Ghosts

One thing you will search in vain for in the Catechism of the Catholic Church is any discussion of the phenomenon of ghosts.

That doesn’t mean Catholics are forbidden to believe in ghosts. It just means the Church has no particular doctrine concerning them.

The Faith, recall, is not an ideology. Ideology, and its twin sister Heresy are attempts to explain Absolutely Everything in terms of some cramped idea or other. Everything is Economics. Everything is Electricity. Everything is Evolution. The Faith does not attempt to whittle reality down like that. Instead, it says, “We don’t know much about this big weird world, but here is the one thing we do know:

We believe in one God, the Father, the Almighty, Maker of Heaven and Earth, of all things visible and invisible.

We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ… etc.”

It proposes no all-explaining theory of everything about the formation of the moon, or human psychology, or the Perfect State–or ghosts.

The Faith leaves the exploration of the big weird world to us and follows with interest–and a certain, non-commital, easy-going flexibility–the discoveries and advances of human exploration in the various fields of human knowledge. What profitable things humans can learn about the world she urges them to use for the common good and to glorify God the Creator. She does not fear whatever truths might be discovered because she knows all truth is God’s truth. But nor is she discomfited by the fact that some things are not fully penetrable by the human mind. She is comfortable with mystery. So ghosts (if they are real) do not freak out the Catholic mind either. So, from what I can tell, the Church remains comfortably agnostic about them, neither endorsing nor denying their reality.

For myself, I have never experienced ghosts (though I have had uncanny encounters with the dead in other ways, and known people who have). On at least two occasions, I had encounters with my Dad after his death, and both were important and healing. My mother likewise had an experience of encounter with my Dad after his death that was deeply healing and consoling for her. I know of other people who have Tales of the Unexplained to tell (and I would invite you to add your own in the comboxes since I am perfectly certain that such experiences are, in fact, very common and a global and pan-historical phenomenon.)

That’s why I have no trouble thinking that ghosts are real. I have enormous respect for broadly attested human traditions and the traditions of encounters with ghosts is, so far as I can tell, universal across both human cultures and human history. Yes, they inhabit folklore. But not just folklore. They also inhabit stories of people claiming to be genuine eyewitnesses with all the things we expect from sober people who are not in it for the money, or fame, or because they suffer from mental illness. When the whole human race shares in believing something that widespread and age-old, my respect for universal human experience accords with that of Chesterton:

Somehow or other an extraordinary idea has arisen that the disbelievers in miracles consider them coldly and fairly, while believers in miracles accept them only in connection with some dogma. The fact is quite the other way. The believers in miracles accept them (rightly or wrongly) because they have evidence for them. The disbelievers in miracles deny them (rightly or wrongly) because they have a doctrine against them. The open, obvious, democratic thing is to believe an old apple-woman when she bears testimony to a miracle, just as you believe an old apple-woman when she bears testimony to a murder. The plain, popular course is to trust the peasant’s word about the ghost exactly as far as you trust the peasant’s word about the landlord. Being a peasant he will probably have a great deal of healthy agnosticism about both. Still you could fill the British Museum with evidence uttered by the peasant, and given in favour of the ghost. If it comes to human testimony there is a choking cataract of human testimony in favour of the supernatural. If you reject it, you can only mean one of two things. You reject the peasant’s story about the ghost either because the man is a peasant or because the story is a ghost story. That is, you either deny the main principle of democracy, or you affirm the main principle of materialism— the abstract impossibility of miracle. You have a perfect right to do so; but in that case you are the dogmatist. It is we Christians who accept all actual evidence—it is you rationalists who refuse actual evidence being constrained to do so by your creed. But I am not constrained by any creed in the matter, and looking impartially into certain miracles of mediaeval and modern times, I have come to the conclusion that they occurred. All argument against these plain facts is always argument in a circle. If I say, “Mediaeval documents attest certain miracles as much as they attest certain battles,” they answer, “But mediaevals were superstitious”; if I want to know in what they were superstitious, the only ultimate answer is that they believed in the miracles. If I say “a peasant saw a ghost,” I am told, “But peasants are so credulous.” If I ask, “Why credulous?” the only answer is—that they see ghosts. Iceland is impossible because only stupid sailors have seen it; and the sailors are only stupid because they say they have seen Iceland.

As to what ghosts are and how they fit in with what my Faith reveals about the dead, I see no great difficulty. The faith certainly reveals that all who have ever lived, live still. The Church’s doctrine of the particular judgment is that:

1022 Each man receives his eternal retribution in his immortal soul at the very moment of his death, in a particular judgment that refers his life to Christ: either entrance into the blessedness of heaven-through a purification or immediately, — or immediate and everlasting damnation.At the evening of life, we shall be judged on our love.

Now, as has been rightly said, God, under carefully controlled laboratory conditions, can do whatever he likes. That can, for all I know, include permitting certain souls to work out whatever they still need to work out with respect to ties to this world. My own encounter with my Dad seems to have involved this and was for my good as well as his.

As I get older and approach the possibility of my own death with all sorts of projects uncompleted, hopes and dreams unfulfilled, and various wounds unhealed, the more it makes sense to me that some people could die locked into being consumed by such unfinished business. So I can certainly imagine certain personalities, particularly enormously strong-willed or addictive ones, getting “stuck” and unable to move on to the good God wills for them in the next life just as they can often get stuck even in this life.

It may be that part of the good the communion of saints does for us might involve drawing us onward at the hour of our death and breaking the grip of earthly obsession with unfinished business. At any rate, I think if my darling Janet pre-deceased me, desire to see her again would be a powerful sacramental grace–perhaps the last grace of the sacrament of marriage–in dislodging me from getting stuck on That Book I Never Finished or That Relationship I Never Healed or whatever else it was that got me stuck on earth and unable to move on. The love of the saints may be the solvent that frees us from unhealthy ties to the past and helps us com further up and further in.

Not, of course, that we are to try to seek encounters with the dead. Scripture forbids necromancy for a reason. For us to pursue traffic with the dead is, in a curious way, a sort of idolatry: an attempt to make an end run around Christ and get at the Blessed Realm without him. It’s the same error Adam and Eve made and results in the same thing: death. And, of course, there is the reality of the demonic. Satan appears as an Angel of Light, or as a loved one at a seance if that will do the trick in stealing a heart away from hope in God to mere hope in continuance of earthly life. Our destiny is transformation–theosis. A glorified and risen human existence in the New Heaven and the New Earth, not mere stretching into an endless future as a disembodied spook. The pursuance of an afterlife in defiance of God’s will is the exact wrong way to get what we actually want. “Seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things shall be yours as well.” (Matthew 6:33).

But though we are so bound, God is not bound. If (as he sometimes seem to do) he permits the Blessed (as at Lourdes or in other saintly apparitions) or those undergoing Purgatory to appear to those on earth, that’s his business. He knows best and can order all such things according to his will.