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All Souls Day

In November we have both All Souls’ Day and Remembrance Sunday, and in this parish we generally observe them together on the same day. The first of these observances is essentially a secular one, to do with the wars of our time. The second originated much earlier in response to ever more detailed teaching in the western Church about the state of the faithful departed, teaching which involved the doctrine of purgatory, a doctrine which in general Anglicans do not hold.

In some ways purgatory can be seen to meet a need. Most people seem hardly ready for the perfection of heaven - they could do with a bit of a spiritual smartening up before they actually get there. But that is not what the doctrine of purgatory is mainly about. Its principal idea is that although God may have forgiven our sins, his justice still requires that we undergo punishment for them. Not eternal punishment in hell, you understand, but temporal (i.e. temporary) punishment in purgatory - until we have paid off our debts and can go to heaven.

To me there are at least two things wrong with this. Firstly, I find it impossible to believe that God punishes those he forgives in order to satisfy the demands of his justice. And secondly, it doesn’t take into account the wonderful doctrine of epektasis, first clearly formulated, I believe, by St Gregory of Nyssa in the fourth century. For most western theologians, papal or protestant, life after death for the ’saved’ is thought to be a state of unchanging perfection, while for the ’lost’ it is a state of perfect and unchanging hell - literally.

For St Gregory, on the other hand, life after death is one of constant growth and development, of new discoveries and new joys stretching out through all eternity. And furthermore, the great gulf between the saved and the lost is not necessarily fixed forever - and certainly not at death. God never ceases to will and work for the salvation of all his creatures.

The main difference, as you can see, comes from the idea of change. On the one hand, as many thinkers have seen - the Buddha is only the most notable example - change leads in our experience to the loss of all that we love most dearly. Change and decay in all around I see, as the hymn puts it.

Thus many have thought that if heaven is to be truly perfect there will be no room for any change there. And not only that, if there were any possibility of change in heaven, that would imply that there was room for improvement, and that things there were not perfect after all!

This is perhaps where a little reverent agnosticism could be useful to us. Just how the heavenly realms manage to combine change and perfection is the sort of paradox we here cannot really understand. Yet change, in the sense of growth, development, discovery, and so on, is part of our fulfilment as human beings. We like to learn and grow, to have further lessons to learn and higher peaks to scale. It’s part of the human nature which (I trust) heaven will constantly fulfil - not suppress in favour of some static perfection. Because God is infinite in beauty, wisdom, goodness, and everything else, even eternity will not be long enough for any of his creatures to know and enjoy his greatness and his glory.

This is much closer to the present teaching of the Eastern Churches, and knowing my little predjudices as you do by now, you won’t be at all surprised to learn that it seems to me a much more inviting prospect than being merely pickled in perfection for eternity!