attitudes. Religious language is concerned with God, with thanking God, praying to God
and praising God. It will not do at all to say that it is directed towards attitudes” (1997a,
61). And at the end of life, what one is answerable to is not one's attitudes, but to God.
Here is one impressive expression of such answerability:
I know only that when I see my life for what it is—see myself for what I am: when I see
how incapable I am of directing my life to anything holy—then the contemplation of
death is the greatest hope. (And I do not mean this in a negative sense: that here at last
will be an end of my own adding to my degradation.)I know that with death I shall reach
something not myself. That—saving possible nonsense in this—even my damnation will
have something divine about it
My tendency to write melius fuerit non vivere (“It would have been better not to live”) is
an expression ofunwillingness to know—which—if it masters me—will keep me from
seeing death as the sole beauty and majesty; as the centre of “Thy will be done.” To look
on death if this means looking away from the world—is again a form of deception: a
failure to see death as the word of God(Is this the tendency which finds its most vulgar
expression in “That will be glory for me”?). (Rhees 1997e, 235–37; see also Phillips
1970, 2001a)
What we have seen is that to believe in the things of the spirit is to believe in God. The
use of “belief” in this context refers to a conviction or confession,
end p.462
not to the epistemological use of “belief” which is a second-best to knowledge and which
turns religious belief into a matter of probability or epistemic trust. What is
acknowledged when God is acknowledged is the spirit, the light, the element in which the
believer sees all things. If I come to acknowledge the existence of Snowdon, having
denied it for some reason previously, I do so within a logical space I already possess, my
knowledge of other mountains, valleys, and so on, but if I come to acknowledge the
reality of divine grace for the first time, no prior logical space awaited it. I come to
acknowledge a spiritual reality, a kind of reality (Winch 1996). This is why to see one's
life as a gift of grace, or to lose this perception, is to have one's life wax or wane as a
whole. To acquire or to lose faith is not to change one's opinion within a perspective, but
to acquire or to lose a whole mode of illumination, the illumination of grace.
Given what has been said about the acknowledgment of a divine reality, it is not difficult
to see why it is important not to make a mistake about it. This is “Why people wish to say
that there is some reality corresponding' to our religious beliefs. I can see no objection to saying that, provided it is not thought to be the sort ofcorrespondence' (and the sort of
`reality') that we have in physics” (Rhees 1997a, 61). It is not like thinking that there is a
person in the room when it is empty, or thinking that something is gold when it is not.
What is involved, rather, is “The dangers of doing something that claims to be worship of
God, but is not really worship of God at all” (Rhees 1997a, 58). This would be giving
oneself to something unworthy of worship, something unworthy to be God. “Mistake”
and “idolatry” come to much the same thing in this context.
At the end of this section, I can do no more than indicate one example of what I take to
be the kind of mistake I have in mind. It is to be found in religious apologetics, in the
ways explanatory answers are given to the problem of evil, either in theodicies that claim