Daily prayer in Ordinary Time 2025: 1, Monday 3 February 2025

‘Immediately a man out of the tombs … He lived among the tombs’ (Mark 5: 2-3) … the Tomb of Amyntas, carved into the rock face in the cliffs above Fethiye in south-west Turkey (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Patrick Comerford

The 40-day season of Christmas concluded yesterday with the Feast of the Presentation of Christ in the Temple (Sunday 2 February 2025) or Candlemas. Today we return to Ordinary Time in the Church Calendar, the liturgical colour returns from white to green, and it is little more than a month before Ash Wednesday (5 March 2025) and the beginning of Lent.

Today, the calendar of the Church of England in Common Worship remembers Anskar (865), Archbishop of Hamburg and missionary in Denmark and Sweden. Later this morning, I have a GP appointment in Stony Stratford and some blood tests. The meeting of trustees of a local charity that mistakenly turned up last week actually takes place this evening. But, before today begins, I am taking some quiet time this morning to give thanks, to reflect, to pray and to read in these ways:

1, today’s Gospel reading;

2, a short reflection;

3, a prayer from the USPG prayer diary;

4, the Collects and Post-Communion prayer of the day.

‘Immediately a man out of the tombs … He lived among the tombs’ (Mark 5: 2-3) … the ‘King’s Tomb’ is a symbol of Kaş in southern Turkey (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Mark 5: 1-20 (NRSVA):

1 They came to the other side of the lake, to the country of the Gerasenes. 2 And when he had stepped out of the boat, immediately a man out of the tombs with an unclean spirit met him. 3 He lived among the tombs; and no one could restrain him any more, even with a chain; 4 for he had often been restrained with shackles and chains, but the chains he wrenched apart, and the shackles he broke in pieces; and no one had the strength to subdue him. 5 Night and day among the tombs and on the mountains he was always howling and bruising himself with stones. 6 When he saw Jesus from a distance, he ran and bowed down before him; 7 and he shouted at the top of his voice, ‘What have you to do with me, Jesus, Son of the Most High God? I adjure you by God, do not torment me.’ 8 For he had said to him, ‘Come out of the man, you unclean spirit!’ 9 Then Jesus asked him, ‘What is your name?’ He replied, ‘My name is Legion; for we are many.’ 10 He begged him earnestly not to send them out of the country. 11 Now there on the hillside a great herd of swine was feeding; 12 and the unclean spirits begged him, ‘Send us into the swine; let us enter them.’ 13 So he gave them permission. And the unclean spirits came out and entered the swine; and the herd, numbering about two thousand, rushed down the steep bank into the lake, and were drowned in the lake.

14 The swineherds ran off and told it in the city and in the country. Then people came to see what it was that had happened. 15 They came to Jesus and saw the demoniac sitting there, clothed and in his right mind, the very man who had had the legion; and they were afraid. 16 Those who had seen what had happened to the demoniac and to the swine reported it. 17 Then they began to beg Jesus to leave their neighbourhood. 18 As he was getting into the boat, the man who had been possessed by demons begged him that he might be with him. 19 But Jesus refused, and said to him, ‘Go home to your friends, and tell them how much the Lord has done for you, and what mercy he has shown you.’ 20 And he went away and began to proclaim in the Decapolis how much Jesus had done for him; and everyone was amazed.

‘They came to the other side of the lake … [and he] stepped out of the boat (Mark 5: 1) … a boat at the shore at Cape Clear (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Today’s Reflection:

We are returning to Ordinary Time in the Church Calendar today, but in the Lectionary provisions for the Gospel readings at the daily celebrations of the Eucharist we are continuing our readings from Saint Mark’s Gospel.

In today’s reading (Mark 5: 1-20), after calming the waters during a difficult boat journey, Jesus stills the mind and heart of a ‘possessed’ man who cannot be restrained. There are shorter versions of this story in the two other synoptic gospels (Matthew 8: 28-32; Luke 8: 36-33), but Mark’s is the most dramatic.

This man is regarded as ‘unclean’ for many reasons: the disturbing and embarrassing state of his psychiatric health; living among tombs and graves; and his foul and blasphemous language; his undressed and bloody wounds; and his violent behaviour. The totality of his unacceptable presence is expressed in saying he was as unclean as 2,000 pigs, although the name Legion hints at 3,000 to 6,000 demons.

The image of a dishevelled man, half-fed and verbally embarrassing living among the tombs at first seems over dramatic. But priests and churchgoers in parishes up and down this land are familiar with the homeless and marginalised men who often seek shelter in the lychgates at the entrances to our churchyards.

I cannot provide them with the professional help they need, but I can sit and talk with them, occasionally share a sandwich with them, and listen to their distressing stories. And sometimes, when I get to know them by name, they begin to accept me too, to the point of asking me to pray not only for them but for their families too, and occasionally one or two of them asks for a blessing or absolution.

One of the greatest intellectual minds of the 20th century, the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, regularly called on his friend Dr Maurice O’Connor (‘Con’) Drury (1907-1976) for psychiatric help, and might have been homeless but for the care and help of this Irish psychiatrist.

Con Drury was an Anglican ordinand at Westcott House in Cambridge for just a year, but became a friend of the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, while he was at Cambridge. One day in 1931, Wittgenstein visited Drury at Westcott House, and they sat in silence in the chapel. When suddenly someone in the gallery started playing the piano, Wittgenstein jumped up and exclaimed: ‘Blasphemy! A piano and the cross. Only an organ should be allowed in a church.’

Drury left Westcott to work in Tyneside with a club for the unemployed run by Archdeacon Leslie Hunter, who was later involved in the Jarrow March. He then worked with an unemployment scheme in Merthyr Tydfil until Wittgenstein, the economist John Maynard Keynes and their friend Gilbert Pattison arranged to finance Drury’s medical education in Ireland.

Drury became the Resident Psychiatrist in Saint Patrick’s Hospital (‘Swift’s Hospital’) in Dublin under Professor Norman Moore. He was instrumental in arranging Wittgenstein’s many visits to Ireland, and was a pioneer in psychiatric medicine in Ireland as the Resident Psychiatrist in Saint Patrick’s Hospital and its nursing home at Saint Edmundsbury’s in Lucan.

The Cambridge philosopher and Dublin psychiatrist met almost daily, strolling in the Phoenix Park and the Zoo, or visiting the Botanic Gardens in the 1940s. When Drury visited the dying Wittgenstein in Cambridge in April 1951 Wittgenstein accompanied him to railway station, and his last words to Drury were: ‘Whatever becomes of you, don’t stop thinking.’

Two of the great minds of the 20th century, the philosopher and the psychiatrist, had helped each other throughout their lives. I never know who I am sitting beside in the lychgate. They may not be among the greatest of philosophers; I am certainly not among the exemplary priests or counsellors. But sitting there with them, I look forward to the day when each one known to me by name may be ‘clothed and in his right mind’.

Hopefully, some of them get more than the prayers they need and that they get to the point where someone is able to say: ‘Go home to your friends, and tell them how much the Lord has done for you, and what mercy he has shown you.’

‘The swineherds ran off and told it in the city and in the country’ (Mark 5: 14) … a boot scraper in the shape of a pig at Westcott House, Cambridge, a pun on the surname of the former principal, Bertram Cunningham (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Today’s Prayers (Monday 3 February 2025):

The theme this week in ‘Pray With the World Church’, the Prayer Diary of the Anglican mission agency USPG (United Society Partners in the Gospel), is ‘Common Humanity and Love for Religious “Other”.’ This theme was introduced yesterday with a Reflection by the Revd Dr Salli Effungani, a minister in the Presbyterian Church in Cameroon (PCC), Programme Officer for the Programme for Christian-Muslim Relations in Africa (PROCMURA), and Adjunct Lecturer on Interfaith Relations at Saint Paul’s University, Limuru, Kenya.

The USPG Prayer Diary today (Monday 3 February 2025) invites us to pray:

We thank you for creating us in your image, each unique and precious in your sight. Help us to celebrate our shared humanity and extend love to those of diverse faiths and backgrounds.

The Collect:

God of grace and might,
who sent your servant Anskar
to spread the gospel to the Nordic peoples:
raise up, we pray, in our generation
messengers of your good news
and heralds of your kingdom
that the world may come to know
the immeasurable riches of our Saviour Jesus Christ,
who is alive and reigns with you,
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever.

The Post-Communion Prayer:

Holy Father,
who gathered us here around the table of your Son
to share this meal with the whole household of God:
in that new world where you reveal
the fullness of your peace,
gather people of every race and language
to share with Anskar and all your saints
in the eternal banquet of Jesus Christ our Lord.

Yesterday’s Reflection

Continued Tomorrow

‘Go home to your friends, and tell them how much the Lord has done for you, and what mercy he has shown you’ (Mark 5: 19) … an icon in Holy Trinity Church, Old Wolverton (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2025)

Scripture quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible: Anglicised Edition copyright © 1989, 1995 National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide. http://nrsvbibles.org

‘Immediately a man out of the tombs … He lived among the tombs’ (Mark 5: 2-3) … the lychgate at the entrance to the churchyard beside Saint Mary and Saint Giles Church, Stony Stratford (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2025)

Clancarty: The high times and humble origins of a noble Irish family

The cover of ‘Clancarty: The high times and humble origins of a noble Irish family’ by Rod Smith … to be launched in London next month

Patrick Comerford

It is always a delight to receive a new book in the post, particularly a book that I am part of, even though that may be a very small part.

Rod Smith is a journalist and family historian living in New Zealand. He has already researched and published a history of the Guinness family, Guinness Down Under, and now he has written an equally fascinating book about the Trench family and the Earls of Clancarty, Clancarty: The high times and humble origins of a noble Irish family.

I have been invited to speak at the London launch of his new book next month. But he also invited me to contribute one of the forewords and has used my photograph of a memorial to the 3rd Earl of Clancarty in Saint Brendan’s Church, Loughrea, Co Galway.

In addition, part of my foreword has been quoted on the back cover of this exciting new book.

The book arrived in the post today, and I hope to say more about it when it is launched in London next month.

Foreword

How we understand the place of landed, titled families in Ireland and their contribution to Irish life has changed profoundly in recent years. This reappraisal has been helped, in part, by the Landed Estates project at the University of Galway, the fresh approach and publications programme at the Centre for the Study of Historic Irish Houses and Estates at Maynooth University, pioneered by Professor Terence Dooley, and the work of historians in response to the ‘Decade of Centenaries’, including the Easter Rising in 1916, the War of Independence and the Irish Civil War.

In the past, writers were often dismissive of the roles of families such as these, caricaturing them as oppressive or capricious landlords, portraying them as quaint or eccentric, or finding them relative to nation-building narratives only when their scions were creative writers such as WB Yeats or George Bernard Shaw, or identified with nationalist causes, as with Henry Grattan, William Smith O’Brien or Douglas Hyde.

Too often, the Irish identity of these families was easily questioned or traduced, with pejorative labels such as ‘planters’ or hyphenated stereotyping such as ‘Anglo-Irish’ that doubted their identity and that implied Irish identity depends on particular cultural, linguistic or supposed ethnic backgrounds. The unsettling rise of populist racism in Ireland is a consequence of cultivating a definition of Irish identity that is neither broad enough nor tolerant enough, that is not visionary enough to embrace the variety and breadth of ethnicity and culture that contributes to the mosaic making up the full, beautiful, diverse and rich picture of Irish identity.

The contribution of the Trench family to that mosaic is both rich and beautiful in its scope. They were French Huguenots in their origins, so offering an early contribution to linguistic and religious pluralism in Ireland. And their lives have embraced church life, and the cultural, political, architectural, educational and social life of Ireland.

In this book, Rod Smith retells the Clancarty story, a remarkable tale of a family whose members are more than eccentric title holders or benign landowners. Every family has its surfeit of embarrassing members, in this case the eighth earl, who openly sympathised with Hitler and the Nazis, and later believed in flying saucers and aliens living at the centre of the earth. On the other hand, the ninth earl is an artist and crossbench peer who is vocal about the arts and Europe and those on society’s margins.

A wider study of the Trench family would include Richard Chenevix Trench, Archbishop of Dublin and a key figure in initiating the Oxford English Dictionary; Wilbraham Fitzjohn Trench, Professor of English Literature at Trinity College Dublin and a trenchant critic of both Yeats and Joyce; Terry Trench, a founding figure in An Óige, the Irish Youth Hostel Association; and the academic and journalist Brian Trench and his brother the musician and composer Fiachra Trench.

One of the untold stories that continues to fascinate me is that of Archbishop Power Le Poer Trench of Tuam. Although a vigorous evangelical, he was sensitive to Irish culture and was loathe to ordain any man for his diocese who did not speak Irish. His portrait was inherited by his direct descendant, the psychiatrist Dr Maurice O’Connor Drury (1907-1976). Con Drury first met Ludwig Wittenstein in Cambridge in 1929 and their friendship lasted until Wittgenstein died in 1951. Drury was the psychiatrist who helped to restore Wittgenstein to full health in Ireland in the 1930s and 1940s, and so a descendant of the Clancarty Trenches rescued one of the greatest philosophers of the 20th century.

These untold stories offer a wider perspective on a family whose rich and varied biographies and contributions to Irish life are introduced in this insightful study. Thankfully, this book introduces the truth that the stories of families such as this must never be confined to the margins and the footnotes of Irish social and political history.

(Revd Professor) Patrick Comerford,
formerly Trinity College Dublin and the Church of Ireland Theological Institute

Memorial inscription for William Thomas Le Poer Trench, the 3rd Earl of Clancarty, by his wife Lady Sarah Juliana Butler, in St Brendan’s Church, Loughrea, Co Galway. Photograph by Patrick Comerford 2021 (p 181)

Daily prayers in Ordinary Time with USPG: (12) 9 June 2023

Trinity College, Cambridge, was founded by Henry VIII in 1546 (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Patrick Comerford

This week began with Trinity Sunday (4 June 2023). The calendar of the Church of England in Common Worship today (9 June) recalls Columba, Abbot of Iona, Missionary (597), and Ephrem of Syria, Deacon, Hymn Writer, Teacher of the Faith (373).

Over these few weeks after Trinity Sunday, I am reflecting each morning in these ways:

1, Looking at relevant images or stained glass window in a church, chapel or cathedral I know;

2, the Gospel reading of the day in the Church of England lectionary;

3, a prayer from the USPG prayer diary.

Inside the chapel of Trinity College (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

The Chapel, Trinity College, Cambridge:

My images this morning (9 June 2023) are from Trinity College Cambridge, founded by Henry VIII in 1546 and one of the oldest and largest colleges in Cambridge. Trinity College Chapel, which dates from the mid-16th century, was begun in 1554-1555 by Queen Mary and was completed in 1567 by Elizabeth I.

The architectural style is Tudor-Gothic, with Perpendicular tracery and pinnacles. The roof is of an earlier style than the rest of the building, and may have been re-used from the chapel of King’s Hall, the college that preceded Trinity on this site. Only the walls and roof date from the Tudor era.

The chapel has a fine organ, originally built by ‘Father’ Smith in 1694. Many alterations were made over the years until, in 1913, an almost totally new organ was built. Some of the pipes were so large that they would not fit in the organ loft and instead had to stand in a corner of the ante-chapel. In 1976 the present mechanical-action instrument, based on the surviving pipework and within the original cases, was completed by the Swiss firm Metzler Söhne. There are regular recitals on Sundays during term time.

The Choir of Trinity College, Cambridge, is composed of around 30 male and female Choral Scholars and two Organ Scholars, all undergraduates of the college. As well as singing the liturgy in the chapel, the choir has an extensive programme of performances and recordings.

The Dean of Chapel is the Revd Dr Michael Banner; the current Director of Music, Dr Stephen Layton, is stepping down after 17 years, and the vacancy was advertised in the Church Times last Friday (2 June 2023).

The chapel has memorials to the Cambridge Triumvirate – Brooke Foss Westcott, Joseph Barber Lightfoot and Fenton Hort – and to Isaac Newton, Bishop John Robinson, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Charles Villiers Stanford, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Bertrand Russell, Thomas Babington Macaulay and AE Housman.

The Cambridge Triumvirate commemorated in Trinity College Chapel (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Mark 12: 35-37 (NRSVA):

35 While Jesus was teaching in the temple, he said, ‘How can the scribes say that the Messiah is the son of David? 36 David himself, by the Holy Spirit, declared,

“The Lord said to my Lord,
‘Sit at my right hand,
until I put your enemies under your feet’.”

37 ‘David himself calls him Lord; so how can he be his son?’ And the large crowd was listening to him with delight.’

The entrance to Trinity Chapel (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Today’s prayer:

The theme in the prayer diary of the Anglican mission agency USPG (United Society Partners in the Gospel) this week is ‘Protecting the Environment in Zambia. This theme was introduced on Sunday by USPG’s Regional Manager for Africa, Fran Mate, with a reflection from Zambia for the United Nations World Environment Day on Monday.

The USPG Prayer invites us to pray this morning (Friday 9 June 2023):

Let us pray for the government of Zambia. May it work to raise awareness of environmental damage and seek to implement policies to protect the country’s health and environment.

Collect:

Almighty God,
who filled the heart of Columba
with the joy of the Holy Spirit
and with deep love for those in his care:
may your pilgrim people follow him,
strong in faith, sustained by hope,
and one in the love that binds us to you;
through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord,
who is alive and reigns with you,
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever.

Post Communion:

Holy Father,
who gathered us here around the table of your Son
to share this meal with the whole household of God:
in that new world where you reveal
the fullness of your peace,
gather people of every race and language
to share with Columba and all your saints
in the eternal banquet of Jesus Christ our Lord.

Yesterday’s reflection

Continued tomorrow

Tennyson’s statue in the Ante-Chapel of Trinity College, Cambridge (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Scripture quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible: Anglicised Edition copyright © 1989, 1995, National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide. http://nrsvbibles.org

Key figures in the story of the Anglican Reformation depicted in a window in Trinity College, Cambridge, from left (top row): Hugh Latimer, Edward VI, Nicholas Ridley, Elizabeth I; (second row): John Wycliffe, Erasmus, William Tyndale and Thomas Cranmer (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Praying in Ordinary Time 2021: 77, Trinity College, Cambridge

Trinity College, Cambridge was founded by Henry VIII in 1546 (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Patrick Comerford

Before the day gets busy, I am taking a little time this morning for prayer, reflection and reading. During this time in the Church Calendar known as Ordinary Time, I am taking some time each morning to reflect in these ways:

1, photographs of a church or place of worship;

2, the day’s Gospel reading;

3, a prayer from the USPG prayer diary.

My theme this week is seven college chapels in Cambridge, and my photographs this morning (14 August 2021) are from Trinity College.

Inside the chapel of Trinity College (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Trinity College was founded by Henry VIII in 1546 and is one of the oldest and largest colleges in Cambridge. Trinity College Chapel, which dates from the mid-16th century, was begun in 1554-1555 by Queen Mary and was completed in 1567 by Elizabeth I.

The architectural style is Tudor-Gothic, with Perpendicular tracery and pinnacles. The roof is of an earlier style than the rest of the building, and may have been re-used from the chapel of King’s Hall, the college that preceded Trinity on this site. Only the walls and roof date from the Tudor era.

The chapel has a fine organ, originally built by ‘Father’ Smith in 1694. Many alterations were made over the years until, in 1913, an almost totally new organ was built. Some of the pipes were so large that they would not fit in the organ loft and instead had to stand in a corner of the ante-chapel. In 1976 the present mechanical-action instrument, based on the surviving pipework and within the original cases, was completed by the Swiss firm Metzler Söhne. There are regular recitals on Sundays during term time.

The Choir of Trinity College, Cambridge is composed of around 30 male and female Choral Scholars and two Organ Scholars, all undergraduates of the college. Besides singing the liturgy in the chapel, the choir has an extensive programme of performances and recordings.

The Dean of Chapel is the Revd Dr Michael Banner, and the current Director of Music is Stephen Layton.

The chapel has memorials to the Cambridge Triumvirate – Brooke Foss Westcott, Joseph Barber Lightfoot and Fenton Hort – and to Isaac Newton, Bishop John Robinson, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Charles Villiers Stanford, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Bertrand Russell, Thomas Babington Macaulay and AE Housman.

The Cambridge Triumvirate commemorated in Trinity College Chapel (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Matthew 19: 13-15 (NRSVA):

13 Then little children were being brought to him in order that he might lay his hands on them and pray. The disciples spoke sternly to those who brought them; 14 but Jesus said, ‘Let the little children come to me, and do not stop them; for it is to such as these that the kingdom of heaven belongs.’ 15 And he laid his hands on them and went on his way.

10 His disciples said to him, ‘If such is the case of a man with his wife, it is better not to marry.’ 11 But he said to them, ‘Not everyone can accept this teaching, but only those to whom it is given. 12 For there are eunuchs who have been so from birth, and there are eunuchs who have been made eunuchs by others, and there are eunuchs who have made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. Let anyone accept this who can.’

The entrance to Trinity Chapel (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Prayer in the USPG Prayer Diary:

The Prayer in the USPG Prayer Diary today (14 August 2021, Pakistan Independence Day) invites us to pray:

Let us pray for the people of Pakistan, as they celebrate their independence.

Yesterday’s reflection

Continued tomorrow

Tennyson’s statue in the Ante-Chapel of Trinity College, Cambridge (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Scripture quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible: Anglicised Edition copyright © 1989, 1995, National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide. http://nrsvbibles.org

Key figures in the story of the Anglican Reformation depicted in a window in Trinity College, Cambridge, from left (top row): Hugh Latimer, Edward VI, Nicholas Ridley, Elizabeth I; (second row): John Wycliffe, Erasmus, William Tyndale and Thomas Cranmer (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Small books, large empires, campaigning newspapers: anniversaries for thinking

Ludwig Wittgenstein and his Limerick-born interpreter Elizabeth Anscombe

Patrick Comerford

The ‘Decade of Centenaries’ has moved to a new phase this year, with commemorations – among others – of the centenaries of the opening of the Stormont Parliament, the signing of the Anglo-Irish Treaty, the formation of the Irish Free State in 1921, and partition.

This year also marks the centenary of the publication of a short book. The name of the book – Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus – is not punchy, and the centenary edition is unlikely to appear on best-selling lists this year or to find its way into the decorations of shop windows. But this book has changed philosophy for ever.

Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) was a Viennese-born Cambridge philosopher who had been influenced at an early stage by Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. He worked primarily in the fields of logic, the philosophy of mathematics, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of language.

In his lifetime, Wittgenstein published just this one small, 75-page book, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921), one article, one book review and a children’s dictionary. His major work, Philosophical Investigations, was not published until two years after his death.

After World War I, and following the publication and translation of his Tractatus, he returned to Cambridge in 1929. There he met Dr Maurice O’Connor ‘Con’ Drury (1907-1976), then an ordinand in Westcott House, the Anglican theological college in Cambridge.

Con Drury was instrumental in arranging the philosopher’s many visits to Ireland in the 1930s and 1940s. During those visits, he stayed at Ross’s Hotel, now the Ashling Hotel in Parkgate Street, Dublin, in Kilpatrick House in Red Cross, Co Wicklow, as a guest of the Kingston family, and at the Drury family cottage in Kinvara, Co Galway.

Wittgenstein enjoyed strolling in the Phoenix Park and the National Botanic Gardens, Glasnevin, where a plaque on steps in the Great Palm House recall that he liked to sit and write there in the late 1940s. He returned to Cambridge and died in 1951.

Westcott House, Cambridge … an encounter with Con Drury brought Wittgenstein to Ireland (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

* * *

One of his best-known students was Professor Gertrude Elizabeth Margaret Anscombe (1919-2001). She was born in Limerick and baptised in Saint Mary’s Cathedral, and became one of the greatest English philosophers of the 20th century.

She was Ludwig Wittgenstein’s student and one of his literary executors. She became an authority on his work, editing and translating many of his writings, including his Philosophical Investigations.

Elizabeth Anscombe was Professor of Philosophy in the University of Cambridge from 1970 to 1986. When she died 20 years ago, she was buried in a grave in Cambridge beside the plot where Wittgenstein was buried half a century earlier.

Bertrand Russell said Wittgenstein was ‘the most perfect example I have ever known of genius as traditionally conceived.’ Iris Murdoch’s debut novel centred on a line from the Tractatus. His influence reaches almost every discipline in the humanities and social sciences, and he has influenced many current Anglican theologians, including Andrew Davison and Alison Milbank.

Events to mark the centenary of the Tractatus include an international symposium of philosophers, an exhibition in Vienna and new editions in German and English.

Wittgenstein was a guest of the Kingston family in Kilpatrick House in Red Cross, Co Wicklow (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

German identity after
150 years of unification

As Angela Merkel steps down in September after 16 years as Chancellor of Germany, there are concerns about the rise of the far-right in Germany and questions about whether Germany can remain the powerhouse of the European Union.

Angela Merkel’s enduring presence on the European stage makes it difficult to remember that Germany is a new state, by European standards, and modern Germany only exists since German unification 150 years ago.

The Unification of Germany formally took place on 18 January 1871 at the Hall of Mirrors in the Palace of Versailles, following Bismarck’s humiliation of France in the Franco-Prussian War. William of Prussia was proclaimed the Emperor of the German Empire, and Berlin became the capital of the new Germany.

German national identity only developed in the 19th century, and German Unification postdates, for example, the proclamation of the modern Italian state (1861), the formation of the modern Greek state (1827), the Act of Union (1801), and the French Revolution (1789).

German colonies were spread across Africa, Asia, and the Pacific. Between 50% and 70% of the Herero population in in German South-West Africa (Namibia) was exterminated in 1904. It became known as the Herero and Namaqua Genocide, and was an act of racist savagery that seemed unique at the time. But it became the forerunner of the Turkish genocide of Armenians and Pontic Greeks, and then, in the 1930s and 1940s, the Holocaust and the attempted genocide of Jews.

The Brandenburg Gate … a symbol of both German unification and German imperialism (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

* * *

Writing recently in the New Statesman, Richard J Evans, former Regius Professor of History at Cambridge University, observed: ‘It is a curious fact that if you say Germany was not exclusively or even primarily responsible for the outbreak of war in 1914, you are regarded as left wing in Britain and right wing in Germany.’

Wilhelm II, the last Kaiser, was forced off the throne in the November revolution after Germany’s defeat in World War I. He went into exile in the Netherlands where he spent the rest of his life, and the German colonial empire came to an end in 1919.

Members of the Hohenzollern family, the Prussian royal family, openly identified with the Nazis in the 1930s. The public backing of ‘Crown Prince’ Wilhelm for the Nazis in 1932 and 1933 was a significant influence in persuading large numbers of monarchist Germans to vote for Hitler and to support the Third Reich. The ex-Kaiser’s fourth son, August Wilhelm, became a Nazi stormtrooper.

The Hohenzollern family has recently emerged from decades of obscurity and has initiated a number of legal battles to recover what they claim is family property, including castles, estates and art works.

As Professor Evans wrote, ‘A decision in their favour would mean in effect ignoring their ancestors’ collaboration with the Nazis’ and ‘undermine the Federal Republic’s continuing and, so far, largely successful efforts to come to terms with the Nazi past.’

Continuity and identity remain problems for Germany, even 150 years after German unification.

The Hohenzollern crypt in Berlin Cathedral (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

200 years of
‘Guardian’ journalism

For the past 50 years, I have been a daily reader of The Guardian, which is celebrating its bicentenary this year.

It is 200 years since a four-page weekly first appeared in Manchester in 1821. Since then, the Manchester Guardian has become The Guardian, and has published more than 54,000 editions, and several million pieces of journalism, including news reports, leaders, opinion articles, interviews, reviews, photographs and cartoons.

In its own words, The Guardian is ‘older than Germany, fish’n’chips, the FA Cup and Texas.’

At the beginning of the last century, the campaigning owner-editor, CP Scott, supported Irish Home Rule and opposed the Boer War. In 1914, the Guardian warned that a rush to war would be ‘a crime against Europe.’

Since then, the Guardian has embraced social justice, workers’ rights, redistributive economics, fairness, environmental concern, a measure of pacifism, an inclination for an underdog and a good sense of humour.

Sarah Tisdall leaked documents in 1983 revealing where cruise missiles would be deployed at Greenham Common. The Guardian was taken to court, and then editor Peter Preston, gave back the incriminating evidence – to the dismay of staff and readers. It was not the Guardian’s finest hour: Tisdall was jailed, and Preston later conceded he should have destroyed the documents at the outset.

The Guardian was first published in 1821 (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

* * *

Some of its finest hours include taking on Jonathan Aitken in 1995. Aitken vowed to strike the Guardian down with the ‘trusty shield of British fair play’ and ‘the sword of truth.’ But determined journalists uncovered the supporting evidence they needed when they found key receipts in the basement of a bankrupt Swiss hotel.

Aitken had been receiving pay-offs from the Saudis, and when he was jailed for perjury for 18 months, the Guardian front-page headline proclaimed: ‘He lied and lied and lied.’ Niall Hamilton brought a £10 million libel case, but the evidence exposed him as liar and a cheat and brought an end to the ‘cash for questions’ case.

Chris McGreal witnessed genocide in Rwanda. Maggie O’Kane and Ed Vulliamy revealed the horrors of the siege of Sarajevo and the death camps in Bosnia.

Ewan McAskill told the story of Edward Snowden, the NSA files and in the biggest intelligence leak, uncovering the scale of western surveillance, and the Guardian played a pivotal role in the 2010 Wikileaks and in revealing the ‘Panama Papers.’

The newspaper that gave us memorable ‘typos’ such as a man named Brian who died of a ‘brian tumour’ also gave us the best-ever April Fools’ Day joke with a seven-page supplement on the attractions of San Serriffe on 1 April 1977.

Local newspapers are folding up and dying in England. The Lichfield Mercury, where I was a freelance contributor 50 years ago, began in 1815 but finally came to an end last year. The Guardian is constantly adapting to new circumstances and markets; hopefully, it has another 200 years of campaigning journalism ahead of it.

A special cartoon by Posy Symmonds celebrates 200 years of Guardian journalism

This feature was first published in the July 2021 edition of the ‘Church Review’ (Dublin and Glendalough.

Praying in Lent and Easter 2021: 92, Westcott House, Cambridge

The chapel and buildings of Westcott House appear to form visual cloisters for neighbouring All Saints’ Church (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Patrick Comerford

During the Season of Easter this year, I am continuing my theme from Lent, taking some time each morning to reflect in these ways:

1, photographs of a church or place of worship that has been significant in my spiritual life;

2, the day’s Gospel reading;

3, a prayer from the prayer diary of the Anglican mission agency USPG (United Society Partners in the Gospel).

This week, we are in an ‘in-between week’, between Ascension Day and the Day of Pentecost. My photographs this week are from places I associate with the life of USPG. Earlier in this series, I introduced the Chapel in the USPG offices in Southwark and its stained glass windows (20 March 2021).

This morning (19 May 2021), my photographs are from Westcott House, Cambridge. This Anglican theological college on Jesus Lane was the venue for a residential meeting of USPG trustees in November 2015. I have also taken part in seminars in Westcott House organised by the Institute for Orthodox Institute for Christian Studies, which is based across the street at Wealey House, Jesus Lane, and I have visited Westcott House regularly when I have stayed around the corner at Sidney Sussex College.

During the residential meeting of USPG trustees in Westcott House, we met in the Knight Room, facing on one side onto Jesus Lane and out across the gardens of Jesus College, and on the other side onto the Front Court of Westcott House. We also took part the Community Eucharist in the college chapel.

Westcott House was founded in 1881 as the Clergy Training School by Brooke Foss Westcott (1825-1901), then the Regius Professor of Divinity in Cambridge University and later Bishop of Durham.

Westcott was one of the Cambridge Triumvirate of Biblical scholars, alongside Joseph Lightfoot (1828-1899), who was Lady Margaret's Professor of Divinity at Cambridge and who preceded Westcott as Bishop of Durham, and the Dublin-born Fenton Hort (1828-1892), Hulsean Professor of Divinity in Cambridge. Together, they produced The New Testament in the Original Greek, which lead to the Revised Version, the Revised Standard Version and eventually the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV) of the Bible.

William Derrick Lindsay Greer (1902-1972) became the first Irish-born Principal of Westcott House in 1944. He was educated at Campbell College, Belfast, Saint Columba’s College, Rathfarnham, and Trinity College Dublin. He was the Secretary of the Student Christian Movement (SCM) in Britain and Ireland (1935-1944) before becoming the Principal of Westcott House. He later became Bishop of Manchester (1947-1970), and died in 1972.

Staff members over the decades have included many important Anglican theological minds, including Robert Runcie, Archbishop of Canterbury; John Habgood, Archbishop of York; Hugh Montefiore, Bishop of Birmingham; Alan Webster, Dean of Saint Paul’s Cathedral, London; and, of course, Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury. Others include Charles Freer Andrews, a missionary, educator and social reformer in India; Canon John Collins, a leading figure in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and the Anti-Apartheid Movement; and the theologians Don Cupitt, later Dean of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, Mary Tanner, Angela Tilby and Harry Williams.

Among the Irish alumni was Dr Maurice O’Connor (‘Con’) Drury was (1907-1976), who was an ordinand for just a year before he left Westcott House. Con Drury became a friend of the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, while he was an undergraduate at Saint John’s College, Cambridge, and was instrumental in arranging Wittgenstein’s various visits to Ireland.

Inside the chapel of Westcott House (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

John 17: 11-19 (NRSVA):

[Jesus said:] 11 ‘And now I am no longer in the world, but they are in the world, and I am coming to you. Holy Father, protect them in your name that you have given me, so that they may be one, as we are one. 12 While I was with them, I protected them in your name that you have given me. I guarded them, and not one of them was lost except the one destined to be lost, so that the scripture might be fulfilled. 13 But now I am coming to you, and I speak these things in the world so that they may have my joy made complete in themselves. 14 I have given them your word, and the world has hated them because they do not belong to the world, just as I do not belong to the world. 15 I am not asking you to take them out of the world, but I ask you to protect them from the evil one. 16 They do not belong to the world, just as I do not belong to the world. 17 Sanctify them in the truth; your word is truth. 18 As you have sent me into the world, so I have sent them into the world. 19 And for their sakes I sanctify myself, so that they also may be sanctified in truth.’

Preparing for the Community Eucharist in the chapel of Westcott House (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Prayer in the USPG Prayer Diary:

The Prayer in the USPG Prayer Diary today (19 May 2021) invites us to pray:

Let us give thanks for religious communities, and the people who devote their lives to worship. May they have strength and peace in all they do.

Yesterday’s reflection

Continued tomorrow

A quiet corner near the chapel in Westcott House, Cambridge (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Scripture quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible: Anglicised Edition copyright © 1989, 1995, National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide. http://nrsvbibles.org

The bell at the chapel in Westcott House (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Tales of the Viennese Jews: 11, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and his Jewish librettist

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791) … his image seems to be present on every street corner in central Vienna (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2019)

Patrick Comerford

The Tales from the Vienna Woods is a waltz by the composer Johann Strauss II (1825-1899), written just over a century and a half ago, in 1868. Although Strauss was baptised in the Roman Catholic Church, he was born into a prominent Jewish family. Because the Nazis had a particular penchant for Strauss’s music, they tried to conceal and even deny the Jewish identity of the Strauss family.

However, the stories of Vienna’s Jews cannot be hidden, and many of those stories from Vienna are told in the exhibits in the Jewish Museum in its two locations, at the Palais Eskeles on Dorotheergasse and in the Misrachi-Haus in Judenplatz.

Rather than describe both museums in detail in one or two blog postings, I have decided since my visit to Vienna last month to post occasional blog postings that re-tell some of these stories, celebrating a culture and a community whose stories should never be forgotten.

When Kurt Waldheim was President of Austria, there was a cruel joke among journalists that the definition of an Austrian politician was someone who tried to convince you that Hitler was German and that Mozart and Beethoven were Austrian.

Of course, both composers died in Vienna, Mozart in 1791 and Beethoven in 1827. But while Ludwig van Beethoven was born in Germany – in Bonn in 1770, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was born in Austria – in Salzburg in 1756.

The great Jewish composers and musicians associated with Vienna included Gustav Mahler (1860-1911), who lived in Vienna in 1897-1907; and the Hungarian violinist Joseph Joachim (1831-1907), a cousin of the grandmother of the Cambridge philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. Nor should we forget the Jewish origins of the Strauss family.

Mozart decorates souvenirs and boxes of chocolates and marzipan in shops in central Vienna (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2019)

There can be no doubting that Viennese citizens and shopkeepers regard Mozart as one of their own – he decorates shop windows, chocolate boxes and a variety of marzipan gifts on every street in the Austrian capital.

And, while no-one could even imagine that Mozart was Jewish, many key Jewish people influenced his life and work.

The Habsburg Emperor, Joseph II (1780-1790) issued his ‘Edict of Toleration’ in January 1782. For a long time, his chief censor was Joseph von Sonnenfels, a convert to Catholicism but a grandson of Rabbi Michael the Pious, Chief Rabbi of Berlin. He was a subscriber to Mozart’s piano recitals and generously helped the composer’s brother-in-law, Joseph Lange, when the actor was ill.

Joseph II raised Israel Hönig (1724-1808), a rich merchant and a subscriber to Mozart’s piano evenings, to the nobility with the title of ‘Edler von Hönigsberg’ and made him a ‘Government Counsellor’ (Regierunsrat), although he remained a faithful Jew.

Joseph II also employed Lorenzo Da Ponte (1749-1838), a converted Jew from Venice and a one-time Catholic priest, as the librettist of the Imperial Opera House.

Lorenzo da Ponte was born Emanuele Conegliano in the Republic of Venice. He was Jewish by birth but in 1764, his widowed father converted himself and his sons to Roman Catholicism in order to remarry. Emanuele took his new name of Lorenzo Da Ponte from the Bishop of Ceneda, Lorenza Da Ponte, who baptised him. He was ordained a priest in 1773 and moved to Venice.

But the young priest led a dissolute life: he had a mistress while he was the priest at the Church of San Luca and they had two children. He was charged with ‘public concubinage’ and ‘abduction of a respectable woman’ in 1779. At his trial, it was alleged that he had been living in a brothel and organising the entertainments there.

He was found guilty, banished from Venice for 15 years, moved to Gorizia Görz, then part of Austria, and from there moved to Vienna. There, through the good offices of the composer Salieri, Da Ponte met Joseph II and later Mozart, at the residence of Baron Wetzlar, a converted Jew who supported the composer and wanted to help Da Ponte.

In his collaboration with Mozart, the Jewish-born Venetian poet wrote the libretti of three operas: The Marriage of Figaro (1786), Don Giovanni (1787) and Cosi fan tutte (1790).

Figures of the Golem on a shop shelf beside the Old-New Synagogue in Prague … does the Golem comes to life in the statue in ‘Don Giovanni’? (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2019)

The original character of Don Juan first appears in The Trickster of Seville (1630), a play by Tirso de Molina (1579-1648), a Spanish monk from a family of converted Jews or conversos. A century and a half later, another converted Jew and priest, Emmanuele Conegliano, known as Lorenzo da Ponte, reworked Tirso’s play as a libretto for Mozart’s Don Giovanni.

Jewish folklore comes to life in the finale of Don Giovanni, as a huge marble statue is turned into flesh to exact vengeance on a murderer. Indeed, the oblique reference to the Yiddish legend of Der Golem was not lost on audiences in the Austro-Hungarian empire who were familiar with the tales of the Golem of Prague.

Mozart, like Michelangelo – who concealed his love of Judaism in his Sistine Chapel painting – criticised the anti-Semitism of his time, in his opera Il Seraglio, depicting the hated Turk, Selim Pasha, as a compassionate man devoid of religious prejudices.

Mozart was well-read in the works of the Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelssohn (1729-1786), grandfather of the composer Felix Mendelssohn, owned copies of his works and seems to have been influenced by his thinking.

Judengasse or Jewish Street … Wetzlar helped Mozart to move to No 3 in 1783 (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2019)

Baron Raymond Cordulus (Naphtali Herz) Wetzlar von Plankenstern (1715-1799), a wealthy Jewish banker who converted to Catholicism, was Mozart’s understanding landlord during his early, struggling period in Vienna and Mozart asked Wetzlar to be the godfather of his first son. When Mozart found more secure lodgings at Judengasse 3 in 1783, the baron paid for his move.

Mozart and introduced to Da Ponte were introduced at Wetzlar’s palais in 1783. When theatrical intrigues seemed to prevent the first staging of The Wedding of Figaro in Vienna in 1785, Wetzlar to look after the financing of the opera and to stage the production in London. In a letter to his father, Mozart says ‘the Baron, a wealthy Jew, is my true and good friend.’

When almost all wealthy supporters had abandoned Mozart by 1791, shortly before his death, he was still welcome at Wetzlar’s house.

The composer Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy (1809-1847), grandson of the philosopher Moses Mendelssohn, was known to his contemporaries as ‘the Mozart of the 19th century.’ He regularly conducted Mozart’s orchestral compositions and played the piano concertos with great enthusiasm.

Ernst von Mendelssohn Bartholdy, a nephew of the composer, presented some valuable musical manuscripts to the library of German Emperor William II in 1908. They included a complete copy of Mozart’s Entfuhrung aus dem Serail.

From the early 19th century on Jewish virtuoso musicians played a major role in popularizing Mozart's compositions.

Ludwig Wittgenstein’s kinsman, Joseph Joachim, was the leading violin virtuoso of his time and a close friend of Clara and Robert Schumann and of Johannes Brahms. In a letter to Clara Schumann on 18 August 1857, he writes: ‘… for us, who generally consider Mozart a musical Divinity, all little parts by him are interesting and dear.’

Hermann Levy (1839-1900) was the conductor at Bayreuth of the first performance of Richard Wagner’s Parsifal, and provided one of the best German translations of Le Nozze di Figaro.

Gustav Mahler (1860-1911) was instrumental in revitalising the popularity of Mozart’s operas at the beginning of the 20th century. He was the meticulous, demanding conductor of their initial productions at the Salzburg Festivals.

Bruno Walter (Schlesinger) (1876-1962) wrote in his Von der Musik und Musizieren (‘About Music and Music Making’) in anticipation of the approaching bicentenary of Mozart’s birth on 27 January 1956. He wrote, ‘To begin with, this should serve above all as a word of gratitude for the supreme joy with which Mozart’s compositions have brightened, blessed my life.’

Mozart and Beethoven in the window of Vienna’s best-known music shop, the Musikhaus Doblinger on Dorotheergasse (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2019)

Other postings in this series:

1, the chief rabbi and a French artist’s ‘pogrom’

2, a ‘positively rabbinic’ portrait of an Anglican dean

3, portraits of two imperial court financiers

4, portrait of Sigmund Freud, founder of psychoanalysis

5, Lily Renée, from Holocaust Survivor to Escape Artist

6, Sir Moses Montefiore and a decorative Torah Mantle

7, Theodor Herzl and the cycle of contradictions

8, Simon Wiesenthal and the café in Mauthausen

9, Leonard Cohen and ‘The Spice-Box of Earth’

10, Ludwig Wittgenstein and his Jewish grandparents

11, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and his Jewish librettist

12, Salomon Mayer von Rothschild and the railways in Vienna

13, Gustav Mahler and the ‘thrice homeless’ Jew

14, Beethoven at 250 and his Jewish connections in Vienna

15, Martin Buber and the idea of the ‘I-Thou’ relationship

16, Three Holocaust survivors who lived in Northern Ireland.

17, Schubert’s setting of Psalm 92 for the synagogue.

18, Bert Linder and his campaign against the Swiss banks.

19, Adele Bloch-Bauer and Gustav Klimt’s ‘Lady in Gold’.

20, Max Perutz, Nobel laureate and ‘the godfather of molecular biology’.

Tales of the Viennese Jews: 10, Ludwig Wittgenstein and his Jewish grandparents

Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) … born in Vienna, three of his four grandparents were Jewish

Patrick Comerford

The Tales from the Vienna Woods is a waltz by the composer Johann Strauss II (1825-1899), written just over a century and a half ago, in 1868. Although Strauss was baptised in the Roman Catholic Church, he was born into a prominent Jewish family. Because the Nazis had a particular penchant for Strauss’s music, they tried to conceal and even deny the Jewish identity of the Strauss family.

However, the stories of Vienna’s Jews cannot be hidden, and many of those stories from Vienna are told in the exhibits in the Jewish Museum in its two locations, at the Palais Eskeles on Dorotheergasse and in the Misrachi-Haus in Judenplatz.

Rather than describe both museums in detail in one or two blog postings, I have decided since my visit to Vienna last month to post occasional blog postings that re-tell some of these stories, celebrating a culture and a community whose stories should never be forgotten.

A plaque at the Ashling Hotel in Parkgate Street, Dublin, recalls Wittgenstein’s time as a guest (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

The Viennese-born Cambridge philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) taught at the University of Cambridge from 1929 to 1947. His Philosophical Investigations (1953) was published posthumously but has become one of the most important works of 20th century philosophy. His mentor Bertrand Russell described him as ‘perhaps the most perfect example I have ever known of genius as traditionally conceived; passionate, profound, intense, and dominating.’

Ludwig Wittgenstein was born in Vienna in 1889. A family tree shows his paternal great-great-grandfather was Moses Meier, a Jewish land agent who lived with his wife Brendel Simon in Bad Laasphe in the Principality of Wittgenstein, Westphalia. Napoleon decreed in 1808 that everyone, including Jews, must adopt an inheritable family surname. Moses Meier’s son, also Moses, became Moses Meier Wittgenstein.

His son, Hermann Christian Wittgenstein (1802-1878), took the middle name Christian to distance himself from his Jewish background. He married Franziska (Fanny) Figdor (1814-1890), who was also Jewish and a first cousin of the violinist Joseph Joachim (1831-1907), who worked closely with Brahms. They both became Protestants before they married, and the couple began a successful wool trading business trading in Leipzig.

Their 11 children included the philosopher’s father, Karl Otto Clemens Wittgenstein (1847-1913), who became an industrial tycoon. By the late 1880s, he had an effective monopoly on Austria’s steel cartel and was one of the richest men in Europe. The Wittgensteins became one of the wealthiest families in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, second only to the Rothschilds.

Karl Wittgenstein married Leopoldine ‘Poldie’ Maria Josefa Kalmus in 1873. Her father, Jakob Maximilian Kalmus (1814-1870) was a Bohemian Jew from Prague; her mother, Marie Stallner (1825-1921) was a German-speaking Catholic born in Sevnica in present-day Slovenia, and was Ludwig Wittgenstein’s only non-Jewish grandparent.

Ludwig Wittgenstein was born in Vienna on 26 April 1889 in the ‘Wittgenstein Palace’ at Alleegasse 16, now the Argentinierstrasse, near the Karlskirche. He was one of nine children who were all baptised as Catholics and received formal Catholic teaching. Gustav Klimt painted Ludwig’s sister for her wedding portrait, and Johannes Brahms and Gustav Mahler gave regular concerts in the family’s many music rooms.

In an interview, his sister Gretl Stonborough-Wittgenstein said their grandfather's ‘strong, severe, partly ascetic Christianity’ was a strong influence on all the Wittgenstein children.

While Ludwig Wittgenstein was at school at the Realschule, he decided he had lost his faith in God and became an atheist. But his religious faith and his relationship with Christianity and religion in general would change over time. He resisted formal religion, saying it was hard for him to ‘bend the knee,’ although he once said, ‘I cannot help seeing every problem from a religious point of view.

With age, his personal spirituality deepened, and he wrestled with language problems in religion. At a time when he was finding it difficult to work, he wrote in 1947, ‘I have had a letter from an old friend in Austria, a priest. In it he says that he hopes my work will go well, if it should be God’s will. Now that is all I want: if it should be God’s will.’

In Culture and Value, Wittgenstein asks, ‘Is what I am doing really worth the effort? Yes, but only if a light shines on it from above.’ His close friend Norman Malcolm later wrote, ‘Wittgenstein’s mature life was strongly marked by religious thought and feeling. I am inclined to think that he was more deeply religious than are many people who correctly regard themselves as religious believers.’

Wittgenstein visited his Irish friend, the psychiatrist Dr Maurice O’Connor (‘Con’) Drury (1907-1976) in Dublin in August 1947, and when he returned to Cambridge he resigned his professorship, planning to move to Dublin. He lived for some months in 1948-1949 at the Ashling Hotel in Dublin, but returned again to Cambridge.

Wittgenstein became very ill in Cambridge on the evening of 27 April 1951. When his doctor told him he might live only a few days, he reportedly replied, ‘Good!’

Four of his former students arrived at his bedside – Ben Richards, the Limerick-born philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe, Yorick Smythies, and Con Drury, once an Anglican ordinand at Westcott House, Cambridge, and later a regular communicant at Christ Church Cathedral, Dublin.

Anscombe and Smythies were both Roman Catholics. At their request, the Dominican friar and founding warden of the Dominican retreat centre at Spode House near Rugeley, Father Conrad Pepler (1908-1993), also attended. Wittgenstein had asked for a ‘priest who was not a philosopher’ and had met Father Conrad several times before his death.

His friends were unsure at first what Wittgenstein would have wanted. But they remembered he had said he hoped his Catholic friends would pray for him, so they did, and he was pronounced dead shortly afterwards. He was given a Catholic burial in Cambridge.

A plaque in the chapel of Trinity College Cambridge recalls Witthenstein’s time as a fellow and professor (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

On his religious views, Wittgenstein was said to be greatly interested in Catholicism and was sympathetic to it. However, he did not consider himself a Catholic. According to Norman Malcolm, Wittgenstein saw Catholicism as a way of life rather than as a set of beliefs he personally held.

So, did Wittgenstein see himself as Jewish?

Wittgenstein wrote repeatedly about Jews and Judaism in the 1930s, and many biographical studies present that his writings about Jewishness as a way in which he thought about the kind of person he was and the nature of his philosophical work.

On the other hand, as David Stern points out, many philosophers regard Wittgenstein’s thoughts about Jews as relatively unimportant, and many studies of his philosophy do not even mention the topic.

Yet, some writers have referred to Wittgenstein as a ‘rabbinical thinker’ and a far-sighted critic of anti-Semitism.

There is much debate about the extent to which Wittgenstein and his siblings, who were of three-quarters Jewish descent, saw themselves as Jews. The 1935 Nuremberg laws in 1935 defined as Jewish someone with three or four Jewish grandparents.

In a diary entry shortly after the German-Austrian Anschluss, he described the prospect of holding a German Judenpass or Jewish identity papers as an ‘extraordinarily difficult situation’ and compared it to hot iron that would burn his pocket.

In his writings, Wittgenstein frequently referred to himself as Jewish, at times as part of an apparent self-flagellation. For example, while berating himself for being a ‘reproductive’ as opposed to ‘productive’ thinker, he attributed this to his own Jewish sense of identity.

He wrote, ‘The saint is the only Jewish genius. Even the greatest Jewish thinker is no more than talented. (Myself for instance).’

While Wittgenstein would later claim that ‘my thoughts are 100% Hebraic,’ as Professor Hans Sluga has argued, if so, ‘His was a self-doubting Judaism, which had always the possibility of collapsing into a destructive self-hatred (as it did in [Otto] Weinberger’s case) but which also held an immense promise of innovation and genius.’

Wittgenstein once wrote, ‘Bach wrote on the title page of his Orgelbüchlein, “To the glory of the most high God, and that my neighbour may be benefited thereby.” That is what I would have liked to say about my work.’

In a letter to Bertrand Russell in 1912, he said Mozart and Beethoven were the actual sons of God – both composers died in Vienna.

Although I could find no exhibits relating to Wittgenstein in the Jewish Museum at the Palais Eskeles on Dorotheergasse last month, across the street from the Museum there are frosted portraits of Mozart and Beethoven in the window of Vienna’s best-known music shop, the Musikhaus Doblinger at Dorotheergasse 10.

Mozart and Beethoven in the window of Vienna’s best-known music shop, the Musikhaus Doblinger on Dorotheergasse (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2019)
Other postings in this series:

1, the chief rabbi and a French artist’s ‘pogrom’

2, a ‘positively rabbinic’ portrait of an Anglican dean

3, portraits of two imperial court financiers

4, portrait of Sigmund Freud, founder of psychoanalysis

5, Lily Renée, from Holocaust Survivor to Escape Artist

6, Sir Moses Montefiore and a decorative Torah Mantle

7, Theodor Herzl and the cycle of contradictions

8, Simon Wiesenthal and the café in Mauthausen

9, Leonard Cohen and ‘The Spice-Box of Earth’

10, Ludwig Wittgenstein and his Jewish grandparents

11, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and his Jewish librettist

12, Salomon Mayer von Rothschild and the railways in Vienna

13, Gustav Mahler and the ‘thrice homeless’ Jew

14, Beethoven at 250 and his Jewish connections in Vienna

15, Martin Buber and the idea of the ‘I-Thou’ relationship

16, Three Holocaust survivors who lived in Northern Ireland.

17, Schubert’s setting of Psalm 92 for the synagogue.

18, Bert Linder and his campaign against the Swiss banks.

19, Adele Bloch-Bauer and Gustav Klimt’s ‘Lady in Gold’.

20, Max Perutz, Nobel laureate and ‘the godfather of molecular biology’.