Religious Language and the Sublime

 

            And in these examples, some attitudes at least approach the religious, which springs from human responses to the natural and cultural worlds as well as to the significance other people can have. One might think of experiences that can go deep: the beauty and goodness of – a long marriage characterized by love and fidelity; the courage of a mother giving birth, or a bystander risking their life at the train station to protect a victim from a violent gang; or a nurse whose comportment around mentally ill patients of the severest sort is without a trace of condescension or sense that these souls would be better off never having been born (Gaita). What it means for God to exist is dependent from the wonder some people feel over existence; the horror some feel over evil, guilt, death; the sublimity of selfless love or courage. Though such things may be deeply meaningful without any reference to God, it is in such matrices that authentic religious beliefs originate and religiously significant attitudes are cultivated. This is the kind of reality such attitudes correspond to, a reality connected to facts but never reducible to them. These religiously significant attitudes do not correspond to reality (the facts) but organize reality into meaningful experience; they are the light which is necessary for reality to appear to us; they function somewhat as criteria do to that of which they are criteria – as the geometrically defined, ideal circle functions with respect to empirically real circles.

            As people use the language of religion in the context of their lives, God is the object of various kinds of prayer and worship: expressing gratitude, reverence, existential fears, deep wishes, needs for comfort, and so on. The language is set apart from everyday language: the language of prayer and worship is not only often ritualized to demarcate it from everyday language, but at its best is more pure than ordinary language – the authentic prayer or worship attempts to express the heart uncluttered by egotistic wishes. This is where the language of the sacred makes contact with reality; not in correspondence to states of affairs in the world. Religious language is the language of the sublime.

            Does this mean it is nonsensical? In a way, Wittgenstein (as least the author of the Tractatus) would have shared the view of those atheists who claim that God talk is not so much false as meaningless – that the language of the sublime is meaningless. If the sense that language can have be restricted to the expression of possible, experience-able factual states of affairs in the physical universe, then the language of the sublime would have to be nonsensical, since by definition the sublime transcends possible, experience-able states of affairs in the universe. Nevertheless, though nonsense, Wittgenstein thought that the sublime (which he called the mystical) was the source of everything that mattered in human life – even the physical world takes on significance for us (or not) in light of that which cannot be expressed: religious or metaphysical attitudes. (As I indicated above, this radical demarcation between fact and value presupposes a certain cosmology – that of modern science: the belief (and it can be no more than a belief) that modern science mirrors nature, the physical universe. The consequence of this dualism: “Not how the world is is the mystical, but that it is.”)

            It is important to note that all religiously relevant attitudes – including atheistically influenced ones – are sublime (and thus metaphysical): they transcend any possible factual-scientific state of affairs. It may help at this point to make the structure of the sublime and the meaning of sublime language clearer, which I will do using Thomas Weiskel’s three phrase model. First, a contrast to everyday experience is presupposed. Linguistically speaking, signifiers (words) have a conventional relation to that which is signified (referents). Psychologically “the mind is in a determinate relation to the object, and this relation is habitual, more of less unconscious (preconscious in the Freudian sense) and harmonious (22).” A father, to take an example suggested by Cordner, has a conventional relationship to his children: he is preoccupied by work, does his duty by the children – reads to them in the evening, etc – but experiences all this as something normal, everyday, something typical for his culture. We might say this relationship is somewhat shallow without intending a moral judgment. And this shallow relationship is interwoven with the meaning the language of family (son, daughter, love, duty, etc.) has for him, again understood in a rather literal, conventional way.

            And then, in the second phase, something happens to radically disrupt this conventional relationship: he loses a child in an auto accident or, less dramatically, is moved by some loving gesture of the child.

 

The habitual relation of mind and object suddenly breaks down. Surprise or astonishment is the effective correlative, and there is an immediate of a disconcerting disproportion between inner and outer. Either mind or object is suddenly in excess – and then both are, since their relation has become radically indeterminate (22-23).

 

In terms of Wittgenstein, the event unsettles the conventional attitude (and the interconnected meanings of the language of family). The habitual attitude breaks down. Like Tolstoy’s Ivan Ilyich, he begins to see his previous life with his children in a new, critical light.

            In the third and final stage – assuming it comes at all – a fresh, new relationship is established. This new relationship, incorporating the excess Weiskel identified, has a different character:

…the mind recovers a fresh balance between outer and inner by constituting a fresh relation between itself and object such that the very indeterminacy that erupted in phase two is taking as symbolizing the mind’s relation to a transcendent order. This new relation has a “meta” character that distinguishes it from the homologous relation of habitual perception (23; emphasis mine).

 

The father – again, like Ivan Ilyich – has come to see his children in a different light; has come to change the attitude he has towards them. It is like the linguistic change between conventional uses of words like son, daughter, father, including the ways a sociologist might perhaps use the words in his work, to the super-charged uses of these words in religious poetry – language “used at full stretch” reflecting a deeper love for the children. And the conversion is not restricted to how the father experiences his children; in a sense, he now lives in a different world.

            I would like to connect this change in attitude with something more recognizably religious by reflecting on another example, one used by Peter Winch. We are asked to imagine a pre-historic mountain tribe whose birth, death, initiation, and marriage rituals include a ceremonious moment of silent contemplation of the mountains, prostrating their bodies before the mountains: “I should want to say that members of the tribe were expressing something like reverence and even religious awe (110-111).” A further marker that would bring these practices into analogy with practices we designate as religious would be the degrees of devoutness with which different tribe members performed these rites. Winch notes that in other tribes the solemnity and gravity he associates with his example could be expressed with gaiety, but that would not weaken the analogy. More essential to its religious character – the behavior would have to be

set apart …from everyday practical concerns…not in the sense that it has no connection at all with such concerns (on the contrary), but in the sense that it is stylized, ruled by conventional forms and perhaps thought of as stemming from long-standing traditions. I should also expect such rituals to be associated with a sense of wonder and awe at the grandeur and beauty of aspects of the tribe’s environment…. (111)

 

Winch thinks of religious language and images as growing out of this religious practice, and deriving its sense thereof.[1]

            We can see the sublime at work here. The rituals actualize some original experience of reverence or awe, with which significant events (birth, initiation, marriage, and death) are brought into association. These biological and sociological events are transformed by this association, transforming the way they are experienced. The rituals symbolize the relation of these events and the life of the tribe to a transcendent reality. Talk of the gods in this context has a “meta” character (like language in quotation marks), symbolizing the “very indeterminacy that erupted” when the object called forth the response of awe or reverence.

            This indeterminacy may be elucidated by Wittgenstein’s Tractatus distinction between propositions that represent possible states of affairs in the world and those that must employ the logical-grammatical language of representation but whose meaning cannot be determined by any possible state of affairs for the simple reason that no such worldly state of affairs is possible. In the Tractatus Wittgenstein famously just asserted the meaning of such literally meaningless, other-worldly (in the sense of not being reducible to any possible fact or set of facts in the world) “shows itself.” In his latter work, the notion of Einstellung / attitude previously discussed helps us to understand this showing better. The imaginary tribe undergoing the sublime experience of awe or reverence conceives of gods as objects of their worshipful attitude.

            The language of the sacred (sublime, mystical) that becomes part of their ritualized worship is set apart from everyday language – just as, for example, the language of the Eucharist for Catholics has a fundamentally different character from all other language uses. Here is a part of that language:

 

It is truly right to give you thanks, truly just to give you glory, Father, most holy, for you are the one God living and true, existing before all ages and abiding for all eternity, dwelling in unapproachable light; yet you, who alone are good, the source of life, have made all that is, so that you might fill your creatures with blessings and bring joy to many of them by the glory of your light.

 

The grammatical form here is (and must be) that of assertion, imperative, petition, and so on, drawing on everyday language and speech acts. For instance, the assertion, here paraphrased, that God has existed before human history, that in fact God has existed eternally, and that God is located within a kind of light that human beings could not approach – with the assumption that it would blind us – utilizes the language of assertion and can be stated as I have just done in propositional form. And of course, thought of as assertions, the language seems a bit crazy – mythological (in a derogatory sense) or superstitious as it would probably seem to a man for whom the scientific Enlightenment goes deep as an attitude towards the world. Clearly, it would make no sense in ordinary language to predicate eternity to an agent who performed actions in time – unless eternity meant not outside of time, but existing in time, considered as countless moments going back and forward as numbers to on a number line. If we could get the concepts to make logical sense, we are still left with the non-accidental impossibility of ever having any experience (to check) of what seem assertions of fact.

            But this switching from the language’s origin in the sublime to everyday factual and conceptual would be a bad misunderstanding – to treat the language of “showing” or gesturing towards the indeterminacy of the sublime as profane assertions. Such language, obviously, can only be figurative (or analogical in Aquinas’s sense). The problems with figurative language will be treated below; here it is enough to note that the figurative depends on the literal.            

            This Wittgenstein judges to be a major confusion. What gives religious language its sense is religious life, typically structured by religious practice (prayer, worship, etc.). The sense that religious language may have cannot be grasped independently of that experience and practice by a conceptual-logical analysis that would presume to re-write the imperfect emotive-figurative expression in more precise terms. This does not immunize such language from reflection or critique, but allows us to see what such reflection or critique amounts to and how it might proceed. It also allows us to recognize that treating philosophical-theological language as a more accurate expression of an emotive, metaphorical religious language involves a reductive shift that loses the sublime character of religious language as though it consisted of debatable propositions.

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[1]

The religiously significant analogy to the case of the father would be that his talk of his children and his love for them (together with the new spirit in which, for example, he reads to them) has been energized by the attitude shift, by his sublime sense of the utter preciousness of his children, by his gratitude for their lives. We can imagine the latent religiosity of the new attitude if we now imagine some terrible accident that caused the death of one of these children. In other words, the father’s sense of his children’s preciousness has some relation to the tribe’s sense of awe at the majesty of the mountain: both express a sense of transcendent value, both may lead to more general attitudes about the preciousness of life or the world – that is both may flow into religious expressions of gratitude, for instance.