«Solo l’amore può credere nella resurrezione». Riflessioni su Wittgenstein e la fede cristiana

As many of us, Wittgenstein found rather obscure the core of the Christian faith, namely the ideas of a Redeemer, who died for our sins, and of His and our Resurrection. However, from the deep feeling of what he called his ‘sinfulness’ he felt that there was a way to the non-incomprehensibility of such a faith, even if he saw all the difficulty to believe both in the resurrection of the flesh and in the validity of natural laws. His highly personal reflections on these questions show how he considered hard to hold fast to our rationality and to believe without deceiving ourselves, namely to be what he called ‘a honest religious thinker’. Wittgenstein did not insulate religious statements from rational scrutiny, and his suggestion that the meaning of those statements is to be understood within the practices and the form of life of the believer should not be interpreted as having this consequence. Nevertheless, he acknowledged that the reasons of faith are totally different from those of our ordinary beliefs, as he made clear by claiming that “it is love that believes the Resurrection”.