Evidently, people remain intrigued by the religious dimensions of Wittgenstein's philosophy, as well as by the meaning of his voiced thoughts on religious belief and, indeed, by the contributions made by those philosophers who seek to apply his insights to the problems of the philosophy of religion. As there has been such a wide variety of interpretations of the Wittgensteinian view – fideism, non-realism, disguised atheism, etc. – it would seem that at least some commentators are reading Wittgenstein incorrectly. In this new book, Earl Stanley B. Fronda traces the misunderstanding of Wittgenstein's view of religion to a single oversight: the obliviousness of commentators to the apophatic tradition in Christian thought. Once this apophatic tradition – typified by the via negativa and a recognition that God cannot be positively described – is recognized as an important tradition within Christianity, and once the thoughts on religion offered by Wittgenstein and his followers (notably D. Z. Phillips) are seen to be consistent with negative theology, then Wittgenstein will no longer be regarded as a fringe figure outside the mainstream.

Fronda begins by exploring the now-famous comment made by Wittgenstein to M. O'C. Drury: ‘I am not a religious man, but I can't help seeing every problem from a religious point of view’. Fronda is concerned to work out what this ‘religious point of view’ amounts to, and he locates it in mysticism, a contention that is borne out by the ‘theological’ passages of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and by Wittgenstein's correspondence with Paul Engelmann and Ludwig von Ficker. Armed with this view, Fronda attempts a Pseudo-Dionysian interpretation of the mystical passages of the Tractatus. The silence demanded at the end of the Tractatus is thus no positivistic denial of the importance of religion, but is rather entirely of a piece with Pseudo-Dionysius’ view that silence is the terminus of theology. This much seems reasonable, even enlightening. What is far more controversial is Fronda's frequently voiced contention in this book that there is ‘no fundamental difference between the Tractarian and the mature Wittgenstein on matters of religion. Thus, if the Tractarian Wittgenstein's religious position qualifies as mysticism, then so does the mature Wittgenstein's’ (p. 21). We will return to the problematic nature of this claim shortly, but – to continue outlining the argument of this book – Fronda next turns his attention to Wittgenstein's later work, looking (for example) at what the Wittgensteinian tradition has to say about miracles, the standard arguments for the existence of God, and the nature of religious language. The most interesting aspect of these sections is Fronda's suggestion that the key to understanding Wittgenstein's view is the analogous relationship between God-talk and mind-talk: ‘speaking of God, like speaking of the mind, can be done meaningfully only via criteria’ (p. 87), bodily behaviour in the case of the mind, and ‘God's effects’ (namely creation) in the theological case. In the final part of the book, Fronda levels a series of criticisms against non-realist interpretations of Wittgenstein, and defends Wittgensteinian philosophers of religion (principally Phillips) against the charge that Wittgensteinianism ‘propagates theological positions that are so unorthodox as to be bizarre even’ (p. 190). For Fronda, the Wittgensteinian approach to religious belief is straightforwardly in line with an apophatic and Plotinian tradition, and the objection that Wittgensteinianism is unorthodox is rooted purely in ignorance: critics of the Wittgensteinian approach ‘are either nescient or just oblivious of the existence of the apophatic tradition with its long and respected history in Christendom’ (p. 206). By offering such an apophatic interpretation of the work of Wittgenstein and his followers, Fronda has sought in this book to place Wittgenstein squarely in the Christian tradition and to show how Wittgensteinianism occupies an orthodox place within traditional theology. Throughout the book, a great many interesting connections are drawn between Wittgenstein and notable Christian thinkers, and the account given of Wittgenstein's early thought is well undertaken.

Three criticisms need to be registered concerning Fronda's project and its execution. First, although his apophatic reading of the Tractatus is legitimate and persuasive, this view cannot be thoroughly applied to the entirety of Wittgenstein's thinking on matters religious. There simply are too many differences between the early and late Wittgenstein to permit such an easy transition, and Fronda's attempts to show a seamless continuity between the phases of Wittgenstein's work are not compelling. For example, he states that Wittgenstein's mature philosophy of language (just like the view articulated in the Tractatus) ‘still delineates a limit to what can be said’ (p. 53), but that tells us very little about the mature Wittgenstein's view of religion (or of anything at all, actually). Again, Fronda quotes Wittgenstein's comment to Drury that his fundamental ideas ‘came to him early in life’, drawing the ill-grounded conclusion that ‘mysticism is likely to be one such fundamental idea’ (p. 219). Much more textual support is needed to demonstrate that Wittgenstein's later view retains the mystical dimension of the Tractatus, and the only way to do this would be to explore the later-phase writings on religion, such as the ‘Lectures on Religious Belief’. Strangely, however, Fronda spends little time discussing that text (presumably because it doesn't support the apophatic reading), and relies rather on reports of conversations Wittgenstein had with others. But the ‘Lectures on Religious Belief’ deserve a lot more attention than they are given here, and the views put forward there differ markedly from the apophatic content of the Tractatus. What Wittgenstein has to say there about (for example) belief in the Last Judgment is suggestive of a moral interpretation of religion: in line with his remark that although religion is belief, ‘it is really a way of living’, the claim of the mature Wittgenstein seems to be that a religion is, in some way or another, an aid to conduct, a collection of regulating pictures which serve to reinforce a distinctive morality, ‘rules of life … dressed up in pictures’ (Culture and Value, p. 29). Obviously, that is an overly simplified version of what is going on in Wittgenstein's later view of religion, but such material should really be given greater attention by Fronda (even though it might be seen to support the non-realist view of Wittgenstein that he is keen to dismiss).

Another omission in Fronda's overview of the Wittgenstein literature is even more striking. While at least some consideration of the ‘Lectures on Religious Belief’ is to be found in Fronda's book, there is absolutely no mention (not even in the bibliography) of a set of notes which constitute Wittgenstein's most incisive thoughts on religion: the Remarks on Frazer's Golden Bough. (Is Fronda oblivious of the existence of the Remarks?) Downplaying the significance of this text is not an unusual element in the work of those seeking to, as it were, ‘Christianize’ Wittgenstein – the classic example of this is Cyril Barrett's Wittgenstein on Ethics and Religious Belief –and the reasons for so doing are obvious. For the Remarks on Frazer deal, not with the beliefs of Christians, but with the ritual practices of so-called ‘primitive’ peoples the world over, and what Wittgenstein says here stands in marked contrast with the picture Fronda wishes to paint of an orthodox, traditional Christian believer. Not only does Wittgenstein speak of the profundity of magical practices and the depth of human sacrifice, but he also moves still further away from the apophatic theology of his earlier thought. Statements about gods (and, by extension, about God) are not to be seen as violations of the boundaries of sense indicating the reality of the ineffable, but as utterances which are in some manner expressive. Thus:

Such a remark encapsulates something crucial in Wittgenstein's later thought about religion: to understand religious utterances, one must look to the context in which the utterance is made, and what the speaker is doing, or trying to achieve, by means of it. One can then see that statements about (for example) God do not ‘go beyond’ what can be said, but have a perfectly legitimate contextual meaning. Of course, one has then to move away from thinking that an instance of God-talk refers to any being or person (even an ineffable one): ‘The way you use the word “God” does not show whom you mean – but, rather, what you mean’ (Culture and Value, p. 50).

A third criticism concerns the evidence used to support the claim that the mature Wittgenstein embraces apophatic theology. As already indicated, Fronda underutilizes the vital texts relating to Wittgenstein's mature religious thoughts, and probably overutilizes conversational evidence. (As an aside, it really is remarkable how Wittgensteinians pore over each gnomic conversational utterance from the master, certain that there must be vital significance in everything he said. We seem to have here something like a Wittgensteinian Hadith.) Fronda's use of conversational fragments is sometimes combined with a willingness to pursue tenuous connections to arrive at a desired conclusion. For example, in his attempt to illustrate the possible influence of Aquinas on Wittgenstein's religious thought (a difficult undertaking, since Wittgenstein has extraordinarily little to say about Aquinas), Fronda notes that the Summa Theologica was one of only a few philosophical works in Wittgenstein's possession when he died. This, of course, is not enough evidence to support the claim that Aquinas influenced Wittgenstein, so Fronda connects this with another piece of (conversational) evidence. I quote at length:

This really is not sufficient evidence for Aquinas’ influence on Wittgenstein, of course. Even the reported comment about the landlord's unread books doesn't show that Wittgenstein must have read his own copy of the Summa: he wasn't criticizing Reverend Morgan for having one or two books that he hadn't read, but a whole wall of unread books, put there simply to impress people. And even if Wittgenstein did read the Summa, we do not, in the absence of any explicit written remarks, have any grounds for thinking he was impressed by – rather than critical of – Aquinas. Wittgenstein read Frazer, after all, but certainly wasn't influenced by him.

Ultimately, however, the insuperable problem involved in presenting an account of Wittgenstein's theology, or his philosophy of religion, or his general religious thought, is that there is very little unity in his thinking on these issues. What we find instead is, rather, a collection of what Iris Murdoch fittingly called ‘exasperating hints’, and Wittgenstein's comments on religion – often penetrating and incisive, frequently enigmatic – tend to be situational and largely critical, with Wittgenstein keen to expose the shortcomings of some particular approach to religious belief (Frazer's intellectualism, for example), rather than being intent on advancing any positive doctrines. This, of course, is consistent with the project of his later philosophy, which does not elaborate theoretical positions but rather aims to expose the confusions inherent in philosophical questions. So while there is much to glean from what Wittgenstein has to say about the mystical in the Tractatus, or how he attacks philosophical theology as ‘something indecent’, or how he criticizes intellectualist accounts of magical practices (and so on), these investigations should ideally stay specifically focused on those individual issues. The project of looking into Wittgenstein's religious thought as a whole is probably a fruitless one. We may have reached the end of the road here.