Death and the importance of imagination
“In memory of Nicholas Serafine. Pray for him.” These words are inscribed on a brass plate attached to a small rack of votive candles in the rear of St. Paul’s Church in South Philadelphia.
A lifelong parishioner told me that the saint beneath whom the candles are placed is Saint Julian (though he called him Saint Juliano). There are many Saint Julians. The most famous — who unfortunately probably never existed — is Julian the Hospitaller, the subject of one of Flaubert’s Three Tales. But the statue seems to be of someone dressed as a Roman soldier, so maybe it’s Julian of Auvergne, an officer in the Roman army who was martyred.
Not that it makes any difference. One can just burn a candle and say a prayer. I have, in fact, taken to doing precisely that — burning a candle and saying a prayer for the late Mr. Serafine, about whom I know nothing. I figure that most of the people who light a candle in front of this saint never notice the brass plate or read the inscription. But I have. So why not comply with the request? It is, after all, more efficacious to pray for another than for oneself.
As a Catholic, of course, I believe “in the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come” (and also in Purgatory, which Msgr. Charles Sangermano, former pastor of St. Paul’s, once memorably described as providing “cosmetic surgery for the soul”). But I’m also a one-world-at-a-time sort of guy and tend to agree with John Hall Wheelock that “to have lived / Even if once only, once and no more, / Will have been — oh, how truly — worth it.” Either way, as Cicero noted, for those of a philosophic turn of mind, the whole of life is “a preparation for death.”
The ancient Greeks thought we survived our physical demise to the degree that others remembered us. It sounds a rather fragile mode of being, but maybe not. After all, our remembrance of things past can often be so vivid as to cause what is happening at the moment to practically dissolve.
“In the unconscious,” Freud observed, “every one of us is convinced of his own immortality,” adding that “it is indeed impossible to imagine our own death.” This seems a bit odd when you consider that there was a time — a good bit of time, actually — when, as far as we can tell, we didn’t exist. But maybe we’re on to something. Maybe we just know that, having once come into being, we will go on being in some way, shape, or form.
Honoring the dead, and regarding them as somehow continuing to exist, is a well-nigh universal human characteristic, as is the belief in gods and spirits. Why not take these things at face value?
In The Idea of the Holy — written after he had visited many countries and explored how the religious impulse was expressed in various traditions — Rudolf Otto concluded that the fundamental ground of the religious impulse was a sense of what he called the “numinous.” This he defined as a “non-rational, non-sensory experience or feeling whose primary and immediate object is outside the self.” He calls it a “mystery” that is both “terrifying” (tremendum) and “fascinating” (fascinans).
Enough people, I think, have experienced this “sense sublime / Of something far more deeply interfused” that “rolls through all things” — to borrow from Wordsworth — that it ought not to be dismissed out of hand because it is not subject to scientific verification.
Truth can be arrived at as much by introspection as by dissection. If you quietly observe something — a still life, a junco hopping about in your back yard, a potted geranium atop a crumbling wall — what you observe ceases after a time to be entirely “out there.” It becomes a part of your self. This is what Thomas Aquinas was getting at when he said that the knower and the known are one. It is a sort of knowledge different from the kind arrived at through ratiocination. It is the sense we have when we just know something is so, no matter what anyone says or thinks to the contrary. Call it intuition (which comes from the Latin intueri, meaning to look at and, by extension, to contemplate). It is, I believe, what drives the imagination, which is why we ought to take what we imagine every bit as seriously as — and perhaps even more seriously than — what can be demonstrated by means of charts and graphs.
I happen to imagine that Nicholas Serafine knows that I am doing as requested on the brass plate bearing his name. I like to think that some day he’ll return the favor.
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i have a feeling prayers of this kind do actually kickstart things in the universe. i once lit a votive candle for the soul of TS Eliot and about five minutes later bumped into a girl i fell in love with about a month after that, which in turn really opened a door in my life.