The Gift of Remembrance
J. Prescott Johnson, Ph.D.
Northwestern University
Professor Emeritus of Philosophy
Monmouth College (IL)
The French theistic existentialist writer, Gabriel Marcel, has said that we have an obligation to remember the dead. I do not remember that he explains or justifies this remark. He may have done so, but I do not recall it. This article is my attempt to explain and justify this view..
When we remember someone who is no longer living we reinstate them in our own living spirit and consciousness. This confers on them a mode of life. Our remembrance is our gift to them.
This assertion may seem strange and perplexing to us. But I do not think that it should. We have no reason to think that the departed are forever lost in a dark oblivion. They may, and do, appear the in the focus of one’s own living. In our life they also live. Why should we suppose that this focus serves no living reality, that it is but a mystic and illusive shadow? To do so is actually to impugn our own reality and consciousness.
There is one significant and unique individual who is no longer living, namely the man known as Jesus of Nazareth. I shall attempt to show reasonably how we who are living may contribute to the life and meaning of that life, and thus fulfill our obligation to him. And, as I shall argue, in the reality of that process we fulfill our obligation to those who now live, and in so doing become effective in bringing their living to spiritual fruition and fulfillment.
There is a complexity in the nature of God. As eternally self-existent, he is absolute in his self-isolation, devoid of all relations. He is independent of all others, those who exist contingently and not necessarily.
A short reference to Plato is helpful. Plato defined God’s eternal self-existence by the term the unconditioned beginning. The Greek term is vυπόθετov (anhypotheton). The term is found nowhere else in attic literature, and is used only in Republic and only three times. It is a very significant term. It is wholly negative and abstract, fitting therefore for the abstractness of the primordial nature of God.
Nevertheless, there is another phase of God’s nature. It is the phase of relativity. God’s relativity is his relationship with his people. It’s acme is Jesus’s death on the Cross. We have in Scripture the cry of Jesus’ agony at the Cross:
And about the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, saying, ’-, ’-, lä’-mä’ sä-bch’-th-n-? that is to say, My God, My God, why hast thou forsaken me (Matt. 27-46)?
Thus we have entered into the life of God. And this has brought change, not only to ourselves, but change to the divine experience and life. From now on God is our great companion and we are forever within the shadow of his protective wings.
Now this process involves the relation of people to people. In remembering those who have passed into the vale tears, who no longer live, we involve ourselves in conferring a mode of reality on them. In our actual life they now also live. Out obligation to remember them has been fulfilled, and the fruits are that they too live.
God’s relativity reaches its ultimate limit in the Son’s experience of suffering and death. The chapter of relativity is thus closed, and God moves forward , beyond mere relativity, to another phase of his life. Here, too, this phase involves not only development in God’s life, but also development in the life of the people of God. Both aspects join to bring in a final triumph in the saga of remembrance, in which the harmony of both phases unite, not only in time, but in eternity, to finalize and fulfill that remembrance.
This phase of God’s life is the phase of God’s perfected actuality. It is the phase of God’s life that creates and sustains the unity and harmony of redeemed individuals, preserving both the identity and the completeness of their harmony. In the words of Alford North Whitehead (A British-American philosopher):
Thirdly, there is the phase of perfected actuality, in which the many are one everlastingly, without the qualification of any loss either of individual identity or of completeness of unity. In everlastingness, immediacy is reconciled with objective immortality.
Perfected actuality, where people sustain their individuality and yet unite in relations of harmony without violation of their individuality, is, finally and ultimately the proper goal of society. And it is this goal that yields the power of remembrance.
There is yet another phase of God’s life. It is the phase of God’s superjectivity. It reintroduces the values saved in his own life into the world. The value are given a quality divinity, and this quality saves the world and its people.
In the fourth phase, the creative action completes itself. For the perfected actuality passes back into the temporal world, and qualifies this world so that each temporal actuality includes it as an immediate fact of relevant experience. For the kingdom of heaven is with us today. The action of the fourth phase is the love of God for the world. It is the particular providence for particular occasions. What is done in the world is transformed into a reality in heaven, and the reality in heaven passes back into the world. By reason of this reciprocal relation, the love in the world passes into the love in heaven, and floods back again in the world. In this sense God is the great companion–the fellow-sufferer who understands.
Thus the process of remembrance is brought to finality and completion in the divine memory. We are forever secure in the gift of remembrance.