Remembering the Dead

As I age, the fervor with which I remember the souls of the dead has redoubled, as if to keep pace with the lengthening number of names of individuals who now appear on my personal list of remembrance. And while I am intuitively confident that my increased zeal has something to do with the continually emerging tangible reminders of my own mortality, and with the hope accompanying it that someone will remember me, I do not think this accounts for the phenomenon of remembering in its fullness. Let us consider what it means to pray for and remember the dead and the opportunities these present, either to benefit departed souls, advance the growth in holiness of the living, or both, or neither.

The Church designates November 2 as All Souls’ Day, a day to remember the souls of the faithful departed. The specificity of this designation implies that others have departed this life insufficiently faithful to be included. As severe as this sounds, and as uneasy as it may make us, the Church’s logic is straightforward: If a soul has been condemned to Hell, its condemnation is eternal. Thus, it makes no sense to commend such a soul to God. If, as some have argued, the soul condemns itself by way of an active decision to excommunicate itself from all that is good, all that is God, the result is the same. The divide between Heaven and Hell is not permeable (cf. Lk. 16:19-31).

In his book That All Shall Be Saved: Heaven, Hell, and Universal Salvation (2019), Eastern Orthodox philosopher David Bentley Hart argues for universal salvation with numerous difficult and fascinating arguments, both scriptural and philosophical. One of the most compelling and accessible is his contention that a just God would not issue eternal condemnation for sins committed by a finite being in time. Essentially, Hart’s point is that eternal punishment is not commensurate with a finite crime and hence represents an act of injustice against the condemned. But God’s nature is such that He cannot act unjustly.

I confess my considerable affinity with Hart’s view, not only because of his arguments but because I am persuaded by St. Thérèse of Lisieux’s teaching regarding the extravagant mercy of God. She understood that God’s mercy is not constrained by the limits of our imagination or by any human inclination to condemn ourselves or others with impunity. Although she does say, prophetically, that “little children are not damned,” nowhere does she claim, contrary to Church teaching, that all are saved. Nevertheless, given her conviction that God’s mercy is incomparably lavish, extravagant in its prodigality, I think it would have been difficult for her to reconcile her experience of God with One who damns, even occasionally. Whatever reservations she might have had, she did not articulate them, opting instead to defer in humility to the wisdom of the Church.

On the other hand, Thérèse would have happily joined the ranks of those who profess hope that all might be saved, and the way she understood and experienced God would have amplified that hope. She professed further — many years before Hart — that God’s justice requires His mercy; because we are finite, fallible, imperfect creatures so constitutionally in need of mercy, failure to offer it would be essentially unjust. Given our limitations, it is only fair (just) that God treat us with mercy. At any rate, because I can neither know nor determine who qualifies as one of the faithful departed, I commend all the souls of the persons I have loved to God.

Let us return to the question of who, if anyone, benefits from our prayers for the dead: (1) either the souls of the faithful departed are the beneficiaries of prayerful acts of remembrance; (2) we (the ones who pray and remember) are the beneficiaries; (3) no one, living or dead, benefits; or (4) both the remembered and the rememberers benefit. I will examine each option before arguing that the last makes the most sense, at least for a person of faith.

Option #1: The Deceased Are the Beneficiaries of Prayer

Let us consider the context of the question more broadly. All human beings, true believers or not, are inclined to remember — if not prayerfully, at least thoughtfully and with affection — their beloved dead. Even those who deny that the soul can survive the demise of the body — an option Plato considered but rejected — tend to remember the people they love who preceded them in death. By holding our beloved dead in memory, we assert their significance for us then and their ongoing significance for us now. They continue to matter to us. At the very least, if we could benefit them we would. Although this inclination proves nothing, it does say a great deal about the persistence of love in human beings and the enduringness of human connection. We are not creatures who simply forget, as grief and trauma demonstrate, but beings both burdened by and grateful for memory.

If the souls of the faithful departed are to be affected in any way by our prayers, there must be a relationship of some kind between the living and the faithful dead that makes connection possible. If the divide is absolute, connection is impossible. The living must have some kind of affiliation, alliance, bond, or fellowship with the dead that permits us to relate to them. And they do. It is what the Church calls the communion of saints. However humble that connection might seem compared to the animating relationships of our earthly lives, it is essential to posit a communion of saints if intercession for the dead is to be possible. The fact that we seem to have a natural inclination to remember the dead and hope for the welfare of those we have loved suggests that we have some built-in intimation of this community, even if its reality cannot be demonstrated.

The communion of saints has been an article of faith since its inclusion in the Apostles’ Creed beginning in the late fourth and fifth centuries. It posits the existence of a spiritual community among all who are living in grace and all who have died in grace. It is a “community of salvation that encompasses the whole church, heavenly and earthly…a fellowship of persons constituted and determined as such by the blessings of salvation” (Encyclopedia of Theology: The Concise Sacramentum, 1975). Like all communities, this one is distinguished by what its participants have in common — which, in this case, is grace. Although its living members strive imperfectly, and its deceased members are still being readied for eternal life, no one in this community, living or dead, has renounced God’s love entirely; rather, each participates in grace to a greater or lesser degree. Interestingly, while we, the living, tend to prefer our position to that of the deceased members of the community of saints, their outcome is already assured, whereas ours is not. It is still possible for us to turn aside from grace.

Within this company of grace, the Church teaches that prayers for the faithful departed have a “salutary effect,” benefiting the one who is commended to God for mercy. It remains possible, even likely in my view, that the benefit offered to the faithful departed extends to the one making the prayer, underscoring the fact of their connectedness, just as acts of love occurring in the ordinary world tend to benefit both recipient and giver, at least spiritually. At any rate, the Church maintains that the living can support the faithful departed as they progress through their process of purification by prayerfully recalling them.

Within the circle of believers, option #1 is not controversial. But, critically, it is an article of faith, not a claim demonstrated by reason. Ordinary Catholics professing the Apostles’ Creed declare that they believe in “the communion of saints” and tend to presume that the faithful dead benefit by their prayers, even though the spiritual causality — if such exists — remains obscure. Certainly, the Church encourages us in this direction by setting aside a special day of remembrance and prayer and urging us to pray for the souls of the faithful departed. Although believers remember the dead in the context of private prayer, or serendipitously when the deceased comes momentarily to mind, the Church prefers that we pray for our beloved dead within the context of the Mass, when we recall the death and resurrection of Jesus, giving hope to our confidence that these others shall be raised, too.

Furthermore, the Church urges us “to pray for the living and the dead,” especially the souls in Purgatory, and designates such prayer as a spiritual work of mercy. In doing so, she signals that some mercy, some benefit is shown to the deceased who are remembered. Just as the ignorant benefit by learning, the afflicted benefit by being comforted, the offenders by being forgiven, the doubtful by being counseled, and so on for all the works of mercy, the souls of the faithful departed must likewise benefit. Otherwise, it makes no sense to call it an act of mercy.

Option #2: Living Persons Who Faithfully Remember the Dead Benefit

This perspective is contrary to the common assumption that remembering the dead is nothing more than an instance of the living doing a kind of favor for the dead, with no return on investment possible, until we join the ranks of the dead ourselves and, we hope, find ourselves on the receiving end of someone else’s prayers. Nevertheless, Catholics are instructed to pray for the faithful departed, and I believe there are strong reasons to affirm that the living also benefit from doing so.

First, when we pray for and remember the faithful departed, we deepen our personal consciousness of death. Because so much in modern life conspires to make us forget that we will die, even when we know, objectively, that this outcome is mathematically certain, we are helped when we have occasion to remember that death awaits each of us. Although some disingenuousness comes naturally to us, inclining us to obfuscate hard or unwelcome truths, it is difficult to remember the dead with any earnestness without also remembering that we, too, will die. We, the living, are reminded of our own finitude, not merely the fact that we are “beings-toward-death” in some philosophical or metaphysical way, but that we await our particular death, on some definite day, of some specific cause, in some manner unknown to us but inevitable nonetheless. The Church provides a graphic reminder of this on Ash Wednesday, directing us to remember our impending return to dust.

The 19th-century Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard offers a compelling argument in support of option #2. In “The Work of Love in Recollecting One Who Is Dead,” an essay in his masterpiece Works of Love (1847), Kierkegaard argues that (1) such an act is a work of love, and (2) the one who recollects, not the one who is recollected, is disclosed as acting selflessly, freely, and faithfully. Thus, ongoing engagement in the practice of recollecting the dead should deepen selflessness, freedom, and faithfulness in the person who undertakes this particular act of love. This work of love in recollecting one who is dead is revelatory, but only in a one-sided way: only “the one who is living is disclosed,” not the one who is dead (toward whom the work is directed). Accordingly, Kierkegaard says, “If you want to ascertain what love there is in you or in another person, then pay attention to how he relates himself to one who is dead.”

Kierkegaard’s argument is fairly simple. In a relationship between a person who is alive and one who is dead, the “one who is dead is no actuality; no one, no one can make himself no one as well as one who is dead, because he is no one.” As no one, the dead person “has withdrawn himself completely, and he has not the slightest influence, neither disturbing nor accommodating, on the one living who relates himself to him.”

It is important to clarify the difference between the Catholic view of the faithful departed and Kierkegaard’s view stated here. Whereas Catholics characterize the faithful departed as members of the community of saints by virtue of their participation in grace, Kierkegaard characterizes them as “no one,” having “no actuality” at all. This difference is substantial, literally so, and presumes vastly different anthropologies undergirding these varied perspectives. In fact, these valuations are so divergent that we must ask if the positions are even compatible.

In Kierkegaard’s view, the dead have no agency whatsoever. Because they are bereft of agency, the dead cannot effect any change in the living. But Kierkegaard does not say that the dead are the source of the benefit the living experience (as they become increasingly selfless, free, and faithful) while prayerfully remembering the dead. He says instead that the living develop unselfishness, freedom, and fidelity (without crediting the dead as the cause of their growth in virtue). Instead, the work of love in remembering the dead is itself the source of these alterations, not the deceased “no one.” This position is not at odds with the Catholic view; to the contrary, Catholics believe that prayer can and does change the one who prays. For these reasons, Kierkegaard’s arguments supporting option #2 can be readily affirmed by Catholics.

Kierkegaard argues that “the work of love in recollecting one who is dead is a work of the most unselfish love,” because any form of repayment — whether by profit or reciprocity — is impossible. That’s because the one who is recollected is no one, without actuality, and hence is incapable of any action whatsoever. By contrast, if you love another living person who, say, stands in need of your services, it is always possible for you to gain some profit from the beneficiary of your love, if not immediately, then in time. For example, gratitude is a kind of repayment that can happen immediately. When the beneficiary thanks you, you are gratified or pleased by his words. Even if the beneficiary offers no words of thanks, it is possible that he might return the good deed on some future occasion, perhaps even exceeding your original act of generosity if he finds himself in a position to do so. Kierkegaard is a rigorist if ever there was one, and his point is that selflessness cannot be assured if even the possibility of repayment exists. Only the work of love in recollecting the dead guarantees that the one who recollects cannot profit — precisely because the one who is recollected is dead.

Obviously, the work of love in recollecting the dead makes repayment by reciprocity impossible, too. If you love a living spouse, a friend, a difficult family member, or even an adversary, the possibility of reciprocity is always open. If your spouse reciprocates your devotion, your work of love is not entirely selfless, as you experience the joy of being loved in return. The same is true for reciprocal friendship. Even if you direct an act of love toward, say, a particularly difficult family member, reciprocity is still possible as long as the family member is alive. But the “no one” whom you recollect in the work of love in remembering the dead can neither repay nor engage reciprocally with you. Thus, Kierkegaard concludes, the work of love in recollecting the dead is the most unselfish work of love possible. It is unselfish because no profit or reciprocity is even possible. “If, then, you wish to test yourself as to whether you love unselfishly,” he writes, “just pay attention to how you relate yourself to one who is dead.”

Kierkegaard contends that “the work of love in recollecting one who is dead is a work of the freest love.” If love is extorted or compelled, however slightly, a work of love is not entirely free. Kierkegaard does not subscribe to the romantic but fanciful view that love must necessarily be free (in order to be love). To the contrary, most ordinary works of love have, upon examination, some elements of unfreedom or compulsion. When a parent reaches to soothe a screaming toddler, can he be sure that his work of love has not been extorted, at least in part, by the child’s deafening screams? Of course not. If an unhoused person asks for monetary assistance, pleading silently with only his eyes, the sheer misery of his situation can prompt people to give. This, too, is a kind of small compulsion. Similarly, if you care for a parent suffering from Alzheimer’s, your many works of love are not entirely free. A thousand possible compulsions might prompt you to act, including a sense of obligation, the desire to outshine your siblings in dutifulness, the wish to be admired as the self-sacrificing caregiver, and the subtle desire to be confirmed in your high opinion of yourself. Kierkegaard would encourage us to act with as much freedom as possible, but he understands that, as human beings, we are susceptible to these compulsions. For this reason, even if a work of love is not entirely free, it remains a work of love.

Kierkegaard argues that “the stronger the compelling, the less free is the love.” Accordingly, a work of love can only be entirely free when no compulsion or extortion is possible. But compulsion or extortion can only be completely eliminated — even as a possibility — when the recipient of the act of love is dead, is no one, is incapable of any activity whatsoever, and hence incapable of any compulsion. In short, a dead person cannot “extort” or “compel” a living person to do anything: the dead cannot cry, beg, urge, demand, constrain, flatter, badger, or pester in any way. Because of this, the work of love in recollecting the dead is the freest love. Perhaps because “there is no one easier for the living to avoid than one who is dead,” it is also rare.

Finally, Kierkegaard argues that “the work of love in recollecting one who is dead is a work of the most faithful love.” Fidelity in love, though difficult, can often be helped along. A married couple, for example, might find that the fact that they have children boosts their fidelity toward each other; a long, shared history can do the same. Similarly, religious seriousness regarding the vow they have taken would likely reinforce their mutual faithfulness. But what if there are absolutely no supports to help love remain faithful? “In order to test properly whether a person’s love is faithful,” Kierkegaard writes, “everything can of course be removed whereby the object could in any way help him to be faithful. But all this is absent in the relationship to one who is dead, who is no actual object. If love then continues, this love is the most faithful.”

The insight can be expressed in another way. When human love fails, it is commonplace, even customary, for one or both parties to complain bitterly that the other changed. Had the other not changed, the aggrieved party complains, then I would have persisted faithfully in love. Alas, the reasoning goes, I was betrayed by the fact that you changed; had this not happened, our love would have remained inalterable. Kierkegaard, of course, takes pains to point out that both parties will have necessarily changed, by virtue of being beings-in-time, so that the accusation against the other is simultaneously an accusation against oneself. If love is to persist in time, it must learn to accommodate change. Only the dead, having no actuality at all, cannot change. “It is out of the question that it was the one dead who changed,” he writes. “If a change occurs in this relationship, I must be the one who has changed. Therefore, if you want to test whether you love faithfully, just observe how you relate yourself to one who is dead.”

Kierkegaard concludes his argument with this summation: “The work of love in recollecting one who is dead is thus a work of the most unselfish, the freest, the most faithful love. Therefore go out and practice it; recollect the one who is dead and just in this way learn to love the living unselfishly, freely, faithfully. In the relationship to one who is dead, you have the criterion by which you can test yourself.” Whoever practices this work of love over time and with deepening fervor will grow in selflessness, freedom, and fidelity so as to be able to love the living more. If the work of love in remembering the dead makes us more unselfish, more free, and more faithful, the benefit is both ours and the living we love more freely, faithfully, and selflessly.

Since option #1 cannot be demonstrated with any certainty but must be held, if it is held, only by faith, it follows that it would not be unreasonable to reject option #1, as many have done. Consistency would require these same people also to reject option #3, the position that both “parties” benefit. Depending on their assessment of Kierkegaard’s argument, they will end by supporting either option #2 or option #4 — the latter stating that no one benefits at all. But because I find Kierkegaard’s argument compelling and believe by faith that the faithful departed can benefit by prayerful remembrance, I defend option #3 that both the living and the dead benefit.

Alas. Whatever you decide, dear reader, let all of us be careful lest the untangling of these options distract us from the duty of engaging in this work of love.

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