to say and what is wrong to say, thereby learning the “grammar” of that language thus
used. In learning to use it thus, one learns that peculiar mode of valuatively interpreting
one's experience and of regulating one's life that it is the function of religious language to
be expressive of. In learning the language, the person learns to interpret experience and
orient life in the religious way.
What is that way? Wittgenstein assumes that most of us already know; we don't await his
telling us. Accordingly, he doesn't say much on the matter, apart from emphasizing the
characteristic unshakeability and comprehensiveness of religious belief. Speaking of a
man who believes in the Last Judgment, Wittgenstein says that “he has what you might
call an unshakeable belief. It will show, not by reasoning or by appeal to ordinary
grounds for belief, but rather by regulating for in all his life. This is a very much stronger
fact—foregoing pleasures, always appealing to this picture. This in one sense must be
called the firmest of all beliefs, because the man risks things on account of it which he
would not do on things which are by far better established for him. Although he
distinguishes between things well-established and not well-established” (1966, 54).
As already noted, it follows from the above points that religious beliefs are not
explanations or hypotheses, nor are religious rituals attempts at causal efficacy. A typical
charge against religious beliefs is that they are poor explanations and ill-grounded
hypotheses, and against religious rituals that they are patently ineffective. That is what
Wittgenstein, in his remarks on Frazer's The Golden Bough, took Frazer to be saying.
Such charges represent a gross misunderstanding of religion. “Frazer is much more
savage than most of his savages,” says Wittgenstein, “for these savages will not be so far
from any understanding of spiritual matters as an Englishman of the twentieth century.
His explanations of the primitive observances are much cruder than the sense of the
observances themselves” (1971, 34).
What accounts for Wittgenstein's fury? It arises, I suggest, from his life-long sense that
religion goes deep in human life, coupled with his conviction that to construe religious
beliefs as explanations, and religious rituals as the technology of magic, is to treat
religion as something utterly trivial and misguided: the explanations turn out to be
oddball and the rituals, stupid. The whole approach must be brushed aside. The rituals
can be seen as a form of language, a symbolism in their own right; a language and a
symbolism which are expressive in characterWhen the adoption of a baby is marked by
the woman pulling the child from beneath her clothes, then, to use Wittgenstein's words,
“it is crazy to think there is an error in this and that she believes she has borne the child.”
The ritualistic gesture expresses her attitude to the adopted child; she will be as close to it
as if she had given birth to it. (Phillips 1976, 35)
A religion such as Christianity is not based, more or less securely, on claims about
historical facts. Instead, it offers us
end p.259
a (historical) narrative and says: now believe! But not, believe this narrative with the
belief appropriate to a historical narrative, rather: believe through thick and thin, which
you can do only as the result of a life. Here you have a narrative, don't take the same
attitude to it as you take to other historical narratives! Make a quite different place in
your life for it. There is nothing paradoxical about that!Queer as it sounds: The historical