Oct 13 2009
Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent
St Nicholas Cabasilas: The Life in Christ, Book VI; Hauerwas: “Christian Ethics as Informed Prayer”; Wittgenstein: “A Lecture on Ethics” and Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 6.4-7
“Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent”[1]
Scruton, in “Thoroughly Modern Mill” from last week’s readings, wrote about a wisdom that is “deeper and rarer than rational thought”. This week’s readings go even further, discussing ethics and epistemology in terms beyond rational/intellectual language. Cabasilas discusses holding on to grace in order to know and perform “the duties to God which we all have in common” (p160) through clinging “to that [Christ’s] Heart and that Head, for we obtain life from no other source” (p161). Hauerwas considers a way to discover the “form and content of Christian ethics” in worship and liturgy. Wittgenstein shows how language and propositional thought is not equal to the task of discovering ethics, which must be transcendent of these forms, and can be discovered perhaps in poetry (it is certainly one with aesthetics), perhaps in paradox, but ultimately only in the inexpressible.
Cabasilas shows that while the commandments of Christ are “binding on all the faithful” and as propositional statements permitting intellectual comprehension are important guides on the spiritual path, nevertheless, it is ordering “his life according to Christ’s heart” that provides ‘the way’. It is notable that it is the heart that must be “filled with good thoughts” – not the mind. It is not through thinking about God, but through contemplation, musing, and meditation on God and the revelation of God that the ‘good’ is known (p172). It is the heart of love that suffers – the “proof of friendship” (p163) and the aesthetics of the immortal body are not weakened but rather strengthened by its bearing of those wounds (p164) – and in this aesthetic we discover our ethic of sacrificial love (as Wittgenstein says, “ethics and aesthetics are one”) and this ethic is lived through being united with our Saviour. Through spiritual means our ethic – the life we live – is built up, and through spiritual means it can also be destroyed by temptations to presumption and shame/despair (p168). Through purification it is built up (p175) and the pure life is lived in the Beatitudes (the “true philosophy”, p181) – which describe the ethic of life through approaching it from many sides (cf Wittgenstein’s “Lecture on Ethics”) and through describing the life of Christ in whose life we can find life, since “it was for the new man that human nature was created in the beginning” (p190) and he has become the “food of our thoughts” (p191).
Cabasilas ends Book VI by saying, “if we are thus with Christ by sacred rite, prayer, meditation, and reflection, we shall train the soul for every virtue” (p194). Hauerwas has discovered this same principle (six centuries later he writes with the expectation that it will be seen as a “novelty” – after Kant, the immanent world of ethics and the transcendent world to which worship aspires are irreconcilable). Hauerwas points out that “life is in fact a rehearsal for worship” and while Wittgenstein comments on the unity of ethics and aesthetics, Hauerwas points out, against all modernist assumptions, that in fact good, beauty and truth are a unity. Worship also forms the ethical life since its vision is greater than the modernist division of public and private, seeing society’s “politics” as being about the best use of all the gifts of God rather than just a materialistic economy; and finally, a rediscovery of the active and eschatological direction of worship overcomes the modern’s perceived divide between words and action. After all, in Christ we have the Incarnate Word. Hauerwas describes the experience of a tribe newly converted to Christianity: they experienced (rather than read about) the fact that the Eucharist constituted the church, they required peace between brothers sharing in communion, and they experienced the liturgy as judgement on their social mores: in other words, one aspect of the Liturgy was “a corporate practice for discerning the good”.
Wittgenstein does not oppose language and reality, seeing that poetic language can sometimes contain what is inexpressible in logical language (p167). Hence when he comes to consider ethics, he wishes to go beyond the idea that “ethics is the general enquiry into what is good” by considering at least also aesthetics (so we have good and beauty in a search for truth), but also making several other statements, intended to increase understanding – illustrating the “background” against which language receives meaning (cf p166). He illustrates that it is not possible to reach judgements of absolute value from facts: i.e. one cannot get to what ought to be from what is. He goes so far as to say that ethics is “supernatural”. In attempting to express absolute value in words, the logical, factual content of the linguistic expression is discovered to be nonsense in each case: the language can only attempt to reach at a world inaccessible to it. From this he infers that all religious terms are used “allegorically” or as “similes” (although perhaps ‘symbol’ would be a more appropriate expression as in the symbol of faith, the creed – does the language participate in what it is attempting to express, rather than just standing for it?). In fact, there are no facts behind the similes. He suggests that to see the world in this way is to see it as miracle, as contrasted with a scientific way of looking at the world, which is able to see only facts. It is just the same with language, which is technically able to see only facts – hence to describe the transcendent in words is to “run against the boundaries of language” (p176) – hence the need for a practical apophaticism.
We speak only to show the inadequacy of language to these matters; “whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent”. But language and reasoning are given to us as gifts and they can aid our beginning, even if as we move further along the path we may reach a point where we see, like Aquinas, that all our intellectual struggle and reasoning is just straw. Out of pride, I could have left the paper blank after the Wittgenstein quotation, but it is better not to eschew the humble things, since everything that has been created can speak of God, even if only in muted or distorted tones (cf 1 Cor 13:12).
[1] Wittgenstein: Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus 6.7
