing he were at a loss to explain in his
own terms why no invasion took place, since every element in the
situation seemed to favour it, this would not be a permissible
move.  He is free to say 'I simply cannot explain it' but not 'It
is  due to witchcraft'.

  Of course the range of permissible explanatory concepts may
vary.  There may well have been times and places in which learned
and respected historians took the  influence of witchcraft
entirely seriously.  But it is  clearly not within the permitted
range for, say, academic historians of our own time;  and neither,
it seems fair  to add, is the miraculous, or divine intervention
in  human affairs.  The salvation of England in 1940 cannot  be
ascribed to miracle any more than it can be ascribed  to magic.
And the same holds when, AS SUCH HISTORIANS,  we discuss the
beginnings of the Christian church.  We may say if we wish 'This
happened because people believed that Jesus Christ had risen from
the dead'. But it would be something altogether different if we
said 'This happened because Jesus Christ had risen from the dead'.
For in so doing we make an all-important  alteration in the range
of concepts with which we think about the events in question.  We
pass from the  standpoint of the secular historian to that of the
Christian believer, and this is something much more  radical than
merely to accept as true certain  assertions about which we have
hitherto been sceptical.   To go back to Wittgenstein's game
analogy, we may say  that the secular historian and the believer,
since they adopt such different equipment are in effect PLAYING
DIFFERENT GAMES.

  So here we have another sense in which the
'historical proof-game', i.e. the game played by our
modern secular historian, is irrelevant to belief.
Historian and believer may both talk about Jesus
and his disciples;  but they talk in such different
terms that they can have little that is of more than
peripheral importance to say to each other.  And to
suppose that they are playing the same game and are,
as it were, in competition over which of them can
make the more successful moves within it, is simply
to invite confusion.

  In the first of his LECTURES IN RELIGIOUS BELIEF*8*,
Wittgenstein imagines an encounter with a believer who  regards
the illness he suffers as a divine punishment for his sins.
Wittgenstein, in the role of unbeliever, does not think that the
illness is not a punishment;  rather, he DOES NOT THINK AT ALL
about God or punishment in connexion with illness.  He dwells on
the difference between himself and the believer, the 'enormous
gulf' as  he has earlier called it -      I think differently, in
a different way . . . There       are . . . these entirely
different ways of thinking       . . . He cannot even get close
enough to the believer to contradict him.  Mutual contradiction
after all requires  that we frame the same statements and then
disagree about their truth-values.  Framing the same statements in
its turn requires that we use the same concepts.  And in  so far
as we use different concepts, then we simply  produce different
statements.  We have not enough in common to contradict one
another.

  In brief, then, what divides believer from unbeliever, our
Christian apologist, say, from his secular audience,  is not
primarily a disagreement over questions of fact, over what did or
did not occur.  But neither can it be resolved into a disagreement
over moral values or ideals. Rather it is something more
fundamental than either of these, a difference over what
POSSIBILITIES we are  prepared to take seriously, and hence what
concepts we  are willing to apply.  ('More fundamental' in the
sense  of playing an essential role in determining what we can
admit as fact and what values we can hope or aspire to realise.)
If so, then it appears indeed to be pointless to try to argue with
each other across such a gulf, or to  try to argue each other into
crossing it.

  Religion may perhaps soften the peremptory 'Do this! Think like
that' from an order to an invitation;  but Wittgenstein's point
still holds that, in the very nature of the situation, we can
offer no reason why it should be accepted.  It is, in essence, an
invitation to approach things differently.  To approach them - in
the terms we  have adopted - with a mind open to a greater range
of possibility.  If the invitation is accepted, then there  is
indeed scope for dialogue and debate, and attempted
justifications, as moves WITHIN the believer's 'proof- game'.
This is not the place to discuss the matter at length, but - to go
back to a point raised earlier - when the first apostles preached
to their fellow Jews, they had an audience who already accepted
the possibilities of divine intervention in human history, of
prophecy and  Messiahship.  And hence there was already a
framework  within which it was possible to argue with them about
the claims of Jesus.  (Even Cornelius, the first non- Jewish
convert, is presented as a 'devout man, and one  that feared God .
. . and  prayed to God always'.)*9* If there had been no such
framework, it would have been pointless for the apostles merely to
bear witness to strange events.  To say, 'I have seen a man walk
on water and rise from the grave', even if it is believed, is not
in itself to say anything of RELIGIOUS significance.  And only in
a context where this can intelligibly be offered as evidence that
the man in question is the promised  Christ does it acquire such
significance.  Given an  audience with a radically different
religious heritage,  or with none at all, convincing them that
such events had taken place would have done little towards making
them Christian, unless the apostles could also bring them to adopt
an entirely new way of understanding these, and indeed all other,
events.

  But how can anyone be brought to such a change?  We  seem to
have reached the position that there are  'entirely different ways
of thinking' and that it is theoretically impossible to
demonstrate from any neutral standpoint that one is right and
another wrong, or one better than another.  And hence we have no
way of  avoiding a relativism which says that any choice among
them must be arbitrary or subjective, a matter of what we find
emotionally satisfying perhaps, or of what, through historical
accident, is familiar to us.

  The phrase 'ways of thinking', however, invites the  question:
Ways of thinking ABOUT WHAT?  Are we supposing that there is
something like a constant body of  experience, existing
independently of any such way, about which we might think now in
this way and now in that? (Rather as we might try out different
techniques of  mapping on a landscape which is in itself
indifferent to all such techniques.)  But clearly our way of
thinking  and our experience cannot be thus mutually independent.
A lot of philosophical endeavour has gone into the  question of
how, and to what extent, the concepts with which we think are
rooted in the immediate data of  experience.  And in turn, the
conceptual equipment we bring to our dealings with the world plays
an important role in determining what we notice in it, what
distinctions we draw, and what is highlighted or obscured.  (As a
rough analogy, if we make a drawing of a landscape, our drawing
obviously is determined by what we see in the landscape;  but it
is equally true that what  we see is determined by the very
process of drawing.)   The relationship is by its very nature
unstable and always liable to change.  It is always possible, in
any field of human interest, to come upon situations which
outreach or elude existing conceptual equipment and the language
which embodies it, and hence create an incentive to find new
concepts and new words;  or by the same token new concepts and
words may open up the way to new experience.

  Is it possible that we should encounter a situation  which
creates a need - not felt hitherto - for  specifically RELIGIOUS
concepts or religious language? We may recall in this connexion
the sentence already quoted from Wittgenstein:  It is LOVE that
believes the Resurrection.  It is of course open to argument just
what Wittgenstein had in mind here.  But in our present context,
the question prompted by what he says is this: Could an encounter
with selfless or disinterested love - the AGAPE of the New
Testament - be in itself something  to which the language of the
secular world proves  inadequate, and which needs for its
expression the language of religion?

  Consider for example a young mother gazing at her  newly-born
child;  it would be entirely understandable if she felt moved to
voice her love for her child by saying 'This is a gift from God',
even though she rarely uses religious language on other occasions.
What would make such language appropriate here?  It is highly
unlikely that, when the mother says her child is a gift from God,
she is offering this as an EXPLANATION of the child's presence -
as she might explain the appearance of a new cot or baby clothes
by saying 'This is a gift from Aunt Margaret'.  She is presumably
quite familiar with the biological facts about how a baby is
conceived and how it develops and is born.  She is not puzzled or
in search of a further cause;  nor is she invoking any extra-
terrestrial equivalent of Aunt Margaret's benevolent activity.  We
might say that she speaks, not  out of puzzlement, but out of
WONDER - wonder at the very being of her chid and of her own
motherhood.  Any attempt to comprehend the situation in physical
or psychological terms, to present it simply as another instance
of  something familiar, seems to her to devalue it, to  deprive it
of its wonder.  And it is important to note  that any over-literal
or anthropomorphic theology, any  attempt to reduce God, as it
were, to a kind of celestial Aunt Margaret, would likewise devalue
it.  'This is a  gift from God' offers gratitude and humility;  it
conveys  also something of the sense of having been mysteriously
visited or honoured that finds its most memorable expression in
the Magnificat.  But its function requires  that we respect this
element of mystery, that we allow  the focus of gratitude and
humility, the source of honour and visitation, to remain, as it
were, within a cloud.

  The words of course evoke images of human giving, but  we must
be wary of resting too much weight on these.   And for another
reason as well.  Suppose the baby is born with a serious mental or
physical handicap, or dies soon after birth.  Inevitably the
question arises:  If God has  perfection in his gift, how can his
gift be less than  perfect, or how, once given, can it be snatched
away  again?  And yet in Christian discourse the words 'This is a
gift from God' are still counted appropriate;  even in such a
situation the young mother is still expected to  say them, (or at
least to assent to them).  Now if their function is literally to
report some quasi-human transaction of giving and receiving, this
surely is asking too much.  But if they have a different function
- to acknowledge a mystery rather than to transmit knowledge of
how things are, or to offer patience and submission in the
presence of something past finding out - then it becomes possible
to say them.

  Recalling for a moment Martin Buber's distinction  between the
'primary words' I-THOU and I-IT*10*, we might say that the young
mother responds to her baby as THOU rather than IT.  And while IT
can in principle be defined, explained, evaluated, whatever is
THOU for us is always in some part unique, inexplicable,
mysterious.   And, according to Buber:      Every particular THOU
is a glimpse through to the       eternal THOU .  .  . the THOU
that by its nature      cannot become IT.*11*

  We perhaps may borrow these terms in order better to  understand
how the love for her baby, which moves the mother to say 'This is
a gift from God', brings awareness  in some measure of this
element of the mysterious in the being of things.  Or, to revert
to the terms we used earlier, she has been made aware of
possibilities - possibilities both joyful and grievous - that have
not hitherto been known to her.

  By creating such awareness, love, in the sense in  question, may
thus discover a use, and a need, for religious language.  When the
young mother adopts such language, it is clearly not on the basis
of evidence or argument;  but neither is it merely arbitrary
decision. She adopts it because it is the only language available
that seems to meet the needs of the occasion.  And it is  not
difficult to envisage how an encounter with Jesus - whether in
person, or through the Gospels, or through his influence on the
lives of his followers - might produce a similar reaction.  In the
face of such an encounter we might well find - as doubtless many
in the past have found - our existing ways of speaking and
thinking  inadequate, and reach out towards something wider in
order to do justice to it.  And here also, we should adopt a
religious vocabulary, not to state conclusions, for which we now
have evidence, but rather to  acknowledge (take account of,
celebrate perhaps) a new element in our experience to which our
secular vocabulary is insufficient.

  But, while awareness of mystery and of boundless possibility,
and of a need to take account of these, may well be an essential
part of religion, can it be the whole of Christianity?  After all,
the good tidings of the Gospel are not simply 'Unto you is born
this day in the city of David someone who will give you a new
outlook on life- or a new vocabulary'.  Christianity surely wants
to claim that with the coming of Jesus Christ, possibilities -
like those of the Resurrection and of the miraculous in general -
were not just recognized, but realized as well.

  To go back to our Wittgenstein quotation, there is a gap to be
bridged between saying Love believes in the possibility of the
Resurrection, and what Wittgenstein himself actually says - It is
LOVE that believes the  Resurrection.  And it is important to note
in this  connexion that he goes on immediately:

     We might say:  Redeeming love believes even in the
     Resurrection;  holds fast even to the Resurrection,
     What combats doubt is, as it were, REDEMPTION.*12*

Now in Christian teaching 'redemption' indicates much more than a
change in outlook, or way of thinking or speaking, (though no
doubt that is included).  It is the most profound change
imaginable, nothing less than the becoming of a 'new creature'
through the divine gift of grace.  So, if we speak of love as
REDEEMING, in any  orthodox sense of the term, we imply that it is
in some way a means or channel by which such grace can enter into
the human world.  And, with divine grace or (to use a  less
specific term) divine power, then things can, presumably, be
accomplished that could not be accomplished by human resources
alone.  As Wittgenstein puts it:

     . . .you no longer rest your weight on the earth but
     suspend yourself from heaven.  Then EVERYTHING will
     be different and it will be 'no wonder' if you can
     do things that you cannot do now.*13*

  The image of a CHANNEL for the divine grace or power  can be -
and doubtless often has been - expanded in a number of ways.  For
example, we may picture a stream, sometimes fed by melting snow or
spring rains and in full spate, sometimes reduced to a trickle or
dried up altogether by summer drought;  or a great underground
lake beneath a desert, here and there breaking through the surface
in a wellspring that creates an oasis of fertility.  And add
further that, while such sources of water are beyond our control,
we have still some power to block the channels or to keep them
open.  Applying such imagery, we envisage the grace or power of
God as, for example, breaking through at various times and places
into human situations;  as sometimes less and sometimes more
abundant;  as something which is not ours to command, but which
can still - though this has been  debated - be resisted or
welcomed.  It is then easy enough to suppose that, where there is
'grace abounding' things may indeed be done that could not
otherwise be done;  and that this is particularly true in the
lives of Jesus and the saints.  And - although there may be a
psychological barrier to be overcome - there is no reason in
principle why what is thus accomplished should be confined to the
realm of the moral or spiritual rather than the physical.  Given
that the power involved is  without limits, even Resurrection in a
literal sense is not beyond it.

  But whether or not we adopt such imagery and apply it in such
ways is still a matter, not just of experience, but of decision.
No experience can in itself compel us, on pain of inconsistency,
to say 'There but for the grace of God . . .' or 'Truly this was
the Son of God'.  In the New Testament narrative, even among those
who saw the works of Jesus at first hand, some believed but some
doubted - or attributed what they saw to demonic rather than
divine influence.*14*  And, whatever the appeal of our channel and
wellspring images, they do nothing to show us how any supernatural
power actually enters the human world, or even how such a thing
might happen.  Our pictures function in different ways - for
example, they locate the realm of the mysterious, of boundless
possibility, not, or not only, somewhere remote from or beyond
humanity, but actually within it.  ('The kingdom of heaven is
within you, rather than far off in the skies.)  And if so, then
the miraculous may not only HAPPEN but be PERFORMED.  Not only may
manna fall from heaven, but a man may take a few loaves and fishes
and feed five thousand with them.  As well as a vision of
possibility, there is also, as it were, a vocation to put into
effect.

  Now we can readily imagine that an encounter with Jesus or with
saints (whether officially canonised or not) might incline, or
encourage, us to profess that these possibilities have indeed been
realized, and to think and speak of events that have actually
happened as  manifestations of the divine.  To put it crudely, if
strange or unexpected things have happened to us or about us, and
this way of interpreting them is on offer, then we may well find
it easy or attractive to bring the two together.  And doubtless
something of the kind has  happened countless times in the past -
in the beginning of the Christian church for example, and in many
religious revivals or re-awakenings since then.  Belief - to
revert to our imagery - has been like the plants that flourish
around the oasis or along the banks of the stream.  It is thus a
long way removed from being simply something decided upon IN
VACUO.  But, once again, neither is it the outcome of quasi-
mathematical proof, or of quasi-scientific or quasi-legal
evidence.  It is easy to understand the Biblical reproaches for
those who had seen so much of the works of Jesus and still failed
to understand, i.e. TO SEE IN THE PROPER LIGHT.*15* But
nonetheless, no matter what we are shown, there is still room for
disagreement over what IS the proper light.  Wittgenstein imagines
himself being shown remarkable phenomena at, for example, Lourdes,
and in reply to an invitation to believe saying 'Can it only be
explained one way?  Can't it be this or that?' (though it is
interesting that he adds 'I wonder whether I would do that under
all circumstances').*16*

  Religious belief, he says in another context, can consist only
in '. . . passionately seizing hold of THIS interpretation'.*17*
And the metaphors of seizing and holding are there also in the
passage which has been our chief concern - 'This message (the
Gospels) is seized on  by men believingly (i.e. lovingly)'.*18* .
. . 'Redeeming love . . . holds fast even to the Resurrection'.
The terms 'passionately' and 'lovingly' suggest an EMOTIONAL
commitment, but this is not objectionable.  A change as radical as
this could scarcely be devoid of emotion.  Nor is it irrational in
the sense of failing to meet some  standard of rationality that
might fairly be imposed upon it.  In the light of the foregoing
reflections, it would seem that this is the only way in which
religious belief as such CAN be adopted.  Encounters like those we
have  mentioned - and the reactions of those about us to them -
may incline us towards belief, or create a need that it can
satisfy.  But in the end, we either reach out and take hold of it
- or we do not.


*1*
CULTURE AND VALUE (CV) trs. Winch, Blackwell, 1980,
     p33
*2*
LECTURES AND CONVERSATIONS ON AESTHETICS, PSYCHOLOGY
     AND RELIGIOUS BELIEF (LC) ed. Barrett, Blackwell,
     1970, p56

*3*
CV p29

*4*
CV p32

*5*
FIRST EPISTLE OF JOHN, 4,14

*6*
'An Empiricist's View of the Nature of Religious Belief'  THE
PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION, ed. Mitchell, Oxford, 1971, p80

*7*
CV p53

*8*
LC p55

*9*
ACTS OF THE APOSTLES, 10,2

*10*
I AND THOU, trs. Smith, Clark, 1937. p3

*11*
op cit p75

*12*
CV p33

*13*
CV p33

*14*
THE GOSPEL OF ST JOHN, 10,20

*15*
For example, THE GOSPEL OF ST MATTHEW, 13, 13-14

*16*
LC pp60-61

*17*
CV p64

*18*
CV p32