ABSTRACT
The story of Wittgenstein’s presence in contemporary philosophy of religion is a peculiar and in many respects a tragic one. This is in part due to the late appearance of his own writings on religion. While none of these appeared until 1966, the perceived character of the ‘Wittgensteinian interpretation of religion’ had by then already been established by virtue of the work of certain of his followers, who carefully applied leitmotifs of the Philosophical Investigations so as to illuminate problems of religious language. The result was that Wittgenstein’s view of religion appeared to be known even before many had heard what he himself had written, and (here’s the tragedy) that view was habitually understood in terms of ‘fideism’: religion was a ‘language-game’, a ‘form of life’ neither requiring justification nor susceptible to criticism or explanation. Absence of such notions in Wittgenstein’s own considerations of religion seemed to make little difference to these characterisations. The die had been cast. Whenever Wittgenstein’s name was mentioned with regard to religion, the talk was always to be of how religious discourse has its own criteria of meaningfulness, truth and falsity, and it was hard not to think that his approach was specifically designed to protect religion from positivist censure.1 I wish to make no comment on the validity of fideistic devices, but mention this for the sole purpose of highlighting a regrettable feature of the way Wittgenstein’s thoughts on religion have been addressed and appropriated, namely that readers find in Wittgenstein’s writings what they expect to find there rather than what is actually there. And what is actually there is in fact infinitely more interesting, complex and challenging than the occasionally banal glosses which are now so familiar.
