“.____________.” Taking Wittgenstein’s Prayers Seriously

Abstract

This article examines Wittgenstein’s wartime private notebooks (MS 101–103), shifting attention from his philosophical reflections on religion and prayer to the abundance of written addresses to God found within the coded sections. Wittgenstein’s well-known assertion that “to pray means to think about the meaning of life” is juxtaposed with direct invocations of God and the Spirit, including the Pater Noster and prayers for courage and submission to the divine will. These invocations, accompanied by strokes or varied long em dashes framed by dots or exclamation marks which Martin Pilch has hypothesized to be symbolic representations of prayers—invite further reflection. Wittgenstein’s religious utterances are not merely outpourings of anguish, but manifestations of a sustained effort to align both life and work with the will of God, and to offer them for His glory. A compelling illustration of this spiritual orientation appears in M. O’C. Drury’s recollection of Wittgenstein’s declaration that his only wish was for his work to conform to the divine will. The interplay between philosophical inquiry and prayer evokes the Confessions of Saint Augustine, a spirit present throughout Wittgenstein’s work. Augustine’s integration of prayer and confession has similarly inspired 20th-century thinkers such as Jacques Derrida and Jean-François Lyotard. These Augustinian traces challenge conventional understandings of language and its limits, as well as the role of written language and punctuation, demanding a profound hermeneutics of the philosopher’s prayer.

1. Introduction: Wittgenstein’s Prayer

“He was heard because of his reverent submission”

Hebrew 5:7

The question of whether Wittgenstein prayed is beyond dispute. The wartime diaries (MS 101–103)—documents spanning the period from the composition of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (Wittgenstein 1921) to later references to prayer within his correspondence1 and remarks (Wittgenstein 2023)—suffice as evidence. However, few have systematically addressed this dimension across the full breadth of Wittgenstein’s legacy. This article seeks only to gesture toward that lacuna, offering a preliminary reflection.

One reason for the neglect of prayer as a sustained, lifelong practice in Wittgenstein’s thought lies in the prevailing tendency to divide his oeuvre into distinct, often opposing phases. Prayer considered as a “language-game” surfaces in the later period—in the Philosophical Investigations—but as an intimate, personal practice, it already appears in the diaries of the young Ludwig during the First World War (Private Notebooks 1914–1916). Thus, prayer suffers the fate of many essential, life-bound matters: it demands to be thought within the entirety of Wittgenstein’s legacy, yet the whole is often artificially severed, inspiring divergent approaches to language and meaning. As an act of language, prayer is marginalized where it cannot be subsumed under the logical conception of language characteristic of the early Wittgenstein; it reemerges later, listed among the more or less twenty-three examples of language games in the § 23 of the Philosophical Investigations (Wittgenstein 1953). Yet, in this new context, prayer is granted an entirely different linguistic character.

My argument is that prayer must be approached as one of the unifying threads woven through Wittgenstein’s thought—a practice which, whether present or conspicuously absent, retains significance throughout his life. I do not mean to suggest that Wittgenstein prayed continuously; rather, that prayer—like “giving orders and obeying them” or “guessing riddles”—is one of the multiple existing acts or “tools” of language that ought to be compared with what logicians have claimed about the structure of language. It is particularly telling that in this paragraph, Wittgenstein playfully refers to “the author of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus”, as if issuing an order to his former self, cautioning the younger Wittgenstein against having overlooked the manifold uses of language.

Moreover, as will be demonstrated in the following chapters, prayer assumes the role of an autobiographical figure—akin to confession—a category of linguistic act that cannot be extricated from the autobiographical impulse of philosophy itself. The first part will situate this idea within the broader horizon of the Socratic and Augustinian traditions, wherein philosophy intertwines with forms of spiritual self-expression. The second part will turn to literature significant in two respects: first, in which the philosopher is treated as a literary character—a figure granted the capacity to attest to the entirety of a life. The third part shall be devoted to Samuel Johnson’s Prayers and Meditations (Johnson [1785] 2013), a work that may be read as the scaffolding of an unwritten autobiography, where life is surrendered to prayer, distilled to its form as if Johnson entrusted not the narrative of his life, but the discipline of his soul2. As we shall see, Wittgenstein counted himself among Johnson’s beneficiaries, sending copies of the work to friends during times of distress.

2. The Philosophers’ Prayers

Few pay heed to philosophers’ prayers. From the prayers of Socrates to the invocations of twentieth-century thinkers, its traces must appear somewhere to become an object of contemplation. There must be a witness to the philosopher’s prayer, someone who attests to the event of praying. Yet, prayer may also take the form of writing, and in being inscribed, it assumes a peculiar status: the written prayer inevitably raises the question of its addressee. The question “who is meant to read it?” is a profoundly Derridean concern, reminiscent of The Post Card (Derrida 1980)—that open letter which exposes the intimacy of one’s address to God to the gaze of a wide audience.

There is yet another dimension in which the philosopher’s prayer emerges—namely, an autobiographical tendency. This tendency may belong to the philosopher himself, or to those who regard his thought as more than mere verbalization –the unsaid, the ineffable, and therefore inviting testimony about his life, his habits, his gestures, even his unfulfilled desires, particularly in relation to prayer. Thus, it is with Socrates, the philosopher par excellence. B. D. Jackson undertook a typology of Socrates’ prayers in Plato’s dialogues (Jackson 1971), treating them en bloc as a literary phenomenon, for Socrates is, at least in part, a literary figure (Heiler 1932). Yet, it remains equally plausible that Plato, in portraying his master, drew upon authentic prayers he had personally witnessed. Similarly, in the case of Wittgenstein’s prayers, the role of witnesses must not be overlooked. The image of a “religious” Wittgenstein emerges in no small part from the testimonies of friends—confidants not only of his reflections on matters of faith, but also of the torments that accompanied his religious thought. One may mention especially his sister Margaret Stonborough, Maurice O’C. Drury, G.E.M. Anscombe (notably in a forthcoming edition of her recollections of Wittgenstein), Franz Parak, Ludwig Hänsel, and Oets Kolk Bouwsma, to name but a few.

In his catalog of Socratic prayers, Jackson distinguished “biographical prayers,” from which the first reaches back to the days if his youth. Its biographical character is reinforced by the fact that it is recounted in a doubly mediated fashion—for it appears in the tale of Alcibiades, which concludes the Symposium (214A), where Socrates is portrayed as a brave and steadfast soldier, a participant in the Battle of Delium and the siege of Potidaea. After a day-long meditation (skeptómenos), the arrival of dawn becomes for him an occasion for prayer (proseúchomai):

“One morning he was thinking about something which he could not resolve; he would not give it up, but continued thinking from early dawn until noon; there he stood fixed in thought […] until the following morning; and with the return of light he offered up a prayer to the sun, and went his way”.

(Plato 2008)

The second biographical prayer appears at the very end of Socrates’ life, when he accepts the cup of poison and says the following:

“[…] I suppose that I may, and must, pray to the god that my journey hence may be prosperous. That is my prayer; may it be so. With these words he put the cup to his lips and drank the poison quite calmly and cheerfully”.

(Plato 1954, p. 73)

According to Jackson, Plato suggests in this scene that for Socrates, philosophy as the art of dying was not sufficient to undertake the final journey. Jackson employs here the metaphor of a helmsman who—even though he has mastered the art of navigation—still prays for favorable winds (Jackson 1971).

The next philosophical context is that of Saint Augustine whose Confessions (Saint Augustine 1900) are inextricably woven into the very fabric of prayer, and thus stand as its quintessential expression. Were it not for the legacy of Jacques Derrida, Jean-François Lyotard, and the tradition of confessional writing flowing through French Theory and comparative literature—from Augustine, through Rousseau and Nietzsche, to Paul de Man—it might not be so readily apparent that in Wittgenstein, too, there resides an unfulfilled desire of this kind.

And yet, when one gathers the Augustinian threads running through Wittgenstein’s thought—those concerning language (Philosophical Investigations I, p. 3), time (Wittgenstein 1953, I, p. 89; Wittgenstein 1972, p. 107), and God—and traces them through his impulse toward confession in the 1930s, culminating in his expressed wish to dedicate his work to God, one stands before what might be conceived as a blueprint for Wittgenstein’s own “Confessions”. Within such a work, prayer would assume a role akin to that in Augustine: suspended between an active illocutionary act and a meditation upon the subjectivity inherent in prayer itself.

A fitting example of such a confessional form would be Wittgenstein’s wartime diaries (MS 101–103). Were these notebooks to be treated integrally—that is, published in their entirety, with both the coded and uncoded entries presented chronologically as a unified whole—one would discover that entries from the very same day often interweave a diary of the soul with philosophical reflection. The invocation of God frequently stands in relation to his work; it expresses gratitude for the “grace” of that work and appears intimately bound to the search for a “saving word” (erlösende Wort).

The decision to separate these entries stemmed not only from the act of encryption—which, at first, was applied inconsistently—but also from the very material structure of the notebooks. The entries were arranged so that the intimate notes, hidden beneath cipher, would not be mistaken for those writings which, as the dedication to Bertrand Russell suggested, were seen as potentially valuable for future philosophical work—whether by Wittgenstein himself, or, in the event of his death on the battlefield, by his intellectual heirs.

However, this division resulted in a fragmentation of Wittgenstein’s thought—not merely a bifurcation between the existential and the logical, but a deeper severance between experience and reflection. And yet this was one of the rare periods in which Wittgenstein maintained a consistent journal, following models he generously disclosed to us such as Gottfried Keller and Samuel Pepys (Keller 2023a).

Although not overtly spiritual, Samuel Pepys’s diary ought not be neglected. What sets Pepys apart from many other seventeenth-century diarists is his striking self-reflectiveness: a morally attuned, critically observant voice, clearly ahead of his time. Wittgenstein bought Pepys’s diary in 1912 while vacationing with David Pinsent (1990), this model of the diary may well have shaped his imagination—preparing the ground for the war diary he began two years later, in 1914.

3. Gottfried Keller and the Defense of Childish Prayer

The great Swiss writer Gottfried Keller is a far more significant influence on Wittgenstein than is commonly acknowledged—his impact extending well beyond the mere keeping of a diary. And yet his Diary and Dreambook (Keller 2023a) must be considered essential reading for anyone seeking to grasp the path of Wittgenstein’s soul. Wittgenstein himself refers to its memorable opening: “A man without a diary (whether written in his head or on paper) is like a woman without a mirror” (Keller 2023b). However, I will rather draw attention to his most famous semi-autobiographical novel Green Henry (Der grüne Heinrich, 1855–1879), where Keller not only presents the keeping of a diary as an activity with deeply Christian roots (Bouveresse and Imbach 2020)—“a Christian necessity” but also traces a diary of the soul of his alter ego character Heinrich Lee.

“The first thing that the teacher defined as being a Christian necessity, and on which he based a diffuse kind of doctrine, was the recognition and confession of sinfulness […] Immediately after the doctrine of Sin came the doctrine of Faith, as the redemption from sin, and the greatest importance in the whole instruction was attached to this doctrine […] the closing hymn was always and only: By faith we are saved!”

(Keller 2023b)

Wittgenstein’s understanding of prayer also carries a “Kellerian” resonance. It is therefore worthwhile to consider the prayers of Heinrich Lee, the protagonist of Green Henry, and to explore their affinities with Wittgenstein’s own meditations on prayer. As a child, Heinrich prayed frequently—though he would later question whether these were truly prayers or merely “petitions”:

“…[W]henever things went badly with me I would call upon God, and when the crisis approached, I prayed secretly in a few carefully chosen words for a favourable issue and for deliverance from danger, and I must confess, to my shame, that I invariably demanded either the impossible or the unjustifiable”

(ibid)

A crisis of these childish prayers arrived when a certain “worthless hypocrite of a woman” persuaded Heinrich’s mother to introduce the saying of grace before meals. This artificially imposed ritual left Heinrich silent and stupefied for some time. From that moment onward, he no longer prayed aloud. Yet, this silence did not signify the end of prayer, rather it marked its inward deepening. Heinrich’s prayers were still spontaneous and fervent. However, he was conscious that they did not arise from love, but from interest: “I did not love the God of my childhood, I merely made use of Him”. Only the “Our Father”, recited morning and evening, retained its privileged place in his inner life. This was the prayer that gave God a human face, supplanting earlier childlike images of God as a weathercock bird or a tiger:

“The Lord’s Prayer, whose division into closes, with its symmetry, had made the learning of it easy for me and its repetition a pleasant exercise, I would say with masterly skill and many variations, repeating this or the other phrase twice or three times, or, after saying one sentence quickly and softly, I would dwell with slow and distinct emphasis on the following one, and then I would pray backwards and conclude with the words of the beginning, ‘Our Father’. From this prayer a notion had taken root in me that God must be a Being, to whom, perhaps, one could express oneself in rational fashion more easily that to those animal creatures.”

Despite the way Keller’s religiosity is often interpreted—as a religiosity without God—and without entering polemics for which there is no space here3, I would argue that what matters most in this context is the presence of a simple religiosity. A religiosity that does not sever itself from the supernatural, a religious spirit that is irreducible to mere ethics, and which, in a certain sense, is not even fundamentally anti-institutional. Rather, in its simplicity, it allows for a rituality that exists alongside the Church as an institution, irrespective of the crisis of its priests (cf. Keller’s “The Lost Laugh” (Der verlorene Lachen, Keller 1874).

When one reads Keller’s words about “a connection with the safety of the world,” one might well hear an echo of the very same absolute safety Wittgenstein had in mind when, in his Lecture on Ethics, he claimed that this safety should be synonymous with divine care, with a sense, ‘perhaps illusory, perhaps idolatrous,’ of fulfilled entrustment to God, of being held in divine hands.

This disposition belonged above all to childhood—and to a particular kind of childhood: one spent in the countryside, in harmony with the pedagogical ideal of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, amidst the freedom of a preserved state of nature. Though Wittgenstein, did not exactly experience such a childhood himself, he seemed ever in search of it: in the literature (in Keller, in the tales of Johann Peter Hebel or the Brothers Grimm) but also within other people—those who, by grace or disposition, have maintained the memory or the gift of such blessed security.

In Heinrich Lee’s reflections, we discern the quiet persistence of a spirit of prayer, especially the prayer of thanksgiving, offered in moments when Providence seemed to extend its care. Though his world was, in many ways, bereft of God, it was never bereft of faith. His enduring trust in a “personal connection with what was secure in the world” parallels Wittgenstein’s own confession at the conclusion of his Lecture on Ethics, where he speaks of the feeling of “absolute safety”. Heinrich Lee writes the following:

“And yet I hesitated to rid myself of the comforting sensation that Providence cared for me and gave me a favourable hearing, and of a personal connection with what was secure in the world.

Finally, in order not to be deprived of this advantage and yet to save the law of reason, I explained the occurrence to myself in this way, that the inherited habit of prayer had taken the place of an energetic gathering together of mental forces, had freed those forces through the lightening of the heart which was part of the prayer, and made them capable of recognizing the simple remedy which lay at hand or of seeking it; but that this very process was of a divine nature and that God had in this sense once for all delegated the appeal of prayer to man, without interfering in an isolated case, and without vouching for unconditional success every time. Rather had He hit upon the arrangement that in order to guard against the misuse of His name, self-confidence and energy, as far as possible, should have the value of prayer and should be blessed with success.”

(Keller 2023b)

In this light, “saving the law of reason” does not exclude the gesture of prayer. On the contrary, Heinrich’s reflections testify to a profound respect for the one who finds solace in faith—a sentiment that unmistakably resonates with Wittgenstein’s final words in the Lecture on Ethics, wherein he affirms a “tendency in the human mind [he] personally cannot help respecting deeply and [he] would not for [his] life ridicule it” (Wittgenstein 1965).

4. Samuel Johnson and Printed Prayers

Although Samuel Johnson is not explicitly mentioned by Wittgenstein as a source or influence4, his Prayers and Meditations (Johnson [1785] 2013) hold a remarkable place within Wittgenstein’s intellectual and spiritual world. It is known that he shared this modest volume with close companions such as Norman Malcolm5 and Maurice O’C. Drury, writing to the latter the following:

“This is the little book I promised to send you. It seems to be out of print so I’m sending you my own copy. I wish to say that normally I can’t read any printed prayers but that Johnson’s impressed me by being human” [emphasis mine]

This brief admission reveals much. Wittgenstein confesses to finding in Johnson’s prayers a quality that touched him profoundly: humanness6. He recognized in Johnson a kindred spirit, a fellow laborer in the vineyard of moral self-examination and inner struggle.

In fact, Johnson’s prayers are not ornamental acts of piety but urgent, often anguished, pleas woven with meditations and confessions. They are expressions of a man wrestling with his conscience, with the regret over wasted time, and with the longing for divine mercy. This quality—the fusion of an acute sense of one’s sinful nature and demanding moral standard—resonates powerfully with Wittgenstein’s own private writings.

Despite this intimacy, unlike Wittgenstein, Johnson prepared his Prayers and Meditations for publication. He had initially intended to accompany them with a brief autobiographical sketch, a plan ultimately thwarted by illness and the approach of death. Yet the idea he envisioned—the bond between spiritual confession and autobiographical narrative—remains essential. For Johnson, prayer was not born of spiritual security but of the repeated failure to achieve it.

Among Johnson’s most compelling prayers are those addressed to God at the beginning of a new year—prayers marked by repentance, and renewed resolve:

“I have made no reformation; I have lived totally useless, more sensual in thought, and more addicted to wine and meat. Grant me, O God, to amend my life, for the sake of Jesus Christ. Amen./I hope to put my rooms in order./I fasted all day.”

[20 April 1764]

“RESOLVED, D[eo] j[uvante]/To combat notions of obligation./To apply to study/To reclaim imaginations, […] To rise early,/To study religion,/To go to church/To drink less strong liquors/To keep a journal/To oppose laziness by doing what is to be done tomorrow/Rise as early as I can/Send for books for History of War/Put books in order/Scheme of life./O ALMIGHTY God, merciful Father, who hast continued my life to another year, grant that I may spend the time which Thou shalt yet give me in such obedience to thy word and will, that finally I may obtain everlasting life. Grant that I may repent and forsake my sins before the miseries of age fall upon me; and that while my strength yet remains I may use it to thy glory and my own salvation...” [11 September 1760].

(Johnson [1785] 2013)

Such petitions were often preceded by reflections on time misspent, passions untamed, and divine assistance forsaken. Yet, like Wittgenstein’s own diary entries—replete with self-reproach and spiritual longing—they do not culminate in despair but in the quiet birth of a new determination. We find smidgeons of this among Wittgenstein’s private notes:

“May I never loose myself/collect oneself”

[repeated several time on 13.9.14,16.9.14,12.11.14, 16.7.16]

and

“May the spirit not leave me and may it become more constant in me.______.”

(7.11.14) (Wittgenstein 2022)

“Humanity” that Wittgenstein admired in Johnson must be the one expressed by a continued year-after-year failure in bringing resolutions to success:

“Since my resolution formed last Easter, I have made no advancement in knowledge or in goodness; nor do I recollect that I have endeavoured it. I am dejected, but not hopeless.’

[18 September 1764]

“…I have done nothing; the need of doing therefore is pressing, since the time of doing is short. O God grant me to resolve aright, and to keep my resolutions, for Jesus Christ’s sake. Amen”

[idem]

“I am almost afraid to renew my resolutions”

[7 April 1765]

“Since the last Easter I have reformed no evil habit, my time has been unprofitably spent, and seems a dream that has left nothing behind”.

[idem]

“O heavenly father, let not my call be vain, but grant me to desire what may please Thee”

[idem]

In subsequent prayers, Johnson returned to that central truth: that there is no repentance in the grave. Therefore, he prayed not only for pardon, but for the grace to live meaningfully, while the opportunity still endures. Like Wittgenstein, Johnson—the lexicographer—saw labor—intellectual, moral, religious—not as an end, but something that if blessed by divine grace, might become meaningful. In one such prayer, written while compiling his Dictionary of English Language, Johnson petitioned the following:

“ALMIGHTY God, the giver of wisdom, without whose help resolutions are vain, without whose blessing study is ineffectual, enable me, if it be thy will, to attain such knowledge as may qualify me to direct the doubtful, and instruct the ignorant, to prevent wrongs, and terminate contentions; and grant that I may use that knowledge which I shall attain, to thy glory and my own salvation, for Jesus Christ’s sake. Amen.”

[November 1765]

Wittgenstein found in Johnson’s Prayers and Meditations not dogma, but a soul who prayed as he lived, in struggle, in sincerity, but most of all in failure. The prayers became a continuous confession of this failure, and a cry for help—uttered with an indisputable confidence that such help would come, and that it would be redemptive.

Samuel Johnson’s “human” prayers serve a comparable function to what one might call bedside books, or vade mecum—personal spiritual companions—such as the Gospel in Brief which Wittgenstein discovered in a bookshop during wartime. It became a cherished volume, earning him the nickname “the man with the Gospel”. Tolstoy, likewise, was valued not primarily for his more explicitly religious works, such as the Resurrection (Voskreseniye, Tolstoy 1899), but for the spiritual humanity conveyed in his shorter novels—his acknowledgement of the weakness in the flesh and the call for strength in the spirit.

When considering the three remaining wartime notebooks—filled with nearly seventy direct addresses to God, most of them cries for divine support, surrender to God’s will and affirmation of God’s power—one cannot help but draw an analogy to Johnson’s Prayers and Meditations.

5. Tolstoy’s The Gospel in Brief

Wittgenstein bought Tolstoy’s Gospel at the very outset of the war, in August 1914. One is tempted to imagine he must have heard a silent “tolle, lege”, as he entered a bookshop on Mickiewicz square in Tarnów—just after the departure of a profoundly Tolstoyian Circassian detachment and the re-entry of the Austro-Hungarian army into the Galician town. Amid the shelves of devotional literature, he might have reached for that slim volume—The Gospel in Brief—drawn by the author’s name (his passion for Russian literature was well-known), or by the prominence of the word Gospel in the title, or perhaps simply because the edition was in German rather than Polish, the dominant language among books on offer.

Whatever the cause, he began reading it—and from that moment on, echoes of it resound throughout his writings. “Man is free in spirit” becomes a touchstone.

The sheer number of invocations of God found in the Geheime Tagebücher would alone suffice to suggest a confessional character. Yet, as Martin Pilch (2016) was the first to argue in his article “Wittgensteins “Gebetsstriche” in den Kriegstagebüchern (MS 101–103)”, the strokes themselves may function as coded prayers.

In the opening lines of his article, Pilch proposes that “these strokes can be interpreted as abbreviations for recurring prayer formulas, closely related to the well-known short written prayers strongly influenced by Tolstoy.” I would, however, hesitate to posit a direct influence of Tolstoy—either on the written prayers or, more speculatively, on the strokes themselves. Notably, the written prayers appear in the diaries prior to Wittgenstein’s documented engagement with Tolstoy, which casts doubt on any claim of immediate inspiration. Moreover, The Gospel in Brief—Tolstoy’s condensed and restructured version of the Gospels—does not include the kind of direct addresses to God found in Wittgenstein’s prayers. Rather, it centers the Gospel message around the twelve verses of the Lord’s Prayer. Admittedly, the phrase “Your will be done”, which recurs frequently in the diary, derives from that prayer. Yet its origin need not be attributed to Tolstoy; it may well have entered Wittgenstein’s spiritual vocabulary through broader liturgical or scriptural channels, bypassing Tolstoy altogether.

6. The Strokes from MS 101–103

The vast majority of Wittgenstein’s prayers are written in code; this is because they appear on the coded pages of his private diary from the First World War (MS 101–103) (Wittgenstein 2010). At first glance, one might assume that the decision to encode these entries was dictated not by the nature of prayer itself, but by the personal and confidential character of the diary form. However, as the facsimiles reveal, numerous coded entries are accompanied by long strokes—lines drawn with such deliberation that they resist being dismissed as mere em dashes. Frequently bracketed by dots or ended with exclamation marks and, at times spanning two or more lines in succession, these strokes stand out as formal elements in their own right.

Martin Pilch’s hypothesis has since been echoed in several contexts, most notably in the introduction of the newly published bilingual edition of the Private Notebooks 1914–1916 by Marjorie Perloff (Wittgenstein 2022). Nevertheless, to my knowledge, his interpretation has neither been seriously contested nor systematically elaborated upon.

Furthermore, in the recently launched digital project aimed at recreating and disseminating the visual elements from Wittgenstein’s manuscripts, led by Michele Lavazza7, there are, at present, no plans to include the strokes from MS 101–1038 in the project’s graphic lexicon.

As a result, these strokes remain excluded from the recognized language games of Wittgenstein’s Nachlass: they are neither treated as visual graphics, nor as logical notation, nor as encrypted text. Their significance thus remains suspended.

In the first of the wartime notebooks, MS 101, approximately 32 instances of such long strokes can be identified across a span of 61 pages9. In most cases, one to three strokes appear per page, though in some instances as many as six occur. This results in roughly 67 dashes in a single diary from the early months of the war (August 1914 to October 1914). Most of these strokes belong to the coded section of the manuscript, and appear predominantly on the verso pages, beginning from 4 September 1914.

In manuscript MS 102, covering the period from November 1914 to at least the end of March 1915, strokes appear nearly every day—sometimes even multiple times per day, with as many as twelve recorded in March 1915 (MS 102,66v). The total number of strokes in the second wartime diary is approximately 210 (although some are difficult to count due to their ambiguous length or form). In manuscript MS 103, only three strokes appear, bringing the total for the three accessible war diaries to roughly 280.

The first occurrence of a stroke in the non-coded philosophical section appears on 4 October 1914 (MS 101,32r), and then again, the following day (MS 101,33r). Those entries have apparently no religious connotation, however, they concern the sign and the code.

“But in that case [where relation xRy is the only thing that is signified in that sign, because x and y do not stand for anything], how is it possible for “kilo” in a code to mean: “I’m all right”? Here surely a simple sign does assert something and is used to give information to others.____

For can’t the word “kilo”, with that meaning, be true or false?” 10

“At any rate it is surely possible to correlate a simple sign with the sense of a sentence.______”11

If we interpret the stroke as a coded prayer, the following sentence becomes especially revealing that the simple sign—the stroke—is associated with a prayer formula. This remains only a hypothesis, however, the second sentence of the entry seems to cast doubt upon it: “Logic is interested only in reality. And thus in sentences ONLY in so far as they are pictures of reality”.

The next stroke in the uncoded philosophical section appears on 13 October 1914 (MS 101,40r)12. It is conceivable that, following the exclamation “But!_____”, a prayer has been silently uttered—an instance of saying something that cannot be pictured, as this remark deals with the axiom of infinity and the question of its logical form. The entry begins with the now-famous assertion: “Logic takes care of itself” (Cf. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus 5.473).

The next entry from 14 October turns to the concept of the “completely generalized proposition”. This reflection continues the following day, when an atypically long stroke appears in the manuscript:

“_____If there are quite general propositions—what do we arrange experimentally in them?”13

It is followed by a startling confession:

“When one is frightened of the truth (as I am now) then it is never the whole truth that one has an inkling of.”14

A disputed stroke appears on 19 October (MS 101,50r) within a remark stating the following:

“The description of the world by means of propositions is only possible because what is signified is not its own sign! Application ___.”15

And finally, after the coded section comes to an end, one last stroke appears on the recto of the page dated 25 October (MS 101,61r):

“But why do you never investigate an individual particular sign in order to find out how it is a logical portrayal?

The completely analysed proposition must image its reference.

[…] our difficulty starts from the completely generalized proposition’s not appearing to be complex.______

It does not appear, like all other propositions, to consist of arbitrarily symbolizing component parts which are united in a logical form. It appears not to HAVE a form but itself to be a form complete in itself.”16

Concluding this selection of long strokes in the uncoded philosophical part of Wittgenstein’s Private Notebooks, the entries do not address religious, moral or spiritual matters. However, debating the axiom of infinity and generalized proposition and their logical form opens the way to such a possibility that under the strokes consistent prayer formulas are concealed.

Reflecting upon the numerous strokes in the coded section, Martin Pilch identifies three main arguments supporting the interpretation of their being symbolic prayers: first, they typically conclude the personal entries of a given day; second, when strokes do appear within entries, it is usually in emotionally charged contexts or in moments of adversity; third, they tend to coincide with instances in which Wittgenstein appears to be giving himself “courage.”

When analyzing the strokes, and attempting to establish their identity, the first detail to observe is that the shorter lines—those ending in a period or exclamation mark—appear only in entries where the phrase “God with me” is absent. This strongly suggests that these marks function as substitutes for the phrase. A pertinent example may be found in the sequence spanning the last days of September and the first days of October 1914.

“28.9.1914 Worked a bit. We’re awaiting an attack from Kraków. If it happens we will be facing hard times. May the spirit grant me power [no stroke]

29.9.14 […] Courage! _____

30.9.14 […] The will be done! [no stroke]

1.10.14 […] I worked quite a bit but without success. The word is that tomorrow we are supposed to leave the ship. I am curious to know what is to become of me. ______!”

(Wittgenstein 2022, p. 53)

In an expressly religious entry such as on 12.9.14, no stroke seems to be necessary:

“The news gets worse all the time. […] Over and over again I say to myself the words of Tolstoy, ‘Man is helpless in the flesh but free in the spirit.’ May the spirit be within me! In the afternoon the lieutenant heard shots in the vicinity. I became very anxious. Probably we will be attacked. How will I behave when it comes to being shot at? I am afraid, not of being killed but of not fulfilling my duty properly before that moment. God give me strength. Amen. Amen. Amen.”

(Idem, p. 43)

Pilch has also observed a decreasing number of written prayers and a simultaneous increase in the use of strokes when Wittgenstein was transferred away from military-exposed zones. As Pilch notes, “he faced less personal danger”, and yet, paradoxically, despite having better working conditions, he suffered a profound crisis in his work. In that context, “the use of strokes becomes increasingly intense and diverse.”

At times, a longer sequence of strokes appears, as though the writer sought to fill the remainder of a line’s space, continuing into the next line with an elongated stroke. This pattern of symbolic abbreviation, or coded prayer, occurs among others on 28 October 1914 after receiving the news that Paul “was seriously wounded & in Russian captivity”:

“Poor, poor Mama!!!_________ _________. _____” (Wittgenstein 2022, p. 73 [MS 101, 49v]), exclaimed Wittgenstein.

If we add to these numerous strokes the explicit religious formulas, that I listed in my book Wittgenstein in Polish Galicia (2025), we arrive at an impressive number of invocations of God. This quantity is all the more striking considering how consistently it has been overlooked in Wittgenstein scholarship. Furthermore, one must acknowledge that all these references to God—if we assume that the strokes represent abbreviated forms of verbal prayer—are distinctly affirmative. They express strong faith, a call for deeper belief, petition and glorification; never, however, do they voice doubt or negative concern. There is thus an immense charge of faith woven into the philosophical work that would culminate in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. What the Tractatus itself says about prayer, may be traced back to a reflection recorded in June 1916, dating from the Brusilov Offensive, when Wittgenstein wrote “To pray is to think about the meaning of life”. This idea will be further elaborated in the final chapter of this article.

7. The Gesture

In Wittgenstein’s later thought, the prayer is no longer bound to coding, but oriented toward gesturing. In the Tractatus period, language remains tightly bound to the world—propositions correspond to facts, and expression is limited to what can be said clearly. Within that early framework, prayer is encoded, not merely for reasons of privacy, but as a sign of its inexpressibility within the strict boundaries of logic. After completing the Tractatus, and philosophically silent years, Wittgenstein returned to philosophy with an entirely new vision of language. One might ask—echoing Piero Sraffa’s famous question—what is the logical form of prayer-stroke?

The later Wittgenstein opened language to the world of shared forms of life—gesture, practice, and embodiment. The prayerful gesture—above all, kneeling and folding hands becomes not a supplement to language, but a constitutive part of an expanded language game. In this world, prayer is not primarily a matter of propositional content but of lived expression.

As Brad Kallenberg writes

“Prayer […] requires the acquisition of skills—a certain kind of task-specific fluencies”

(Kallenberg 2018, p. 170)

Kallenberg rightly emphasizes that these skills are not solely mental, but involve “doing stuff with one’s body.” (Kallenberg 2018, p. 171)

In its deepest register, prayer bypasses the discursive mind and arises from a suffering soul that longs not only for grace but for transformation –of the body as well. And when the body submits—when it bends—the prayer is heard. Yet Wittgenstein struggled with this submission. The gesture of kneeling was marked by existential difficulty for him:

“Kneeling means that one is a slave. (Religion might consist in this.) Lord, if only I knew that I am a slave!”17

“I cannot kneel to pray because it’s as though my knees were stiff. I am afraid of dissolution (of my own dissolution), should I become soft.”

(Wittgenstein 1998, p. 56e)

These reflections reveal a spiritual resistance manifest in the body—a resistance to yielding, to becoming “soft”. Yet Wittgenstein does not deny the mysterious relation between bodily posture and inner transformation.

“What helps in praying is not the kneeling, but one kneels.”18

Elsewhere, he wrote

“I felt that at the very least I should bring myself to stand up or kneel down, but I was too lazy, and so I crossed myself sitting halfway up and then laid down again. But then I felt that I must get up now, that God could command it of me.”19

Kneeling, then, is no mere physical effort—it demands the breaking of oneself, a gesture of interior prostration. It offers no relief from the burden of prayer; rather, it intensifies it. In the language game of prayer, the gesture is not merely an accompaniment; it conditions prayer’s very efficacy. But that efficacy remains elusive, often occluded from direct expression, as though the language game of prayer contained within itself a game of will and gesture caught in mutual tension.

“We might say very roughly, of people whose nature it is to kneel down on certain occasions, and fold their hands, that in their language they have a personal God”

(Wittgenstein 1998, p. 26)

Why should this gesture—so common, so instinctive—be linked to the idea of a personal God? And what does “personal” mean here, if not the intimacy enacted through embodied reverence.

In these bodily tensions and challenges—in the stiffness of the knees, in the fear of dissolution—we encounter not only a theology of gesture but a theological anthropology. The body dramatizes the fracture between will and submission, a rupture that echoes throughout Wittgenstein’s critique of James Frazer’s The Golden Bough (Frazer 1890), where the ritual is reduced to a mere anthropological function. For Wittgenstein, the gesture bears a weight that cannot be explained away—it is lived, not theorized.

“Election by grace: It is only permissible to write like this out of the most frightful suffering—& then it means something quite different. But for this reason it is not permissible for anyone to cite it as truth, unless he himself says it in torment.—it simply isn’t a theory.—or as one might also say: if this is truth, it is not the truth it appears at first glance to express. It’s less a theory than a sigh, or a cry.”

(Wittgenstein 1998, pp. 34e–35e [MS 118, 117v])

These remarks belong to a broader constellation of reflections from the year 1937, in which Wittgenstein meditates on the non-discursive context of language—from the image of cutting away rotten apples, as one might remove corrupted fragments from one’s own sentences (7 October 1937), to Russell’s despairing outburst: “logic is hell” (1 October 1937), and culminating in a citation from Goethe’s Faust:

“Language […] is a refinement, ‘in the beginning was the deed’ (21.10.1937)”

This final clause marks the end of Faust’s struggle to translate the first line of the Gospel according to John:

• ‘Tis written: In the beginning was the Word,
• Already I stick, and who shall help afford
• The word at such high rate I may not tender;
• The passage must I elsewise render.”
(Goethe 1908)

In his successive attempts, Faust proposes “might”, then “thought” and ultimately settles on “the deed” (in German “die Tat” (emphasis by Goethe.)

This transition—from Logos to deed (or act in other translations)—should be considered alongside another literary and spiritual current in Wittgenstein’s thought: Tolstoy’s Russian rendering of the Johannine logos as razumeniye zhizni—the “understanding of life”, in The Gospel in Brief. Deed and understanding of life, taken together, constitute a crucial cognitivist posture: in order to recognize the deed, one must first understand life—the whole life.

Ordinarily, we think before we speak; but in prayer, this order may be reversed: we speak first and only then begin to think. This reversal deserves careful reflection, particularly in light of insights from cognitive science. When we utter “Thy will be done” or “God be with me,” these are not merely performative utterances– they acquire a cognitive dimension, becoming objects of contemplation and deep reflection on one’s spiritual life, on the life still to come, on the life that will be lived in accordance with the will of the Lord—a life of the happy or of the unhappy (cf. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus 6.43).

It is important to emphasize, as the above remark implies, that according to Wittgenstein, such utterances cannot be quoted or understood unless one shares the inner state of the one who prays. A prayer—especially one that takes the form of a plea for grace (election by grace), belongs to a different order of truth. It means only in torment. It is not a declarative statement but a cry from the depths; not a theory, but an existential confession.

8. Cognitivism and Non-Cognitivism Regarding Prayer

The question of whether Wittgenstein adopted a non-cognitivist, semi-cognitivist, or cognitivist stance regarding religious discourse has recently become the subject of renewed and fruitful debate. A moderate cognitivist position was developed by Alois Pichler and Sebastian Sunday Grève in their article “Cognitivism about religious belief in later Wittgenstein” (Pichler and Sunday Grève 2025, p. 62), in which they shed light on an often-overlooked cognitivist turn beginning in the 1930s and continuing into Wittgenstein’s later reflections.

A crucial source in this regard is a well-known passage from Culture and Value, where Wittgenstein appears to separate faith from empirical facts:

“[T]he historical accounts of the Gospels might, in the historical sense, be demonstrably false, & yet belief would lose nothing through this: but not because it has to do with ‘universal truths of reason’! rather, because historical proof (the historical proof-game) is irrelevant to belief. This message (the Gospels) is seized on by a human being believingly (i.e., lovingly) [glaubend (d.h. liebend)]: That is the certainty of this “taking-for-truth”, nothing else”.

(Wittgenstein 1998, pp. 37–38e)

The cognitive element—“taking for truth”—is not rejected here, but reframed within a different register: the register of love. This convergence of cognition and affect reappears three days later, in a note on the Resurrection: “only love can believe the Resurrection”. When taking for truth is directed toward a salvific reality, it becomes indistinguishable from love. Within this semantic field, surrounding the Resurrection, Wittgenstein frequently returns to the images of “holding fast” and “holding” (Festhalten/halten), grounding the act of belief in a kind of tenacious affective grasp:

“[F]irst be redeemed & hold on tightly to your redemption (keep hold of your redemption)—then you will see that what you are holding on to is this belief.”

(Ibid, p. 39e)

“First be redeemed”—here redemption is presented as a fact. Then: hold fast to it, receive it as truth, take it as truth—lovingly. In this passage, Wittgenstein emphasizes the dynamic relation between truth and love. From this truth-love relation aimed at Redemption emerges a surprising allegory: a transformed game of forces. If one takes hold of this redemption, one will see that one believes. The logic at play here is obscure, and Wittgenstein seeks to illuminate it, with an image opposing the force of gravity:

“So this can only come about if you no longer support yourself on this earth but suspend yourself from heaven”

He continues the metaphor:

“[S]omeone who is suspended looks like someone who is standing but the interplay of forces within him is nevertheless a quite different one”

The same economy of forces reappears in Movements of Thought on 6 April 1937, in a passage Wittgenstein himself entitled “Exegesis of the Christian teaching”:

“This life must uphold you as if in suspension above this earth; that is, when you are walking on the earth, you nevertheless no longer rest on the earth, but hang in the sky; you are held from above, not supported from below.—But this life is love, human love, of the perfect one. And this love is faith.”

(Wittgenstein 2023)

Pichler and Sunday Grève draw attention to a metaphor for an honest religious thinker that appears twice in Wittgenstein’s writings: that of the tightrope walker (Wittgenstein 1998, p. 84 e. cf.; Pichler and Sunday Grève 2025, p. 10). It is tempting to apply it here. To hold oneself in faith is like walking a tightrope—precarious, suspended, demanding focus and trust. So, is this, indeed, a question of belief? Yes—if we consider the Gospel scene of Peter walking on water (Matthew 14: 28–31). Peter, like a tightrope walker, appears to rest upon an impossible surface, but until he believes, he is held from above. He is redeemed—“first be redeemed”—by doing precisely what Jesus has done before him (Matthew 14: 25–26). Only after the miracle occurs does doubt enter, and with it, the danger of falling. In this sense, doubt becomes a negative cognitive act, a rupture in the suspension that faith has achieved. One must receive the miracle as truth, cling to it lovingly as truth. But if doubt causes one to fall or to drown, should we not understand this play of forces as unfolding along a cognitive axis? Has cognition misunderstood the dynamics of force and gravity, has it doubted the physical power of lovingly grasping the truth of Redemption?

Wittgenstein brings Resurrection and Redemption into close proximity, and in this context the redemptive word, das erlösende Wort, emerges both as word and salvation: it is the word that saves, and salvation as Word. In light of this, we can consider prayer as a saving word, an instance of “God talk”. Excluding theological propositions, creedal affirmations, liturgical language, and similar forms, we must reckon with a broader spectrum of perspectives concerning the possible (or impossible) role of reason in both the content and the function of the prayer formula. A non-cognitivist interpretation would hold that prayer is neither a meaningful proposition, nor an act of communication. A fideist would claim that prayer expresses belief independently from semantic content—not as an argument, but as confession; not as analysis, but as participation. In this view, prayer is not a proposition with cognitive value, but a way of life.

Yet, if we allow a form of moderate cognitivism—particularly the one inviting cognition in terms of love, following Pascal’s phrase: “the heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of”, then prayer may indeed carry cognitive weight.

In the December 1937 remark that contains this image of hanging from heaven and an altered interplay of forces, Wittgenstein presents one of his arguments for a non-cognitivist reading:

“[F]aith is faith in what my heart, my soul needs, not my speculative intellect. For my soul, with its passions, as it were with its flesh & blood, must be redeemed, not my abstract mind”.

Clearly, the certainty of faith (“I need certainty”) involves an entire nexus of realms waiting for redemption—heart, soul, flesh and blood. But does that mean that a religious utterance cannot be reduced to truth-apt propositions? I would say the opposite: Wittgenstein is reducing the concept of “calling Jesus the Lord” from the First Letter to the Corinthians and, further, “Christ’s resurrection” to propositions he might/or might not meaningfully utter. In the case of “Lord”, the result is negative, “because that says absolutely nothing to me”, whereas he admits he can use terms like “the paragon”, “God”, or understand when others call Him God. In this spirit, prayer may begin to appear as a cognitive utterance. Wittgenstein could say: I can call him Father; I can utter the Our Father lovingly. I can also understand those who call God their Father. Within such a perspective, the opening line of his reflection gains depth: Wittgenstein aligns with Saint Paul’s affirmation “‘& no man can say that Jesus is the Lord, but by the Holy Ghost.’

And it is true: I cannot call him Lord; because that says absolutely nothing to me” […] “Because I do not believe that he will come to judge me”.

(Wittgenstein 1998, p. 38e [MS 120, 108 c. 12.12.1937])

Wittgenstein is acutely aware that the term believe can be misleading. In another reflection from the same year, he observes:

“I believe”: the word “believing” has wrought horrible havoc in religion. All the knotty thoughts about the ‘paradox’ of the eternal meaning of a historical fact and the like. But if instead of “belief in Christ” you would say: “love of Christ,” the paradox vanishes, that is, the irritation of the intellect. What does religion have to do with such a tickling of the intellect. (For someone or another this too may belong to their religion.)

It is not that now one could say: Yes, finally everything is simple—or intelligible. Nothing at all is intelligible, it is just not unintelligible.—”

(Wittgenstein 2023, [19.4.1937])

The “irritation of the intellect” points to a cognitive domain—and also to its refusal. Yet this is not Tertullian credo quia absurdum, but rather a fides quaerens intellectum—faith seeking reason, but not in an unintelligible way. In another entry, he writes the following:

“One shouldn’t be puzzled that one age doesn’t believe in witches & a later one does believe in witches & that this & similar things go away & come back, etc.; but in order to no longer be puzzled you only need to look at what happens to yourself.—One day you can pray but on another perhaps not, & one day you must pray, & on another not. Through mercy I am doing much better today than yesterday [emphasis in code].”

(Wittgenstein 2023, 26.3. [37])

Placed in proximity, these remarks—drawn from a year of deep philosophical reflection and prayerful life in Norway—reveal a crucial insight: belief, even superstitious belief such as belief in witches, is akin to prayer. The Enlightenment’s linear narrative of faith giving way to reason is therefore misaligned. Faith is not a stage to be outgrown, but a mode of being that may emerge at any moment—both in human history and in the soul of a single individual. One day you can pray, another day you cannot meaningfully say either “Lord” or “Father”. Another day you must… “Trouble teaches prayer” (Idem, 4.2.7 [37].

9. “To Pray Is to Think About the Meaning of Life”

Wittgenstein prayed—and he prayed continuously, if we consider that as a man in his twenties, stationed in the Carpathian mountains and having just survived the Brusilov Offensive—one of the most intense and bloodiest Russian campaign of the war—he wrote the following:

“To pray is to think about the meaning of life”

This sentence bursts forth in a philosophical credo, a manifesto already carrying the rhythm of the Tractatus, and from which many of the propositions—later found almost unchanged in the compact pages of Wittgenstein’s treatise—would flow.

• “What do I know about God and the purpose of life?
• I know that this world exists.
• That I am placed in it like an eye in its visual field.
• That something about it is problematic, which we call its meaning.
• That this meaning does not lie in it but outside it [Cf. 6.41] […]
• The meaning of life, i.e., the meaning of the world, we can call God.
• And to that meaning we can connect the image of God (Gleichnis von Gott) as a Father:
• To pray is to think about the meaning of life.”
(Wittgenstein 2022, p. 177)

If prayer was, during this period, a daily practice for Wittgenstein—as has been established since the Geheime Tagebücher became accessible to readers—then we can clearly see that it constitutes one of these figures that can help to understand the system while itself formally standing outside the observed system, like Derrida’s différance. The sentence “To pray is to think about the meaning of life” must be connected to other propositional formulations in which the meaning of life appears:

• “To believe in a God means to understand the question about the meaning of life.”
• “To believe in God means to see that the facts of the world are not the end of the matter.”
• “To believe in God means to see that life has a meaning.”
(8 July 1916)

We see clearly that this meaning has a holistic character—that it arises at the limit, or in the liminal moments of life—in accordance with the Tractatus’s thesis that those to whom the meaning of life has suddenly been revealed could not say what that meaning consisted in (Cf. Tractatus)

Prayer thus constitutes a keystone between faith in God and the reflection about the meaning of life—that meaning which lies beyond the domain of argumentation and explanation. At the same time, the wartime prayers recorded in Wittgenstein’s notebooks, far from being merely expressionist (and thus non-cognitivist) cries of a tormented soul and body, carry yet another dimension, one also tied to the whole of life—namely, they often beseech the possibility of right living and work: to live according to the will of God and to dedicate one’s work to His glory.

“I received a letter from an old friend in Austria, a priest. He wrote that he hopes my work will succeed—if it be in accordance with the will of God. And that is exactly all I want: if it be in accordance with the will of God,” Wittgenstein confided to Drury.

This well-known dimension of Wittgenstein’s work—aligning more with the Lutheran tradition of soli Deo gloria, maintained by devout composers such as Bach or Händel, than with the Jesuit Ad maiorem Dei gloriam—the dedication of one’s work to God, should be understood in the light of prayer. We know from M. O. C’ Drury’s account that, in a preliminary preface to Philosophical Remarks, Wittgenstein intended to use this formula (Drury 1996, p. 168). But a crucial key to avoiding a misreading of this dedication lies precisely in the final restraint from using the formula itself: Non nobis, Domine, non nobis, sed nomini tuo da gloriam (cf. Psalm 115:1).

Prayer, as philosophical meditation on the meaning of life, bears fruit in a mode of thinking that seeks to articulate that meaning—in the hope that the transparency of language might resolve our problems. But when that system fails, because “the problems of life are not resolved,” the rest is silence. And yet, the philosopher presses against the walls of language, calls upon God, and straightens his paths—offering his work to Him.

Prayer, mentioned among the examples of language-games in §23 of the Philosophical Investigations, reminds “the author of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus” himself—just as it reminds other logicians—to compare “the multiplicity of language-tools and their uses, the multiplicity of kinds of words and sentences, with what [is said] about the structure of language.”

If Wittgenstein made prayer the context for this self-critical reflection—turning toward himself—then it follows the act of praying is the same, both at the time the Tractatus was composed and at the time this remark was written

10. Conclusions

Prayer is, above all, bound up with life itself—and from the philosophical perspective, it inevitably leans toward biographism. Its natural place is the diary—the intimate mirror of the soul and, at the same time, an accounting noteboook (livre de comptes). The question of why prayer is written down is the same as the question of why one keeps a diary at all.

The context of Keller, Johnson, Tolstoy and Saint Augustine, allows us to penetrate more deeply into the essence of prayer in Wittgenstein’s thought. This perspective primarily shifts prayer from the domain of piety to the realm of seeking the meaning of life. In doing so, prayer cannot be considered outside the cognitive register. Certain facts are meaningful for life and whether they happened or not changes nothing. These facts belong to the register of aligning one’s will with the will of God.

The prayers of Samuel Johnson moved Wittgenstein with their deep human quality, the sincerity with which Johnson confessed his weaknesses. Similarly, Tolstoy, in moments when he turns away from the reader to write parables that only indirectly concern truths of faith. Here resounds a clearly Augustinian tone, an echo of The Confessions, where prayer is not a gesture meant to inform God—who already knows everything—but a gesture revealing the truth of how deeply fallen a person may still call upon God.

Paolo Virno, in his book When the Word Becomes Flesh (Virno 2015), drawing on Husserl, speaks of prayer in terms of ontogenesis. Prayer affirms the “I” as a speaking being. This ontological rhythm of prayer has a visual dimension: Heinrich Lee, discovering the symmetry and structure of the Our Father, plays with its repetition and through this perceives the human face of God and His ontological character.

Every verse of the Our Father—the only prayer Wittgenstein quotes directly and speaks of—resonates with the distant tones of his religious figures: to call God Father is to speak like a child—it is an expression of simplicity, purity of the heart, and love, akin to the desire to read the Gospels to children.

Prayer maps the transformation of life “Give us this day our daily bread” is the invocation of a daily life, in which God enters the ordinary and transforms it. “And forgive us our trespasses”—confesses our wretchedness.

“Someone to whom it is given in such distress to open his heart instead of contracting it, absorbs the remedy into his heart”

(Wittgenstein 1998, p. 52e)

Indeed, trouble teaches us to pray. Authentic prayer as an expression of pain, is born only in suffering (“infinite distress” (Ibid)). When the absolute value steps onto the stage—absolute security, the thought of death, the experience of miracle, the sense of sin and wretchedness—each of these experiences gives rise to allegories, parables, and images. These images have the structure of prayer.

What is, then, the logical form of a prayer?

The stroke—the simplest of all notations—may be seen as a sign of the radical simplicity sought by the Tractatus. This recalls a peculiar affliction—a disorder in which language is thought but not written in which the hand traces lines that appear meaningless, though the afflicted person’s mind believes having written clearly. Language becomes disconnected from motor execution even though the ability of the hand remains. Arthur Gibson, philosopher and mathematician, suffered from this condition under examination stress. For this reason, he studied under special care by Elisabeth Anscombe and Peter Geach. “I still see the words I thought I wrote”, he recalled, “but they told me it was just lines” (Grove 2012). This recalls a symbolic aphasia or stress-induced agraphia—a loss not of motor ability, but of semantic communion. Prayer, rendered as a stroke, may resemble just that: a trace of a meaning deeply meant, though it appears to the world as merely a line.

“The solution of the problem of life is seen in the vanishing of this problem”.

(Wittgenstein 1921, p. 187) (6.521)

Perhaps this solution—which suspends argumentation and theory—is the elusive logical form that draws the logician’s attention to his own prayer and its being heard.