Born into a family of Jewish descent, baptized and educated in Roman Catholic fashion and influenced by Protestant as well as agnostic members of his family, Wittgenstein was puzzled, inspired, and almost tortured for his whole life by very high ethical demands on himself and his conduct of life without ever practicing anything that would have been near to a religious life. “He appeared to crave for relief from his weaknesses; that is, in religious terms, for redemption” (Kober 2007: 244).
Frederick Sontag adds the following characterization of Wittgenstein’s presumed inner conflicts: “Philosophy, intellect, simplicity, ascetic practice and the search for love, all fought continually as competing goals in Wittgenstein’s mind and soul, and they did so without resolution”. (1995: 128). Other than Leo Tolstoy, however, whose book The Gospel in Brief was for some time during World War I his preferred and almost revered reading, Wittgenstein did not revert to a religious life.
During World War I, when he voluntarily served in the Austrian army in often life-threatening positions at the front line, we can see from his notebooks that belief in God was not completely distant or alien to him.
On July 6th, 1916, he wrote in his Notebooks (1914-1916):
The meaning of life, i.e. the meaning of the world, we can call God. And connect with this the comparison of God to a father. To pray is to think about the meaning of life. (NB, 73e)
A few years later, in his first book, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, there was little space left for religious thoughts. “God does not reveal himself in the world” (TLP: 6.432) is one of the few references to be found. We can assume, however, that this was not because he had entirely lost interest in religion, but because the matter was outside the scope of the book. In the narrow definition of meaningful discourse he is advocating in the Tractatus, religious language “does not get so far as to be false” (Clack 1999: 28). In that interpretation of meaning, Wittgenstein considered religious beliefs neither to be true nor false, he signified them to be senseless (cf. ibid.).
Gradually, Wittgenstein developed a more distanced attitude towards religion, which Brian R. Clack characterizes as follows: “Religion is not grounded in rationcination, but is, rather, something like a way of responding to the world, a mode of orientation, or a way of living in the world.” (1999: 65 f).
In his last years he was using religious as well as mythical matters more metaphorically, to exemplify his epistemological considerations. Before we can draw conclusions concerning religion from his aphorisms, we must prepare the stage with some epistemological deliberations.