G. E. M. ANSCOMBE VOLUME THREE Ethics, Religion and Politics Basil Blackwell Oxford First published in 1981 by Basil Blackwell Publisher 108 Cowley Road Oxford OX4 iJF England All rights reserved. No part o f this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of Basil Blackwell Publisher Limited. in this col l ect i on G. E. M. Ans c ombe 1981 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Anscombe, Gertrude Elizabeth Margaret The collected philosophical papers o f G. E. M. Anscombe Vol. 3: Ethics, religion and politics 1. Philosophy, English Addresses, essays lectures I. Title 192'.08 B1618 ISBN 0-631-12942-1 Typeset in Photon Baskerville Printed and bound in Great Britain at The Camelot Press Ltd, Southampton 12 Faith In the late 1960s some sentence in a sermon would often begin: We used to believe t h a t . . . . 1 always heard this phrase with an alarmed sinking o f the heart. I had alternative expectations. The more hopeful one was f o r some absurd lie. For example: We used to believe that anyone was safe for Heaven i f he kept the Church rules. We used to believe that there was no worse sin than to miss mass on Sunday. The worse one was o f hearing something like We used to believe that there was something special about the p r i e st h oo d ; We used to believe that the Church was here for the salva tion o f souls. Now there was a We used to believe . . . which I think could have been said with some truth and where the implied rejection wasnt a disaster. There was in the preceding time a professed enthusiasm fo r rationality, perhaps inspired by the teaching o f Vatican I against fideism, certainly carried along by the p romotion o f neo-thomist studies. T o the educated laity and the clergy trained in those days, the word was that the Catholic Christian faith was rational, and a problem, to those able to feel it as a problem, was how it was gratuitous. - a special gift o f grace. Why would it essentially need the promptings o f grace to follow a process o f reasoning? It was as i f we were assured there was a chain o f proof. First, God. Then, the divinity o f Jesus Christ. Then, his establishment o f a Church with a Pope at the head o f it and with a teaching commission from him. This bod y was readily identifiable. Hence you could demonstrate the truth o f what the Church taught. Faith, indeed, is not the same thing as knowledge but that could be accounted for by the extrinsic character o f the proofs o f the defide doctrines. The knowledge which was contrasted with faith, would be knowledge by proofs intrinsic to the subject matter, not by proofs from someone s having said these things were true. For matters which were strictly o f faith intrinsic proofs were not possible, and that was why faith contrasted with knowledge . This is a picture o f the more extravagant form o f this teaching. A more sober variation would relate to the Church that o ur L or d established. In this variant one w ou l d n t identify the church by its having the Pope, but otherwise; and one would discover that it had a Pope and that that was all right. This more sober form had the merit o f allowing that the believer was committed to the Christian faith, rather than suggesting that he had as it were signed a blank cheque to be filled out by the Pope in no matter what sum. A yet more sober variant would have avoided trading on the cultural in- This paper has not previously been published. It was delivered as a Wiseman Lecture at Oscott College. The Philosophy of Religion heritance for which the name o f Jesus was so holy that it was easy to go straight from b e li e f in G o d to b e li e f in je s us as G o d s Son. In this more sober variant one would be aware o f the dependence o f the New Testament on the Old: one would be clearly conscious o f the meaning o f calling o ur Lord Christ . The sober variants would have a disadvantage fo r the propagandists o f the rationality (near demonstrability) o f faith - though a great advantage in respect o f honesty and truthfulness. The disadvantage was that no one could suppose it quite easy fo r anyone to see that what Jesus established was matched by the Catholic Church that we know. I f it was j ust a matter o f his having f ounded a Church with a Pope, then it was easy indeed! Butotherwise it was obvious that learning and skill would be required to make the iden tification. And the considerations and arguments would be multifarious and difficult to be sure about. Hence the problem most commonly felt, amongst the more intellectual enquirers, as to the character o f the certainty ascribed to faith. The so-called preambles o f faith could not possibly have the sort o f certainty that it had. And i f less, then where was the vaunted rationality? But there was a graver problem. What about the faith o f the simple ? They could not know all these things. Did they then have some inferior brand o f faith? Surely not! And anyway, did those who studied really think they knew all these things? No: but the implication was that the knowledge was there somehow, perhaps scattered through different learned heads, perhaps merely theoretically and abstractly available. In the be lie f that this was so, one was being rational in having faith. But then it had to be acknowledged that all this was problematic - and so adherence to faith was really a matter o f hanging on, and both its being a gift and its voluntariness would at this point be stressed. I sometimes hear accounts o f the times o f darkness before Vatican II which strike me as lies. I hope that I have not been guilty o f lying in what I have said here. This at least is my recollection o f how it was in some presen tations, some discussions, some apologetic. Was, and is no longer, not necessarily because better thoughts about faith are now c o m m o n ; there is a vacuum where these ideas once were prominent. But all these considerations, proofs, arguments and problems are now out o f fashion, f o r various reasons which I w on t discuss. The passing away o f these opinions is not to be regretted. They attached the character o f rationality entirely to what were called the preambles and to the passage from the preambles to faith itself. But both these preambles and that passage were in fact an ideal construction - and by ideal I d o n t mean one which would have been a good development o f thinking, i f it had occurred in an individual; I mean rather fanciful , indeed dreamed up ac cording to prejudices: prejudices, that is, about what it is to b e reasonable in holding a belief. The right designation f o r what are called the preambles o f faith is not that but at least f o r part o f them, presuppositions . Let me explain this in a Faith 115 simple example. You receive a letter from soneone y ou know, let s call him Jones. In it, he tells you that his wife has died. Y o u believe him. That is, you now believe that his wife has died because you believe him. Let us call this just what it used to be called, human faith . That sense o f faith still occurs in our language. Why , someone m*ly be asked, do y ou believe such-and- suchP , and he may reply I j ust took it on faith - so-and-so told me . Now this believing Jones, that his wife has died, has a number o f presup positions. In believing it you presuppose (1) that y our f r i e n d j o n e s exists, (2) that this letter really is f rom him, (3) that that really is what the letter tells you. In ordinary circumstances, o f course, none o f these things is likely to be m doubt, but that makes no difference. Those three convictions or assumptions are, logically, presuppositions that>'o have i f y our b e li e f that Jones wife has died is a case o f your believing Jones. Note that I say they areyour presuppositions. I do not say that your believ ing Jones entails those three things; only that y our believing Jones entails that y ou believe those three things. In modern usage faith tends to mean religion, or religious belief. But the concept o f faith has its original home in a particular religious tradition. I f a Buddhist speaks o f his faith , saying f o r example that his faith ought not to be insulted, he means his religion, and he is borr owing the word faith which is really alien to his tradition. In the tradition where that concept has its origin, faith is short for divine faith and means believ ing G o d . And it was so used, among the Christian thinkers at least, that faith, in this sense, could not be anything but true. Faith was believing God, as Abraham believed God, and no false b e l i e f could be part o f it. I want to say what might be understood a bout faith b y someone who did not have any; someone, even, who does n ot necessarily believe that God exists, but who is able to think carefully and truthfully about it. Bertrand Russell called faith certainty without p r o o f . T hat seems correct. Ambrose Bierce has a definition in his Devil s Dictionary; The attitude o f mind o f one who believes without evidence one who tells without knowledge things without parallel . What should we think o f this? According to faith itself faith is believing God. I f the presuppositions are true, it is, then, believing on the best possible grounds someone who speaks with perfect knowledge. I f only the presuppositions were given, Bierce would be a silly fellow and Russell would be confuted. But is there even the possibility o f believing G o d ? This is hard to grasp: it is itself one o f the things without parallel . Anyway, in general, faith comes by hearing , that is, those who have taith learn what they believe by faith, learn it from other people. So someone who so believes believes what is told him by another human, who may be very ignorant o f everything except that this is what he has to tell as the content o f faith. So Bierce s Devil may be right. Qne who has not evidence believes one who has not knowledge (except o f that one thing): at least, he believes what the latter says and he gets what he believes from the latter; yet according to The Philosophy of Religion faith he believes God. I f so, then according to faith a simple man - a man with no knowledge o f evidence - may have faith when he is taught by a man ignorant o f everything except that these are the things that faith believes. More than that, according to faith this simple man and his teacher have a belief in no way inferior to that o f a very learned and clever person who h a s faith. //faith is like that, even i f it is believing God, then it follows that the Bierce definition is right after all. For everyone is to have faith and few can be learned, and their learning doesn t give them a superior kind o f faith. Everyone is to run: and few are road-sweepers. It is clear that the topic I introduced o f believing somebody is in the middle o f our target. Let us go back to Jones, and investigate believing Jones, when you read in his lettei that his wife has died. You can t call it believing Jones j ust i f Jones says something or other and you do believe that very thing that he says. For you might believe it anyway. And even i f it s someone s saying something that causes you to believe it, that doesn t have to be believing him. He might just be making you realize it, calling it to your attention - but y ou j u d g e the matter for yourself. N o r is it even sufficient that his saying it is y our evidence that it is true.1 For suppose that you are convinced that he will both lie to you, i.e. say the opposite o f what he really believes, and be mistaken ? That is, the opposite o f what he thinks will be true; and he will say the opposite o f what he thinks. So what he says will be true and you will believe it because he says it. But you w o n t be believing him! Ordinarily, o f course, when you believe what a man says, this is because you assume that he says what he believes. But even this doesn t give us a sufficient condition f o r your believing to be believing him. For here again one can construct a funny sort o f case - where you believe that what he believes will be true, but by accident, as it were. His b e li e f is quite idiotic, he believes what h e s got out o f a Christmas cracker for example. In fact, unknown to him but known to you, what has been put in the crackers for their party arc actual messages with some practical import. You know that the messages in the blue crackers are all true, and the ones in the red crackers all false. He believes any o f them. And now he tells you something, and you believe it because he says it and you believe he is saying what he believes, and because you know that this thing that he believes comes out o f a blue cracker. That wouldn t be believing him. But when you believe your history teacher, for example, it is enough that you believe what he says because he says it and you d on t think h e s lying and you think what he believes about that will be true. I mean, that is enough f o r you to be believing him. So the topic o f believing someone is pretty difficult. O f course i f you could put in that you believe the person knows what he is telling you, these difficulties d o n t arise. You believe what he says because he says it and you believe that he knows whether it is so and wori t be lying. T h a t s why this p a r 1 I asked Mary Geach to construct a case to show this. She responded with what follows. Faith 117 ticular problem w o n t normally arise about that letter from your friend Jones telling y ou his wife has j ust died. Now there is another question about what it is to believe someone, which concerns the presuppositions. I said that jyou presuppose that Jones exists, did write the letter, and did say that in it, i f you believe him to the effect that that was so. I d id n t say that the mere fact o f y our believing Jones presupposed those things. Now what in fact are we to say here? Suppose someone has a hoax pen-friend - I mean, the pen-friend is really a contrivance o f his school-fellows who arrange for their letters to be posted from Chicago to England and make the non-existent correspondent tell their friend all sorts o f things. And suppose he believes the things in the usual sort o f way in which people believe things they are told. Is he believing the pen-friend? What are we to say? Would n t we say that some ancient believed the oracles o f the gods? And w ou l dn t it then be right to say he believed the god whose oracle it was ? I f y ou insist on saying that the deluded victim does not believe the pen- friend because the pen-friend doesn t exist, you will deprive yourself o f the clearest way o f describing his situation: he believed this non-existent p e r son . And, somewhat absurdly, you will have to say that his own expression o f b e li e f I believe her , is not an expression o f belief, or not a proper one. What then would be the proper one? We had better settle for saying that the victim believes the pen-friend, and that the ancient was believing A po l l o - who does not exist. And doesn t the same point hold for the case where the letter-writer does exist, but you have misunderstood what he wrote, or mis takenly supposed that this letter is from him? Especially i f the mistakes were quite reasonable ones. Now let us think some more about the presuppositions. Ordinarily the presuppositions o f believing N simply do not come in question. I get a letter from someone I know; it does not occur to me to doubt that it is from him. Suppose that the doubt does occur for some reason. The letter perhaps says it is from him - the very thing to raise a doubt! Now I take it as obvious that, i f I decide to believe that the letter is from him, I w on t do so on the grounds on which I believe him when the letter says his wife-is dead. For I believe his wife is dead because he says so. But the reason why I believe the letter is from him is n ot that he says so. His credibility is not my warrant for believing that the letter is from him. Even i f the letter begins This is a letter from your old friend Jones and I j ust believe that straight o f f and uncritically, I believe the sentence, and believe that the letter is from Jones because the sentence says so, but I could never say I believed it because I believed him. This is the sense in which the presuppositions o f faith are not themselves part o f the content o f what in a narrow sense is believed by faith. Now let us change the case. Suppose a prisoner in a dungeon, to whom there arrives a letter saying: This letter comes from an unknown friend, N . 2 2 This development o f a case which I considered (see What is it to believe someone? in Volume II), o f a letter from an otherwise unknown person, is taken from Peter Geach. See The Virtues (Cambridge, 1977). x 1 8 The Philosophy of Religion It proposes to help him in various needs which he is invited to communicate by specified means. Perhaps it also holds out hope o f escape from the prison The prisoner doesn t know i f it is a hoax or a trap or is genuine, but he tries the channels o f communication and he gets some o f the things that he asks for; he also gets further letters ostensibly f rom the same source. These letters sometimes contain information. We will suppose that he now believes that N exists and is the author o f all the letters; and that he believes the information as coming from N. That is, his b e li e f in that i nformation is a case o f believing N. His be lie f that N exists and that the letters come from N is, j us t as in the more ordinary case, not an example o f believing something on N s say-so On the other hand, as we are supposing the case, he does not have prior knowledge o f N s existence. And it could happen that he, like the man who uncritically accepts the letter beginning This is from J ones , believes the opening communication This is from an unknown friend call me N straight off: j us t as he d likely believe straight o f f that a whispered o r tapped communication purporting to come from the next cell is a communication from another prisoner. Even so the beliefs which are cases o f believing N and the be lie f that N exists are logically different. This brings out the difference between presuppositions o f believing N and believing such-and-such as coming from N. Pre-suppositions d o n t have to be temporarily prior beliefs. Suarez said that in every revelation God reveals that he reveals. That sounds like saying: every letter from N to the prisoner informs him that the information in the letter is from N, and every bit o f information from N is accompanied by another bit o f information that the first bit was from N. Put like that there is an absurdity, an infinite regress. But it should not be put like that. Rather: in every bit o f information N is also claiming (implicitly or explicitly, it doesn t matter which) that he is giving the prisoner information. And now we come to the difficulty. In all the other cases we have been con sidering, it can be j n a d e clear what it is f o r someone to believe someone. But what can it mean to believe G o d ? Could a learned clever man inform me on the authority o f his learning, that the evidence is that G o d has spoken? No. The only possible use o f a learned clever man is as a causa removens pro- hibens. There are gross obstacles in the received opinion o f my time and in its characteristic ways o f thinking, and someone learned and clever may be able to dissolve these. Forgetting that a bout hearing - i.e. from teachers - should we picture it like this: a man hears a voice saying something to him and he believes it is God speaking, and so he believes what it says - so he believes G o d ? But what does he believe when he believes it is God speaking ? T hat God has a voice- b o x ? Hardly. In relation to the be lie f that it is G o d speaking, it doesn t matter how the voice is produced. There is a Rabbinical idea, the Bath Q ol , the daughter o f the v o i c e . You hear a sentence as you stand in a crowd - a few words out o f what someone is saying perhaps: it leaps out at you, it speaks to your c o n ditio n . Thus there was a man standing in a crowd and he Faith 1 1 9 heard a woman saying Why are you wasting your time? He had been dithering about, putting o f f the question o f becoming a Catholic. The voice struck him to the heart and he acted in obedience to it. Now, he did not have to suppose, nor did he suppose, that that remark was not made in the course o f some exchange between the woman and her companion, which had nothing to do with him. But he believed that G o d had spoken to him in that voice. The same thing happened to St Augustine, hearing the child s cry, Tolle, lege . Now the criticial differentiating point is this. In all those other cases it is clear what the one who believes X means by X speaking , even when we judge that X doesn t exist. For example, what the believer in the oracle means by A po l l o speaking . But it is not clear what it can mean for God to speak. For A po l l o , or Juggernaut, is simply the god o f such and such a cult. Note, I am not here following those who explain deity as the object o f worship . That definition is useless, because they have to mean by worship the honour paid to a deity . Divine worship is the special sort o f honour intended to be paid, the special sort o f address made, to a deity. This may be offered to what is not divine, to a stone or another spirit or a man; or to what doesn t exist at all. So when I say A po l l o was the god o f such-and-such a cult , I am calling attention to the question: what would it mean to say These were n o t - n o n e o f them were - the temples and oracles o f A p o l l o - precisely of the temples and oracles o f A p o l l o ? What would it mean to say that Shiva was not the god o f destruction? Shiva is the god o f this worship, which is the cultus o f a god o f destruction. In this sense, G o d is not the god o f such-and-such a worship. This is something that can be seen by an atheist too, even though he holds that there is in any case no such thing as deity. For he can see, i f he thinks about it, that G o d is not a proper name but is equivalent to a definite description (in the technical sense). That is, it is equivalent to the one and only true g o d , the one and only real deity . The point o f putting in true and real is that those who believe there is only one deity have so much occasion to speak o f deities that they do not believe to exist. We then speak o f A po l l o , Shiva and Juggernaut as gods who are not gods. An atheist believes that God is among the gods who are not gods, because he believes that nothing is a deity. But he should be able to recognize the identity o f G o d with the one and only g o d . , It is because o f this equivalence that G o d cannot be formally identified as the go d o f such-and-such a cult or such-and-such a people. T o say that God is the god o f Israel is to say that what Israel worshipped as god was the one and only g o d . So it could significantly be denied. And it could be seen to be true - even by one who believed that the description the one and o nly g o d is vacuous. . . And so we can say this: the supposition that someone has faith is the sup- 120 The Philosophy of Religion position that he believes that something - it may be a voice, it may be something he has been taught - comes as a word from God. Faith is then the belief he accords that word. So much can be discerned by an unbeliever, whether his attitude is poten tially one o f reverence in face o f this phenomenon o r is only hostile. But the Christian adds that such a be lie f is sometimes the truth, and that the con sequent belief is only then what he means by faith.
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