"Not With the Eye Only":
The Resurrection, Epistemology and Gender
A form of deepened spiritual perception—"not with the eye only", in the words of the poet R.S. Thomas—has to be in play if we are to account for seeing the risen Christ today.
By Sarah Coakley
About the Author: Sarah Coakley is the Edward Mallinckrodt, Jr. Professor of Divinity at Harvard University. A priest in the Church of England, she holds theological degrees from Cambridge (MA, Ph.D) and from Harvard (Th.M). She was Lecturer and Senior Lecturer in the Department of Religious Studies at Lancaster University, before becoming Tutorial Fellow and University Lecturer in Theology at Oriel College, Oxford. The author of Christ Without Absolutes: A Study of the Christology of Ernst Troeltsch (Oxford, 1988), she co-edited The Making and Remaking of Christian Doctrine (Oxford, 1991) and edited Religion and the Body (Cambridge, 1997). Forthcoming publications include God, Sexuality and the Self: An Essay "On the Trinity" and a book of collected essays, Powers and Submissions: Philosophy, Spirituality and Gender, to be published by Cambridge and Blackwells, respectively.
MY INTEREST IN THIS LECTURE is in what we may call the epistemic conditions for 'seeing' the risen Christ, an interest that will cause me to bring into play some seemingly unlikely conversation partners: the patristic authors Origen and Gregory of Nyssa on the one hand, and the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein on the other. The resultant confluence of ideas will admittedly be novel and speculative; and I shall leave it a deliberately open question whether my argument would have met with Wittgenstein's favour—a matter, I suspect, of some exegetical subtlety. But I take these risks in order to try and explicate how a form of deepened spiritual perception—"not with the eye only", in the words of the poet R. S. Thomas1—has to be in play if we are to account for seeing the risen Christ today, a possibility that much modern Western theology has either despaired of completely, or reductively demythologized.
Peter Carnley has recently written: "I . . . think the task of providing an epistemology that can account for the Christian claim to identify the presence of the raised Christ as a religious object in present experience, rather than just engage in what I think is a somewhat futile quest for the historical resurrected Jesus, is the most important challenge facing resurrection theology today. . . . It is understandable that it is the area that most theologians of the resurrection put into the too-hard basket."2 What follows, then, is my attempt to respond to this challenge, to delve into this 'too-hard basket'.
What I hope to illuminate by my speculation is the epistemic reason for the believer seeing the world in a different way from the non-believer, in being able to give meaning, that is, to the language of 'encounter with the risen Christ'. My suggestion is that this difference between the believer and the non-believer, whilst certainly hinging on what Wittgenstein called the 'grammar' of religious belief (and involving thereby a consideration of the life-forms and 'practice' that necessarily attend the language of resurrection faith), nonetheless cannot finally be explained except by an account of a transformation of the believer's actual epistemic apparatus.3 We are in the realm here of what some patristic and medieval writers called 'the spiritual senses': the transformed epistemic sensibilities of those being progressively re-born in the likeness of the Son. As far as I know, Wittgenstein never reflected explicitly on this subject matter, this possibility of senses-beyond-senses; nor would he have been at ease, I admit, with the reifying language of epistemic 'apparatus'. But we shall have reason to conclude, as we go along, that he had at least some intimations of this possible line of thought.
My argument will proceed thus. I start on familiar territory, with a crude sketch of two approaches to the resurrection which have dominated the theological scene in the modern period—let us call them the 'Lockean' and the 'Barthian' approaches, as a convenient shorthand. At first sight they look like extreme competitors, mutually exclusive alternatives; but on closer inspection they are revealed more as two sides of the modernistic coin. Moreover, while each has apologetic strengths, each too has rather notable theological weaknesses; and neither can give a convincing account of certain subtle features of the New Testament appearance narratives which seem epistemologically determinative. In order to escape through the horns of this dilemma, we are in search of a third (putatively 'Wittgensteinian'?) alternative, which does justice to the narratives, practices and 'forms of life' that sustain a spiritually-mature response to the 'resurrected' life. It is here that the tradition of 'spiritual senses', reaching back to Origen in the third century, may help us fill out this picture: according to this view, it is not just referring that may differ in differing contexts, but even perceiving (here I shall extend an argument of Hilary Putnam's in relation to a 'realist' reading of the late Wittgenstein and its significance for religious claims4). In short, the reception of religious truth does not occur on a flat plane: even within the ranks of 'believers' the understanding or perception of the 'risen Christ' will have variations of depth. We have focused too much in the era of 'secularism', I shall argue, on the great gulf apparently fixed between the 'believer' and the 'non-believer' (and even some of Wittgenstein's conversations seem to get stuck here5); yet epistemic and religious transformation surely does not stop with conversion or baptism, and we need to be able to give an account of this.
Finally, I shall deliver a last speculative aside about the relation of these arguments to questions of gender, and draw some lines of connection with suggestive themes from current feminist epistemology, as well as from other pre-modern theological material. This is not—I should underscore with some emphasis—an 'essentialist' suggestion: not, that is, an argument that women (qua physically or genitally female) have responded more sensitively to the 'risen Christ' than have men. Rather, I am drawing attention to the way that theological and philosophical traditions in Christendom and the modern West have from time to time valued some forms of epistemic response over others; and how, more or less unconsciously, the forms of response needed to access the 'risen Christ' have on occasions been associated normatively with women or with stereotypical 'femininity'. That this line of argument is no mere aside or afterthought will, I trust, emerge in the course of my exploration.
So much by way of preliminary overview. I now turn to the more detailed exposition of my thesis.
I. Two Sides of the Modern Coin: The Resurrection as 'Historical' or 'A-historical' Event?
As has often been remarked, two characteristic ploys for explicating the status of the resurrection as 'event' have dominated in the modern period, and still continue as major competitors in the field.6 The first is the approach that attempts to rein in resurrection faith to the standards of Lockean 'probabilism': the rational basis for such a belief is adumbrated, the evidence carefully surveyed, and the degree of appropriate firmness of belief on the basis of that evidence calculated. When the Humean dicta about the miraculous are added to this (and interpreted in a non-reductive mode), we have the principle that 'the wise man [sic] proportions his belief to the evidence', conjoined with the concession that a 'miracle' (in the new, modernistic sense of a non-repeatable violation of a 'natural law') may be appropriately believed if and only if the disbelieving of it would prove 'more miraculous' than the believing of it.7 These are, by any accounts, tough criteria of adjudication to bring to the inconsistent, fragmentary, and elusive testimony of the New Testament texts: the situation might seem desperate from the outset. Yet those contemporary writers such as Wolfhart Pannenberg and Richard Swinburne who (from rather different starting points) continue to attempt an historically-demonstrated case for the resurrection in this mode are propelled by a fundamentally apologetic conviction: that the resurrection of Jesus, if it is to be rationally believable, must be subject to the same level of critical scrutiny that we would accord to any (secular) 'historical' event.8
Whether this conception of the apologetic task is a strength or a weakness may here remain a moot point; more important for our immediate purposes in this essay is to reflect on the features of the New Testament texts that make this Lockean/Humean modernistic re-reading distinctly odd from the perspective of achieved resurrection faith in biblical style. Even Thomas the Doubter, the one potential 'British empiricist' of the New Testament scene one might feel, drops his pre-announced conditions for belief instantly on encountering the risen Christ face to face [John 20:24-29]. (John's text, be it noted, gives no hint that Thomas actually put his hands in the wounds: it is the patristic tradition from Ignatius of Antioch on, and the more haunting visual realism of the already-modern Caravaggio that mislead us here.) Thus it is that both Pannenberg and Swinburne, in their different ways, have trouble doing justice to the more alluring and mysterious features of the 'appearance' traditions: the priority given to women witnesses, the suggestion that they were not at first believed, the uncertainty about the events at the grave itself and whether fear, awe and confusion dominated, the difficulties in even recognising the risen Christ.9 To turn these features to good account on a Lockean reading is a tour de force10; whether one would even want to do so is of course the pointed question precisely raised by the 'Barthian' objector.
In the famous words of Barth's The Epistle to the Romans, "If the Resurrection be brought within the context of history, it must share in its obscurity and error and essential questionableness".11 The 'Barthian', in other words, is no less in search of foundational certainty than the 'Lockean' approach which he rejects; he merely chooses not to risk letting it reside in philosophical ratiocination or historical evidences. His 'foundation' is the risen Christ himself, encountered in the unspeakable Krisis of judgment, so elusive that his revelatory presence intersects history only as a tangent touches a circle.12 By appealing to the pure paradoxes of Kierkegaardian thinking, the early Barth protects the resurrection from the probings of secular historiography (an apologetic gain, seemingly); but at the same time he wraps it in total epistemological obscurity (an apologetic loss, one might counter). If one is not already one of the elect, the cognoscenti, it is unclear how one could do anything about it (and indeed even to try would be to convict oneself of works-righteousness); the leap into the void ("Genuine faith is a void . . ."13) is on this view more truly like lurching beyond Kant's boundary into the noumenal realm than being progressively lured by the 'dazzling darkness' of the pre-modern apophatic tradition. I am not of course the first to read Barth as the reverse-side of Kantian epistemology.14 But it remains ironic that Barth—as we have seen—accuses those who approach the resurrection as a 'historical' event of falling into 'obscurity'; for nothing, it seems, could be more epistemologically obscure than the early Barth's own 'a-historical' alternative.
Strangely too, or so I would argue, it is some of the same features of the New Testament appearance texts that cause trouble for this 'Barthian' approach as they did for the 'Lockean'. It is especially the narratives that chart a change of epistemological response that are noteworthy here, or else indicate the possibility of simultaneous and different responses to the same event (such that some vital shift is again required for recognition of the risen Christ to take place). Significantly these features arise in more than one strand of the 'appearance' traditions: the interaction between Mary and the 'gardener' in John (where Mary has to 'turn' several times before she recognises Jesus [John 20:11-18]); the lovely story of the walk to Emmaus in Luke (in which it was possible to walk all that distance without recognising the risen Jesus, until he broke bread [Luke 24:13-35]); the strange possibility of simultaneous recognition and 'doubting' in Matthew [Matthew 28:17]; the obscurity and fear as apparent preconditions for resurrection belief in Mark [Mark 16:1-8]; the only-gradual recognition of Jesus by the lake-side after the miraculous catch of fish [John 21:1-14]: not all of these intriguing features, surely, can be explained away as merely redactional or apologetic embroidery? And if not, what do they tell us about the epistemological conditions under which the risen Christ comes to be apprehended—a matter on which the 'Lockean' answers inadequately and the 'Barthian' seems not to answer at all? To this—rather subtle—question we now turn with a speculative suggestion. Thereafter we shall consider whether Wittgenstein could possibly have approved of it.
II. The Resurrection & the Spiritual Senses: A Suggestion
The doctrine of the spiritual senses has its Christian inception in the work of Origen (c.185-254), although Origen builds the theory entirely from his creative scriptural interpretation.15 The promotion of the idea that there is a realm of 'spiritual' sense, different from, and superior to, the gross physical senses, is seemingly motivated not merely by a Platonic distaste for the material world (although this is undeniably a strand in Origen's thinking), but at least as much by the desire to explain the progressive transformation of the self's response to the divine through a life-time of practice, purgation and prayer. In other words, our perception of God, and thus too our grasp of doctrinal verities, does not occur on a flat, or procrustean, bed, but is appropriately open to its object only to the extent that the faculties have been progressively purified.
According to Origen this process involves three stages, all engendered and sustained by ever-deepening meditation on Scripture: ethike (being appropriately formed in the moral life), physike (learning to see the world from the perspective of the 'forms'), and enoptike (contemplation of the divine itself).16 The climax of the 'enoptic' stage is a deep communion with the eternal Word;17 and, following the rabbis, it is Origen's insistence that the ultimately indispensable metaphor for this union is an erotic, 'sensual' one—the language of the Song of Songs, on which Origen wrote a notable (and notably beautiful) commentary.18 It is this pressure—itself Platonic—to unite the noetic and the erotic, that gives Origen's Christianized Platonism its special flavour: sometimes Origen will talk of the spiritual senses as the 'faculties of the heart',19 for with them love—properly purged—finds its integration with mind and its final resting place in the Logos (Christ): "after realising the beauty of the divine Word, we can allow ourselves to be set on fire with saving love, so that the Word itself deigns to love the soul in which it has encountered longing for it".20
Although Origen did not specifically devise this theory to answer the problem of the recognition of the resurrected body, it is noteworthy that in his debate with his famous interlocutor Celsus, Celsus explicitly chides Christianity for a reliance on material sense knowledge because of its belief in a resurrection of the body.21 And it is precisely in answering this charge that Origen sketches out his doctrine of the spiritual senses. Yes, he responds, the resurrected body is indeed described via sense knowledge, as Scripture shows us; but this is transformed sense knowledge, the sense knowledge of the 'inner' self, which uses the language of the physical senses only figuratively.22
Origen himself, then, draws a sharp disjunction between the 'inner' and the 'outer' senses:23 there is no clear sense in which the latter gives meaning to the former, except by an exceedingly paradoxical use of metaphor. Nonetheless, the metaphor remains hallowed and indispensable; the language of 'divine sensuality' is irreplaceable in charting the ascent to union with the resurrected Christ, even if Origen remains notoriously squeamish about the final redeemability of physical matter itself. Here, indeed, there is an interesting contrast with Origen's important fourth-century follower in the 'spiritual senses' tradition, Gregory of Nyssa (c. 330-c. 395); for Nyssa's subtly-adjusted views seem to allow for some significant point of continuity or development from the physical to the spiritual in the spectrum of purgation of the senses. Thus it is that Gregory can write in the 'Prologue' to his own Commentary on the Song of Songs (in other respects deeply dependent on Origen's): "I hope that my commentary will be a guide for the more fleshly-minded, since the wisdom hidden [in the Song of Songs] leads to a spiritual state of soul".24 Doubtless this modification reflects the autobiographical difference between Origen's stern vision of celibacy (possibly involving actual castration) and Gregory's own later move from married to monastic life.25 Whatever the explanation we might prefer, the difference is non-trivial epistemologically, since on Nyssa's view the toe-hold for spiritual perception is precisely in the physical, a possibility that is rendered problematic by Origen's sterner disjunction. Nyssa's strongly apophatic sensibilities also make the treatment of spiritual 'sight' quite differently-nuanced from Origen: the hegemony of clear visual perception is completely toppled, for him, in the dark intimacy of the embrace by Christ. Either way, however, we should note that the gender implication of the privileged use of the allegory of the Song of Songs is that the 'Bride' (feminine), when suitably prepared for the nuptial embrace of the Bridegroom, becomes the supreme knower and recognizer of Christ—a point to which we shall shortly return.26
Origen's and Gregory's teaching on the spiritual senses was a strand of thought curiously neglected in the West until the medieval period (when it was richly re-cast by Bonaventure and others);27 it then took another turn in Spanish counter-Reformation spirituality, where Ignatius of Loyola's rules for the 'discernment of spirits' became more a spiritual means for making well-considered vocational decisions in response to Christ than a complete life-time's epistemological programme.28 (Already we see the seeds of the modern divide between 'spirituality'—now fixed as a noun—and emergent secular epistemology.) In Calvin and the Protestant divines, however, the spiritual senses tradition transmuted into a discussion of the (generalized) sensus divinitatis, the inbuilt capacity for human response to God which has become tragically besmirched by sin and has to be refurbished by the graces of the Holy Spirit.29 What we note in this shift into the early-modern period, then, is a an apparent loss of the subtle multi-leveled aspect of the pre-modern spiritual senses tradition. For Origen, as we have seen, there are distinct and different levels of perception, depending on one's spiritual maturity and (concomitant) epistemological capacity; for Calvin, this necessarily elitist and progressivist model is replaced by a theory of double predestination. It is not that some people get only so far in their perception of the divine and others a little further; rather, some people receive intellectual revelation and the affective graces of the Holy Spirit, and others do not. It is a significant difference, and one which I now wish to explore. For whilst the Protestant strand of this story has recently received important philosophical attention from 'Reformed' epistemology,30 the earlier, Origenist (or, better, Nyssan) reading of the spiritual senses has seemingly yet to be evaluated as a serious current epistemological option.31 Let me here make a few preliminary, if somewhat speculative, suggestions.
How might this tradition of the spiritual senses throw light on our initial discussion of the epistemological problem of the resurrection narratives? My suggested response to this is three-fold. First, we note how this tradition is capable of explaining a range of different responses to the risen Christ, even amongst the faithful. Not all responses are equally deep; and the closest recognition (involving dark 'ecstasy' in Nyssa or actual mingling with the Word in Origen) will often—in the era of the church—involve long years of moral and spiritual preparation, prolonged practice in 'sensing' the presence of Christ. Second, then, this approach also indicates how seeking and recognizing the resurrected Christ requires a process of change, one only rarely achieved at speed;32 it will involve an initial 'turning-around' morally, then practice in seeing the world differently, then only finally the full intimacy of 'spiritual/sensual' knowledge of Christ. What happens in this process is a transformation of one's actual epistemic capacities through their 'purgation' (understood somewhat differently, I have argued, in Origen's and Gregory's case). Thirdly, this approach stresses the absolutely crucial significance of the integration of the affective and the erotic in any adequate understanding or 'knowledge' of the risen Christ (although this is differently the case in Origen and Gregory, Origen being notoriously ambivalent about the final significance of the material body). Yet in neither author are the affective/erotic and the noetic set off against each other as disjunct alternatives, or even as a complementary duality.
If we now apply these insights to the intriguing features of the New Testament resurrection narratives to which we have already drawn attention, it must be readily acknowledged that the links, suggestive as they are, involve significant disanalogy as well as analogy: the New Testament appearance stories seem to involve 'epistemic transformations' much more instantaneous than those described in Origen's schema. This granted, the points of connection are still striking. The first feature just delineated indicates how doubt and faith could strangely co-exist in response to an 'appearance' of the risen Christ [Matthew 28:16-17]; or how it might be difficult, initially, and prior to some change in one's normal demands for perceptual evidences, to recognize the risen body [John 20:24-28]. The second feature, correlatively, underscores how some 'turning' in one's posture or attitude, some difference of perspective or visual angle, or transformation of the nature of physical 'touch', might be required in order so to grasp the resurrected reality [John 20:11-18]. And the third feature, finally, would suggest that a narrowly noetic investigation would take one nowhere in this quest; that the evidences of the 'heart', and of orienting and worshipful practices of the body, could not be neglected if Christ-as-risen were to be apprehended [Luke 24:28-35]. Such are the suggested (if speculative) points of connection.33 If I am right, then the 'spiritual senses' tradition represents one powerful way in which reflection on seeking and finding Christ remained cogent in an era after the end of the 'apostolic' appearances were over [see 1 Cor 15: 5-8], even as it recapitulated and extended some central features of those appearances.
Now let us ask whether Wittgenstein might possibly have intuited some of these same points; and—further—what we might conceivably make of this line of approach as a contemporary religious epistemological option, especially in relation to the subtle question of recognizing the risen Christ.
III. Wittgenstein and Resurrection Epistemology
In this (necessarily brief) section, I wish to focus primarily on some characteristically dense and rich remarks made by Wittgenstein in the year 1937, and enshrined—in English—in the volume Culture and Value (hereafter CV).34 Not only does Wittgenstein here make his only direct remarks about the resurrection (CV 33e); but the surrounding obiter dicta are, from the perspective of the particular epistemological questions I have so far opened up in this essay, extraordinarily apposite. Indeed the speculative novelty of my undertaking here is a hermeneutical one: I suggest that we read the remarks on the resurrection in the light of the surrounding aphorisms. It will be worth quoting an excerpted number of phrases and sentences before drawing out their apparent (combined) significance:
The edifice of your pride has to be dismantled. And that is terribly hard work (CV 26e).
The way to solve the problem you see in life is to live in a way that will make what is problematic disappear (CV 26e).
Christianity is not a doctrine, not, I mean, a theory about what has happened and what will happen to the human soul, but a description of something that actually takes place in a human life (CV 28e).
. . . a man who is not used to searching in the forest for flowers . . . will not find any because his eyes are not trained to see them . . .—And this is no wonder for someone who knows how long even the man with practice, who realizes there is a difficulty, will have to search before he finds it. When something is well hidden it is hard to find (CV 29e).
Religion says: Do this!—Think like that!—but it cannot justify this and once it even tries to, it becomes repellent; . . . It is more convincing to say: "Think like this! however strange it may strike you." Or: "Won't you do this?—however repugnant you find it" (CV 29e).
Everything that comes my way becomes a picture for me of what I am thinking about at the time. (Is there something feminine about this way of thinking?) (CV 31e).
Kierkegaard writes: "If Christianity were so easy and coy, why should God in his Scriptures have set Heaven and Earth in motion and threatened eternal punishments? . . . what you are supposed to see cannot be communicated even by the best and most accurate historian . . . "(CV 31e).
In religion every level of devoutness must have its appropriate form of expression which has no sense at a lower level. This doctrine, which means something at a higher level, is null and void for someone who is still at the lower level; he can only understand it wrongly and so these words are not valid for such a person (CV 32e).
Christianity is not based on a historical truth; rather, it offers us 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 only do as the result of a life (CV 32e).
Queer as it sounds: The historical accounts in the Gospels might, historically speaking, be demonstrably false and yet belief would lose nothing by this . . . This message (the Gospels) is seized on by men believingly (i.e., lovingly) (CV 32e).
. . . I cannot utter the word "Lord" with meaning. Because I do not believe that he will come to judge me; because that says nothing to me. And it could say something to me, only if I lived completely differently (CV 33e).
What inclines even me to believe in Christ's Resurrection? It is though I play with the thought.—If he did not rise from the dead, then he decomposed in the grave like any other man. . . . But if I am to be REALLY saved,—what I need is certainty—not wisdom, dreams or speculation—and this certainty is faith. And faith is faith in what is needed by my heart, my soul, not my speculative intelligence. For it is my soul with its passions, as it were with its flesh and blood, that has to be saved, not my abstract mind. Perhaps we can say: Only love can believe the Resurrection. Or: It is love that believes the Resurrection. . . . What combats doubt is, as it were, redemption. . . . So this can come about only if you no longer rest your weight on the earth but suspend yourself from heaven. Then everything will be different and it will be "no wonder" if you can do things that you cannot do now (CV 33e).
The immediate feature that strikes us, first, in considering this collocation of remarks, is the forceful rejection of what I earlier termed the Lockean/Humean approach to religious belief in general, and the resurrection in particular; and this, as is well-known, is even more forcibly stressed in the Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief.35 Religious beliefs and doctrines are not to be demonstrated by 'evidences'. Embracing them is more like the adopting of a whole new way of life, or 'picturing' differently, or making a particular narrative central to one's existence, than coolly adjudicating on their likelihood with the 'speculative intelligence'.
The most obvious alternative, then, is the 'Kierkegaardian' (and 'Barthian') lurch to another sort of 'certainty', the certainty of 'faith'. And since Wittgenstein here, and indeed elsewhere,36 makes no bones about his attraction to both these thinkers, it is natural enough to box him up as a consistent devotee of this line of thinking. Here is the 'normative' side of his view of religion that he is nonetheless loath to own up to:37 faith has its certainties which are given, not 'justified' (CV 29e); the move to faith is obscure and better not probed (it cannot in any case be brought about by 'works'(CV 32e)); it has nothing to do with ordinary 'events' or secular 'history' (CV 31e, 32e); its occasion cannot be willfully or mentally triggered: 'love' and the speculative intellect find themselves in problematic disjunction (CV 33e); 'faith' involves, in se, unshakeable 'certainty' (CV 33e). None of these sentiments would seem compatible with the spiritual senses tradition we have just outlined.
Yet the suggestive remarks that surround these more obviously 'Kierkegaardian' purple passages are worthy of further probing; for a number of them do not seem so easily compatible with what we earlier termed the early 'Barthian' perspective on resurrection belief. Some, indeed—if I am right—show distinct marks of coincidence with the pre-modern spiritual senses tradition (especially when backed by cognate remarks in the same volume and elsewhere from the same period), and stand thereby in at least a problematic relation to this 'Kierkegaardian'/'Barthian' alternative. Let me expatiate briefly. I shall comment on four such 'marks', the first being the most significant and thus here treated at some greater length than the others.
This first clue comes in the noteworthy passage on CV 32e: "In religion every level of devoutness must have its appropriate form of expression . . .", etc. (my emphasis). Here Wittgenstein explicitly addresses—and embraces—the possibility that people at different levels of spiritual maturity or understanding or practice (the German is Religiosität) might construe the force of religious language differently. Indeed, for one at a lower level, some language could actually have little or no such force ('these words are not valid for such a person'). We can readily see how this might apply to someone seeking 'meaning' in the somewhat elusive doctrine of the resurrected body of Christ. Yet this idea of a sliding scale of 'levels' of 'devoutness' is surely hard to square with the disjunctive Kierkegaardian Either/Or, or with dramatic 'leaps' into 'faith'. (Even if, as Kierkegaard avows, the 'certainty' of faith may paradoxically continue to be attended by nagging doubt, his model is hardly compatible with the idea of structured epistemic levels).38 Rather, the sliding-scale approach suggests, in the spirit of the pre-modern tradition we have been considering, a subtle range of differing possibilities of religious and epistemic responses to the divine, even within the ranks of the faithful. And it is here that a link with Putnam's recent 'realist' re-reading of the later Wittgenstein's thought on religion may be significant and inviting. Let me give a brief résumé of Putnam's argument in order to extend it.
Putnam argues first—and to my mind convincingly—against the view that Wittgenstein's appeal to 'picturing' in religious language somehow suggests a non-cognitive view of such language.39 On the contrary (and this will shortly be significant for our assessment of the subliminally-gendered dimension of resurrection belief), Wittgenstein begins to aver strongly in lectures during the 1930s that 'pictures' are intrinsic to much of our thinking, and no less religious thinking; but nothing is implied thereby about such thinking being non-cognitive or merely 'emotive'.40 More ingeniously, Putnam then goes on to argue (via a subtle interpretation of the Lectures on Religion41) that even the concept of 'referring' in the later Wittgenstein is a 'family resemblance' notion: what 'referring' is is mastering the technique of the appropriate use of a word, but such use (appropriately) differs in differing realms of discourse. Thus 'there isn't some one thing which can be called referring', even though there may be 'overlapping similarities' between one sort and another.42 So the suggestion that Wittgenstein's notion of religious language involves complete 'incommensurability' with other forms of language also fails to convince. It is not that Wittgenstein thinks that, when the religious person and the non-religious person 'talk past' one another, one is being non-realist and the other (incommensurably) realist, or one failing to 'refer' and the other succeeding. On the contrary, concludes Putnam, no 'language game' (or, better, in the case of religion, set of language games43) is in worse shape than another, epistemologically-speaking, because of its failure to provide a 'transcendental guarantee'; for at the base of any such language game is an appeal to 'trust' which is as unavoidable as it is challenging.44
Putnam leaves us thus suspended; yet although he has—to my mind—convincingly routed the 'non-realist' interpretation of Wittgenstein's religious views, he has not said as much as he might about the problem of apparent incomprehension between religious and non-religious folk (a matter from which he starts, and which is pointedly raised in the Lectures45). Nor, we note, has he explicated the intriguing words in CV 32e about 'levels of devoutness' and their relation to 'meaning'. It is not just religious and non-religious people who 'talk past' each other, it seems, but even different parties of those within the churches; and of this Wittgenstein seems willing to give some account in CV 32e. My suggestion, then, is that we read this important passage as a further epistemological counterpart of the fluid theory of 'referring' explicated by Putnam. Just as 'referring' has no one ('essential') meaning from a 'family resemblance' perspective, so too 'perceiving' seemingly has no one meaning either. We 'perceive' at different 'levels', according to the development of our 'devoutness'. If this is indeed Wittgenstein's meaning (and it does seem to be the 'plain sense' of the text), then we are extraordinarily close to the central insight of the spiritual senses tradition.46 The closest contemporary counterpart in today's epistemological scene might be found in the analysis of so-called 'proper functioning'47; yet in Wittgenstein's case, if I read him aright, this is a 'layered' understanding of types of functioning, one which involves not only the removal of sin for its full effect, but some actual change in the perceptual capacities.
There are other hints, too, of such an alliance with the spiritual senses tradition: further features of this section of Culture and Value fit uneasily with the Kierkegaardian perspectives that are otherwise explicit. For when Wittgenstein talks, secondly, of the necessity to 'dismantle one's pride' (stressing that it is 'hard work'), or to lead a life of a 'completely different' sort as a precondition of belief, or to train one's eye to look 'with practice' for the right things, one is struck by the progressive nature of the epistemological undertaking and its accompanying preparatory moral seriousness. (And, as I am suggesting, may we not read these comments in relation to the surrounding remarks on religious matters?). Here, it seems, is no sudden lurch into 'certainty', sweeping aside all human cooperation or preparedness, but more truly a progressive unfolding of insights based in patient moral transformation. The picture is akin to what we now term a 'virtue epistemology'.
Further, and thirdly (and relatedly), the insights about living a 'picture'48, or relating, unshakably, to a particular narrative (CV 32e), are worth comparing with an important passage a little later in Culture and Value (from the year 1946), which we must certainly acknowledge as self-consciously 'Kierkegaardian':
I believe that one of the things Christianity says is that sound doctrines are all useless. That you have to change your life. (Or the direction of your life) (CV 53e).
The point is that a sound doctrine need not take hold of you; you can follow it as you would a doctor's prescription.—But here you need something to move you and turn you in a new direction. . . . Once you have been turned round, you must stay turned round. Wisdom is passionless. But faith by contrast is what Kierkegaard calls a passion (
53e).
The pressing question that here confronts us is whether Wittgenstein himself, having located the significance of 'turning' (the reminiscence of Mary Magdelene's 'turning' at the grave-side is not insignificant: it involves the possibility of seeing differently), and then having used 'Kierkegaardian' rhetoric to describe it, could himself ever satisfactorily account—either personally or theoretically—for the possibility of such an unexpected event. Again, his casting around for antecedent preparations for such an eventuality—moral transformation, focus on a 'life' or a 'narrative', or (elsewhere, late in Culture and Value) the preparations of 'suffering'49—seem to give the lie to a consistently 'Kierkegaardian' or 'Barthian' account of faith. We have at least here a hermenuetical aporia: a Protestant rhetoric of pure and unmerited grace vies with intimations of a more ancient 'Catholic' spirituality of progression into holiness.
Fourthly, and finally—and again paradoxically—it is perplexing, in the light of the 'Kierkegaardian' disjunction set up between 'love' and 'speculative intelligence' in relation to the resurrection specifically (CV 33e), and between 'wisdom' and 'passion' in relation to doctrine generally (CV 53e), to find Wittgenstein also insisting that redemption can only occur 'if you no longer rest your weight on the earth but suspend yourself from heaven' (CV 33e).50 For what can this mean, if the 'passions', and 'flesh and blood' (ibid) are precisely what is at stake (not, as Wittgenstein insists, a disembodied mind)? Does this not imply some transformation of the passions, of 'flesh and blood', in order that their natural earthiness be precisely 'suspended from heaven'? Wittgenstein does not tell us; but the question-mark remains in the air, and intriguingly resummons the notion of 'levels' of different forms of response.
To sum up the results of this necessarily dense section: I have been arguing that the epistemological remarks that surround Wittgenstein's analysis of resurrection belief in Culture and Value are worth reading in relation to it; and that if we do this, we find a certain tension between the (occasionally explicit) avowals of 'Kierkegaardianism' and strands of thought more compatible with a 'spiritual senses' approach such as outlined above. Whilst there is nothing in Wittgenstein's text, of course, to suggest the Platonizing overtones of Origen's particular reading of the spiritual senses, other points of continuity are striking, and give the lie—or so I have argued—to a consistently 'Kierkegaardian' or 'Barthian' understanding of faith.51 (Indeed, we may perhaps speculate whether this tension may have been a contributing factor in Wittgenstein's notable inability to embrace faith in any robust sense for himself.52) Yet here, as we have seen, is a view of faith profoundly sensitive to its differing 'levels' of intensity, perceptual/tactile response, and spiritual and moral maturity. Here is a view of faith rooted in 'practice', involving particular forms of vision and a 'layered' understanding of doctrine's possible 'meanings'. Here is a view of faith that involves 'turning around' and coming to perceive ('picture') differently.
Why then, finally, does Wittgenstein speak of such 'picturing' as 'feminine'? (CV 31e)? It is to the neglected question of the 'gendered' nature of the 'grammar' of resurrection belief that we turn, finally.
IV: 'Femininity' and the Resurrection
Wittgenstein's aside is elusive as it stands, and there is no intrinsic reason—we must admit—to connect the supposed 'femininity' of 'picturing' with the resurrection specifically. Nonetheless, there are reasons why such a gendered connection could be illuminating. Let me mention four such reasons.
First, there is the obvious New Testament evidence for the primacy of women's testimony in witnessing to the resurrection, and the apparent scepticism or delay involved in some of the male disciples's response. It is a commonplace of New Testament scholarship to acknowledge the apparently apologetic massaging of the Lukan and Johannine traditions to allow for an earlier response from Peter and John.53 More likely is it, however, that the women (and especially Mary Magdalene) were the initial recipients of 'appearances' (whether of angels or of Jesus himself) and their witness at first treated with some scepticism: it was, after all, fragmentary, awe-struck and somewhat incoherent, and apparently attended by strong elements of 'fear'.54 Further, a woman's witness was, in Jewish law, regarded as less convincing and reliable than that of a man. Yet it was in all probability women who were first enabled to 'see' the risen Christ.55
In the hands of later tradition, however, 'femininity' and the resurrection are treated as correlative for another reason, which seems to build, gender-stereotypically, upon this memory. As Thomas Aquinas puts it in a notable but neglected passage in the third part of the Summa (ST 3a, 55, 1 ad 3), it is women's supposedly greater capacity for 'love' (shown in their fidelity to Jesus at the crucifixion and their early presence on Easter morning) that will guarantee them a quicker share than men in the beatific vision. It is here that we are reminded not only of Wittgenstein's insistence that 'love' rather than dispassionate intellectual curiosity is what responds to the resurrection, but also of the rich exegesis in the spiritual senses tradition of the Song of Songs, where, as we explicated earlier, it is also only the 'feminized' soul that can fully respond to the embraces of the Bridegroom, the exalted and heavenly Christ.
A third suggestive point of connection is raised by Wittgenstein's acknowledgment that his 'picturing' epistemology is not quite normative in the epistemological terms of his day; that it smacks of a form of 'feminized' subversion of normal ways of thinking about reference and meaning. A creative link may be made here with recent developments in feminist epistemology,56 which has incisively challenged the hegemony of the 'recognition-of-hard-objects-at-five-paces' model for normative epistemological discussion, a challenge that draws attention instead to the contextual significance of any 'S-knowing-p', and to the varieties of types of possible 'knowing', personal as well as cognitive. Unsurprisingly, these feminist writers find themselves drawing on occasions on Wittgenstein.57 'Knowing' can take many forms in 'the stream of life';58 and if a culture dubs some of the more subtle forms 'feminine', it may well be more a sign of the lesser significance it grants to them (as personal, affective, hard-to-grasp) than necessarily connected with a spuriously 'essential' nature of 'woman'.
Fourthly, and finally, we do well to connect here with the insights of contemporary French feminism (especially with the work of Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray), which—utilizing the distinctions of Jacques Lacan's linguistic theory—dubs 'semiotic' that style of speech that subverts or destabilizes the ordered 'symbolic' language of normative 'masculinist' culture.59 'Mystic speech', from this perspective, is unsurprisingly often a mode of subversive 'female' utterance;60 and 'woman's' association with the fearful events of death and birth also links her with the 'semiotic'—with what is repressed in the efforts at stabilizing cultural order.61 From this (gendered) viewpoint, is it surprising that the 'grammar of raised' has proved so elusive to the modernistic bias in philosophy, with its demand for stiff foundational universals? Or that alternative visions of epistemology might fall—as Wittgenstein self-described—under the suspicious rubric of 'feminine'? Or again, and finally, that poets—ever in the vanguard of the 'semiotic'—should have proved in this period so much more successful in evoking the subtle responses of resurrection belief than their theologian counterparts?
One cannot do better, surely, than the late-lamented R. S. Thomas, whose poem 'Suddenly'62 remarkably encapsulates what I have tried to express in this paper about the complexity and subtlety of 'seeing' the risen Christ:
As I had always known
he would come, unannounced,
remarkable merely for the absence
of clamour. So truth must appear
to the thinker; so, at a stage
of the experiment, the answer
must clearly emerge. I looked
at him, not with the eye
only, but with the whole
of my being, overflowing with
him as a chalice would
with the sea. Yet was he
no more there than before,
his area occupied
by the unhaloed presences.
You could put your hand
in him without consciousness
of his wounds. The gamblers
at the foot of the unnoticed
cross went on with
their dicing; yet the invisible
garment for which they played
was no longer at stake, but worn
by him in this risen existence.
Conclusions
I have in the course of this lecture presented a number of intertwined theses. In the first place, I have suggested that the apparently disjunctive modern choice between an approach to the resurrection in the spirit of Locke and Hume (on the one hand), or Kierkegaard and the early Barth (on the other), is a false one, which does not in any case do justice to some of the more alluring and subtle features of the New Testament narratives. Secondly, my brief exploration of the 'spiritual senses' tradition—rooted in Origen's thought but finding a less harshly-dualistic reading in the writing of Gregory of Nyssa—attempted to sketch out a third alternative in which transformation of normal sense perception becomes the requisite of resurrection belief. Turning thirdly to the work of Wittgenstein I have tried, admittedly more speculatively, to indicate a strand in his thinking that is redolent of this 'spiritual senses' tradition, and which I believe stands in some tension with his acknowledged—though sometimes baffled—attraction to the thought of Kierkegaard and Barth. Finally, in feminist vein, I have suggested a number of ways in which the elusiveness of 'seeing the Lord' has at times been associated with 'woman', 'femininity', or the 'semiotic'; and how this gendered dimension of the 'grammar' of resurrection faith is seemingly intrinsic to our continuing difficulties in expressing the reality of a risen Christ who cannot finally be grasped, but rather 'seen' — 'not with the eyes only'.63
Notes
1. From R. S. Thomas, 'Suddenly', Laboratories of the Spirit (London, 1975), 32, quoted in full later in this lecture.
2. Eds. S. T. Davis, S. Kendall, S.J., and G. O'Collins, S.J., The Resurrection (Oxford, 1997), 40.
3. I have been greatly helped here by Ingolf U. Dalferth's brief, but penetrating, account of the evocations of 'grammar' in Wittgenstein, and its ontological significance, in his paper, 'Wittgenstein: The Theological Reception' (circulated at the Claremont conference, 2000), esp. 23-9; see also idem, Jenseits von Mythos (Frieburg, 1993), ch. 6. The novum of what I am going to suggest here lies not in ascribing ontological import to Wittgenstein's views on religion in general, but in my hypothesis about a malleability in the faculties' capacity to respond to certain kinds of divine reality.
4. See Hilary Putnam, Renewing Philosophy (Cambridge, MA, 1992), chs. 7-8.
5. See the discussion of the Last Judgment in L. Wittgenstein, Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology, and Religious Belief (Berkeley, CA, 1966), 53-9; and also—taken by itself—the section on the resurrection in Culture and Value (Chicago, 1980), 32e-33e. (For an extended discussion of the meaning of this passage in context, see intra.) D. Z. Phillips's treatment of the problem of the apparent mutual incomprehension between believers and unbelievers, which starts from Wittgenstein, concludes—rightly in my view—that 'there is no sharp line between belief and unbelief' (Religion Without Explanation (Oxford, 1976),187). A facile reading of Wittgenstein, however, might easily come to the opposite conclusion.
6. This is evident in the recent compendium volume on the resurrection, eds. S. T. Davis, D. Kendall, S.J., and G, O'Collins, S.J., The Resurrection (see n. 2). Here some contributors remain firmly fixed within the framework of 'historical' discussion of Jesus's post mortem existence, whilst Barth's alternative perspective is also aired (see ch. 12). Peter Carnley sets the tone for a third alternative, as already mentioned.
7. D. Hume, 'Of Miracles', from An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, section X, reprinted in R. Wollheim (ed.), Hume on Religion (London, 1963), see pp. 206, 211.
8. The (now-classic) treatment of this theme by Pannenberg is to be found in his Jesus-God and Man (London, 1968). Richard Swinburne, from the rather different perspective of British analytic philosophy of religion, shares Pannenberg's concern to subject the resurrection events to the scrutiny of secular historiographical method, even though—in his more recent work—he admits the importance of a prior commitment to theism in the assessment of the evidence: see his The Concept of Miracle (London, 1970); The Existence of God (Oxford, 1979), esp. ch 12; Revelation (Oxford, 1991), esp. ch. 7; and 'Evidence for the Resurrection', in eds. S. T. Davis, D. Kendall, S.J., and G. O'Collins, S.J., The Resurrection, ch. 8. I subject the views of Pannenberg and Swinburne to critical scrutiny in my 'Is the Resurrection a "Historical" Event? Some Muddles and Mysteries', in ed. P. Avis, The Resurrection of Jesus Christ (London, 1993), ch. 6, arguing that whilst it does seem an initial apologetic duty to assess the resurrection narratives from the standpoint of critical historiography, the conclusion can only be that of an alluring question-mark.
9. I provide a more detailed examination of these characteristics of the New Testament 'appearance' narratives below, intra. For a useful analysis of how these features of the narratives have been treated by recent New Testament scholars, see G. O'Collins, S.J., 'The Resurrection: The State of the Questions', in eds. S. T. Davis, D. Kendall, S.J., and G. O'Collins, S.J., The Resurrection, ch. 2, esp. pp. 13-17.
10. Pannenberg's is surely the most sophisticated and tenacious attempt so to do: see my account of his attempt in Jesus-God and Man in 'Is the Resurrection a "Historical" Event?' (see n. 8).
11. K. Barth, The Epistle to the Romans (London, 1933), 204, commenting on Romans 6: 8-11. There is a sensitive recent re-evaluation of the role of 'history' in Barth's Romans in B. L. McCormack's Karl Barth's Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology (Oxford, 1995), ch. 3.
12. Ibid, 30: "In the Resurrection the new world of the Holy Spirit touches the old world of the flesh, but touches it as a tangent touches a circle, that is, without touching it".
13. Ibid, 88.
14. This is a persistent theme, for instance, in the work of David Tracy: see, e.g., Blessed Rage for Order (New York, 1975), 27-31. B. L. McCormak (n. 11) also explores Barth's indebtedness to Kant.
15. Karl Rahner traced some important aspects of the history of the spiritual senses tradition in his first major theological publications. See his 'The "Spiritual Senses" According to Origen' (originally in a longer version in French in RAM 13 (1932), 113-45), and 'The Doctrine of the "Spiritual Senses" in the Middle Ages' (also originally in RAM 14 (1933), 263-99), both now in Theological Investigations, vol. 16 (London, 1979), chs. 6 and 7. In the first essay Rahner gives a well-documented account of the scriptural passages Origen draws on to support his position (see ibid, 82-89, esp. 83 n. 12). Also compare the important treatment of the spiritual senses in vol. 1 of H. U. von Balthasar's Herrlichkeit (orig. Einsiedeln, 1961): Eng. tr., The Glory of the Lord I: Seeing the Form (Edinburgh, 1982), 259-308.
16. Origen assigns these three stages to scriptural meditation on Proverbs, Ecclesiastes and the Song of Songs respectively. For a detailed account of Origen's three-stage theory of ascent see A. Louth, The Origins of the Christian Mystical Tradition: From Plato to Denys (Oxford, 1981), ch. 4.
17. As Louth's account (see n.16) well illustrates, this undertaking is for Origen conceived in essentially Platonic vein, as an escape from the material: "So the mind, purified and passing beyond everything material, so that it perfects its contemplation of God, is made divine in what it contemplates" (Commentary on John, XXXII. xxvii; cited in Louth, Origins, 73).
18. Available in English translation, along with two Homilies by Origen also devoted to the subject of the Song: ed. R. P. Lawson, Origen: The Song of Songs—Commentary and Homilies, ACW 26 (New York, 1956).
19. De Principiis 1, II; discussed in Rahner, 'The "Spiritual Senses" According to Origen', 85.
20. From the Prologue to the Commentary on the Song, as translated in Rahner, 'The "Spiritual Senses" According to Origen', 95.
21. See Contra Celsum 1.VII.
22. Ibid. The subtle question of how this 'figure' conveys the passion of the physical whilst also (purportedly) abstracting completely from it is well discussed in Louth, Origins, 67-70.
23. See the Song Prologue (tr. Lawson, 29): "if anyone still bears the image of the earthly according to the outer man, then he is moved by earthly desire and love; but the desire and love of him who bears the image of the heavenly according to the inner man are heavenly".
24. Gregory of Nyssa, Commentary on the Song of Songs, tr. Casimir McCambley (Brookline, MA, 1987), 35, my emphasis. (Oddly, Gregory's crucial contribution to the spiritual senses tradition is not singled out for discussion in Rahner's seminal study.)
25. On the subtlety of Nyssa's views about virginity and celibacy (granted his early marriage), see the important and suggestive article of M. D. Hart, "Reconciliation of Body and Soul: Gregory of Nyssa's Deeper Theology of Marriage", Theological Studies 51 (1990), 450-78.
26. This theme has been importantly explored by Verna Harrison, "Male and Female in Cappadocian Theology", JTS 41 (1990), 441-71. Harrison's view of gender, however, owes much to a Jungian theory of 'complementarity', which arguably Nyssa himself does not espouse: compare my "The Eschatological Body: Gender, Transformation and God", Modern Theology 16 (2000), 61-73.
27. This development in the medieval West is covered by Rahner in "The Doctrine of the 'Spiritual Senses' in the Middle Ages" (see n. 15); and also by H. U. von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord, vol. 1 (Edinburgh, 1982), 284-308.
28. Illuminatingly discussed by von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord, 297-8 (though he does not explicitly draw the distinction between 'spiritual' and 'epistemological' that I essay here).
29. See J. Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, orig. 1559, tr. F. L. Battles (Philadelphia, 1960), III. ii. 7, etc.
30. See the discussion by A. Plantinga in Warranted Christian Belief (Oxford, 2000), chs. 8 and 9.
31. I made a first attempt to adumbrate this approach in my "Response" to W. P. Alston in eds. S. T. Davis, D. Kendall, S.J., and G. O'Collins, S.J., The Resurrection, 184-90.
32. That is not to say that the full consciousness of recognition may not come 'suddenly': for this theme in Plato and Origen, see Louth, Origins,70-1. Also compare the R. S. Thomas poem, "Suddenly" quoted at the end of this essay.
33. A very original and suggestive reading of the resurrection narratives by a New Testament scholar, along somewhat similar lines to mine, is to be found in M. Sawicki, Seeing the Lord (Minneapolis, 1994). Sawicki draws on Bourdieu's notion of 'practice' (rather than appealing to Wittgenstein's epistemology) in order to give content to the conditions of 'practice' under which the early Christian communities could come to know the risen Christ.
34. L. Wittgenstein, Culture and Value (Chicago, 1980).
35. See n.5, above, for the Lectures; and ibid, 57-9, for Wittgenstein's rejection of Fr. O'Hara's appeal to 'scientific' evidences for religious belief.
36. On Wittgenstein's attraction to Kierkegaard, see Putnam, Renewing Philosophy, 144-50. On the rather more ambiguous evidence about Barth, see the discussion in F. Kerr, Theology After Wittgenstein (Oxford, 1986), 152.
37. I. U. Dalferth makes a telling point about Wittgenstein's unwillingness to own the normative side of his views about religion in "Wittgenstein: The Theological Reception" (see n.3), 32-33.
38. On the possibility of the co-incidence of certainty and doubt in Kierkegaard, see Putnam, Renewing Philosophy, 145; and ibid, on the closeness of some of Wittgenstein's views to Kierkegaard's Concluding Unscientific Postscript (Princeton, N.J., 1941), esp. 25-48. The drama of doubt and certainty is however a paradox not easily subsumed into a graded theory of 'ascent'.
39. Putnam, Renewing Philosophy, 154-7.
40. Ibid, 158-61.
41. Ibid, 160, citing Wittgenstein's Lectures, 67.
42. Ibid, 167.
43. Putnam occasionally falls into the trap of referring to a whole religion as 'a language game' (e.g., ibid, 173); compare the excellent discussion in P. Sherry, Religion, Truth and Language-Games (London, 1977), ch. 2, which reminds us that Wittgenstein himself did not use the terms 'language-game' or 'form of life' for anything as large as a whole religious system, but rather for much smaller elements within such.
44. See Putnam, Renewing Philosophy, 177.
45. See again Wittgenstein, Lectures, 53-9.
46. I am abstracting here from the attendant Platonism of Origen's version of the theory, with—as we have seen—its notorious disjunction between nous and soma, a disjunction that Wittgenstein's philosophy of mind of course stringently questions. It is this feature of Origen, not the rather subtle aspects of his spiritual senses doctrine, which causes Fergus Kerr to point to Origen as the ultimate progenitor of the Cartesian tradition fundamentally brought into question by Wittgenstein: see Kerr, Theology After Wittgenstein, 168.
47. See esp. the treatment of an 'Extended Aquinas/Calvin Model' along these lines of 'proper functioning' in Plantinga, Warranted Christian Belief, Part III.
48. Wittgenstein acknowledges (CV 32e) that 'pictures' too can have different valences at different times, depending on one's spiritual state: "at my level the Pauline doctrine of predestination is ugly nonsense . . ."
49. CV 86e (from 1950).
50. Note that the Kierkegaardian disjunction between 'passion' and 'intelligence' is not the same as the Origenistic dualism between 'mind' and 'body'. Here Wittgenstein seems to be embracing the former, yet simultaneously reaching out for a non-dualistic understanding of the transformative capacities of the enfleshed self—a possibility that reminds us more of some aspects of Gregory of Nyssa's rendition of the spiritual senses tradition than of Origen's.
51. See again my remarks and citations in n. 46. It goes beyond the scope of this essay to chart all the twists and turns of the spiritual senses tradition as aspects of it were recast in scholastic (and much later, neo-scholastic) religious epistemology. The inheritance with which Wittgenstein may have been somewhat familiar, from his upbringing and continuing interaction with Catholicism, is the type of neo-scholastic reflection on levels of 'rational' and 'super-rational' knowledge found in (e.g.) J. Maritain, The Degrees of Knowledge (New York, 1938). It is not part of the thesis of this paper that Wittgenstein was directly cognizant of the patristic form of the spiritual senses doctrine.
52. On this see Ray Monk's pertinent remark: "Still there is a persistent and nagging doubt about how Wittgenstein expected, or hoped, . . . redemption to come about—whether, so to speak, it was in his hands or God's" (R. Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius (London, 1990), 412).
53. See Luke 24: 11 (expressing strong initial disbelief of the women by the male disciples), compared with the added variant text at this point, which has Peter immediately coming to verify the women's tale; and John 20: 2-10, which (unconvincingly?) interrupts the story of Mary Magdalene's first encounter with the risen Jesus by insisting that both Peter and John also came early to the tomb.
54. This is especially emphasized in the Markan account: see the famous last sentence of Mark (16: 8).
55. For a contemporary feminist account of the significance of this likelihood, see E. Schüssler Fiorenza, In Memory of Her (New York, 1983), ch. 4, esp. 138-40. For an incisive recent account of the probable primacy of Mary Magdalene's witness to the resurrection, see G. Theissen and A. Merz, The Historical Jesus: A Comprehensive Guide (Minneapolis, 1998), 496-9.
56. See, e.g., eds. L. Alcoff and E. Potter, Feminist Epistemologies (New York, 1993), and esp. Lorraine Code, "Taking Subjectivity into Account" (ibid, ch. 2), for the critique of epistemology which fails to acknowledge the primary significance of 'knowing' other people as a condition for re-identifying objects.
57. See ibid, 9, 17, 23, 163-5; and compare the account of Wittgenstein's objection to viewing 'the self as a detached spectator' in F. Kerr, Theology After Wittgenstein, 134. Kerr does not himself make a connection to feminism, but his points are exactly parallel to the ones wielded by Lorraine Code (n. 56) in explicitly feminist mode.
58. See Wittgenstein's Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology, vol. II (Oxford, 1980), 687: "Words have meaning only in the stream of life".
59. For a succinct account of this theory of language and of Kristeva's and Irigaray's versions of it, see C. Weedon, Feminist Practice and Post-Structuralist Theory (Oxford, 1987).
60. See Luce Irigaray's justly-famous essay, 'La Mystérique', in Speculum of the Other Woman (Ithaca, N.Y., 1985), 191-202.
61. See Julia Kristeva's equally-renowned article, "Stabat Mater", in ed. T. Moi, The Kristeva Reader (Oxford, 1986), 160-86.
62. R. S. Thomas, Laboratories of the Spirit, 32 (see n. 1). Worth comparing with Thomas's 'semiotic' evocation of the spiritual senses is the equally remarkable poem on a similar theme, "The Transfiguration" by Edwin Muir: (Oxford, 1960), 198-200. It starts:
So from the ground we felt that virtue branch
Through all our veins till we were whole, our wrists
As fresh and pure as water from a well,
Our hands made new to handle holy things,
The source of all our seeing rinsed and cleansed
Till earth and light and water entering there
Gave back to us the clear unfallen world.
63. I am very grateful to John Privett, S.J., for allowing me some space and solitude in Faber House, Cambridge, MA, whilst writing this lecture during a sabbatical year funded by the Lilly Foundation; and to Ludger Viefhues, S.J. and Heinrich Watzka, S.J., for some stimulating conversations on Wittgenstein.
