The Case for Ghosts

 

An interesting thought piece.

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.

I Ain't Afraid of No Ghosts

 

There is a common misconception that Christians do not believe in ghosts. See the video clip.

No religion that denied the existence of ghosts would be worthy of attention. My own misunderstanding that Christianity did not believe in ghosts held me back from full-hearted commitment to Christianity at one point. Of course there are ghosts. People all over the world report encounters. This denial made Christianity look less like a conduit to the next world than a charade in defense of philistinism. It looked like trying not to think about the next life. It looked like whistling past the graveyard.

Gerald, the resident Christian voice in the clip, explains that there is a prohibition in the Old Testament against trying to consult with the dead.

If so, Jesus is guilty of this sin.

Matthew 17: 1-3: 

After six days Jesus took with him Peter, James and John the brother of James, and led them up a high mountain by themselves. There he was transfigured before them. His face shone like the sun, and his clothes became as white as the light. Just then there appeared before them Moses and Elijah, talking with Jesus.

The event is in three gospels, and referred to in the fourth.

What is prohibited is necromancy. That is, divination: calling upon the spirits to tell you the future. This implies a lack of trust in God, and in divine free will.

This has been cooked into a prohibition on contact with the dead by Protestant theologians who want to discourage prayer to the saints and a belief in purgatory, ultimately because this allows for indulgences, which Martin Luther saw as corrupt. So some protestant groups do not believe I ghosts. But most Christians are Catholic or Orthodox, and do.

Gerald then explains that communication with the dead is not possible: “there is no coming back.” Apart from the Transfiguration, already cited, the prophet Simon is successfully summoned from the afterlife in the Old Testament (1 Samuel 28). Not to mention Lazarus. Or, er, Jesus Christ.

Gerald cites the story of the rich man and (the other) Lazarus, as his evidence. There, he submits, it is not possible for Lazarus to return to earth to warn the rich man’s relatives. 

But this is not what the story says. 

He said, ‘Then, father, I beg you to send him to my father’s house—for I have five brothers—that he may warn them, so that they will not also come into this place of torment.’ Abraham replied, ‘They have Moses and the prophets; they should listen to them.’ He said, ‘No, father Abraham; but if someone goes to them from the dead, they will repent.’ He said to him, ‘If they do not listen to Moses and the prophets, neither will they be convinced even if someone rises from the dead.’”

Abraham’s refusal makes it clear that Lazarus could go. But it would be futile. If there were capable of ignoring the Mosaic law, they will ignore a ghost. As many do in the modern world. God gives us what we need to know; he does not pressure or bully us. Nor should we do right merely from fear of punishment.

This passage endorses Judaism as a perfectly sufficient religion. The “someone rising from the dead” is surely a reference to Jesus.

Why doesn’t the rich man go himself to war his brothers?  Asking Lazarus to go implies that he understands Lazarus is in a different position. Souls in hell cannot appear to those on earth, it seems. But souls in heaven can.

Stephen Crowder then chimes in to deny that one’s dead relatives look down on you from heaven. “Angels are not human.”

They can be. As St. Augustine points out, “angel” is not a class of being, but an office, that of messenger between heaven and earth. There are various classes of spiritual beings: seraphim, cherubim, and so forth. But there are also the spirits of the dead, and there is no reason they cannot perform this function. 

Indeed, this is the function of the saints, and to deny it happens is to deny the saints.

And when he had taken the scroll, the four living creatures and the twenty-four elders fell down before the Lamb, each holding a harp, and with golden bowls full of incense, which are the prayers of the saints. – Revelations.

Even if they are not emissaries between earth and heaven, why wouldn’t the sainted dead continue to be interested in those they love on earth?

If heaven is the fulfilment of our desires, how could heaven be heaven for a good, unselfish man or woman if they could no longer see or know what is happening with their loved ones still in the world below, and, indeed, could not help them in some way?

Crowder avoids the problem by suggesting that everyone enters heaven at the same moment, because this is the nature of eternity. 

This is not the teaching of the Catholic Church; otherwise there would be no distinction between the particular judgement at death and the general judgement at the end of time. Nor does it work conceptually. Time is something of value: without time, there is no music, no prayer, no deeds, no games, no stories, no poetry, no art, no thought. All require duration. Therefore, heaven would be a profoundly inadequate place, not heaven at all, if there were no time. Rather, time is to heaven as space is as seen from a mountaintop—one reason why heaven is pictured as above us. You can observe any moment, past or future. Just as you can the three dimensions of space.

So a good Catholic believes in ghosts. The beings we encounter as ghosts might in any instance be angels or demons. But they might also be what they appear to be, or claim to be: the spirits of the departed, speaking to us from heaven or from purgatory.

A Ghost Story

 

Darkmoon, Pixabay.

Xerxes has seen a ghost. He had a vivid experience one night recently, while lying fully awake, of the weight of his wife getting out of the other side of the bed, shuffling off to the bathroom, then returning.

His wife died a year ago.

He also sometimes hears her speak.

Xerxes dismisses, although he cannot explain, the experience:

            “Tradition says that there is a soul, distinct from the physical body. The body ends, but the soul carries on.

            Reason balks at that distinction. We are embodied souls. All that makes us unique individuals depends on the combination of body and spirit. Our minds need sensory input from our bodies; without bodies, our minds cease to function, even to exist.

            Once we are gone, reason says, we are gone. Period.”

He gives no reasons he think this—he just says “reason.”

Many important philosophers reason the opposite: Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Leibnitz, Descartes, Berkeley. Most of the world’s cultures reason the opposite.

Are they all wrong? Perhaps; but one at least needs to present one’s reasons.

“Our minds need sensory input from our bodies.”

This is easily shown to be false. We can think in a darkened room. We can dream while asleep.

You mean we need original sense-impressions at some point in order to form these mental images? Aristotle or Locke thought so. But Plato, for example, thought sense-impressions merely reflected ideal forms already in the mind. Berkeley pointed out that we have no idea whether the physical senses exist except in our mind—let alone the things we imagine they perceive. All perceptions, for all we know, are purely mental.

“without bodies, our minds cease to function, even to exist.”

All the evidence goes the opposite way. Everything mental seems to be eternal; only the physical can die. Anything that dies or disappears physically persists mentally. We call this “memory.” And aside from memories, abstractions, mathematics, emotions all seem immortal. You will say a memory or an emotion may “fad.” Yes, fade; but not die. It is always still there somewhere, and something as trivial as the taste of a madeleine or a particular smell may bring it all flooding back.

No need to even go into ghosts. Or so-called “near-death experiences” in which the consciousness survives clinical death, or out-of-body experiences. They are no doubt evidence, but they are needless evidence of the almost self-evident.

Some atheists claim that belief in an afterlife is merely “wishful thinking.” That might be true, if you invented a religion that believed only in a heaven, and not purgatory or hell. None do.

Essentially every human culture has come to the same obvious conclusion, based on the hard logic and the evidence.

Catholic Ghosts

The Brown Lady: A distinguished English upper class country house ghost.

Interesting article here that outlines the Catholic position on ghosts. It turns out that it is perfectly orthodox for a Catholic to believe in ghosts—the apostles believed in ghosts, Shakespeare believed in ghosts, and so did Thomas Aquinas.

Makes sense to me. All cultures believe in ghosts, which makes it improbable that they are not real. Souls in purgatory may be given the power to communicate with the living in order to alert then to their plight. This only makes sense, since the living can help them through their prayer. Souls in heaven, too, must be free to communicate with the living as part of their blessed state. Surely this goes without saying. Heaven would not be heaven if we were separated from those we love, would it?

The Ghost of Lord Combermere.

Even souls in hell may be made visible to the living by God in order to serve as a warning.

And in addition to the souls of the dead, there are also demons about, of course. They too might appear as “ghosts.” Poltergeists, for example, seem more like demons than the souls of the dead.