mystery and mumbo-jumbo

14
Philosophical Investigations 7:4 October 1984 ISSN 0190-0536 $2.50 Mystery and Mumbo-Jumbo Gordon Graham, University ofst. Andrews In this essay I propose to discuss what I find to be one of the most difficult, but at the same time most important problems in the philosophy of religion, the existence and character of mystery. There was a time when the philosophy of religion was all attack and defence, when its business was to provide some demonstration of the truth of theism or at least its reasonableness, or conversely its error and irrationality. In the movement known as linguistic phil- osophy this direct concern with content gave way to a more indirect concern with the character of religious belief and the true place of reason with respect to it. Under a motto which read “Philosophy leaves everything as it is” philosophers set themselves to analyse the logic or the structure of religious belief, and as this enterprise became intertwined with the older doctrine that nothing properly called religion could be encompassed within the limits of reason alone, attempts to provide beliefs with intellectual found- ations of a philosophical kind and attempts to undermine religion with philosophical arguments were eschewed. In my view these protestations of philosophical neutrality were always a little unconvincing. To begin with, for the most part it was only those sympathetic to religion who advocated neutrality and the ban on philosophical criticism was always one-sided. In the second place, there was always some concern to give religion credentials even if these consisted only in showing the mistaken nature of a good deal of intellectual criticism. Thirdly, and most importantly, there has always been a striking intimacy between the study of philosophy and theology such that any firm distinction between the two is much harder to draw than, say, a corresponding distinction in the fields of politics, art, psychology, or even ethics. And this intimacy is such that a ban on philosophical criticism and argument in religion and theology looks, on occasions, like a ban on all argument and criticism. Perhaps for these reasons the fashion has changed once more and 381

Upload: gordon-graham

Post on 02-Oct-2016

213 views

Category:

Documents


0 download

TRANSCRIPT

Philosophical Investigations 7:4 October 1984 ISSN 0190-0536 $2.50

Mystery and Mumbo-Jumbo

Gordon Graham, University ofst. Andrews

In this essay I propose to discuss what I find to be one of the most difficult, but at the same time most important problems in the philosophy of religion, the existence and character of mystery. There was a time when the philosophy of religion was all attack and defence, when its business was to provide some demonstration of the truth of theism or at least its reasonableness, or conversely its error and irrationality. In the movement known as linguistic phil- osophy this direct concern with content gave way to a more indirect concern with the character of religious belief and the true place of reason with respect to it. Under a motto which read “Philosophy leaves everything as it is” philosophers set themselves to analyse the logic or the structure of religious belief, and as this enterprise became intertwined with the older doctrine that nothing properly called religion could be encompassed within the limits of reason alone, attempts to provide beliefs with intellectual found- ations of a philosophical kind and attempts to undermine religion with philosophical arguments were eschewed.

In my view these protestations of philosophical neutrality were always a little unconvincing. To begin with, for the most part it was only those sympathetic to religion who advocated neutrality and the ban on philosophical criticism was always one-sided. In the second place, there was always some concern to give religion credentials even if these consisted only in showing the mistaken nature of a good deal of intellectual criticism. Thirdly, and most importantly, there has always been a striking intimacy between the study of philosophy and theology such that any firm distinction between the two is much harder to draw than, say, a corresponding distinction in the fields of politics, art, psychology, or even ethics. And this intimacy is such that a ban on philosophical criticism and argument in religion and theology looks, on occasions, like a ban on all argument and criticism.

Perhaps for these reasons the fashion has changed once more and 381

282 Philosophical Investigations

philosophical theology, that is, the philosophical investigation of religious belief and theological doctrines, has come into its own again. It will, let us hope, be better than it sometimes has been for the salutary attention to actual facts about religion which linguistic analysis occasioned. Be this how it may, it seems that there is to be found amongst philosophers at the present time a general recogni- tion of what must appear inevitable - that the philosophy of religion is not and cannot be a wholly second-order activity but on occasions speaks directly to the substance of religious belief. Yet to my mind there must remain some question whether the instincts of the linguistic analyst were wholly mistaken, and whether there is not something peculiar about religion that indeed makes it invulner- able to certain sorts of criticism. Consider the matter in this way.

I

At its most powerful, philosophical criticism employs the tech- nique of reductio ad absurdurn, showing that two beliefs which may appear innocent enough contain contradictory implications so that the man who asserts both takes away with one hand what he has given with the other. In fact to show the incoherence of some view or other is no more, and no less, than this; that sooner or later it ends in contradiction. I do not mean to suggest that this is all there is to philosophical criticism. There is no doubt a great deal that may be accomplished by the careful use of Occam’s razor, and the demonstration of circularity in arguments which presuppose what they are intended to prove is very important in philosophy, but at least in large part the power of philosophical criticism consists in showing that what we thought was true or at least reasonable is in fact incoherent because impossible and impossible because contra- dictory.

Now this should give philosophers of religion pause, if, that is to say, they have even a passing acquaintance with the world’s reli- gions. The reason is this. We will find the detection of contradic- tion compelling if and only if it is something we strive to avoid, but the curious fact is that religion and theology abound in contradic- tions and the assertion of these contradictions, graced by the name of paradox, seems very much to the taste and inclination of those who have much to say in this context. Ronald Hepburn has

Gordon Graham 283

remarked in this connection:

Paradoxical and near paradoxical language is the staple of accounts of God’s nature, and is not confined to rhetorical extravaganzas.’

If this is so, and it is certain that it is, philosophical arguments whose force consists in revealing contradictions will hardly trouble the religious believer or theologian a t all. Faced with our criticisms he will tell us that it comes as no surprise to him that what he says is contradictory since his business, after all, is with mystery and it is impossible that the mystery of a transcendent God should be wholly comprehended within the confines of human thought.

Should this rejoinder bother us? Can we not conclude that, whatever his reply, his thoughts on God are jumbled and confused and that if confusion is the staple of religion, so much the worse for it? Some of its philosophical critics would like us so to conclude, but we ought also to be troubled, I believe, by the thought which influenced the linguistic analysts, namely, that there seems to be something summary and too easy about this dismissal of a feature of human life which is without parallel in its universality, some sense that if this is the end of philosophical criticism, philosophers have missed the whole point of religion. And if they have, so much the worse for philosophy. Roy Holland expresses it nicely:

When you are presented with something that you think to be notjust accidentally mysterious but necessarily mysterious, there is always the danger that you have fallen into an obscurantist muddle. But while this is one of the worst sorts of muddle that can occur in philosophy, it is by no means the worst thing possible in philos- ophy. Far worse is the superficiality that conceives nothing to be unfathomable because it has fished only in coastal waters.’

It might be sufficient for some people simply to have this reminder or warning stated. Even if it is, they are still left with the greatest of difficulties, that of distinguishing between obscurantist muddle and mystery. But for others it will not be sufficient, and if it is not this is possibly because they are struck by the thought that perhaps contradictory assertions are the staple of those who deal in mystery just because there ir nothing that is necessarily mysterious, or

1. R. W. HeDburn: Christianitv and Paradox London 1958, D. 16 2. R. F. Holiand: “Is goodness a mystery?” in Against Empiricism Blackwell 1980, D. 93.

284 Philosophica[ Investigations

essentially mysterious. The problem here, in other words, is specially intractable and for that reason we must ask a t one and the same time, two questions: How do we tell mystery from mumbo- jumbo? Are there any unfathomable mysteries? This may seem absurdly ambitious but I propose to proceed in a rather negative manner by examining what others have said already. A few pre- liminary remarks are necessary first, however.

I have spoken of contradiction as a common mark of mystery, but I do not mean to imply that the existence or utterance of a contradictory assertion is either a necessary or sufficient condition of mystery. It is not a necessary condition because mysteries, if there are any, may also be marked by assertions which appear, so to speak, to be dramatically false rather than contradictory - like Socrates’ insistence that a good man cannot be harmed, or the Christian claim that God can hear silent prayer. O n the other hand, contradiction is not a sufficient condition of mystery because (and it is this which makes the whole subject peculiarly difficult) we cannot afford to dispense with the notion of objectionable con- tradiction, that is mumbo-jumbo. It is true that some wilder spirits amongst religious thinkers and some latter-day Hegelians have rejoiced in the omnipresence of contradiction and held that we must discard the law of non-contradiction if we are to achieve real understanding, but apart from the fact that their arguments, such as they are, often employ the suggestion that to do otherwise would be contradictory, I do not think that much effort needs to be expended in defence of the claim that objectionable contradiction is something we cannot do without. From the most mundane to the most elevated level it is vital to our activities because I cannot, for instance, ascertain and act upon your wishes respecting the dinner menu if you keep contradicting yourself, nor can the religious seer suppose that whatever the form in which they come, the claims of his opponents cannot be denied.

Contradictions, then, are neither inevitable nor invariable indica- tions that the subject in hand is mysterious. For the most part I shall restrict myself to contradictions, however, partly because these are peculiarly difficult and often most striking and partly because the question of mystery just is most important in the context of the world’s great religions where we do find contradictory assertions, like that of the Koran in which it is said that, though Allah is very far away, He is nearer than a man’s vein - or the claim of Christian theoloav that God is Three and One - or of the Buddha’s - that

Cordon G r a h a m 285

in Nirvana a man neither is nor is not. What I want to show first of all is that there may be occasions upon which the only things we can say are contradictory.

I1

Someone might take exception to talk of contradiction and hold that in religion it is paradoxes not contradictions with which we are concerned. Let us consider this distinction. It is commonly said and easy to say that paradoxes are apparent contradictions, i.e. asser- tions with the form of a contradiction which, if we understand them aright, are not really contradictions at all. This is the view of Kellenberger in his article “God and M y ~ t e r y ” ~ where he draws a distinction between contradictions of form and contradictions of meaning. This distinction constitutes only a small part of his argu- ment, in the course of which he makes the very important point that it is God’s nature, not His existence which is mysterious, but so far as it goes it is not satisfactory. Taken in one way it helps us not at all. If a paradox is something that looks like a contradiction but isn’t, then its analysans will give us, in non-contradictory form, just what the paradox aimed to assert. But in this case, leaving aside the rhetorical extravaganza, we will be left with nothing to wonder or puzzle about. There will be no suspicion of mystery. We can, if we like, call these cases paradoxes but then, I should claim, we have not yet managed to focus upon those peculiar items we set out to discuss. For instance, it is just because we think that the familiar saying “It’s raining and it isn’t” can be cashed out into a pretty plain statement about the weather that we do not believe there to be anything mysterious about the sort of day of which this might be said. One could, of course, because of its form, call it a paradox. But then, once again, it is not the sort of paradox in which we are interested if we are interested in mystery. If I am right about this we have to conclude that a paradox is really a paradox the less seeming its contradictory character and the more it aspires to the real thing.

In a paper to the Aristotelian Society, Ian Ramsey4 tries to deal with paradox and contradiction in a similar but more sophisticated

3. J. Kellenberger: “God and mystery” American Philosophical Quarterly Vol. I1 1974. 4. I . Ramsey: 33. 1959.

“Paradox in Religion” Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume

286 Philosophical Investigatioris

way by offering a classification of different types of contradiction. First of all we can distinguish avoidable paradoxes, obvious muddles. Secondly there are paradoxes which are also avoidable but which nevertheless have a point to make. Thirdly, and most importantly are those upon which we are trying to focus - unavoidable paradoxes, part of whose nature, we might say, is their contradictory form. Now the idea that there is something unavoidable in paradox seems to me suggestive and I shall come back to it but I think it will be found that Ramsey’s general attempt to classify different types of paradox is mistaken in just the way that Kellenberger’s simpler distinction, and indeed any general attempt to distinguish between paradox and contradiction, is mistaken, because just in so far as paradoxes of the first two types are dealt with, they cease to be paradoxical. With respect to the first, we are told that these are obvious muddles, but what could be more obviously contradictory than the remarks in the Isa Upanishads about Brahman that “It is both far and near; It is within all this and It is outside all this”? If it is an obvious muddle, there is no paradox; if it really is paradoxical its obviousness only underlines that fact and does nothing to remove it. The second category, we are told, are avoidable contradictions which nonetheless make a point. But again, if we suppose that this point can be made in a non- paradoxical way, the point has nothing paradoxical about it, and if the paradox is necessary to making the point, it is unclear in what sense the paradox is avoidable.

The problem as I see it is this. What we call paradoxes are troublesome in part because they appear to be contradictions. Our efforts to get rid of the trouble by dispelling the contradictions can only succeed, however, at the expense of the paradox, that is, a t the expense of eliminating every element of paradox. Ramsey has a third category, what he calls unavoidable paradoxes, but we have now seen reason to think that this may be something of a pleonasm, that their unavoidable character is the important part. Paradox is thus not to be understood as a logical form akin to contradiction, conjunction or disjunction but rather something, anything, which is intellectually objectionable but nevertheless unavoidable. This is its important feature. Consequently, on occa- sions a paradox may rightly be described as an apparent rather than a real contradiction but in so far as it really is a paradox nothing much turns on this fact. Consider, by way of illustration of this the

Gordon Graham 287

Christian doctrine of the Incarnation. According to this doctrine Jesus of Nazareth was both fully human and fully divine. The doctrine arose because theologians saw, or thought they saw, in the work and words ofJesus, evidences of both humanity and divinity. It is certainly a paradoxical doctrine and the history of Christian theology contains numerous attempts to resolve the paradox by opting exclusively for humanity or divinity. Orthodoxy has always resisted these atrempts and insisted upon the truth of the paradox. In doing so, however, it does not contravene the law of non- contradiction, for as it stands the claim that Jesus was fully human does not contradict the claim that he was fully divine. It does so only if we add the assertion that what is fully human cannot be fully divine. Now it is whether or not to add this assertion that is under dispute. The orthodox theologian can consistently maintain that this additional proposition is not true without qualification since Jesus is the one instance, perhaps the only one, where it does not apply. Furthermore, he might refuse to accept any expansion of the concepts of humanity and divinity that would make the paradox a straightforward contradiction, jus t because to accept it would involve him in contradiction. We may think that this is sophistry of some sort, in the belief that the theologian must accept some expan- sion of these concepts, but he is surely entitled to claim that precisely because of his respect for the law of non-contradiction, he cannot do so.

The point of the example is this. The paradox in this case is not a contradiction but it accomplishes very little to show that it is not because the sense in which it is a seeming contradiction is the sense in which it is impossible to show that it is not a contradiction, but equally impossible to show that it is. In other words, thought is here, so to speak, holed up in a corner with the result that an unsatisfactory conclusion, the doctrine of the Incarnation, is unavoidable. Any success, then, which meets our endeavours to separate paradox and outright contradiction, is to no avail.

I shall describe the paradoxical therefore as the unavoidably objectionable in thought. This enables us to distinguish between mystery and mumbo-jumbo. Mysteries are marked by paradox,

288 Philosophical Investigations

mumbo-jumbo by contradiction, and paradoxes are intellectually objectionable assertions which are at the same time unavoidable. This way of speaking has the advantage of enabling us to accommodate in the category of paradox those assertions to which I referred earlier, which are not contradictory so much as dramati- cally false. The trouble with the paradox that “a good man cannot be harmed” lies in the fact that patent falsehood seems to be the unavoidable conclusion of Socrates’ (let us suppose) compelling arguments. However, though we now have a distinction between mystery and mumbo-jumbo we are not much further on, because, as I pointed out, distinguishing between these two and deciding whether or not there are any essential mysteries, are questions which cannot be treated separately. Any doubt about the second, therefore, has not been assuaged by my distinction but only com- pelled to take another form, namely, in what sense are intellectually objectionable assertions ever really unavoidable?

It is tempting to think that it must be logical unavoidability, and this I think is what Ramsay holds. The precise import of the terms “logic” and “logical” is not always very clear, but in this context I think it is easy to see that it cannot be the rules of logic which force paradox upon us. In the firat place there is a sense in which, as Lewis Carroll’s famous tale about Achilles and the Tortoise illus- tates, logic cannot take us by the throat and force us to do anything. If we discover that there is after all something whereof we cannot speak, we are, in principle at least, free to pass over it in silence. But in any case I think it will be found with almost every paradox, that if we try hard enough, and sometimes not very hard, a little logical juggling can remove any necessity to proceed to contradiction. All paradoxes emerge in a context of thought and reflection. They are without the necessary compulsion or unavoidability if they are announced, as it were, out of the blue. Because this is so we always have available to us the possibility of rejecting or abandoning the premisses or starting points from which the paradox has sprung. Consider again the doctrine of thc Incarnation. I said that this doctrine arose out of the evidences of the Gospels, evidences of Christ’s humanity and His divinity. Faced with the inevitability of paradox we can of course relinquish these evidences or their in- terpretation and thereby avoid the paradox. The interesting fact, of course, is that this is precisely what orthodox Christians have not wanted to do, but since the Gospels constitute the beginning of

Gordon Graham 289

their reflections, the compulsion at this point cannot be a logical one. There may be more to be said than this brief argument allows, of course, but in the long run I do not see that we can show the unavoidable character of paradox to be logical. Logic is just too flexible. It never compels us to stop thinking and leaves open always the possibility of revision. If logic is the only constraint upon our thought, therefore, there are no paradoxes, only contra- dictions which, as I have said, we must strive to avoid. And because there are no paradoxes there is, a t least in the context in which I have been arguing, no reason to talk of mystery.

To say that paradox is unavoidable is a curious remark in itself, for it seems that as far as logic goes, you can always avoid it if you want. This way of putting it suggests that the source of the com- pulsion must lie in our not wanting to avoid it, that the compulsion is, in a manner of speaking, psychological. If the term “logical” has its difficulties “psychological” is worse no doubt, but I hope in what follows to lend it at least sufficient precision for my purposes. By psychological I do not mean to refer to anything akin to kleptomania, about which there are in any case considerable prob- lems. I have in mind rather the sense in which I think Wittgenstein regarded paradox as psychologically compelling, in his “Lecture on Ethics”, an essay of obvious importance to the subject of mystery. Here Wittgenstein concludes:

I can see now that these nonsensical expressions were not nonsensical because I had not found the correct expression, but that their nonsensicality was their very essence . . . My whole tendency and I believe the tendency of all men who ever tried to write or talk Ethics or Religion was to run against the boundaries of language. This running against the walls of our cage is perfectly, absolutely hopeless . . . But it is a document of a tendency in the human mind.5

What is the tendency exactly? It is not merely a tendency to come out with such utterances, but a need to come out with them. The examples of paradox that Wittgenstein gives are not all of a kind on my view, but of one at least he is right in saying that it springs from a certain experience of a rather profound kind. It is the attempt to articulate this experience that ends in paradox but, and this is the important point, the desire to articulate it is greater than the desire to avoid nonsense. In other words one wants to avoid contradiction

5. L. Wittgenstein: “A Lecture on Ethics” Philosophical Review Vol. 74 1965, p. 11,

290 Philosophical Iiivestigationr

and the palpably false, but sometimes what we want, because of our experience, is “just to go beyond the world and, that is to say, beyond significant language”. According to Wittgenstein, then, we want for the most part and for very good reason to avoid nonsense, but sometimes nonsense is just what we want.

What can we conclude from this? Since nonsense is nonsense whatever way you look a t it there can, if I have understood Witt- genstein correctly, be no question of correcting the nonsense and retaining what we want. What is called for is not intellectual analysis but a judgement of value. Are there occasions upon which nonsense is a price worth paying for speech? As he remarks to Waismann “I can only say: I don’t belittle this human tendency; I take my hat off to it. And here it is essential that this is not a sociological description but that I speak for myself.”’ Someone might hold that nonsense is valuable if there really are mysteries in human experience, not if there are not. But on the strength of my earlier argument and on Wittgenstein’s view, this is a mistake for there are not two questions here but one only. To value paradox is to hold that there are mysteries; to hold that there are mysteries is to value paradox. Consequently, it appears that in answer to the question, Are there any mysteries? I can only speak for myself.

It should now be clear that we have reached an unfortunate position. For very good reasons we have rejected all attempts to dissolve or analyse paradoxes and are therefore in agreement with Wittgenstein. But this appears to commit us to his final conclusion, which has the result of making the assertion of paradox and the “perception” mystery a wholly subjective affair and thus one in which it is impossible to guard against the arbitrary direction of whim and fancy. If I can only speak for myself anyone who raises a question or an objection must also only be speaking for himself. The mysteries of life and death are thus on a par with differences of taste.

I am not sure if this is a true implication of Wittgenstein’s own views but my purpose is not the exposition of Wittgenstein. In the concluding section of this essay I want to show that we can accept his claim that the nonsensicality of paradox is of its essence without being forced into radical subjectivism.

6. Ibid. 7. Ibid. p. 16

Gordon Graham 291

IV

Wittgenstein regards paradox as the result of an attempt to go beyond significant language. He held this view because of a certain account of language to which he adhered and which, it seems reasonable to think, he later found reason to revise. It is hard to say, therefore, whether at the time his lecture was written, Wittgenstein meant this view of paradox to carry the implication that paradox- ical utterances are nonsensical in the fullest sense. But whatever his view at this time or subsequently it does seem wrong to think of paradoxes as utterly nonsensical and even plausible, if somewhat problematic, to think of them as assertions with a truth value. The reason is this. One piece of nonsense is as good as another but clearly one paradox is not as good as another. Contradictions cannot assert and cannot therefore be denied but it appears that for many paradoxes at least there are others which look very like the assertion of the opposite. Take Wittgenstein’s own example. He sometimes has, he tells us, an experience which he can only describe as “feeling absolutely safe, whatever happens”. As he points out, on the face of it this is contradictory. To be safe is to be safe from some catastrophe or other, and if this catastrophe should befall us we are not safe from it. We cannot therefore be safe whatever happens. Interpreted in this way Wittgenstein’s claim is nonsense and cannot describe an experience adequately. If one piece of nonsense is as good as another it ought to be the case that the experience is as adequately (or inadequately) expressed by the utter- ance “I feel absolutely doomed, whatever happens”. But of course the two utterances are not interchangeable. One expresses some- thing quite different from the other and we may conclude therefore that each says something.

There may be some resistence to the idea, however, that either asserts anything. Might these not be expressions of attitudes? I cannot provide any conclusive arguments to settle this question but there are at least some pointers which suggest that it is right to think of paradoxes as assertions. First, many theological paradoxes, which it would be quite implausible to regard as expressions of attitudes, share the feature I have been discussing. For instance the paradox that God, thought not in time, acts in time, may be contrasted with the claim that God, though in time, acts out of time. Both may be shown, on a superficial level. to be contradic-

292 Philosophical Investigations

tory, but each says something different. (Possibly the second says nothing at all, but this strengthens rather than weakens my claim). Secondly, the disconcerting existence of truth-valued contradic- tions, for which I have been pleading, may be made more palatable by reminding ourselves of another class of utterances with which we are more at home - true falsehoods in the form of metaphors. “My smile falls heavily among the bric-a-brac”, T. S. Eliot writes, and though we can see at a superficial level that smiles are not the sorts of thing which behave in this way, we are not generally disposed to the view that Eliot is trading in evident falsehoods and are easily made sympathetic to the thought that this may indeed describe an action in a context most accurately. One valuable insight of the later Wittgenstein and the linguistic analysts was that actual uses of language may not conform to the ways in which logic sometimes inclines us to think that they must, and this observation holds as much for paradox as for metaphor and indeed less exotic expressions.

Resistence to the suggestion that paradoxes assert may arise from the suspicion that any such admission puts religious belief beyond the scope of rational criticism. Some of the things Wittgenstein says appear to bear this out. He concludes, for example, that there can be, as he puts it, no science of ethics or religion and this may be taken to imply that as far as religious and ethical beliefs of a fundamental kind are concerned, anything goes. But, of course, anything does not go. I have already offered an account of the distinction between paradox and mumbo-jumbo, the latter being something which we always have reason to discredit. From the fact, if it is one, that religious belief invariably and necessarily contains elements of paradox, it does not follow that it cannot contain a lot of nonsense also. Secondly, from the fact that paradox may be invulnerable to redtrctio ad absurdurn of a logical or concep- tual kind, it does not follow that it is constrained by nothing, even that there is no sense in which paradoxes cannot be flatly absurd. There is a parallel with metaphor here. To call a man a mouse is different from calling him an elephant. Either or neither may be accurate or inaccurate descriptions of his character, even though both are, in a sense, plainly false. Usage constrains use in different ways, and again I see no reason why this observation should not apply to paradox also. The proof of my claim might be thought to be the production of some of these constraints on paradox, but in

Gordon Graham 293

fact I do not think this can be done in a general way but only by examining particular cases.* In like manner, I do not think it possible to set out any general constraints upon the use of meta- phor, especially novel metaphors in poetry, but this does not alter the fact that criticism in poetry is possible. Anyone who doubts this cannot have read the best of literary criticism, and similarly anyone who thinks that once paradoxes are admitted and taken seriously, sustained and critical thought is not possible, cannot have read any substantial theology and must surely be perplexed by the number of pages theologians are able to fill9 Thirdly, I have suggested that often the unavoidability of paradox arises from our need and desire to do justice to our experience. Consequently, since religious be- lievers are not a tiny minority of mankind whose beliefs may reasonably be suspected of being the result of hallucination, or even a select number of recipients of mystical experience, there is scope for the comparison, refinement and re-identification of genuine religious experience and its expression in paradox. Furthermore, it is plausible to think that even some of the most abstruse theological constructions ultimately rest upon common, though by no means universal, experiences commonly expressed in paradox. For example, D. M. Baillie in his celebrated book God wac in Christ tries to show that the doctrine of the Incarnation is a paradox which cannot be dispensed with precisely because of the need to articulate the experience of grace, i.e. the experience of a power, not ourselves, that works for righteousness within us.

There are of course many to whom this sort of talk means nothing, just as there are some to whom poetry is a closed book. I do not know whether there is any way of settling the dispute between them and those to whom religious experience is very real. As we saw, according to Wittgenstein what is called for here is a judgement of value. And he construes this in such a way that sooner or later the disagreement between those who are convinced of the reality of things not seen and those who regard them as deluded must pass the possibility of intellectual resolution. How- ever, my purpose has been a more limited one than finding the

8. This is not something peculiar to paradox. The history of philosophy has shown that the possibility of ageneral account of truth conditions or assertability conditions for quite plain statements of fact is far from evident. 9. One tine example is D. M. Baillie’s book referred to below.

294 Philosophical Investigations

means to judge the truth or the value of religion. What my argu- ment purports to show is that we may admit the possibility of paradoxes which assert truths and still employ the category of objectionable contradiction; that the existence of mystery and para- dox, even if essential to religion does not imply a state of licence in religious beliec and that, since religious believers and theologians are not less susceptible to conceptual muddle and logical faux pas than anyone else, acknowledgement of the necessarily mysterious does not leave philosophical theology with much less to do.

Department of Moral Philosophy The University St Andrews Scotland, KY 16 9AL