1. Introduction
Tracey Rowland has recently written a chapter on Ratzinger’s view of Wittgenstein and notes that he interacts primarily with the ‘early Wittgenstein’ and interprets him as a logical positivist whose philosophy fails to seek truth itself.Footnote 1 For Ratzinger, Wittgenstein represents the worst of modern philosophy because he dissuades humanity from being confident in its ability to engage with the most important questions about its own existence and the source of all things. After Wittgenstein, humanity’s intellect is trapped within the limiting confines of language, Ratzinger believes, and is divorced from the intellectual wonder fitting of those made in God’s image. This reading of Wittgenstein, Rowland notes, lacks a serious engagement with the English Dominicans’ reception of him.Footnote 2 They could have provided Ratzinger with an alternative reading of Wittgenstein’s conception of wonder and an introduction to his later works.Footnote 3 Therefore, if Ratzinger had interacted more with them, he might have had a different picture of Wittgenstein and recognized the ways his philosophy encourages humanity to live in a state of wonder flowing from its creaturely existence.
This article specifically argues that Fergus Kerr offers a compelling account of how Wittgenstein’s philosophy creates the sense of wonder Ratzinger perceives his work has extinguished. Kerr highlights Wittgenstein’s gift for freeing philosophical discourse from the bewitchments it causes for itself by thinking of its quest as solving intellectual problems rather than being open to the mystery of being. Therefore, Kerr’s reception of Wittgenstein reveals the potential commonalities shared by Ratzinger and Wittgenstein. They both believe, for example, that philosophy fundamentally exists for the sake of inviting humanity into reality’s mystery rather than resolving intellectual conundrums. Using Kerr and others to identify certain shared philosophical and anthropological commitments, I aim to join Rowland in encouraging future investigation of how Ratzinger’s thought overlaps with, and can be enhanced by, those who have taken Wittgenstein seriously and, conversely, how their thought might benefit from serious engagement with Ratzinger.
To accomplish this task, I will begin by laying out Ratzinger’s critique of Wittgenstein’s philosophy. Next, I will present Kerr’s and others’ alternative readings of Wittgenstein to identify a path forward for a more fruitful dialog between Ratzinger and Wittgenstein. Finally, this potentially fruitful dialog will be concretized by exemplifying how Wittgenstein’s linguistic analysis supports Ratzinger’s understanding of the relationship between scriptural and dogmatic language and the roles they play within the Church’s life.
2. Ratzinger’s critique of Wittgenstein
As noted above, Ratzinger’s interpretation of Wittgenstein places him into the camp of logical positivism and primarily interacts with the material contained in the Tractatus. Footnote 4 Ratzinger assesses that Wittgenstein’s ‘logical positivism’ results in the diminishment of humanity’s ability or willingness to seek truth itself. He unpacks the dangers of this positivistic notion of truth:
Positivism, which emerged at first as a demand for a particular method to be adopted within the exact sciences, has now very largely taken possession of philosophy—thanks to the impact made by Wittgenstein. But this means that today both natural science and philosophy no longer seek truth but only inquire about the correctness of the methods applied and experiment in logic, chiefly in linguistic analysis, quite independently of the question of whether the starting point of this form of thinking corresponds to reality. In any case, reality seems to be inaccessible.Footnote 5
His fear is that Wittgenstein’s mode of philosophical inquiry reduces everything to following a particular linguistic method rather than allowing human beings to encounter reality. To put it another way, he is weary of what he perceives as Wittgenstein’s abandonment of the philosophical wonder that flows from pursuing truth and, on the contrary, relegates it to, as Rowland describes it, ‘a mere game of concepts’.Footnote 6
Ratzinger provides a summary of his concerns about Wittgenstein’s influence on philosophy and humanity’s understanding of itself more generally:
The name of Wittgenstein stands for the program whose aim is to turn philosophy once and for all into an exact science by causing it to renounce completely all attempts to solve unanswerable questions about reality and to confine itself to the analysis of human language… But [this] does not fulfill the function of philosophy, for man has to go on living and fill his life with a meaning that extends beyond the bounds of arbitrary theorizing and is to be found in responsibility toward reality.Footnote 7
His main objection is that Wittgenstein’s philosophy makes it impossible for human beings to live meaningfully in the world. Instead of language being a tool that allows humans to live and come to know reality, it is consigned to a subjectivist form of reasoning collapsed in upon itself. Ratzinger believes Wittgenstein’s philosophy portrays humanity as always linguistically curved in on itself and, therefore, trapped within its own subjectivity.
In an essay dealing with the relationship of faith and reason, Ratzinger’s concerns about Wittgenstein’s philosophical disposition are displayed more concretely. Ratzinger argues that philosophy must not be reduced to modern scientific methods of discovering truth. For him, if philosophy is relegated to just another expression of modern scientific inquiry, humanity squanders its uniqueness as a rational being who can ask questions about the whole and not just a part of reality. It is true that this attempt to grasp the whole stretches language beyond its limits, but Ratzinger maintains, ‘[Humanity] must not begin to be silent about what we cannot speak of, for we thereby silence the characteristic dimension of our being’.Footnote 8 His claim is that humanity must not confuse bumping up against its linguistic limit with encountering the boundary marker of reality itself. On the contrary, language’s limit is the point at which humanity must use all its linguistic resources to keep itself aware of the transcendent questions that are essential to its identity as rational and embodied creatures.Footnote 9
In a footnote connected with the above-mentioned quotation, Ratzinger notes that his readers should hear resonances with Wittgenstein’s famous conclusion to the Tractatus: ‘What we cannot speak about we must consign to silence’.Footnote 10 He positively connects Wittgenstein with the mystical tradition that recognizes that speculative propositions must be discarded once humanity encounters the transcendent reality toward which these propositions gesture. However, he believes Wittgenstein fails to follow the mystical tradition’s conviction that humanity’s silence arises from an encounter with the Mystery (God) that gives existence to all things. Ratzinger contends that Wittgenstein forces humanity to remain trapped within the ‘immanent frame’Footnote 11 of what can justifiably be stated according to modern scientific rationality. When humanity encounters the ineffable, Wittgenstein, contrary to the mystical tradition, portrays this experience as being devoid of enchantment and wonder. The mystical wonder flowing from a recognition of a transcendent mystery, Ratzinger suggests, is absent from Wittgenstein’s philosophy and portrait of the world.
Ultimately, Ratzinger thinks Wittgenstein’s philosophy must be discarded since it discourages human beings from seeking the One (God) in whom it is possible for them to transcend themselves in order to become truly themselves. He sees Wittgenstein as a philosopher who encourages humanity to adopt a life of radical disenchantment by accepting the reductionistic idea that modern scientific methods are the sole means of discovering truth. As a result, Wittgenstein has rid the world of wonder and mystery and is, therefore, unhelpful in humanity’s pursuit of its telos.
3. Kerr’s and others’ counter-portrayal of Wittgenstein
There are multiple problems with this presentation of Wittgenstein’s work, but one of the main ones is the characterization of Wittgenstein as uninterested in the fact that ‘man has to go on living and fill his life with meaning’. Fergus Kerr helps correct this mistaken portrait of Wittgenstein’s philosophy by providing an alternative picture. One of the ways he does this is by identifying how Wittgenstein’s work might coincide with Gabriel Marcel’s work. In a footnote in his Theology after Wittgenstein, Kerr claims that Wittgenstein rejects the idea that philosophy is predicated on providing solutions to speculative problems and is rather aimed at reintroducing humanity to its natural disposition of wonder. This conviction, Kerr explains, can be seen in continuity with Marcel’s articulation of the difference between a problem and a mystery. Marcel contends:
A problem is something which I meet, which I find complete before me, but which I can therefore lay siege to and reduce. But a mystery is something in which I myself am involved, and it can therefore only be thought of as a ‘sphere where the distinction between what is in me and what is before me loses its meaning and its initial validity’. A genuine problem is subject to an appropriate technique by the exercise of which it is defined; whereas a mystery, by definition, transcends every conceivable technique.Footnote 12
A person who has truly encountered a mystery cannot, as Marcel indicates, treat it in a purely extrinsic manner.
What Kerr surmises is that Wittgenstein strives to identify the many ways in which philosophers have extinguished humanity’s wonder by turning its existence in the world into a problem to be solved rather than a mystery to inhabit. Wittgenstein does not trap people in the conceptual framework of language as a means of imprisoning them from reality; rather, ‘One of the aims of [Wittgenstein’s]… way of doing philosophy’, as Kerr notes, ‘is… to dissipate the fog that other philosophers… spread around things which are wonderful enough in their being’.Footnote 13 Kerr further explains that
[Wittgenstein] seems to fear that it is only with difficulty that a mathematician can maintain a sense of awe once he begins to treat a ‘miracle of nature’ as a problem. Moreover, to the extent that what was initially the object of wonder is concealed by a ‘philosophical fog’, it is no longer possible to sustain the wonderment. Indeed, the wonder sustains a rupture that needs to be healed. Our desire to find solutions to problems subverts wonder, but the possibility remains of recapturing it.Footnote 14
This reframing of Wittgenstein’s linguistic emphasis illuminates how the goal of his philosophical project was not, as Ratzinger claimed, to close humanity off from the mystery of being. On the contrary, he was attempting to alleviate it from the pressure of having to solve the pseudo-metaphysical problems it had created for itself. If Kerr is correct, then a potential link between Wittgenstein and Ratzinger is a shared vision of philosophy as primarily the opening up of a person to reality’s mystery rather than resolving intellectual conundrums.
For example, John Churchill points out that the Wittgenstein of the Tractatus acknowledges and marvels at the existence of the world without being able to explain it.Footnote 15 In contrast to Ratzinger’s interpretation, the Tractatus reveals Wittgenstein’s overwhelming sense of wonder at the sheer existence of the world. Herbert McCabe connects this mysteriousness to the question about God. He explains:
It is of course perfectly right to point out the mysteriousness of a question about everything, to point to the fact that we have no way of answering it, but that is by no means the same as saying it is an unaskable question. As Wittgenstein said ‘Not how the world is, but that it is, is the mystery’..[T]his means that we are asking our ultimate radical question with tools that will not do the job properly, with words whose meaning has to be stretched beyond what we can comprehend. It would be very strange if it were not so. As Wittgenstein says, what we have here is a mystery. If the question of God were a neat and simple question to be answered in terms of familiar concepts, then whatever we are talking about, it is not God.Footnote 16
McCabe’s reception of Wittgenstein’s thought about silence is quite similar to Ratzinger’s description of the mystical tradition’s understanding of it. Words are inadequate for the task of grasping the mystery of God; but, as McCabe notes, it does not mean that the question itself should be abandoned. Humanity must rather keep the ultimate question alive while recognizing that all its linguistic resources will never overcome its inability to comprehend God.
Kerr adds that McCabe sees Wittgenstein’s invitation into silence as a way ‘to protect the realm of ethics and religion − the mystical − from the misapplied ideals of science’.Footnote 17 Churchill makes a similar point: ‘It could hardly be clearer that Wittgenstein recognizes that the search for scientific answers kills wonder. But it is equally clear that he sees the need for a restoration of wonder after the scientific questions have been posed or even answered’.Footnote 18 According to this reading of Wittgenstein, Ratzinger and Wittgenstein are allies in their rejection of the idea that truth can be reduced to what can be known through modern scientific methods.
The sense of wonder at the world’s existence remains in Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, Churchill explains, while being expanded to include the wonder experienced in ordinary lifeFootnote 19 when a person discovers, as Wittgenstein states, that ‘explanation must end somewhere’.Footnote 20 Claiming that explanation must end somewhere is not intended to establish the type of closed linguistic system Ratzinger feared. On the contrary, when humans encounter their own linguistic limit, they have an opportunity to experience a sense of wonder in the presence of that which is beyond their grasp. The idea that explanation must end somewhere only leads to despair if one assumes a relationship with the world and their own life as an outside observer; but if a person remembers that he/she is embedded within forms of life filled with meaning, then the unanswered questions can be seen as mysteries rather than unresolved problems threatening humanity’s existence and understanding of itself.
Therefore, Ratzinger’s critique about Wittgenstein failing to help humanity to ‘keep on living’ misunderstands his philosophical vision. Rather than presenting a comprehensive philosophical theory, Wittgenstein’s work often focuses on how philosophers frequently distract humanity and themselves from ordinary life. They create problems for themselves that are, in fact, the result of a failure to pay attention to the seemingly mundane ways in which human beings interact and communicate with one another. What they misguidedly pursue, he suggests, are explanations where none can be given or are needed. Fundamentally, Wittgenstein’s insights help return humanity to the ‘rough ground’Footnote 21 of ordinary life and therapeutically disavow it of many of the philosophical confusions it has created for itself.
This reception of Wittgenstein can also contribute to Ratzinger’s goal of wedding theology and philosophy together. The only way they find continuity, Ratzinger explains, is if philosophy opens itself up to hearing a word beyond its natural capacity.Footnote 22 Readers of Wittgenstein, such as Kerr, Churchill, and McCabe, are helpful to this project by using his work to remind people of the mystery they experience in ordinary life. This prepares them for the radicality of God’s revelation, since God has chosen to enter the ordinariness of human existence as the means of being known by humanity. With that said, this knowing, as Aquinas would phrase it, is always of that which is unknown.Footnote 23 Wittgenstein’s philosophy, therefore, can help rid humanity of the idolatrous notion that it has the linguistic capacity for overcoming this unknowing and, as a result, recognize God’s freedom in revealing himself – a conviction held deeply by Ratzinger.
To put it differently, Wittgenstein’s emphasis on returning humanity to the ‘rough ground’ of its concrete existence does not have to be interpreted as a mode of disenchantment. If Churchill, Kerr, and McCabe are correct, Wittgenstein’s philosophy is rightly understood as encouraging human beings to appreciate the ordinary moments where mystery and wonder are encountered. Rather than closing humanity in upon itself, Wittgenstein seeks to bring humanity back to an awareness of its own creatureliness. Once this has taken place, humanity, according to someone like Ratzinger, is prepared to hear the word of God’s own self-revelation – Jesus Christ.
4. A concrete example of bringing Ratzinger and Wittgenstein together
Up to this point, I have only identified certain broad points of connection between Wittgenstein and Ratzinger. The rest of this article offers a concrete example of what a fruitful dialog between them looks like. To do this, I will highlight how Wittgenstein’s later work bolsters Ratzinger’s description of the respective linguistic clarity of scriptural and dogmatic language and why both linguistic forms are necessary for the Church’s life. In other words, I will show how a Ratzingerian and Wittgensteinian gloss on the relationship between scripture and dogma unveils the dynamic and harmonious relationship that exists between them. This will provide a small taste of the potential areas where these two thinkers possess similar intellectual instincts and complement each other well. It also illustrates how Wittgenstein’s philosophy does not necessarily forestall wonder but can attune a person to it.
The description of the relation between scripture and the Church’s doctrinal pronouncements is often portrayed as the movement from language that is less clear (scripture’s) to language that has greater clarity (doctrine’s). Within this framework, one is, whether consciously or subconsciously, left with the impression that scripture exists solely for the purpose of being transformed into more precise doctrinal utterances. The problem with this depiction of the relationship between scripture and doctrine is that once a doctrine has been ‘settled’, the biblical narrative can be dismissed. Ratzinger identified this problem and offered a creative corrective to it. He suggested that these two uses of language (dogmatic and scriptural) find their telos in witnessing to and making possible an encounter with God’s revelation of himself in Christ. Through his Christocentric understanding of revelation, Ratzinger explains how the Church’s doctrines help elucidate the meaning of scripture without negating scripture’s role in continually shaping how the Church’s dogmas are received and understood throughout history. He specifically teaches that the Church’s doctrines exist for the sake of allowing the baptized to enter fully the dramatic narrative of scripture – a narrative that seeks to initiate them into Christ’s very own life.
Before specifying how Ratzinger accomplishes this unity between scripture and dogma and explaining why Wittgenstein is potentially helpful to Ratzinger on this point, it is necessary to lay out the overarching contours of Ratzinger’s Christocentric notion of revelation. His theological corpus discloses his commitment to presenting God’s revelation as a personal encounter with Jesus Christ. This is seen early in his theological career when he critiques the Catholic intellectual atmosphere within which he was educated for reducing revelation to propositional truths rather than emphasizing its personal character and role in leading humanity into friendship with God.Footnote 24 He perceived that previous Church teachings had not always sufficiently emphasized that
it is God himself, the person of God, from whom revelation proceeds and to whom it returns, and thus revelation necessarily reaches – also with the person who receives it – into the personal center of man, it touches him in the depth of his being, not only in his individual faculties, in his will and understanding.Footnote 25
Therefore, Ratzinger thought any Catholic doctrine of revelation must narrate the necessary conditions for and essential characteristics of this encounter between the living Christ and humanity throughout history.
He is convinced that the objective content of revelation, properly speaking, is the person of Jesus Christ. When thinking about Christian revelation, one must avoid the mistake of collapsing God’s revelation itself into its mode of mediation/forms of witness – scripture, tradition, and the magisterium.Footnote 26 The reason is that revelation, as mentioned above, is principally about a personal encounter with Christ.Footnote 27 It includes all of the relational qualities entailed in attaining an intimate knowledge of a person and, as a result, is necessarily always more than what can be apprehended in a given proposition or collection of propositions.Footnote 28
Therefore, the end for which divine revelation is ordered, Ratzinger claims, is the union between God and human beings.Footnote 29 What he draws from this fact is that Christian revelation is a dynamic interaction between God’s objective revelation (Jesus Christ) and the subjective recipient(s) of this revelation. His concern is that too often revelation is viewed as something contained within a static reality (e.g., Scripture and Tradition). In such portrayals the subject of revelation is seen as accidentally related to revelation itself. Ratzinger, on the other hand, shows how the Church (the subject of revelation) is a constitutive element of what revelation is essentially. He explains that ‘where there is no one to perceive “revelation”, no re-vel-ation has occurred, because no veil has been removed. By definition, revelation requires someone who apprehends it’.Footnote 30 The point is that faith is not an extrinsic element of revelation since, according to Ratzinger, it would be incorrect to point to a particular object (e.g., Scripture) and say, ‘This is revelation’.Footnote 31 Revelation is not the type of reality that one is able to extrinsically perceive or identify; it is something that can only be known through genuine participation.Footnote 32
What this means is that scripture and the Church’s doctrinal tradition exist for the sake of allowing Christ to be present throughout history. The telos of the scriptural narrative, doctrinal formulas, and, stated more broadly, the Church’s form of life is ordered toward humanity’s deification in Christ. In other words, the Church’s grammar, in all its various forms, is aimed at facilitating the personal encounter with Christ, which leads to humanity’s ability to share in friendship with God.
The above-mentioned description of Ratzinger’s Christocentric notion of divine revelation allows one to situate both scriptural and dogmatic language within the Church’s form of life whose aim is to make continually present the living Christ. This means that scripture and dogma are successful to the extent that they faithfully witness to the One who personally makes himself known throughout history, most especially, in his sacramental presence in the Eucharist. The way in which they accomplish this work of witnessing to Christ is not through a simple process of interpreting scripture’s ‘less clear language’ and translating it into the more conceptually coherent and precise language of dogma. On the contrary, Ratzinger, following Magnus Löhrer, describes the relationship between scripture and dogma as a hermeneutical circle. He contends, ‘[N]ot only is the Scripture equally to be interpreted by dogma looking forward, but that the other way round, dogma too as the interpreting thing it is, is ever again to be read backwards to the interpreted and must be understood on its basis.’Footnote 33 Therefore, scripture needs the Church’s dogmas in order to fulfill its purpose of making Christ known and, likewise, scripture is necessary for understanding what has been received in the Church’s doctrinal pronouncements.
Not only does the symbolic language of scripture and the conceptual language of dogma need one another to be correctly understood, but they are also both essential for the Church to remain the sphere where worship of the triune God is possible. For example, the sacred liturgy’s saturation with biblical language is fitting because of its ability to initiate the baptized into the salvation narrative centered on Christ. The multifaceted linguistic expressions of the liturgy lead to adoration and allow the faithful to recognize the meaningfulness and goal of their lives. It is also the language most fit for making known the person whom the faithful will receive in the Eucharist. As seen in Luke’s account of the Road to Emmaus story, Christ is made known through the opening of the scriptures and the breaking of the bread. Ratzinger interprets this passage as exemplifying the way Christ is revealed throughout history in the liturgy:
[Jesus] cannot be firmly grasped as he could be in the time of his earthly life; he is discovered only in the realm of faith; he sets the hearts of the two travelers aflame by his interpretation of the Scriptures and by breaking bread he opens their eyes. This is a reference to the two basic elements in early Christ worship, which consisted of the liturgy of the word (the reading and expounding of Scripture) and the eucharistic breaking of bread. In this way the evangelist makes it clear that the encounter with the risen Christ lies on quite a new plane; he tries to describe the indescribable in terms of the liturgical facts. He thereby provides both a theology of the Resurrection and a theology of the liturgy: one encounters the risen Christ in the word and in the sacrament; worship is the way in which he becomes touchable to us and recognizable as the living Christ. And conversely, the liturgy is based on the mystery of Easter; it is to be understood as the Lord’s approach to us. In it he becomes our traveling companion, sets our dull hearts aflame, and opens our sealed eyes. He still walks with us, still finds us worried and downhearted, and still has the power to make us see.Footnote 34
Within the liturgy, the language of scripture and Christ’s real presence in the Eucharist open the eyes of the baptized and make their hearts burn. Ultimately, scripture’s narratival structure and the Church’s creative appropriation of it in the liturgy have the capacity to meet a person at the depth of his/her being. In this respect, it is more effective than conceptual language at shaping the entire person and not only his or her intellect.
With that said, it is not enough for the Church to merely recite scriptural language, for example, when attempting to affirm God’s triunity or Christ’s two natures. These and many other dogmatic definitions require a linguistic exactitude that the language of scripture alone cannot provide. This exactitude is not something inherent in conceptual language in any and every context; rather, it is the language necessary for the Church to avoid falling into errors about things such as the Trinity and Christ’s two natures. What this form of linguistic clarity offers is the ability for the Church not to lose something essential about the triune God for whom it was created to worship. Therefore, dogmatic language finds its fundamental role in helping the Church maintain a genuine adoration of the God revealed in Jesus Christ as witnessed to in scripture.
Wittgenstein provides logical clarification of why Ratzinger is correct in his assessment about the Church needing the diverse linguistic expressions of scripture and dogma to receive Christ’s enduring presence. In particular, his linguistic philosophy illuminates the fundamental mistake underlying the assumption that either doctrinal propositions or the scriptural narrative (one that is made up of many genres) provides greater clarity in accessing God’s revelation. Wittgenstein observes that declaring that certain linguistic forms possess superior exactitude represents a confusion about how ordinary language functions. He writes: ‘“Inexact” is really a reproach, and “exact” is a praise. And that is to say that what is inexact attains its goal less perfectly than does what is more exact. So it all depends on what we call “the goal”’.Footnote 35 For Wittgenstein, the contextual clarification of the linguistic end determines whether a particular usage of a word has fulfilled its intended task.
To discover whether a linguistic expression has achieved its goal requires concretely participating in the form of life in which this expression is at home. Wittgenstein’s later philosophy emphasizes that paying attention to how words are used is often the best way of discovering their meaning. This is illustrated in a conversation he had with his friend Maurice Drury. When discussing an essay written by Drury, Wittgenstein brought up Socrates’ philosophical method. He remarked:
It has puzzled me why Socrates is regarded as a great philosopher. But when Socrates asks for the meaning of a word and people give him examples of how that word is used, he isn’t satisfied but wants a unique definition. Now if someone shows me how a word is used and its different meanings, that is just the sort of answer I want.
What this quote highlights is the lack of interest Wittgenstein has with abstractly seeking a term’s universal definition. For him, it is a mistake to look for a universal definition by detaching a word from the ordinary context in which it is used.Footnote 36 Likewise, asking for a universal criterion for determining the clarity or exactitude of a particular linguistic form is meaningless without knowing the role it plays within a particular community.Footnote 37 Therefore, defining either scriptural or doctrinal language as universally more or less clear is doomed from the start. The reason is that one cannot grasp the clarity of either without asking about the context in which they are used and the goal they seek to attain.
An example of this point can be seen in Paul J. Griffiths’ defense of the need for language which describes God as both regretting and unable to regret. He illustrates this fact by giving an example of the different, yet equally valid, ways a husband describes his wife:
I may say to my beloved, and even to others, that she is the most beautiful woman in the world and the only woman for me; in describing her to the police I may say that she is of such-and-such a height and weight and age, with hair of this color and eyes of that. It isn’t the case that what I say to the police and what I say to her are in contradiction; neither is it the case that one set of claims is true and the other false; neither is it the case that there’s any place or perspective from which you might reasonably say of one or the other kind of talk, ‘that’s the real thing – that’s the right way to talk about her’.Footnote 38
The mistake one is tempted to make is to say that one of these descriptions corresponds to reality while the other does not. Griffiths shows that this type of grammatical framing is discordant with how our ordinary language works. It is only when one begins to think philosophically, Wittgenstein might say, that he/she begins to feel the need to describe one of these modes of speech as more or less real than the other. As Griffiths illustrates, if someone heard a husband romantically using police report language with his wife, it would be an obvious linguistic misstep. In this context, it is evident that a lover’s affectionate descriptors of his beloved attains its intended goal (e.g, ‘She is the most beautiful woman in the world’).
Griffiths proceeds to show how this use of language applies within a Christian theological grammar. He writes:
Similarly for theoretical and narratival-devotional talk about the LORD. It isn’t that the LORD is really atemporal and simple and has regrets only by courtesy. Neither is it the case that the LORD really has regrets and is said to be atemporal and simple only by courtesy. Rather, it’s the case that Christian grammar requires both things to be said, though in different contexts and for different purposes. It’s also the case that Christian grammar eschews the thought that there’s a single register that satisfactorily comprises everything that needs to be said about the LORD. Christian grammar is in this an instance of a general truth about human thought and talk.Footnote 39
In this passage, he applies Wittgenstein’s insight about the contextual nature of the exactitude of words.Footnote 40 It is incoherent to give a philosophical explanation that excludes one of these modes of speaking from being as essential to the grammar of Christianity as the other. One way of reading Griffiths’ insights, in continuity with Ratzinger’s conception of the relationship between scriptural and dogmatic language, is to see scriptural language as ‘narratival-devotional’ and dogmatic as ‘theoretical’.Footnote 41 What Griffiths argues is that Christianity, which Ratzinger likewise intuits, needs to recognize ‘what each part plays in the discourse-register to which it belongs, and guarding against the transferal (to another register) of claims belonging to one register’.Footnote 42 If he is correct, then there is little value in suggesting that either dogmatic or scriptural language is more or less clear. What is necessary is paying attention to how these different linguistic forms are used within the Church’s life. In other words, it is her concrete life that unveils whether a certain use of language is adequate for the task for which it has been commissioned.
Griffiths helps support Ratzinger’s idea that the narratival or symbolic language of scripture is more appropriate in a setting like the sacred liturgy. In a similar way that a husband telling his wife that ‘she is the most beautiful woman in the world’ is fitting in a discourse between lovers, scriptural language is fit for the Church’s liturgical praise of the triune God and to identify the one who is present in the Eucharist. It is likewise true that scriptural language alone is insufficient for passing on the Church’s doctrinal descriptions of, for example, the person of Christ and the Trinity. She needed a type of theoretical language to resolve the doctrinal disputes throughout history that were often caused by varying interpretations of scripture’s meaning. Therefore, it is impossible to determine abstractly the clarity or fittingness of either linguistic expression without knowing the setting in which it is used. In Wittgensteinian fashion, a person comes to know the linguistic effectiveness of both scriptural and dogmatic language through concrete examples of their use within the life of the Church. Ultimately, Griffiths exemplifies how a Wittgensteinian conception of language helps the Church appreciate the diverse linguistic resources needed for her continual encounter with Jesus Christ.
To summarize: Ratzinger shows how scriptural and dogmatic language are properly understood within the Church’s form of life – a form of life ordered to initiating people into a divinizing encounter with Christ. What Wittgenstein’s therapeutic philosophical approach reveals is that neither linguistic form – scripture or dogma – must abstractly be identified as clearer, since each is needed depending upon the given context in which it is used. Therefore, Wittgenstein’s precise linguistic analysis does not negate the wonder Ratzinger believes arises from an encounter with God’s revelation of himself in Christ. On the contrary, it can be used to remind Christians of the need to deploy a diversity of linguistic resources when reflecting upon God’s revelation. Ultimately, by putting Ratzinger and Wittgenstein in conversation with one another, one comes to a greater appreciation of the harmonious relationship between scripture and dogma and how each of them finds its specific teleological role within the context of God’s revelation of himself in Jesus Christ.
5. Conclusion
In conclusion, the aim of this article was to show how Wittgenstein’s philosophy does not match Ratzinger’s caricature of it. This was done for the sake of clearing certain misunderstandings that have precluded fruitful dialog between those who are intellectual descendants of Ratzinger and Wittgenstein. By adopting Kerr’s and others’ reception of Wittgenstein, Ratzingerians are invited to understand his philosophical musings as helping humans embrace their creatureliness and, in a certain respect, to situate themselves in a preparatory posture for receiving God’s revelation. Wittgenstein’s philosophy is, therefore, able to enhance our understanding of the radicality of God’s revelation of himself and make us open to the mystery and wonder within the ordinariness of everyday life. His philosophy can also help us appreciate the need for the diversity of language within the Church’s form of life. In particular, Wittgenstein’s linguistic insight about the exactitude of words complements and deepens Ratzinger’s notion of the relationship between dogmatic and scriptural language. This serves to attune us better to language’s role in facilitating a real and divinizing encounter with Christ. Ultimately, my hope is that theologians will seek to bring both these great twentieth-century thinkers together in conversation and not content themselves with the simplified caricatures of either of them.
