Interest in the person and work of Ludwig Wittgenstein seems not to be diminishing seventy-five years after his death. He was a charismatic figure in life, and hasn’t ceased to be in death. That charism, then and now, was only in part due to his philosophy; it was also due to his persona. One witness to that is the novelist William Gass, who attended a meeting of the Cornell Philosophy Club in 1949 at which Wittgenstein spoke. This meeting was less than two years before Wittgenstein died, during his only visit to the United States. Gass later wrote that the event was the most important intellectual experience of his life, “yet it was an experience almost wholly without content, for it was very plainly not just what the old man said that was so moving, it was almost entirely the way in which he said it, the total naked absorption of the mind in its problem.” There are many such witnesses to the force of Wittgenstein’s persona. He was, and is, as much psychopomp as philosopher; in that way he reminds us of Pascal, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Simone Weil, among others.

Wittgenstein was also, I think, a saint: a man of distinguished and exemplary holiness in life, who also, and not incidentally, was gifted to a remarkable degree with intellectual powers, in particular with those of attention, description, and imagination. However unlikely, it would seem to me fitting if his saintliness were recognized by his canonization, and the importance of his writings acknowledged by his being declared a doctor of the Church.

One measure of continued interest in Wittgenstein is the steady flow of publication of works by and about him. If we consider only the years since 2021, the seventieth anniversary of his death, and only publications in English, we have, of Wittgenstein’s own words, three new translations of the only book he published during his life, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, with a fourth announced, each with a substantial apparatus; a new and unbowdlerized translation of his First World War notebooks (the earlier translation excised his writing about personal anguish and sexual fantasies); selections from his diaries of the 1930s; and a thorough and revealing edition of his correspondence with his last love, Ben Richards, whose hand he held as he died. There is also Anthony Gottlieb’s Ludwig Wittgenstein: Philosophy in the Age of Airplanes, an excellent biography in Yale University Press’s Jewish Lives series; and Sandra Laugier’s Wittgenstein: The Senses of Use, published in French in 2009 and in 2025 in English, which makes strong claims for Wittgenstein’s continuing significance as a philosopher, and is in its own right a distinguished contribution to the philosophy of mind and philosophy of language. And then there are the more or less specialized interpretive essays of varying quality which have appeared in unbroken succession since the 1950s.

Among the philosophers of the twentieth century, Wittgenstein is rivaled in the quantity of attention paid him only by Martin Heidegger (who was born in the same year), and he has, so far as I can see, no rival in the frequency with which imagined versions of him or his writings appear in novels, plays, films, and so on. There is, for example, a strangely beguiling B.B.C. drama from 1973 called A Thinking Man as Hero, which is about the making of an imaginary Wittgenstein documentary, and which, remarkably, dramatizes a sequence of remarks from Wittgenstein’s posthumous book On Certainty. There is also the film Wittgenstein, directed by Derek Jarman from a script by Terry Eagleton, which is a wildly idiosyncratic depiction of both the philosophy and the man. In imaginative literature Wittgenstein figures in, frames, or gives sense to works as varied as Thomas Bernhard’s Wittgenstein’s Neffe, Bruce Duffy’s World As I Found It, and David Markson’s Wittgenstein’s Mistress.

What is the source of this perennial appeal? One answer is Wittgenstein’s personality, in particular the dramatic intensity of his engagement with the philosophical ideas that obsessed him, and his apparent certainty of his own rightness, which was often commented on (positively and otherwise) by those who encountered him. As a thinker he has always had both acolytes and enemies. His life as it appeared to those who knew him, and subsequently to those who read him and read about him, also contributed. It was a life that intersected with the great events of the twentieth century, and it showed many of the characteristics of saintliness: radical asceticism, carelessness of the opinions of the world, single-minded focus on how to live well in response to the gifts given him, desire to communicate those gifts to others, and a mode of living for which eccentricity is too moderate a word. Wittgenstein’s life was, in short, one of surprising holiness.

He was born in Vienna in 1889 to one of the wealthiest families in Europe; for one year he attended the same provincial Austrian Realschule as Hitler, with whom he also shared a birth year, though there is no evidence that they interacted in spite of the desperate desire on the part of some that they should have. Wittgenstein’s ancestry was mainly Jewish; three of his four grandparents were Jews by the ordinary criterion of matrilineal descent. Both his domineering father, Karl, and his mother, affectionately called Poldi, were baptized Catholic, as he himself was. (He was also prepared for confirmation, though there is no record of the sacrament’s being conferred.) There were eight siblings, of whom one died in infancy and three killed themselves in young adulthood, which is a high proportion of suicides even by the standards of their age and class. The young Ludwig trained as an engineer in England; discovered philosophy; and, as an autodidact convinced of his philosophical gifts, went to Cambridge in 1911 to talk with Bertrand Russell, then among the most eminent philosophers in England. He began to work with Russell, who soon acknowledged him as a genius likely to outstrip his own achievement, and who wrote to Ottoline Morrell, one of his many lovers, in 1912 that Wittgenstein’s advent to Cambridge was a “great event in my life.” Wittgenstein was at that point twenty-two. He had published nothing and was without formal philosophical training.

Then came the First World War, during which Wittgenstein served on the front in the Austrian army, in large part in what is now Ukraine (it’s uncanny to read his notebooks from that period and to see that some of the places in and around which he fought are now being fought over again), with distinction and valor, and during which he also drafted large parts of the Tractatus. He subsequently gave up philosophy; renounced his very large inherited fortune after previously giving away large sums to support various causes, including impoverished writers and poets such as Georg Trakl; and worked as a schoolteacher, a gardener, and an architect, as the last of these designing a magnificent high-modernist house for one of his sisters in Vienna in the late 1920s, which still stands even if now with the misfortune of being part of the Bulgarian Embassy. In 1929 he returned to Cambridge and to philosophy, taught and wrote obsessively without publishing, became a British subject in 1939, served for the duration of the Second World War first as a hospital porter in London and then as a laboratory assistant in Newcastle, and in 1949 was diagnosed with prostate cancer. He died in 1951, a few days after his sixty-second birthday.

Wittgenstein often sought solitude, particularly in isolated places in Norway and Ireland. His romantic life was intense, and included relationships with both men and women, the sexual aspects of which seem not now to be knowable in any detail. But apart from a year and a half or so with Francis Skinner in Cambridge from 1938 to 1939, he never set up house with a beloved, and even the company he kept with those he loved was carefully constrained. He never married, and so far as is known begot no children. It isn’t easy to distinguish the intensity of his loves for some we (and he) would have called his friends from that of his loves for those we (and he) might also call his beloveds. (That is, perhaps, another characteristic of sainthood.) He was sometimes petty and violent; he was often self-doubting and even self-loathing; he was almost always self-righteous, and sometimes aware of it; he appeared in the world as a strange visitant.

Such a life has flavor. It feels world-historical and attractive. When contemplated it can encourage discipleship, exciting those who read of it in something like the same way that hearing the life of Antony kindled Augustine. But one must also consider the appeal of Wittgenstein’s work, which has an air of thrilling difficulty, or at least of something unlike most philosophical writing, something that asks to be read differently. His memorial plaque in the chapel of Trinity College, Cambridge, reads, PHILOSOPHANDI NOVAM VIAM MULTIS MONSTRAVIT: “He showed to many a new way in philosophy.” That is certainly true of his literary style, at least.

Wittgenstein published in life one book, the Tractatus; two short essays; and a children’s spelling book, this last during his time as a village schoolmaster in Austria. Of this work he wrote, delightfully, that its effect upon his pupils when he used it with them in draft form had been to awaken their orthographic conscience; conscience-awakening is close to the surface of all his writing. He wants you, the reader, not to think his thoughts, but yours, prompted by his words, and in that way to become someone who thinks clearly and lives well, which two skills are, for him, inseparably connected. Teaching eight-year-olds to spell better wasn’t essentially different for Wittgenstein from teaching G. E. Moore to be a better philosopher. It is also perhaps relevant to note that Wittgenstein was himself an idiosyncratic speller, to some degree in German and more so in English.

Other written materials circulated during his life, of course. Letters, naturally, but also philosophical writing in the form of notes taken by others at his lectures or seminars, or as notes or dictation of his own. All that was more or less samizdat, at least in the sense that Wittgenstein didn’t prepare or intend it for publication. He did, however, contribute to the preparation of two philosophical books for publication in addition to the Tractatus. The first was the Philosophical Remarks, which has a gloomy epigraph from Augustine’s Confessions, about, unsurprisingly, education and its toils: “Many who lived before us had constructed the sorrowful ways through which we were forced to pass with the increased toil and suffering that belongs to the children of Adam.” Wittgenstein doesn’t go in much for quoting or discussing the work of others—he once wrote that he had no interest in whether someone before him had written what he was now writing—but when he does, Augustine often figures. The Remarks also has a foreword by Wittgenstein dated November 1930, although the book wasn’t published until 1964 in German and 1975 in English, long after Wittgenstein’s death. The second paragraph of that foreword reads:

I would like to say, “This book is written to the glory of God,” but nowadays that would be chicanery, that is, it would not be rightly understood. It means the book is written in good will, and in so far as it is not so written, but out of vanity, etc., the author would wish to see it condemned. He cannot free it of these impurities further than he himself is free of them.

Both the epigraph and the comment are characteristic. In the same paragraph of the Confessions, Augustine had recalled beatings given him by his teachers. Wittgenstein’s own career as a schoolteacher was marked and marred by his occasional use of violence against his pupils, including an episode in which he knocked a boy unconscious. Such pedagogical violence was more common then than now, but Wittgenstein nevertheless later bitterly repented it, and the quotation from Augustine is another, subtler example of his contrition. For whatever his failings as a teacher, Wittgenstein did not intend to continue this “sorrowful” pedagogical tradition. He sought clarity and perspicuity, not by constructing edifices or systems but by continuing to attend closely to what he was looking at, and repeatedly trying to grasp one and the same thing. Such an effort required goodwill, perhaps we can say virtue, on the part of its writer; and Wittgenstein tells us that the work’s “impurities” (not errors) will be intimate with those of its writer. Where there are the latter there will be the former; and where the former are discernible, so are the latter. This, if not evidence of sainthood, is evidence both of aspiration to it and of seeing what it is: the inseparable holiness of life and work. That is how writing with goodwill can be glossed; and that expression, in turn, is explicitly marked as a gloss on writing to God’s glory.

The second book Wittgenstein prepared for publication is the one on which his reputation largely rests, the Philosophical Investigations. This too remained unpublished until after his death, but in this case the interval was short: The first edition, in facing-page German and English, was in 1953; the fourth appeared in 2009. In his preface, dated 1945, Wittgenstein wrote that it contained the “precipitate” of work in which he had been engaged during the preceding sixteen years. “I should have liked to produce a good book,” he said. “It has not turned out that way, but the time is past in which I could improve it.” This is not false modesty. A recurrent theme in Wittgenstein’s diaries is his lack of satisfaction with his own philosophical work. He confesses himself a bad or failed philosopher almost as often as he confesses himself a sinner: “I know every possible slightest & greatest wretchedness because I myself have committed it.”

At the time of his death, the vast majority of Wittgenstein’s other writings, which amount to many thousands of manuscript and typescript pages, were left to his literary executors to publish as they saw fit. G. E. M. Anscombe, Rush Rhees, and G. H. von Wright began a process which has continued piecemeal since 1951, in many languages. Dozens of volumes are now available in English or German or in bilingual editions; since about 1990 Wittgenstein’s works have been available in electronic editions. The most comprehensive online collection now is probably that held at the University of Bergen.

Wittgenstein wrote philosophy almost entirely in German. He writes in a diary entry that he could “really work only when I can continuously converse with myself in German.” But he also wrote a good deal in English (letters in particular); taught, perforce, at Cambridge in that language; and appears to have been, for all ordinary purposes, fluent in spoken English, and if not exactly fluent at least very capable in written English. His English, written and spoken, may have been inflected with Germanisms, as Rhees noted; yet, as the editors of the fourth edition of the Investigations suggest, his German was sometimes shaped by English, lexically and syntactically. No doubt we anglophones should read him in German if we’re going to pay proper attention to him. But it is also true to say that Wittgenstein’s reception has been broader, deeper, and more thoroughgoing in English than in any other language, largely because he spent more than half his life in England, and because the widely circulated English versions of the Tractatus and the Investigations have attained the status of classics in English. The recent rash of new Englishings of the former shows that his work has become a classic, which means that frequent retranslation is inevitable. The linguistic situation is agreeably complex.

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How to read Wittgenstein? How does reading him suggest reading in general, and in particular reading of philosophy, might productively proceed?

One approach was encapsulated by the late American philosopher Saul Kripke, who in 1982 published a book responsive to Wittgenstein’s remarks on rules and private language. In his introduction Kripke wrote that his purpose was “expounding neither ‘Wittgenstein’s’ argument nor ‘Kripke’s’: rather, Wittgenstein’s argument as it struck Kripke, as it presented a problem for him.” This was very much in keeping with Wittgenstein’s own intentions. “I should not like my writing to spare others the trouble of thinking,” he wrote in the preface to the Investigations, “but so far as is possible, to stimulate them to thoughts of their own.” Kripke was stimulated in this way. Whatever criticisms one might offer of Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language, it is admirably free of exegetical passion, of the desire to get its subject “right”; instead Kripke simply responded to his own reading of Wittgenstein, implicitly treating philosophy as an activity rather than a set of results. This is what readers of Wittgenstein should aspire to, and to what he seems to have aspired himself. Yet there are other ways of reading him, doxographic approaches that try to explain “Wittgensteinianism” as a kind of doctrine. It is among his virtues as a writer that both approaches are feasible.

What, then, is Wittgenstein’s writing like, as writing? It is interrogative, multi-voiced, often aphoristic, sometimes gnomic, repetitive, painterly, and, because it is all of those things, provocative of multiple interpretations, some incompatible with one another. Wittgenstein himself described the Investigations as “a collection of sketches of a landscape” or “an album,” a work in which “the same or almost the same points were constantly being approached anew from different directions.” He produced word pictures: drawings of a topic or scene that raise a question, which is more often than not unanswered but is sometimes then worried at, as a dog worries a rat it has caught. Let us open the album:

Death is not an event that belongs to life. It is not lived through.

You can’t hear God speak to someone else, but only when you’re being addressed—That is a grammatical remark.

The criteria for the truth of a confession that I thought such-and-such are not those for a true description of a process. And the importance of a true confession does not lie in being a true and certain reproduction of some process. Rather, it lies in the particular consequences which can be drawn from a confession whose truth is guaranteed by the particular criteria of truthfulness.

Each of the sentences I write is trying to say the whole thing, the same thing again and again. As if they are all just views of one thing considered from different angles.

“Everything is already there in . . .” How is it that an arrow ↠ points? Doesn’t it seem to carry within it something external to itself?—“No, not the dead line on paper; only something mental, the meaning, can do that.”—That is true and false. An arrow points only in the application that one among the living makes of it. ¶The pointing isn’t hocus-pocus that only the soul can perform.

This is a distinctive kind of philosophical writing. The depth of its distinctiveness helps to explain the strange status of Wittgenstein’s work in philosophy departments in the United States and Europe, at once exalted and marginal. He is acknowledged as a figure of importance; his writing is often enough taught in one way or another; he is said to have contributed significantly to the development of this or that philosophical trend (logical positivism, ordinary-language philosophy, semantics), but the major lines and schools of francophone, germanophone, and anglophone philosophy have proceeded constructively and normatively largely as though he had never written. Analytic philosophy of mind and philosophy of language, for example, continue to treat the relations between language and thought and those between language and world without Wittgenstein. The same is by and large true for discussions of skepticism, which respond to such conundrums as whether we are being deceived by evil demons, or are brains in a vat, or are scripted actors in someone’s virtual reality game, with transcendental arguments rather than close attention to how we come to learn that such questions are of interest and in what contexts we deploy discussions of them. And as for the phenomenological philosophy that follows from Husserl, Wittgenstein is effectively absent, consigned by those who write in that tradition (if they betray any awareness of him at all) to an imagined Anglo-American analytic tradition which is, they say, or would say if they said anything about it, ahistorical and therefore not responsive to the essential analyses of human being, and therefore not serious as philosophy—that is, as frivolous, superficial, and meretricious as the anglophone world generally is from that point of view.

There are many exceptions to the gross generalizations just made. But they can perhaps stand as generalizations, and the upshot is that Wittgenstein has largely become a classic, and is read as classics are. He wouldn’t have minded this much. “One should really write philosophy only as poetry,” he said. “Nothing,” he admitted, “seems to me less likely than that a scientist or mathematician who reads me should be seriously influenced in the way he works.” He compared his writing to posters displayed in English railway stations during the Second World War which read, “Is your journey really necessary?” and doubted anyone who encountered one of his “placards” would find himself saying, “On second thoughts, no” and turn around. He thought it most likely that his work would “cause a great deal of dreck to be written,” in response to which something better might follow. He hoped for what he called “the most indirect effect.” Poetry with indirect effects is not a bad summary of Wittgenstein’s influence. It’s a reasonable ambition for a psychopomp; less so if you wish to found a philosophical school or to propound a body of doctrine.

Philosophers tend overwhelmingly to have interests that Wittgenstein lacked, or at least interests which his writings do not support and indeed appear to criticize. What they have done with his work has often diluted the effects of reading him. (This is especially true of Catholic philosophers.) One of these non-Wittgensteinian but characteristically philosophical interests is knockdown arguments, the kind which, once you understand them, force you to assent to their conclusions. Philosophy of this kind is coercive, or would like to be; it’s only incidentally elucidatory. A second such interest is in doctrine understood as a body of propositions; a third is in system, the arranging of such propositions into an ordered whole, and the baptism of that whole with a name such as realism, idealism, nominalism, behaviorism, fideism, skepticism, or nihilism. This third interest contains a doxographic impulse, which is an urge to classify philosophies under some or another of these heads, as when some say that Wittgenstein is a behaviorist, or a nominalist, or a fideist, or . . . Catholics will easily see how well Thomism fits this characterization, at least in its philosophical aspects.

Argument, doctrine, system: The picture of philosophy here is roughly that there is a world, that philosophical doctrines describe or represent or picture that world, that such doctrines have been demonstrated by argument, and that they can and should be systematized. If that’s the picture you have of philosophical work—a picture I have described briefly and crudely—then Wittgenstein, early or late, can be made to fit it only by force. That is not surprising. The picture is after all of a coercive enterprise. But in the case of Wittgenstein the force required is extreme because his principal concern, I should like to say, is to provide ways other than these of doing philosophy, of addressing questions that philosophers who so understand philosophizing address—and in doing so also to sketch the confused wheel-spinning that such a picture beckons philosophical writing toward.

Wittgenstein doesn’t oppose this coercive picture with another set of coercions. He shows other ways of writing: conversational, multiple, questioning, suggestive. Above all, he refuses (though not by arguing against them) demands to ascend the ladder of doxographic abstraction by treating such labels as “behaviorism” as interesting. Instead he addresses activities closer to the rough ground of life such as thinking, reading, knowing, hoping, writing, whistling, groaning, and despairing by exploring, grammatically, how we talk about them, and, etiologically, how we’ve come to do so. These explorations can and largely do proceed without engaging more high-toned philosophical questions (Can we know anything? How is language related to the nonlinguistic? What is consciousness?). When they work well, which is not always the case, they lead to a happy sidelining of such high-toned questions in roughly the same way that questions about phlogiston or the humors have been sidelined.

An example of what we might call his “low-toned” approach is his discussion of idiomatic expressions and their use in phrases such as “While I was speaking to him I didn’t know what was going on in his head”:

In saying this one isn’t thinking of what’s going on in his brain, but of what’s going on in his thought. This picture should be taken seriously. We really would like to see into his head. But we only mean what we ordinarily mean by saying that we’d like to know what he’s thinking. I want to say: we have this vivid picture—as well as that use, seeming to contradict the picture, which expresses something mental.

It’s commonplace in a conversational setting to sense something unsaid, something hidden, something thought but not said. This might be suggested by tone of voice, rhythm of speech, posture of the body, and so on. If, in such a situation, you would like to know what your interlocutor is thinking but not saying, a brain scan showing which among his neurons are firing won’t meet the case. That is not what you’re after. You want to know what he’s thinking but not saying. That’s what we ordinarily mean by “I’d like to know what you’re thinking.” And, ordinarily, what we expect, all we know how to expect, all our lives have given us as means to have our expectations met (but never fulfilled), is some more words—or perhaps a gesture or two, or both. We don’t want, or expect, some other more direct access to our interlocutor’s inner space, the space between his ears where we might find what we’re after. Perhaps, if you practice telepathy, you might read his mind; but even if you could do this, which you can’t, the yield would again be verbal: It’s only with words, vocalized or not, that he can tell you what he’s thinking. Words are what “What are you thinking?” ordinarily asks for, and what it gets you when it gets you anything.

The upshot is that we have a “vivid picture” of how it is that we get to know what someone is thinking but not saying. We can accept both aspects of the picture, the outer and the inner, and doing so is a way of holding together a first-person perspective with a third-person one. That holding together is something speakers of all languages do easily.

Such an acceptance is also an acceptance of fluency. By performing it we accept the lives we have and the languages we speak. If we refuse such an acceptance, as philosophers do, we might try to resolve the apparent contradiction, the seeming tension, between inner and outer, between private (what he’s thinking) and public (what he’s saying). One way to bring about such a resolution would be to deny the private: Nothing to see there, we might say. (I’m often tempted in that direction.) Another would be to make the public epiphenomenal to the private. The real thing (and how we want that) would then be the private one, whether as a brain state or pattern of thought.

Each of these trajectories generates all the usual difficulties: What is this thing called thinking? How does that, whatever it is, relate to this other thing called speaking? Which of the two is the real thing, the one that explains the other? What should be our doctrine concerning these matters? Questions such as these show a philosophical tendency, and that tendency is degenerative. Those who exhibit it and show enthusiasm for it (inspiration, preferably divine, is needed; otherwise it’s a desperate enterprise) quickly find, Wittgenstein likes to say, their language idling, taking a vacation, becoming (he doesn’t say) a background tinnitical hum that threatens altogether to drown out the conversation it aspires to explain. Then what you say to me is of interest only as a window offering a glimpse of what you think, of the state of your mind or soul. And then I need the specialized skills of a diviner, a haruspex, for your words have become for me entrails only, and are interesting or repellent only so far as they indicate something they’re not. Once I’ve divined what that is—the state of your soul, the patterns of your thought, the shape of your intent, the texture of your desires (do you really love me?), vel sim.—I can bury or burn the entrails. I don’t need them any longer. Haruspices are violent. Their divinations are preceded by slaughter, and the world is emptier of life when their work is done than it was before they began.

There’s no need for any of that. It’s possible to love and value the words the Word has given us, and to see that they show us the inner and the outer, the private and the public together, connected as a Möbius strip. Some mysteriousness remains, and some tension, of a kind similar to that involved in trying to describe a Möbius strip rather than making one and looking at it. There is “use, seeming to contradict the picture” to which it belongs. But Wittgenstein can suggest a trajectory along which we can move toward a delighted arrival at the place from which we began as skilled conversationalists who were already able to speak fluently of what we say and what we think as mutually informed—of speech as expressing thought while also and at the same time forming it; of thought as speech-formed, prompting (in certain circumstances) expression without succumbing to philosophical pressure to allot primacy or reality to the one at the expense of the other, or to dissolve one into the other. Which our ordinary ways of speaking about the one and the other refuse in any case to do, and which give us the trouble they give us only when we find ourselves asking (because our language uses nouns, and nouns are sometimes intimate with things) such questions as “What is thought?” and “What is meaning?” and “Where can I find them?”

Consider another one of his careful distinctions. “I learn the concept ‘seeing’ along with the description of what I see,” Wittgenstein wrote. “I learn both to observe and to describe what I observe.” This he contrasted with “imaging” or imagining, which belongs to “a different context,” closer to “doing” than to “receiving,” almost a “creative act”; while descriptions of what we have seen and what we have imagined are similar—indeed it might not be clear whether one is reading a description of one or the other—the two are “thoroughly different.” To see something and to imagine something are alike in that both have the same kind of object: a leafless tree, perhaps, or your lovely face. But they differ in that imaging, making an inner visual image for ourselves, imagining your lovely face while you’re not before my eyes, is, as we talk of it, something undertaken, while seeing your lovely face when it’s before my eyes is something received. Alike and different, then. One a gift from without, the other an inner-imaginative response to that gift, like the Möbius strip of thought and speech but with a different valence and in the reverse direction. What we imagine is informed by what we have seen, but how we see what we see is also informed by what we have imagined. What I see when I see your lovely face for the hundredth time is—yes—your lovely face; but now, because I’ve found it lovely, the thing I see is tinctured with and shaped by all the times I have imagined it. They can no longer be separated. Attempting to separate them in a principled and systematic way is a degenerative and misleading enterprise. It distracts from what’s easy to talk of, which is the harmonious relationship between what I see of you and what I imagine of you, a relationship that doesn’t rule out tension between the two, and which needs resolution into an ontology of kinds only when we do philosophy.

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I should like to end by attempting to use Wittgenstein to talk about what we do when we say the Creed at Mass. That is a kind of confession, which is an act in which Wittgenstein was very much interested, particularly when it involved a confession of sin. He was a virtuoso and extreme practitioner of confession, often to the surprise and distress of those to whom he confessed. He also often wrote about other kinds of confessing, as in the remark quoted above about confessing “that I thought such-and-such”—confession, that is, as an apt way of talking about what we do when we tell someone what we’re thinking. We offer an avowal (not, I think, a word Wittgenstein uses) rather than a description, and that is an important difference, from which much flows. We can use him to think about the confessio fidei, which is what a corporate recitation of the Creed is, and doing so, as it seems to me, is an apt illustration of what Catholics have to learn from him.

How did we, those of us who say the Creed at Mass, come to learn to do so? The act and the words were passed on to us, handed down to us: We were instructed that these are the words, and this the setting in which you are to say them. We may have been required, or at least asked, to memorize the words in whatever language we use for worship, so that then we could say or sing them without book or screen, as we might the Pledge of Allegiance or “God Save the King” (I hold both passports). Were we also instructed in what the words mean? If we were, it was incidental. The main thing, the key thing, the thing that counted when we were taught, is that we learned to say the words and the setting in which they were to be said—after the Kyrie and the Gloria, before the Sanctus and the Agnus Dei. We became, then, the kind of person who says these things in that setting, as we have probably also become the kind of person who applauds when the concert ends or shakes a hand when it’s offered.

We do, it is true, begin by saying, “I believe.” A practitioner of philosophical divination, as all too many Catholic thinkers are (I’m thankful that not many Catholics are also thinkers, at least about these matters), is likely then to begin to read the entrails: to ask, and answer, which beliefs are here being confessed, and, worse, to say and even to think that what counts about the act, what makes it the act it is, is active and occurrent commitment to the Creed’s propositional content as it’s being recited. That a good recitation is one in which the words are glistered by some thoughts: thoughts that there is one God, that Jesus Christ is consubstantial with the Father, and so on. But, obviously, that is not what counts about the act. It is a violent misconstrual of the kind of act it is. A Catholic who has memorized the Creed and knows its use, but who has nothing to say about what it means, or who, when he does say something about what it means by offering glosses and interpretations gets things wrong, is no worse off as a worshiper, his recitation no less an act of faith, than one who can, and even sometimes does, consider the conundrums as he speaks the words, and can, when asked, speculate about consubstantiality or the filioque in concord with the broad stream of orthodoxy.

The very text of the Creed shows this. We confess belief in, not belief that. We make an act of faith which is also an act of trust. We don’t need to be actively having thoughts about the meaning of the words we say as we’re saying them in order to do that (having such thoughts may be a drawback: Theologians are typically not good at adoration); nor do we need to be disposed, should occasion arise, to talk or think about the meanings of the words we habitually recite. That’s good, because few Catholics have any such thoughts or any such dispositions, as has always been the case. They’re none the worse for it.

Wittgenstein would have us hold together the public and the private, the inner and the outer, not dissolve one into the other, or construe one as the real thing and the other as an imperfect rendition of it. To be a person who says the Creed is to be a person formed by those words in a first-person sense: “I believe.” If asked what one believes about the faith, the first and obvious answer is to provide the words of the Creed. That’s what I believe, we can say. We might, some of us do, find our thoughts shaped, informed, by those words, so that not only can we say some things about them when asked, but also our thoughts and words in other contexts, and in particular our verbal avowals of what we’re thinking (or hoping, intending, regretting, anticipating) in this or that context receive some part of their shape by our habit of recitation. It isn’t that recitation of the Creed pictures or shows our thoughts; that isn’t its point or purpose. It may be that, over time, the habit of recitation begins to form them, and then that its recitation, on this or that occasion or on many, is itself shaped by those thoughts into something it hadn’t been, and begins to express them. The feedback loop can take many forms, and it always alters over the course of a life.

That symbiosis between thought and word, if and to the extent that it happens, makes us creatures of the Word rather than thinkers who speak words. It is a gift of grace. Wittgenstein writes, “Is it a way out of here to cast oneself into the arms of grace?” He expects an affirmative answer. And the answer is affirmative. And then also, “Christianity is really saying: let go of all intelligence.” As, indeed, it is, with the proviso that when let-go intelligence is returned, pressed down, and shaken, it runs over. Wittgenstein saw all that clearly enough, and can help us to see it more clearly than we do. In order to let that happen we need only—those of us who like to read—read him closely and repeatedly. Doing so makes us more intimate with God, and saying so is an avowal of a thought produced by reading, an avowal whose truthfulness is assessable not by me or by you, and not by any diviner who dowses for thoughts, but only by the Lord.