There Are More Things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio...

A Japanese ghost

 

“Those who are deemed worthy to attain to the coming age

and to the resurrection of the dead

neither marry nor are given in marriage.

They can no longer die,

for they are like angels;

and they are the children of God

because they are the ones who will rise.

That the dead will rise

even Moses made known in the passage about the bush,

when he called out 'Lord, '

the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob;

and he is not God of the dead, but of the living,

for to him all are alive."

- Today’s Mass reading. Luke 20:30-38

Xerxes, my muse, observed in his latest column that it is a bit absurd that we continue to celebrate Hallowe’en, because no one any longer believes we commune with the dead, that the dead participate in our lives.

I called him on that. No one? 

All Catholics are supposed to believe it. That is what the communion of the saints is about. I think of Chesterton’s definition of tradition as true democracy, because it includes a vote for the dead. Chinese folk religion also believes the dead remain in contact—the famed “ancestor worship.” All shamanic systems believe so—that is who the shamans talk to. 

We are getting up to a large chunk of the world’s population by this point—quite possibly a majority.

I begin to suspect Xerxes does not get out much. Perhaps he speaks only with mainstream Protestants and atheists.

But I want to go further. One of the biggest lies of modern life is that only the physical world is “real,” that spiritual beings do not exist. I remember in first year philosophy, a visiting professor dismissing some branch of philosophy with the comment that it would allow that unicorns exist. In other words, the non-existence of unicorns was insisted on a priori. No arguments allowed.

That bugged the heck out of me at the time, and has bugged me ever since. That is not philosophy. That is blind faith.

But a grossly materialist blind faith.

In the real world of philosophy, Berkeley has demonstrated that the very existence of the material world is an arbitrary hypothesis, and one that violates the principle of Occam’s Razor, which we take as given in science. Plato posited and argued, I think convincingly, that the material world is just a reflection of an “ideal” world, a world of ideas. Were this not so, mere sense perceptions could never spontaneously form themselves into ideas.

It seems to me that unicorns exist. They exist as a coherent image, which we can discuss. Everyone knows what I mean when I say “unicorn.” They exist as an idea; and a transpersonal idea, an idea that exists objectively.

So too with other spiritual beings: the classical gods, fairies, djinn, and the souls of the dead.

To be seen is not to exist. To exist is not to be seen. Otherwise love too does not exist. Neither does justice, or happiness, or freedom, or any other of the important things of life.

So suck it up, unicorn-deniers.