One of the most beautiful Masses of the Liturgical Year is that of All Saint’s Day, on November 1. I have always loved this Mass. I even wrote a poem about it once—no, relax, dear reader, I am not going to impose it on you here! The Mass’s first reading is that from Revelation about the Great Gathering, the second from John’s Epistle about our seeing God as he really is, a doctrine whose only fault is that it is, as Chesterton said, too good to be true.
Finally, the Gospel is from Matthew about our being glad that our reward is great in heaven. We often forget the sheer beauty of the Masses we hear. Even more, we forget that our religion is unique in that it promises the highest things precisely to us, not to some abstraction or grouping down the eons of time. Christianity is not a selfish religion, but it is a religion that forbids us to doubt that we shall see God, unless, of course, we choose not to see Him. Such is our liberty.
The day following All Saints’ Day is All Souls’ Day. Traditionally, the Church dedicates the whole month of November to prayers for the souls in Purgatory. All Souls is the day on which we remember the dead, our dead. Christianity is not, strictly speaking, a “soul” philosophy or religion. We love Plato, but we are not Platonists. The immortality of the soul is not a Christian doctrine but a Greek philosophical conclusion, no less valid for all that.
All Souls’ Day, furthermore, is not about the Greek philosophical doctrine, which is most useful in Christianity, but it is about those of our dead who are not yet with God. In recent times there has been something of a shadow cast on All Souls’ Day by the way Masses for the Dead are celebrated, as if all the trappings of heaven are immediately and definitely acquired at any death.
But Christianity at its best takes the power of evil much more seriously than a kind of automatic resolving of our problems and the dubious record of our deeds at death. Christianity, perhaps I should say Catholicism, thinks that the power of choice is so fundamental, so dangerous if you will, that it somehow can reach beyond death. Those who would take away Purgatory and All Souls are those who would make the power of our choice to be flabby and inconsequential.
We have, to be sure, Memorial Day in May, a secular day in this country, having I believe rather much to do with our wars, especially World War I, in Flanders’ Fields. In Catholic Europe, on the other hand, All Souls’ Day is the day to visit the graves of our ancestors, our parents, family, and friends. It is a day in which to remember the tremendous doctrine of our freedom as it existed in the lives of those we loved.
All Souls’ Day is a day of remembering—one of the great words of our metaphysics. It is a day of doctrine, of the realization of our ultimate dignity—that of creatures, free creatures, who have the power to reject God because they have the power to choose Him. I cannot, I confess, tolerate the wishy-washiness of those who save everyone at the cost of reducing all of our actions to insignificance because, it is implied, there is nothing that we can do to offend God whose essence is said to be a kind of universal “compassion” that does not care what it is we do or what we think, for that matter. No God who gave us the Commandments acts this way.
In the Breviary for All Souls’ Day, there is a wonderful passage from a book that St. Ambrose of Milan wrote on the death of his brother Satyrus. I do not want to reflect on this whole reading. But I do want to cite the passage in which Ambrose refers to immortality. He puts it in a way I had never seen before.
“Death was not part of nature; it became part of nature,” Ambrose wrote.
God did not decree death from the beginning; he prescribed it as a remedy. Human life was condemned because of sin to unremitting labor and unbearable sorrow and so began to experience the burden of wretchedness. There had to be a limit to its evils; death had to restore what life had forfeited. Without the assistance of grace, immortality is more of a burden than a blessing.
We sometimes forget, though Plato did not, that the philosophic doctrine of immortality does not by itself solve the problem of happiness.
To have an immortal soul, then, does not by itself decide how we live through the souls that animate us. This is why both our blessings and our punishments, even unto a hell, are more dramatic if we are in fact immortal. Ambrose was right, All Souls’ Day was right. Without the doctrine of grace, the immortality of the soul is more a burden than a blessing.
We are said to live in a world that has no need of God. When we hear this sort of thing, we should not forget that this is a “proposition” not at all established or proved. In such a proposition of not needing God, we end up with a world that has no “need” of much of anything because in order for something to be truly “needed,” it must somehow have a transcendent purpose about it, even if it be the most finite of finite things.
The immortality of the soul, as I said, is a Greek doctrine. It is a philosophical doctrine. This origin in reason does not mean that Christians do not hold it, do not think it necessary for their own faith. The only way that we can hold Christianity to be true is to hold that something that is not specifically Christian is true, that which is presupposed to anything being true at all. The central doctrine of Christianity about our destiny is not the immortality of the soul but the resurrection of the body, a much more consoling, and at the same time much more defiant, doctrine.
The immortality of the soul, however, is needed to account for the continuity between our lives and the resurrection of the body. Without the doctrine of the immortality of the soul, we cannot account for the fact that the same person who actually died is the same one who shall rise again. This point is what the Christian doctrine is about in the first place. If we, as unique individuals with our own names, are utterly destroyed at death, but God “re-creates” us in the resurrection, then we are simply not “us.” And to be ourselves is precisely what we want to be, even unto everlasting. This is something at least hinted at by Aristotle when he remarked that we do not want our friends to become something other than they are—gods, for example.
But if our souls are immortal, whether unto good or unto evil, as Plato suggested in Book X of the Republic, then there must be some relation between them all, again for better or worse. All Souls’ Day, if you will, has to do with the “for better” side of those who have died but whose lives were by no means completely honorable or holy in their lifetime choosings. There is nothing unChristian in saying that we need to be purified to see God. We would not want it otherwise.
How are we to understand this need, this “world” that includes souls of the living and the dead, the damned and the glorified? Some friends of mine happened to see recently the Folger Theater production of Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida, a play that I had never seen and may or may not have read. I do not remember reading it, which says something not wholly complimentary about either my education or my memory, or both.
In any case, I happen to have the Viking (1977) Complete Works of Shakespeare. In a wonderful introduction to Troilus and Cressida, Professor Virgil K. Whitaker sets down a brief description of the “world” in which Shakespeare lived. In the context of All Souls’ Day, I want to cite this passage since I think it gives as good a description of “the world” that we presuppose in our tradition as any I have seen of late.
In this world of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, God was the Creator. He placed an order in nature at once hierarchical and universal. By being and doing what they were, these creatures that were not God “did their part in achieving His ultimate purposes.” The order of things came about through the obedience of creatures to both the physical and moral or political laws.
This same human being, however, was free. He could choose not to obey these laws. With God and the angels, man possessed free will. Living rationally meant being free to live according to the laws of God in all their manifestations. Man could also disobey them. This was his freedom. But his disobedience was not without its consequences in himself and others, even in some sense in the Deity itself, as the Incarnation itself suggests.
The powers and appetites of men could cause them to break the laws they did not make. Such were the passions and emotions of men that their calm reason could be overshadowed, rejected, forgotten. But evil itself gives rise to suffering. We cannot but recall Teiresias’ famous line in Oedipus Rex, “To be wise is to suffer.” Nor can we forget Socrates’ “it is better to suffer evil than to do it.”
Whitaker calls “Troilus and Cressida” Shakespeare’s most “modern play.” That is to say, we see the accounts of the evils we would do to one another without the overarching context of man’s standing before God. What is the world like?
The modern reader does not need to be told that what passes for love is often lust, and that what motivates much patriotism has nothing to do with love of country. Modern literature has made these points in wearisome detail. But Shakespeare has intensified and clarified even this aspect of human nature. . . . His eye has roved from the councils of the mighty to the backbiting of their hangers-on. Modern fiction has done much better, moreover, at giving us Cressidas, or a Pandarus and Thersites, than at showing us a Hector betraying his intellect under pressure of the moment or a Ulysses expending his wisdom on an intrigue to end a petty broil. . . . We may not like its [i.e., Troilus and Cressida’s] people, but they are with us everywhere. Shakespeare often tells us what we can be or should be. Here he tells us what, unfortunately, we all too often are.
And if “this” is what we “all too often are,” surely it is not so difficult to find a place for All Souls’ Day, a day in which we realize that, though there are not a few saints among us, there are far more numbers of what we can only call, following Shakespeare’s logic and our own self-awareness, sinners.
As I did before (November 1990), I cannot let this day pass without again recalling Belloc’s Four Men, his book about a walk through Sussex in 1902, a walk that ended on All Souls’ Day. “I went till I suddenly remembered with the pang that catches men at the clang of bells what this time was in November,” Belloc wrote.
It was the day of the Dead. All that day I had so moved and thought alone and fasting, and now the light was failing. I had consumed the day in that deep wandering on the heights alone, and now it was evening. Just at that moment of memory I looked up and saw that I was there. I had come upon that lawn which I had fixed for all these hours to be my goal.
And in the end, that immortality that comes with memory of land, deed, family, and polity Belloc combined with the naming of things, with what we have done and not done, with the sorrow of our endings and the hope of our rising.
When Belloc left the four men, who were indeed himself, the oldest, Grizzlebeard, said to the others:
But I who am old will give you advice, which is this—to consider chiefly from now onward those permanent things which are, as it were, the shores of this age and the harbours of our glittering and pleasant but dangerous and wholly changeful sea.
When he had said this (by which he meant Death), the other two, looking sadly at me, stood silent also for about the time in which a man can say goodbye with reverence.
This is the world that is, isn’t it? Shakespeare’s world, Belloc’s world, Sophocles’s world, where our lives seek the “harbours of our glittering and pleasant but dangerous and wholly changeful sea.”
Ambrose of Milan, to whom the young Augustine listened so carefully, wrote in the same discourse on the death of his brother: “Death is then no cause for mourning, something to be avoided, for the Son of God did not think it beneath his dignity, nor did he seek to escape it.”
In the passage from Revelation on All Saints’ Day, we read:
And all the angels stood round the throne and the elders and the four living creatures, and they fell on their faces before the throne and worshipped God, crying, “Amen! Praise and glory and wisdom, thanksgiving and honour, power and might, be to our God for ever and ever! Amen.”
We will understand modern man, understand what, “unfortunately, we all too often are,” when we again know the relation between All Saints’ Day and All Souls’ Day, when we again know with Plato the philosophic reasons for the immortality of our souls, but know also with Ambrose why “without the assistance of grace,” this same “immortality is more of a burden than a blessing.”
“To be wise is to suffer.” We said “goodbye with reverence,” for “it was the Day of the Dead.”