Bocheński on divine ineffability

Author(s): Roger Pouivet

Source: Studies in East European Thought , September 2013, Vol. 65, No. 1/2 (September
2013), pp. 43-51
Published by: Springer

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/24673190

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Stud East Eur Thought (2013) 65:43-51
DOI 10.1007/sl 1212-013-9183-9

Bochenski on divine ineffability

Roger Pouivet

Published online: 27 August 2013

© Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2013

Abstract Section 11 of Jozef Bochenski's The Logic of religion (1965), is devoted

to the question of divine ineffability: Is it possible to speak of God? Bochenski
shows that even if the assertion of God's ineffability is not contradictory, it can be
contested. Bochenski seems to think ineffabilism is based primarily on a confusion,
viz., on the claim that faith is dependent on an extraordinary experience, and it is
this extraordinary experience which is supposed to be ineffable. The ineffabilist is
unable to say who he is addressing in his prayers and praises so long as he maintains
that nothing can be said of Him to whom they are addressed. Any meaningful
language is minimally referential, whether the ineffabilist likes it or not. This could
be the basis for a critique of Jean-Luc Marion's account of apophatism. This crit
icism shows the fecundity of Bochenski's account of ineffability.

Keywords Bochenski · Divine ineffability · Logic of religion · Polish

philosophy · Marion · Language of religion · Metalanguage

Section 11 of Jozef Bochenski's The Logic of religion (1965), is devoted to the

question of divine ineffability: Is it possible to speak of God? Two points are of
particular interest to me in the way Bochenski considers this issue. Bochenski shows
that even if the assertion of the God's ineffability is nothing contradictory, it can be
contested. It is I think a way for him to say that the thesis of divine ineffability does
not have the mystical depth that some attribute to it. Bochenski seems to think
ineffabilism is based primarily on a confusion, viz., on the claim that faith is
dependent on an extraordinary experience,and it is this extraordinary experience

R. Pouivet (H)
Laboratoire d'Histoire des Sciences et de Philosophie. Archives Poincare, Universite de Lorraine/
Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique. 91, Avenue de la Liberation, 54000 Nancy, France
e-mail: roger.pouivet@univ-lorraine.fr

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44 R. Pouivet

which is supposed to be ineffable. This account stands in opposition to the thesis of

the objectivity of faith, which is compatible with the universality of logic and
especially of semantics.
To say that God is ineffable is to assert that any proposition of the form "God is
x" is false or that the proposition is meaningless. Critical rejoinders come
immediately to mind that could be presented as follows:

1. Every proposition of the form "God is x" is false or meaningless.

2. God is ineffable.
3. (2) is false or meaningless.

Ineffabilism would thereby be self-contradictory, as would be "Nie mowi§ po

polsku" said in Polish.
However, the ineffabilist can answer this: If I say, in Polish, "I do not speak
Polish," this is not to say that I cannot say what I say, or to say that I can say nothing
in that language, but that I cannot say anything more than what I have said.
Similarly, if I say that God is ineffable, I deny His effability without thereby saying
that God has the negative property of being ineffable, but only that this is all that be
said about God.
One could argue against the ineffabilist that when she prays or participates in
worship, for example, she has to pronounce the name of God.. The ineffabilist can
answer that no concept applies to God. "God" would be a proper name, like
"Bronislaw Komorowski," and unlike the "President of the Republic of Poland."
In broad terms, concerning religious discourse two theses are defended. The first
is that we can speak intelligibly of God and say something intelligible (meaningful)
about Him, although we cannot say God quid sit, but only quomodo not sit, as St.
Thomas claims. God is the First cause. The difference between the Creator and His
creatures is such that any talk about Him can be phrased only in negative terms. But
there is another thesis according to which ineffability is not reduced to negative
terms that mark the unbridgeable gap between the Creator and the creature. In this
second case, religious discourse is not adequate to describe God, because it does not
describe the religious experience. The upshot of such a metaphysical and
ontological ineffabilism is that God is not an object described by religious
discourse. The epistemological upshot is that religious discourse has no cognitive
significance: it does not express our knowledge about God. The corresponding
semantic and alethic consequences would be that propositions about God are neither
true nor false, and even perhaps not propositions at all, in case a claim that is a
proposition has to be either true or false.
The philosophy of religion therefore could not be a logic of religion, nor a
philosophical theology or an epistemology of religious belief.1 It could only be a
phenomenology describing the terms of our relationship to what can neither be an
object nor described. In this regard, Jean-Luc Marion distinguishes two paradoxes.
The first, concerning the existence of God, is metaphysical, but it is not about the

' Which runs in the opposite direction of the perspective developed by Salamucha, Drewnowski and
Bochenski (Krakow Circle). On this topic see Pouivet (2006, 2009, 2011).

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Bochenski on divine ineffability 45

concept of God, accepted even by the Atheist who excludes God from existence.
According to Marion,

La seconde aporie s'attache a l'horizon metaphysique, en contestant que Ton

puisse ou doive jamais disposer d'un concept de "Dieu", done en disposer
comme d'une essence parmi d'autres (aussi privilegiee qu'elle s'avere).
Brisant le lien de "Dieu" a son concept, done a une essence en general, elle le
libere de son inscription dans la logique, done eventuellement dans l'onto
theo-logie. Elle retrouve ainsi la voie de l'apophase, done du moment critique
que la theologie mystique impose a toute montee vers le Nom qui surpasse
tout nom (Marion 2010: 88).2

One might question Marion's affirmation that concept and essence are
equivalent, but let us leave this aside. More importantly, we see that "God" is a
Name surpassing any name, even though I would be hard pressed to explain what
this means (the capital letter changes everything, it seems, but I don't see why). The
phenomenology of religion is explicitly presented as a liberation from logic. For
Marion, the 'impossibility of the epistemological phenomenon of God (i.e. its
incomprehensibility) still experiences itself as a counter-experience of God'
(Marion 2010, 95). He adds, "counter-experience is here, as always, to experience a
phenomenon as it refuses the conditions (which by definition are transcendental) of
experience, and contradicts, in its phenomenality beyond the norm, the norms of
manifestations of objects in finite experience" (Marion 2010, 101). Thus we could
test what Marion calls "saturated phenomena," where the intuition, the content of
experience, reaches beyond understanding: consciousness is then confronted with
that which transcends its categories. As he explains, the excess present in the gift
saturates the concept of measure.
Marion finds in the phenomenological vocabulary the anti-logic tradition of some
Christian thinkers, for example Pierre Damien (cited as well by Bochenski).
Contemporary French philosophy has long practiced such ineffabilism inherited,
whether explicitly or not, from the apophatic tradition. Deleuze, Lyotard, Derrida,
Levinas, and Ricoeur voiced the same doubt about the power of conceptual
rationality, and on occasion we even find skepticism about our epistemological
ability to say anything about the reality independent of our minds, our language, and
history. There is much about deconstruction, "difference," absence, otherness, all of
which have to do with this ineffabilism under multiple and various modes. For his
part, Marion adds the "impossible" and "saturation."
I hope to show that Bochenski has an argument against this kind of ineffabilism
and that this argument is sound.3

2 "The second aporia falls within the metaphysical horizon, denying that we can or should ever have
recourse to the concept of "God" and as such to one essence among others (however privileged it may
happen to be). Breaking the link between "God" and his concept, thus with any essence generally, it
releases it from inclusion within logic, and thus possibly from within onto-theo-logy. It thus recovers the
way of apophasis, that is to say, the critical moment that mystical theology puts on any ascent toward the
Name that is beyond every name."
3 See also Pouivet (2013).

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46 R. Pouivet

Ineffabilism and metalanguage

Bochenski explains that the theory of ineffability is not contradictory or self

refuting. It does not say something about what it says one cannot say anything. If we
write 'Un (χ, y)' for 'x is an unspeakable object in the language y,' and we consider
the formula:

(1) (3x, I) Un (χ, I)

(1) may be asserted without inconsistency. And even (1) is certainly true, as it is
easy to find an object χ and a language that satisfy the Un (дг, /). For example, the
object cow is ineffable in the language of chess. In this language, nothing can be
said about a cow.
But can (1) be universalized? The answer is 'yes'. The formula reads:

(2) (/) Un (о, I)

(2) may seem contradictory. Does not the formula say that о is ineffable in any
language, meaning that that (2) is contradictory? However, if (2) is not contained in
the object language, but in the metalanguage, that is to say, if we apply the
(Tarskian) distinction between language and metalanguage to avoid semantic
antinomies, then any contradiction disappears. The property of being ineffable
applies to any religious object in religious language, but it is a property assigned in
the meta-language and not in the object language (the language of religion here).
The formula:

(3) (ur) (0 Un (x, s)

says that there is no other property than the ineffability of a certain object in
religious language. Therefore, 'the believer who, as such, accepts only such
propositions as are expressed in some religious discourse (RD) does not accept and
cannot accept any proposition ascribing to the object of religion (OR) any object
linguistic property' (Bochenski 1965: 35). But he can accept that this object is
ineffable (in the metalanguage).
Bochenski is charitable with ineffabilism by assigning a patent logical
consistency on the basis of the distinction between language and metalanguage.
Accordingly, the method of Marion in God without Being, where each time he
writes 'God' he resorts to the Cross of Saint Andrew, seems more demonstrative
than original. Marion says:

The unthinkable masks the gap, a fault ever open, between God and the idol
or, better, between God and the pretention of all possible idolatry. The
unthinkable forces us to substitute the idolatrous quotation mark around
"God" with the very God that no mark of knowledge can demarcate; and, in
order to say it, let us cross out GKld, with a cross, provisionally of St. Andrew,
which demonstrates the limit of the temptation, conscious or naive, to
blaspheme the unthinkable is an idol (Marion 1991: 46).

When the word G&d is crossed out, we no longer use the term to mean
something; but as I understand it, we situate ourselves in the metalanguage. All this

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Bocheiiski on divine ineffability 47

notwithstanding, perhaps Marion should not be interpreted this way, with the tools
of logical analysis, because he also says that Gi&d crosses out our thought because
he saturates it' (Marion 1991: 46). That what is thought is so transcendent that it
crosses out the word used to think it (or, I am not clear on this, to say we think about
it), is simply unintelligible to me. Perhaps what lies beneath Marion's 'profound'
language—there is a false profundity just as there are false miracles— is, I suspect,
unclarity about the distinction between language and metalanguage, a distinction
which is a commonplace for the contemporary logician!
Be that as it may, even if it is saved by the distinction between language and
metalanguage, ineffabilism semantics leads to a semantic paradox. (3) in fact
implies that there is no other possible description of a certain object in / than to say
in the metalanguage that it is ineffable. Therefore, other than maintaining (2) but
never applying it, and limiting ourselves to a simple formula distinguishing the
general object language and metalanguage, as soon the scope of (3) is recognized,
then any propositions about God must of necessity be eliminated from religious
language. But in religious language, some propositions will assign properties (and
even diverse properties) to that object. For example, for a Christian, God is the
creator of the world; there is one God in three persons; God is love, etc.
The ineffabilist claims to have a loophole here. Religious language is the
linguistic vehicle of worship, praise, prayer. This means that religious language is
not propositional; it does not assume an object with properties. However, the
maneuver is sophistry. For the subclass of propositional statements of a religious
language (praise, worship, prayers, acclamations, hymns, etc.) supposes that 'the
user of such phrases assumes their object—that is, OR—to possess some high value'
(Bochenski 1965: 36). And Bochenski says also:

Now value can be attributed to an object only under the condition that at least
one factual object-linguistic property has been assumed as belonging to it. It
seems a sheer impossibility to worship, that is, to value, an entity about which
one is prepared to assume only that it cannot be spoken about. Such an entity
is, for the user, completely void of any object-linguistic property. It could be,
for example, the Devil. There is absolutely no reason why it should be
worshiped, praised, and so on. (Bochenski 1965: 36).

The challenge for ineffabilist is clear: if he maintains that what he loves, praises
or prays to has no property, and that he cannot say anything about it, then perhaps he
prays to an idol or to the Devil. How can he know? Therefore, the ineffabilist is in a
very difficult situation, both intellectually and religiously. Not to know whether you
are praying to God or to the Devil is disturbing.
This is the difficulty which the ineffabilist, as described by Bochenski, cannot
escape. The ineffabilist is unable to say who he is addressing in his prayers and
praises so long as he maintains that nothing can be said of Him to whom they are
addressed. Any meaningful language is minimally referential, whether the
ineffabilist likes it or not.

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48 R. Pouivet

Religion, semantics and experience

Ineffabilism has been upheld by many philosophers and theologians, including St.
John Chrysostom, Pseudo-Dionysius, John Scotus Erigena, Meister Eckhart, and
Nicolas of Cusa. It is a wonderful tradition and I hardly pretend to refute it simply
by quoting Bochenski. In the first place, his critique of ineffabilism may not perhaps
apply to every attempt in this tradition. We would have to examine the latter much
more closely. Secondly, I wish only to show that Bochenski's critique of
ineffabilism applies to that part of the contemporary philosophy of religion which
gives undue importance to religious experience as the ineffable core of religious
life.

In Varieties of Religious Experience William James considered ineffable

religious experience as the basis of religious life; a similar view is found in
Bergson's Two Sources of Morality and Religion. Jean-Luc Marion takes his
inspiration officially from Husserl and Heidegger. But it seems to me that he is also
inspired by Bergson and the French spiritualist tradition, which goes back to
Ravaisson and Maine de Biran, and even earlier. For all these philosophers, the
heart of philosophy is experience, its many and varied forms. Language is an
obstacle for those seeking to understand the real nature of our experiences and their
deep meaning. The inability to describe adequately the experience of the Absolute,
the Transcendent, the Other, etc., entails the impossibility of describing God
adequately. By the same token it revealsthe idolatrous nature of any such attempt
within religion's discursive field.
It is this conception that Bochenski rejects. In every religion, there is an
"objective faith" which includes some fundamental statements. They are found in
the creeds and catechisms: There is a God'; 'Christ is the Son of God';
'Muhammed is the Prophet of Allah'; 'There is reincarnation'." These are
'epistemic axioms' that constitute faiths. And in each particular religion these
axions are determined by a metalinguistic rule..

This certainly is the case in the Catholic religion, where it is possible to

formulate the heuristic rule in purely syntactical terms, namely, by describing
the form and the context in which elements of objective faith are to be found.
In other religions, this rule is perhaps less precise, but there is always at least a
tendency toward a syntactical formulation; this appears especially in the fact
that in practically all religions there is a rule which says that whatever is
contained in the Scriptures or in the creed of that religion belongs to the
objective faith. (Bochenski 1965: 60).

All statements identified by the heuristic rule have a probability equal to 1. And
even the certainty of such statements is stronger than that of any other statement.
Bochenski distinguishes several theories of religion. The propositional theory
says that certain parts of religious discourse include statements, that is to say,
statements with specific meanings. There are also theories of religious discourse
which hold that it is either meaningless or its meaning is purely emotional.
Bochenski does not talk about the phenomenological theory of religion according to
which religion is concentrated on the experience of what Marion calls "saturated

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Bochenski on divine ineffability 49

phenomena." This theory seems to imply that religious discourse has no semantics
or that its semantics, based on experience, would inevitably be nebulous.

We see that many parts of RD have the grammatical form of indicative

sentences, which normally are used to express propositions. Many among
them, especially those which are parts of the Creed, are said to be believed by
the respective believers. Now, it is true that the term 'believe' may be
interpreted in such a way that it is not necessary to admit that whatever one
believes is a proposition. But the following test precludes all possibilities of
doubt about the character of belief as used in RD. First, we ask a believer of
r if he believes a sentence P, which is part of the RD of r. He, of course, will
say that he does. Then we ask him if he thinks that Ρ is true. It seems that there
can be no doubt about the answer: the believer will always answer that he
does, that he thinks Ρ to be true. But a formula can be true only if it means a
proposition. Therefore, the believers think that some parts of RD express
propositions. (Bochenski 1965: 41-42).

Bochenski considers this to be proof of the following theorem:

Some parts of the RD of every religion are intended by their users to express
and assert proposition. (Bochenski 1965: 41).

If religious language is meaningful (if it means something), communicative (if it

communicates the content of a statement to another person), and is propositional (if
it says something about an object), then it cannot be an exception to the universality
of logic and the semantics, that is to say, to their applicability to all forms of speech,
including the religious. The alternative to this universality is the assertion that
religion is beyond sense or nonsense, assuming an epistemic leap. But leaving aside
the paradoxical nature of the statement, one does have to justify its revisionist
character. An overwhelming mass of believers in different religions seems to think
that their religious utterances mean something and that they are not merely
expressing their emotions or reactions. The ineffabilist in general and the
phenomenologist of religion, such as Jean-Luc Marion, describe a religious life
quite foreign to that of ordinary people.. This what makes ineffabilism so ultimately
paradoxical: in rejecting ordinary logic and semantics, it moves away from what I
am tempted to call "religious commonsense." The ineffabilist proposes a radical
revision of religion which should lead to a modification of certain liturgical
practices. For example, the practice in Christian worship of reciting the Creed, that
is to say, stating and repeating the constitutive propositions of objective faith,
should be called into question. In the Creed God is not ineffable!
Bochenski says nothing about this problem, but I also wonder how an ineffabilist
believes he can teach catechism to a child? Should this child be told that 'God
exists' and that 'Christ is the Son of God and He is risen' do not mean that God
exists and that Christ is the son of God and he is risen—that these statements are
meaningless? Does the child have to wait for an experience of a saturated
phenomenon, a kind of phenomenological epiphany, which would be the occasion
to go beyond speech and reason? In the rhetoric of the saturated phenomena
practiced by Marion, and generally in those philosophies which emphasize the

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50 R. Pouivet

experience of faith (if this expression has any meaning), what is called into question
is the logical framework of any religion, the set of propositions that is believed and
must be believed.

The theoretical austerity of Bochenski's logic of religion finally seems less alien
to the life of a basic believer, one who recites the Creed at face value, than some of
the surprising phenomenological descriptions, however close they are supposed to
be to religious experience. That is why I am tempted, like Bochenski (1965: 131), to
distinguish between what the mass of believers seems to think—common sense
religion—and what some philosophers and some contemporary theologians offer.

Ineffabilism as atheism

Suppose that concerning the statement (D), "There is one and only God," there are
these four possibilities, as proposed by Kenny (2006):

1. It is meaningless and neither true nor false: Positivism.

2. It is meaningful and false: (Positive) Atheism.
3. It is meaningful and may be true or false: Agnosticism.
4. It is meaningful and true: Theism.

To decide positively about the existence of God would require that a statement
like 'God exists' is true or false, and that "God" means something, and that 'exists'
is a predicate or a quantifier. A positivist atheist says that 'God exists' is false: there
is nothing that is God, and therefore 'God does not exist' is true. This is positivistic
atheism because it claims something about God: it is at once a claim about his
(non-) existence, and about the error committed by the believer.. According to
Anthony Kenny the ineffabilist is a 'negative atheist.' The negative atheist believes
that 'God exists' is neither true nor false. 'God exists' is devoid of meaning either in
the sense of an analytically true or false statement or in the sense of an empirical
statement (whose truth or falsity is based on the empirical reality). 'God exists'
expresses a faith (not a belief); God is not captured by a word or concept. In this
sense, the ineffabilist accepts a positivist thesis that certain statements—artistic
(especially in poetry), moral or religious statements—are devoid of empirical
significance, but have an expressive function. They reflect our reactions and
experiences, but have no referential function. We can talk about negative atheism,
because it is the very attempt to say something about God, however analogically,
which is judged negatively.
The ineffabilist is distrustful of language and religious language. He fears that in
speaking of God otherwise than in poetic metaphor, prayer or praise, we turn Him
into a conceptual idol. Many philosophers and theologians have thought in these
terms in the nineteenth century and, especially, in the twentieth centuries. We would
have to reject prepositional knowledge in theology and focus on inner or
phenomenal experience.. The kind of contemporary ineffabilism illustrated by
Marion belongs to this register. One of Bochenski's great merits is to show that this
approach is neither consistent nor necessary. A "logic of religion" is possible to
describe the objective structure of any religion: neither concepts nor reasoning are

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Bocheiiski on divine ineffability 51

absent. And it is a better match for common sense than religious ineffabilism, which
is not a patently false doctrine, as Bocheiiski explains, but quite implausible, as he
also shows, all the more so in the recent excessively esoteric formulation by Jean
Luc Marion.

References

Bochenski, J. Μ. (1965). The logic of religion. New York: New York University Press.
Kenny, A. (2006). Worshipping an unknown God. Ratio XIX 4.
Marion, J.-L. (1991). God without being. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press.
Translated by Thomas A. Carlson.
Marion, J.-L. (2010). Certitudes negatives. Paris: Grasset.
Pouivet, R. (2006). Le thomisme analytique de Jan Salamucha. Revue des Sciences Religieuses, 80(1),
117-118.
Pouivet, R. (2009). Jan Salamucha's analytical thomism. In S. Lapointe, J. Wolenski, M. Marion, & W.
Miskiewicz (Eds.), The golden age of Polish philosophy, Kazimierz Twardowski's philosophical
legacy. Dordrecht: Springer.
Pouivet R. (2011). On the Polish roots of the analytic philosophy of religion. European Journal for
Philosophy of Religion 3.
Pouivet, R. (2013). Epistemologie des croyances religieuses. Paris: Editions du Cerf.

"Й Springer

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