Leaving a confession on show in the library
There was an element of tragicomedy in the attempts by Ludwig Wittgenstein to confess wrongdoings from his past life, to which he felt driven in 1936 after a solitary sojourn in Norway.
At Christmas that year, he left a written confession on view in the reading room of the family house in Vienna. His sister Margarete thwarted his scheme by remarking: “Honourable people do not read another person’s confessions.”
She was right, though it is not simple to state quite why. And her brother was right in the larger attempt to see the truth about himself and acknowledge it. He not only confessed to his family, but even travelled about Lower Austria calling at the houses of children he had taught at primary school there 17 years earlier, to apologise – for pulling a little girl’s ear, for example.
However gauche Wittgenstein was in putting his resolution of confession into practice, it is impossible not to be impressed by his conviction that the first task of the philosopher is to change himself. The difficulty of philosophy, he had written in 1932, was not like that of the sciences, but like “the difficulty of a conversion”. Fourteen years later he noted that “once you have turned round, you must stay turned round”.
Wittgenstein’s campaign of confession forms a chapter in a new book, Confession: The Healing of the Soul, by Peter Tyler, the theologian and psychotherapist.
Wittgenstein had felt his compulsion to confess after a spell alone in a Norwegian hut. Most people would not take him as a model in practical matters. Indeed Prof Tyler quotes Elizabeth Anscombe, Wittgenstein’s admirer and literary executor, saying: “If by pressing a button it could have secured that people would not concern themselves with his personal life, I should have pressed that button.”
Even so, Prof Tyler’s book is a welcome account of confession as something psychologically healing and at the same time directed to the transcendent, to which it opens up the soul. He disagrees with some recent polemics that see confession as a sort of grubby collusion perpetuating vice.
His positive attitude extends to St Augustine, who is always judged by his Confessions. “To reduce the book,” writes Prof Tyler, “to the misogynistic rantings of a deluded man (as some commentators would prefer) is effectively not to have read it.”
Augustine’s confession, he reminds us, is primarily a confession of praise, not of sin. “Without confession we would not exist,” Augustine says in his commentary on Psalm 30 (“I will extol thee, O Lord”, the psalm numbered 29 in the Vulgate version). What can he mean?
I think Augustine was struck that we are not first of all aware of our own thoughts, or even that we are thinking, but rather of things external to us. These things speak to us of God.
Thus begins a yearning for the transcendent (as we may call it), though we find our link with it is damaged and we cannot reach it.
As for Wittgenstein, Prof Tyler says that before he died, his confession was heard by a Catholic priest, Fr Conrad Pepler, the Dominican. Is that what happened?
Wittgenstein had been baptised a Catholic as a child, and Pepler, a good and clever man, certainly visited him more than once before he died. But according to the late philosopher Peter Geach, Wittgenstein received conditional absolution on Pepler’s last visit, which suggest he was by then incapable of speech. Having confessed to unwilling auditors years before, at the last it seems he was unable to make his confession to a priest ready to hear it.