Each year, on the 2nd of November, we celabrate All Souls’ Day. “We”, i.e. those of us who still know, believe, hold or hope that Man “has” a soul, a timeless entity that exists at the transcendent side of daily life and that is to be understood as the spiritual core of the human being. On this day, we pray that the souls that passed away may continue to exist in a state of “rest” that has no beginning and no end: ”requies eterna”. And so, the introitus of the traditional Requiem Mass opens with: “Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine: et lux perpetua luceat eis”. “Lord, give them everlasting rest and let eternal light shine onto them.”
A rest that is eternal
Because the Requiem Mass is a “Mass for repose of the soul of the dead”, its celebration signifies the expression of the age-old notion that the human soul survives the death of the human body. After its passing away, the soul “takes a rest” as it withdraws into the quietness that has no beginning and no end. In that absolute stillness there is no time, simply because there is no action whatsoever. Just to be sure, the soul’s rest is not the “at rest situation” that exists “in time” when opposing forces have reached a state of stand-still and balance while time goes on. It is a “rest” that is eternal in that it transcends the beginning and the end of the “cycle of action” that marks Man’s life between conception (beginning) and death (end).
The Divine Ground of Being
If the soul is indeed what remains after the death of the body, we may very well assume that the soul was also present and actively involved during the body’s lifetime. In any case, the soul must be assumed as present in “the living” who invoke God as the Giver of the soul’s “requiem eternam”. So, for the living as well as for the dead, “eternal rest” is the transcendental repose where the soul just “is”. This is the “Divine Ground of Being” that the soul shares “outside time” with its “Giver”, with the Lord, with God. The soul that passed away “enters time” again when it decides to involve itself with the world as a new human being.
The Great “In-Between”
Upon its “entering of time”, the soul creates what the philosopers called the Great “In-Between”, the metaxy, which is the apparency of distance between the quietness of the ground of pure being and the world where Man is active as a human being. What remains of the “eternal rest” in this “In-Between” is, at best, a faint afterglow of Man’s spiritual origin, or, at worst, a nothingness that has become a complete meaningless void. Whatever may be the case, the soul, being the soul that it is, can’t totally abandon its divine ground and “undo” its beingness. It “haunts” Man with the idea that there’s “more between heaven and earth” and that there’s a Beyond, a divine reality, that surpasses all understanding but that can nevertheless be experienced. The soul’s presence thus induces in Man a drive to locate his divine ground as something in relation to the things of this world in which it is present, though it is not one of them. The effort may very well create an existential tension, which, curiously enough, reaches its climax when Man, unable to experience his divine ground, concludes that divine reality is a delusion and that all there is to Man is one human lifetime that must be spent in the physical universe between conception and death.
Faith and Intellect
Yet, even those of us who are absolutely sure that the the soul is a fiction and that a “requies eterna”, a Divine Ground of Being, doesn’t exist because not too long ago God was declared dead, find it difficult to describe precisely what it is that doesn’t exist. They run into the problem that they must, of necessity, define God as an entity with properties about which one can only advance propositions of the kind that apply to things in the external world. But because God does not belong to and can’t be found in their secular “external world”, this circular explanation of the structure of reality bites its own tail because it a priori excludes God and divinity. If, on the other hand, we enter into a genuine search for the structure of a reality that includes divinity, we are faced with the problem of an inquiry into something experienced as real before the intellectual inquiry into the structure of its reality has begun. Our intellect, intellectus, finds itself in quest of our faith, fides, while our faith is simultaneously in quest of our intellect. (1)
All Souls
In addition to this, the inquiry gets more complicated by the fact that Man will find that he is an active participant in the Great “In-Between” and that this in itself influences the inquiry. Man, the homo sapiens, can’t distance himself from the metaxy and observe it from an objective vantage point. For this, Man, as he struggles in his search for the structure of a reality that includes divinity, will have to assume the viewpoint of the soul. In other words, Man will have to open himself to experience his soul as real before he begins his inquiry. This requires fides, faith, trust in himself as a spiritual being, such in spite of his intellectus warning him to be very careful when it comes to unconditionally trusting his fides. In this regard, All Souls’ Day is an expression of the fides that we trust that the requies eterna is the Divine Ground of Beingness of all souls, meaning those of the dead as well as those of the living who sing “Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine: et lux perpetua luceat eis”.
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(1) The concept of fides in search of intellectus was put forward by Eric Voegelin in his last (spoken) Essay, titled Quod Deus dicitur (What God is said to be) (a). The key paragraph of this essay is: ““We are not facing God as a thing but as a partner in a questing search that moves within a reality formed by participatory language. Moreover, we ourselves are part of the questioned reality that we are linguistically intending as if it were an external object about which we could talk as if we were cognitive subjects facing objects of cognition. The noetic search for the structure of a reality that includes divinity is itself an event within the reality we are questioning. Hence, at every point in the process, we are faced with the problem of an inquiry into something experienced as real before the inquiry into the structure of its reality has begun. The process of our intellectus in quest of our fides, a process that also can be formulated as our fides in quest of our intellectus, is a primary event.” (Italics in the original text)
(a) Quod Deus Dicitur; Eric Voegelin; Collected Works – Volume 12; Published Essays 1966 – 1985; Louisiana State University Press; 1990.
