3. Anscombe's methods

This raises a question of whether there is also a contrast in the methods by which Anscombe arrived at the insights on the one hand and the contrary theses on the other. I think that in broad terms there is a difference in the ways that led her to the two, but that in itself does not speak to the matter of methods in the sense of procedures or techniques. The difference would be this: the theses were arrived at through processes of reading and listening to philosophers, great ones from the past and significant ones from her own period, and discussing and debating, and synthesizing arguments and conclusions so as to come to more or less settled views. The insights, by contrast, came to her in the course of investigations prompted by questions of the form: ‘how is it possible that such and such?’.

This last phrase will immediately suggest a Kantian approach, seeking sufficient and/or necessary conditions of some phenomenon or type of thought or experience; but I have something broader and more varied in mind. One kind of example of the questions that gave rise to her investigations would be ‘how is it possible that people could think that it is permissible intentionally to kill the innocent?’, a second is ‘how is it possible that saying ‘I promise’ creates an obligation’, a third, ‘how is it possible that one can resign from a club and so be free of its rules and authority but not resign from being governed by the state?’, fourth, ‘how is it possible that someone could think that one can only know what is necessary?’, fifth, ‘how is it possible that we know we see objects rather than just surfaces, or just appearances of objects or surfaces?’, a sixth, ‘how is it possible to know what to do or not to do without having some kind of ethical theory be it an implicit one?’, a seventh ‘how is it possible that some philosophers have been convinced that they are immaterial beings while doubting that there is a world of material objects?’, an eighth ‘how is it possible that some philosophers have been convinced that thought is a brain process while also thinking about non-material realities’ and an ninth ‘how is it possible that some philosophers can say there is no such thing as language or think that there are no such things as thoughts?’

In the Theaetetus Plato has Socrates say ‘the feeling of wonder shows that you are a philosopher, since wonder is the only beginning of philosophy’.Footnote ²¹ The wonder in question is related to astonishment but also to puzzlement or else no enquiry would ensue. Characteristically Aristotle is clearer if more prosaic when he writes in the Metaphysics, no doubt with the Theaetetus passage in mind, that ‘It is through wonder that men now begin and originally began to philosophize; wondering in the first place at obvious perplexities, and then by gradual progression raising questions about the greater matters too’.Footnote ²²

Anscombe may well have been struck in reading these passages while studying Greats (Classics and Philosophy) at Oxford for she recalls that while still at school she struggled to justify some ‘principle of causality’ and ‘went around asking people why, if something happened, they would be sure it had a cause’, and of the period of her early university studies she recounts ‘For years I would spend time, in cafes, for example, staring at objects saying to myself: ‘I see a packet [of cigarettes]. But what do I really see? How can I say that I see here anything more than a yellow expanse?’.Footnote ²³ This capacity to be struck by questions and to persist in trying to understand what gave rise to them and how they might be answered, thinking hard and in an undistracted way about these things remained with her and is evident in all her writing.

It also explains her seriousness and with that her preference to engage with great philosophers of the past who were similarly struck by simply stated but profound questions, rather than to engage, as most philosophers now do, with research agendas set by their contemporary peers and pursued in increasing numbers of monographs and articles. At the time when Anscombe began publishing in 1950s it was more common to have few if any footnotes, but by the time she stopped publishing in the 1990s the situation had been completely transformed yet she continued to refer mainly to ancient, medieval and modern writers (generally in her own translations were these were required) making few references to her contemporaries and then for the most part only to leading ones such as Davidson, Kripke, and Quine.

4. Philosophical demeanour

Mary Geach, who is herself a philosopher and Anscombe's literary executor, recalls her mother defining philosophy for the purpose of a Cambridge undergraduate prospectus as ‘thinking about the most difficult and ultimate questions’. She then goes on to say ‘Some people might want to qualify the word “thinking” as it occurs in this definition, but Anscombe did not go in for a special, different kind of thinking’.Footnote ²⁴ This suggests that Anscombe did not believe in or at any rate did not herself make use of a philosophical methodology, but while that may be true in a narrow sense of methodology there is no doubt that her philosophical writings differ from those intended for a general audience in ways that encourage the question are the differences just ones of subject matter or degree of rigour, or is there also something different in method?

As it happens there has been some recent discussion of Anscombe's philosophical style, not in the sense of literary manner, though she certainly has one, but of what the authors of these discussions themselves term her ‘method’: first, by a distinguished former student Cora Diamond in ‘Reading the Tractatus with GEM Anscombe’, part 3 of which is titled ‘Anscombe and Philosophical Method’Footnote ²⁵, and second, by Ulf Hlobil and Katharina Nieswandt in ‘On Anscombe's Philosophical Method’.Footnote ²⁶ According to Diamond, in Anscombe's examination of the Tractatus

According to Hlobil and Nieswandt, meanwhile, a commonly found method when writing on her own account follows a four-stage path:

There is something recognizable in both of these accounts though that may be because of their familiarity as philosophical methods more generally. One might think, especially with regard to what Hlobil and Nieswandt write, that the first and second stages are basically Socratic, and the first certainly so in the sense in which analytic philosophy in its heyday saw itself as engaged ‘Socratic’ definition, and the second then contra-analytic in the manner of Quine in ‘Two Dogmas of Empiricism’. Meanwhile, the third and fourth are recognizably late Wittgensteinian. Given Anscombe's education and later formation as a student of Wittgenstein's this is hardly surprising. But I want to introduce two further features the first of which may serve to explain what is surely obvious about much of her writing, namely its great difficulty and which is related to another feature, which I think is important, which I will call her philosophical demeanour.

Rush Rhees, who together with Anscombe and Von Wright served as Wittgenstein's first literary executors, gave a report of the master's advice: ‘Wittgenstein used to say to me, “Go the bloody hard way”’. adding ‘I remember this more often, perhaps, than any other single remark of his.’Footnote ²⁸ Of course going the bloody hard way oneself is compatible with clearing and preparing the way so that it is signposted and made even, thereby becoming an easier route for those who follow. But Wittgenstein and Anscombe do not do that. Sometimes it is only when we have been led to a dead end and a new start is begun that we realise we were being led along the wrong track. This is not true of ‘Modern Moral Philosophy’ but that is indicative of its atypicality in her oeuvre (a fact rarely referred to) because in it she was setting out for a mixed faculty and student audience, views borne of recent concentrated reading of modern moral philosophy (from Kant to Sidgwick) for the purposes of tutoring undergraduates in it at her college (Somerville). Those views represented her assessment of where the subject had gone wrong and of what cultural shift might lie behind that. The latter aspect incidentally touches on a significant interest on her part in cultural mindsets – weltanschauungen (to which she also refers in ‘Causality and Determination’).Footnote ²⁹

Certainly, misdirection is also a Socratic or Platonic method and she not only read dialogues of Plato, Anselm, Berkeley and Hume with appreciation, she also wrote some of her own. Intention itself is hard to read in part because it is neither linear nor paved nor punctuated with clear views back or forward, We remain in rough and often obscure terrain. One explanation might be the desire to show the workings, another is that this is just a reflection of her own mode of thought. Both could be true but I think there is also something else in that, like Wittgenstein, she wants the reader to know the way is hard or at the least not to conceal the fact; and for them, which is to say for us, to go that way too. This is why, as in the later Wittgenstein, there is an element of many voicednesss in the text. Intention is markedly Wittgensteinean in method and to a degree in its format and mannerisms which explains why its mode may have seemed familiar to her, unfamiliar to most of her contemporaries, and simply perplexing to later readers. Commentators have observed the similarity in style of some of Anscombe's writings to those of Wittgenstein as represented by the Philosophical Investigations or On Certainty, but those who say this are invariable referring to the English editions, perhaps forgetting that Anscombe produced those translations. I am not suggesting that she substituted her voice for that of Wittgenstein but only that as translators are generally aware the expressive rendering of works tends to involve author and translator as co-producers of the resulting text.

Anscombe was not unwitting in matters of style. She can be very creative in formulating examples or introducing imagery. Also, there is a typescript of an earlier version of material for Intention with accompanying comments by Philippa Foot where Anscombe's text is more linear, plain and easily followed perhaps because she had still to recognize difficulties. More likely, however, is that having smoothed things out to her own partial satisfaction she then thought it better to reintroduce or re-expose the bumps, blocks and fissures. There is also perhaps a kind of vanity or pride in being an immediate disciple of one whom she believed (rightly) to be a misunderstood genius, whose profundity of method contrasted with (as she saw it) the superficial facility of theoretical lexicographers such as J.L. Austin whom she hated with a vengeance.

In further though brief characterisation of her demeanour, and in contrast to the preceding, I want to mention a feature that I have not seen discussed though something of the sort has been noted in relation to Wittgenstein, which is a similarity of vision, both in the way of seeing things and in the what of it, to that of G.K. Chesterton. As with Aurel Kolnai another moral philosopher-convert to Catholicism, with whom she shared many substantive moral opinions, Anscombe's embrace of Catholicism was influenced in part by reading Chesterton. For reasons of space I will not quote a series of parallel passages, and I only pick out the idea that nothing is really hidden, that the facts lie before our eyes but that either because they are so familiar or because we are in the grip of an idea or a spirit that distorts our sight. Here then is Chesterton followed by Wittgenstein's reflections on, or expressions of that idea from Philosophical Investigations (129).

5. Knowledge and faith

So much for the matter of philosophical method considered in the abstract. I want next to consider two examples of Anscombe's approach: the first relating to the treatment of a familiar philosophical issue: the nature of knowledge, the second to religious or theological ones: faith and transubstantiation. The first cites and then extends her investigation of when it is appropriate to speak of knowledge and of what in the context and background may make sense of this, not from the point of view of traditional ‘epistemology’ given that the latter is usually associated with a general study of the status of perceptual and doxastic items with regard to conditions of veridicality and justification. Of course, Anscombe was concerned with whether certain beliefs are true and whether they are justified, and with the more specific issue of what the objects of perception may be and the kind of knowledge it may deliver, but it is important to be clear at the outset that as an heir to, and ongoing participant in the Wittgensteinian revolution against Cartesianism in metaphysics and philosophical psychology, she was not concerned with any general task of defining or justifying knowledge, be it perceptual or conceptual.

One reason for the eschewal of definition is that what is called ‘knowledge’ may be quite different, not just as between knowing how and knowing that and knowing of, but even within uses of these expressions. Famously for example the issue of knowledge without observation discussed in Intention requires us to distinguish between what would normally be involved in me knowing that I moved my hand when that was intentional on my part, and me knowing that you moved my hand, to which we can add as another kind of knowledge, me knowing that you moved your hand or indeed my hand intentionally.

Here there is a difference between non-observational and observational knowledge, but also between first-person and second-person knowledge of intentional action, as distinguished say from knowledge of another's heartbeat inferred from taking their pulse. So non-inferential knowledge of intentional action isn't the same as non-observational knowledge of such action, though the latter is an instance of it. We might also note differences that seem to cut across the knowing how, knowing that, knowing of distinction as in knowing where one is and, what is something different again, knowing when one is. The former issue is touched on by Anscombe in an examination, published posthumously, of ‘Grounds of Belief’.Footnote ³² I do not know whether she discussed the latter though she does have investigations of temporal relations, and of the reality of the past, and of knowledge of it by memory and by testimony, and the last source (testimony) which is relevant to what she says about cases of knowing where one is, may also be applied to instances of knowing when one is, where the knowledge is not that expressed, if any is so expressed, exclusively by token reflexives such as ‘here’ and ‘now’ or ‘not there’ and ‘not then’.

Consider the following exchange:

There is a difference between knowing what time it is and knowing what century it is, or what era it is, or if it is an era, and again between knowing that one is standing in a building and knowing that one is standing in Bloomsbury or in London or in Europe. It is not just that there is a difference in expectation with regard to someone's knowledge of when and where they are, it is that there are differences in what explain these differences. Not knowing the time is common enough, not knowing the century, where this is not because one has oddly forgotten, or is mentally confused, or lives in a culture where that measure doesn't occur, should strike us as odd. Consider another exchange:

One might direct someone ignorant of when it is, to look at the clock but what would one refer them to as evidence of what century it is. There are documents and perhaps ‘devices’ that report this but it is not ordinarily by reference to consulting these that one knows the present century as it is by looking at watches and clocks and mobile phones that one knows the time, the day and the date. Also, while someone might be proud of their ability to tell what time it is just by looking at the sky no-one could boast of a comparable skill for telling the day of the week, the date or the century.

No doubt hour, date, century, and era are conventional metrics but there are also significant differences between them. Era is related to time but also to the presence of a physical (in a broad sense) or cultural characteristic enduring through a temporal period, and this seems different from century which again seems different from hour. Of these, century looks to be more independent from a non-temporal feature than does era but some uses relax the temporal boundaries to encompass characteristics, as in ‘the long nineteenth century’ (1789–1914) or ‘a century of progress’. And while in determining temporal location one might look for evidence in each case: hour, century, era, it does not look like experience is involved in the usual understanding of this which does apply in the case of knowing that one is in a building. I can see that in a way that even with a watch I do not see the time. On the other hand knowing that I am in Bloomsbury does not seem just to be a matter of observation, even less knowing I am in Europe or in the Western hemisphere.

Certainly, if at a given time I know I am in a particular named street then given collateral knowledge I also know I am in Bloomsbury, and thereby I currently know I am in London, but any of these could alter without me changing spatial location and without immediately observable consequences, for example, the street name could be changed without me knowing so, and what was designated ‘Bloomsbury’ might be renamed ‘East Tottenham’ and London restyled ‘Central Capital Territory’. Of course, I might infer these facts from observation of other things but where they are not inferred nor would I say they are observed. Rather they are matters of common framework knowledge relying on testimony usually communicated implicitly. Thinking back to the earlier issue, if Anscombe is right then I know non-observationally through exercising my agency that I have a body but my knowledge that I am a human being does not, pace Michael Thompson, seem to be non-observational in that sense,Footnote ³³ but nor does it seem to be observational either. Consider a third exchange:

6. Traditional epistemology

I embarked on this short reflection having said that one reason Anscombe was not interested in traditional epistemology is that she did not subscribe to the idea that there might be an essence or definition of knowledge in general, and the examples I have given illustrate the diversity of things called knowledge which are different not just in the way of instances of the same phenomenon, but are themselves different sorts of things. Practical competence, propositional knowledge, and acquaintance (where knowing a is not equivalent to knowing that a is f) are not just defined over different classes of objects or by reference to different kinds of warrant.

Additionally, there is an issue in seeing how even propositional knowledge could be defined in terms of true belief + warrant, or cause, since belief is a term indicating a quasi- disposition while knowledge is an ability. I say ‘quasi-disposition’ because as Anscombe points out while ‘belief’ is a grammatically dispositional concept it is not a real disposition. Her understanding of the latter notion is related to her metaphysics. She writes:

Certainly, someone who believes something or someone need not tend to a specifiable end as in the manner of a disposition. One may believe that p without ever saying it or anything you take to be implied by it, or even thinking it or as Anscombe puts it ‘without the thought [that p] ever coming into one's consciousness’.Footnote ³⁵ At the same time the criteria, by which I mean something logically different from evidence, for ascribing belief is connected to sincerely thinking or saying. If we use the more general notion of doing something which will cover thinking and saying and exercising non-cognitive capacities then the same is true of ascriptions of knowledge. But that does not show that knowledge is the same kind of thing as belief for as I said, someone who has knowledge has a recognitional capacity for identification or an effective power to do or to make something. As one might say, he or she has an ability to achieve or attain something factive, active or practive. Belief may have truth as its goal but that does not show that someone who has a belief that p tends to the truth that p, or that if p is true and he believes it that this is an achievement or attainment.

As well as not being interested in the definition of knowledge, on account of holding a view akin to the Aristotelian dictum that existence is said to be in many ways, she is not interested in the question of the general foundations of knowledge because there aren't any, certainly not in the sense that other philosophers have tried to build knowledge out of sense-experience, or on the basis of principles of reason, or innate ideas. As she puts it in one place, ‘asked what was given, a present-day English speaking philosopher would be likely to say ‘the lot’. We start mediis in rebus; our philosophical activity is one of describing and clarifying this milieu to ourselves’.Footnote ³⁶ With regard to the question of the nature of mental reference Anscombe is similarly pluralistic and anti-essentialist. She could not have been forgetful of the question posed by Wittgenstein in the Investigations when he asks ‘What makes my thought of him my thought of him?’ but also mindful that his other simple question ‘what is left over if I subtract the fact that my arm goes up from the fact that I raise my arm?’ it is both pointing to an issue and looking toward mistaken assumptions about the nature of thought and action. Philosophers, including Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, Descartes, Locke and the Wittgenstein of the Tractatus have taken these questions seriously in a way that the later Wittgenstein and Anscombe believe is misguided and troublesome. To put it briefly the former group have looked for something like a mechanism, or a causal structure or a metaphysical process that would establish isomorphism, or noetic outreach or causal dependency that could explain intentionality but it does not need and cannot have an explanation from outwith or below. Each of these candidates runs into trouble as regressive or open to counter example or illusory in the sense of a magic trick giving an appearance of something happening because for example we confuse the absence of presence with the presence of absence, such as not observing an agent doing or saying things on an occasion when we might attribute a thought to him and concluding that thought is an essentially private phenomenon of a kind quite unlike saying or doing.

7. Religion and philosophy

Next I turn to the second and contrasting example of Anscombe's approach. As well as being a broadly analytic academic philosopher in the mold of Wittgenstein, Anscombe was also an intellectually committed Roman Catholic, knowledgeable about Hebrew and New Testament Scripture and the major writings of Augustine, Anselm and Aquinas. She wrote on matters of faith, doctrines and morals from a markedly traditional and orthodox perspective and in opposition to what she regarded as the modernist, revisionist, and accomodationist tendencies of twentieth century figures about which, and whom, she could be scornful.

Given the depth and extent of her religious commitments, her great gifts for philosophy which allowed her to make significant and lasting contributions in metaphysics, moral philosophy, philosophy of mind and action, and the history of philosophy, and the pervasive atheism and agnosticism among her Oxford and Cambridge colleagues, it may seem surprising that she did not publicly advance or defend the cause of theism with any of them.Footnote ³⁷ Similarly, there is no mention in any of her writings of William Alston, John Hick, Basil Mitchell, Dewi Phillips, Alvin Plantinga, William Rowe, Richard Swinburne or any other philosopher of religion writing during the period of her professional career. This is not to say, however, that philosophical discussion of religion is entirely absent from the writings published during her lifetime, but significantly nor is there much of it, and what there is hardly conforms to the sort of thing usually referred to as ‘philosophy of religion’. I will say why I think this is so but first consider what she actually gathered under that heading.

The third volume of her Collected Philosophical Papers, selected by Anscombe and published in 1981 while she still held the Chair of Philosophy at Cambridge, is Ethics, Religion and Politics. It is divided into three parts headed Ethics, Philosophy of Religion and Political Philosophy, the part first containing ten papers and the second and third two each. In the Introduction to the book Anscombe writes as follows:

The two papers in question are ‘On Transubstantiation’ and ‘Faith’. The first was written as a London Catholic Truth Society pamphlet intended for a general, non-academic readership and appears barely philosophical at all, certainly not a philosophical paper. It begins ‘It is easiest to tell what transubstantiation is by saying this: little children should be taught about it as early as possible. Not of course using the word ‘transubstantiation’, because it is not a little child's word’. Note that specifying the ‘what’ is set within the context of acting; it is a partly ostensive and partly pragmatic definition. She then continues by talking about the Mass and the consecration of the bread and wine, and proceeds in an advisory tone as if to parents or perhaps infant school teachers suggesting how they might explain the idea of religious sacrifice. Much of what follows is expository but now addressed to adults directly, expounding religious understandings of the nature and purpose of Christ's sacrifice.

The only part of the essay that tilts in the direction of familiar academic philosophy is a short discussion of whether the very idea that the bread and wine become the body and blood of Christ is unintelligible or incoherent. This begins:

She then considers a putative line of refutation: how can a man be wholly in the small space defined by a host? Agreeing he cannot be present dimensively she suggests there are other ways for a body to be in a place writing of this very and perhaps uniquely special case ‘when we consider That which the bread has become, the place where we are looking has become (though not dimensively) the place where it is: a place in heaven’. A little later she writes

I suppose that by ‘physically’ she means in a real and substantial way, in contrast on the one hand to being ‘symbolically present’ and on the other to being ‘immaterially present’, whatever either of these might mean. In other contexts one would expect Anscombe to bite hard into these terms and distinctions to test which might be real and which illusory or otherwise confused. That she does not do so here and barely clarifies things is a further indication that this is not a philosophical essay or at least not as would generally be recognized. The brevity, conversational style and instructional intent of her discussion contrasts markedly with writings on the same topic by Michael Dummett, another Roman Catholic and Oxford philosopher also influenced by reading Wittgenstein and by studying with and becoming a professional colleague of Anscombe herself.

Dummett's writings on religion, like Anscombe's, are generally on particular religious questions and addressed to a religious readership rather than philosophical ones prompted by religious concepts and claims. In the case of transubstantiation, however, he wrote two long and in large part philosophical essays. The first is titled ‘Transubstantiation’ and remains unpublishedFootnote ⁴¹; the second ‘The intelligibility of Eucharistic Doctrine’ appeared in 1987 in a festschrift for Basil Mitchell who had retired from the Oxford Nolluth Chair in the Philosophy of the Christian Religion three years previously to be succeeded by Richard Swinburne.Footnote ⁴² In neither paper does Dummett refer to Anscombe's essay. This may seem surprising given that he must have known of it but I suspect he regarded it as catechetical rather than investigative and having nothing to offer in resolving the theoretical problems that he was concerned with. Indeed any philosopher learning that Anscombe had written on the subject and that she had gathered that writing in a volume of Collected Philosophical Papers in a section head ‘Philosophy of Religion’ is likely to be disappointed qua philosopher.

Second, although her essay is not a philosophical one it does show the influence of two figures who deeply influenced her approach to philosophy and to religious subjects: Aquinas and again Wittgenstein. Note to begin with the resemblance of her response to the claim that the doctrine of the real presence is impossible and contradictory, viz. that while the doctrine cannot be understood it can be defended by showing there is no contradiction, and what Aquinas writes in Question 1, article 8 of the Summa Theologiae ‘Whether Sacred Doctrine is a matter of Argument’:

Next, note the resemblance between what she has to say in seeking to defuse the charge of contradiction and what Aquinas writes in the Summa Theologiae discussing ‘Whether the body of Christ be in this sacrament in very truth, or merely as in a figure or sign?’

As regards the Wittgensteinian influence, this appears at the very outset. In the passage from the opening part of the Philosophical Investigations which I pair here with the opening of Anscombe's essay, Wittgenstein is describing a more primitive stage of inducting a child into a language game but the logic is the same as that which Anscombe employs. Remember also that the translation of Wittgenstein is Anscombe's.

8. On Faith

The second of the collected papers: ‘On Faith’ was given as an annual lecture at St Mary's College Oscott which then as now was a seminary for the training of Catholic priests, and her audience would have been seminarians, plus the Rector, Vice Rector, Spiritual Director and other teaching staff. Again, therefore, she was addressing co-religionists but ones who could be presumed to have a greater or lesser degree of academic formation in philosophy and theology. The Second Vatican Council had ended a decade before, but already there had been a move away from the kind of neo-scholastic training that had become dominant in the wake of Leo XIII's encyclical Aeterni Patris ‘On the Restoration of Christian Philosophy’ which commended scholastic philosophy and especially that of Aquinas. The manual form in which this had been presented was more dogmatic and purportedly deductive than discursive and some of those present would have recognised if not appreciated the target of some of her criticisms. Having rejected certain tendencies associated with the phrase ‘We used to believe’ Anscombe continues

What follows is an interesting exploration of the idea of faith not as propositional belief but as believing someone, and of this faith in him or her as having as logical presuppositions certain assumptions or convictions. Divine faith, at least in the Judaeo-Christian conception with which she is concerned, is believing God which is made possible by the transmission of faith and of what it presupposes by way of beliefs about God. Faith is not on this account created by transmission, it is a gift not from previous generations but from God, but it may be transmitted via them (and though she does not say so that may be the normal, and ‘appointed’ means of receiving this divine gift.) This involves the recipient assuming authority on the part of some others, for believing someone in the relevant sense is not just to believe what he says, or even to believe it in consequence of his saying it, but to believe it because he says it, taking his saying it to be an assurance of its truth. She continues:

Anscombe's conclusion is that Divine faith – believing God – is believing 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’.Footnote ⁵⁰ Again a few comments are in order. First, one can see again, now in the scholastic phrase causa removens prohibens – removing an obstacle that impedes the cause of an action or process – the idea that the role of philosophy in relation to religious claims, and specifically those of Christian doctrine, may not be to establish their natural intelligibility let alone to prove them, but only to remove seeming intellectual blocks to the reception of those teachings. On this account philosophy's role is as handmaiden to sacred doctrine, as again Aquinas states:

In both ‘Transubstantiation’ and ‘Faith’ we can see very clearly the influence of Aquinas and Wittgenstein. What is taken from each is rather different in kind, however. First, Anscombe more or less quotes Thomas (and the point about not seeking to prove a point of doctrine but only to counter allegations of contradiction is also a recurrent theme in Peter Geach's writings on religion whose indebtedness to Aquinas he oft acknowledged). What she takes from Thomas in the case of transubstantiation is something she repeats as part of her own answer. Here then I think we might say that his influence is that of a teacher of substance. In the case of Wittgenstein it is different. What she derives is first a conception of the task of philosophy in general, as conceptual clarification. Elsewhere she writes:

The example she was concerned with is distinguishing necessity de re and de dicto, but there is something of deeper and more extensive significance which she almost always refers to Wittgenstein, which is studying the ‘grammar of concepts’ and which is related to the Aristotelian classification and logic of categorical predications, and that in turn to the logic of specifications of natures and of what belong to them. The latter crops up in various places, as for example in ‘Modern Moral Philosophy’ when she writes

Again in her essay ‘Human Essence’ she writes:

Although the manner of its presentation is very different from anything in Aquinas or other medieval Aristotelians, the issues that Anscombe, following Wittgenstein, is on to are those of certain logical and, though he would not say it, metaphysical distinctions, specifically those between essence, proprium, and accidental accidents. Anscombe never wrote about the parallels but it is this commonality that provides a bridge between her Aristotelianism and her Wittgensteinianism. Neither, however, is much developed in the cause of what we now think of as constructive philosophy of religion or natural theology.

Regarding Wittgenstein she actually thought that the implications of his early philosophical views and later philosophical demeanour were generally troublesome for religion. Writing in the Catholic weekly The Tablet in 1954 she remarked:

That latter doubt is worth pondering. Is she really uncertain? or is it dutiful disingenuity or equivocation? On the one hand consider what she wrote in her 1986 ‘Syllabus of Errors’ (Twenty Opinions Common among modern Anglo-American Philosophers’): ‘Analytical philosophy is more characterized by styles of argument and investigation than by doctrinal content. It is thus possible or people of widely different beliefs to be practitioners of this sort of philosophy. It ought not to surprise anyone that a seriously believing Catholic Christian should also be an analytical philosopher’.Footnote ⁵⁶ This would support the idea that Wittgenstein's philosophy presents no obstacle if one took her to be thinking of him as an ‘analytical philosopher’. But by the same token her uncertainty, if genuine, may warrant a contraposition implying that in her opinion he was not simply a philosopher of analytic method but was perhaps an implicit or undercover metaphysician, or perhaps a deflationist, or even a ‘Humean’ of a kind at odds with religious doctrine. This brings me to ‘on the other hand’ which is an observation reported by Anthony Kenny who records her as saying ‘On the topic of religion Wittgenstein is poison’.Footnote ⁵⁷ Why might she have said this? Here I conjecture two considerations. First, that she had seen people poisoned by his ideas: some perhaps made skeptical about the application of mundane concepts to the idea of a transcendent reality; others believing that he actually provided a means of taking religion seriously but only as a celebration of the human, rather than an acknowledgement of the divine. I am thinking here, as I suspect was she, of the practitioners of ‘Wittgensteinian fideism’, especially perhaps Rush Rhees and Dewi Phillips the former a fellow student and executor of Wittgenstein, the latter the best known member of the Swansea Wittgenstein school. Anscombe sometimes spoke of ‘the Swansea sigh’ and in writing about ‘The Simplicity of the Tractatus’ she reports that Wittgenstein ‘once said to his friend Rush Rhees, a sighing man, not to repine and blame himself for something in himself: “that's God's fault not yours”’.Footnote ⁵⁸ The ‘Swansea sigh’ may refer just to this aspect of Rhees's personal character but given the way in which others picked up both certain skeptical ideas and the manner of this influential figure I think the ‘sigh’ became a form of Swansea Neo-Wittgensteinian criticism or unarticulated response to what were perceived to be philosophical errors, and the main one with which members of the Swansea school were concerned was ‘metaphysics’ in a use of the term equivalent to ‘crass reification’. But Christian doctrine in an orthodox understanding of it has obvious metaphysical presuppositions, hence hostility to metaphysics would poison serious belief.

Second, there is perhaps a further point which may suggest that she was troubled by the possibility that she herself had been affected by this anti-metaphysical aspect of Wittgenstein's philosophy, for she found it difficult to argue for the idea of an immaterial intellect or a separable immaterial soul, on the grounds that concepts of substance belong to the natural order. This is something she was evidently uncomfortable about and tried not to discuss, for it meant that she could not follows Aquinas in what he argued on philosophical grounds about the persistence of a separated active intellect,Footnote ⁵⁹ and it raised questions about the credibility of Catholic beliefs and practices relating to the souls of the faithful departed. More radically, her failure to persuade Foot and Kenny, the two Oxford philosophers to whom she had been closest, of the case for theism, and the conspicuous absence in her extensive oeuvre of any direct argument for the existence of God, raises the question of whether she doubted the power of philosophy to show the reasonability of theism save in the negative respect already referred to, of defending against arguments intended to show its unreasonability insofar as it advanced or presupposed contradictory claims. There are places in her writings which might seem to suggest a positive disposition towards constructive natural theology, but on closer examination these turn out to be inconclusive speculative explorations, as in her suggestion that Anselm's famous proof is not an ontological argument.Footnote ⁶⁰

9. Conclusion

Two aspects of Anscombe's work as a philosopher emerge from the foregoing explorations. First, that she used her considerable mental powers to expose and analyse the presuppositions and complexities of important human theoretical and practical thought and action. Second that with regard to the things that mattered most to her, her religious faith and practice, she viewed the role of philosophy rather differently. Here she recognized the limits of constructive reason but also allowed the credibility of revelation as a source of knowledge about what human beings are, about how they ought to live, and about what they are for in the sense of their telos. In both endeavours she drew on what she had learned from Wittgenstein and from Aquinas and the fruits of this are a large body of writings that still remain to be comprehended. But where she is clearest is where she was most certain: that morality consists in large part of prohibitions, that these cannot really be made sense of apart from belief in a Divine legislator and that belief in such a providential creative source is philosophically defensible even if it is not philosophically demonstrable. Having previously mentioned Chesterton it is apt to end with a quotation from an essay by Graham Greene which, applied now to Anscombe, in part captures an aspect of the singular style and multiple modes of her thought as shown in her treatment of faith and of transubstantiation. He writes: