** FATHER FRANK’S RANTS Rant N. 799 29/11/18

A PARISHIONER BELIEVED I WAS DEAD. NOT YET BUT...WHAT WOULD IT BE LIKE TO EXIST IN THE BEYOND?
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LIFE AFTER DEATH

‘Father Gelli, they told me you had died!’ a parishioner phoned me. Luckily, she had got me confused with an unfortunate Father Kelly. My son Linus laughed: ‘Dad, you are rather stout. Can’t see you as an ectoplasm!’ Touché!

‘Ectoplasm’ designates a ghostly entity, a kind of ‘subtle body’ supposedly exuded by a medium during spiritualistic trance. Some boast of expertise at summoning them. Like Jacline Mouraud, a nice lady and key activist in the ‘Gilets Jaunes’ – Yellow Vests - movement now shaking France, rising up against President Macron’s unpopular reforms. Which shows that spiritualism and social militancy need not be in opposition. Craze for invoking ectoplasms swept Victorian England but it was a conservative, non-political affair. Ms Mouraud shows an unsuspected radical side of spiritualism, perhaps?

Professor Peter Geach, a tough philosopher and logician, doesn’t buy it. In the paper ‘Immortality’ he asks: what evidence can there be for ectoplasms? It can't be simply a matter of what someone says she has seen, heard or felt. To be credible, their existence should be checked out by physical scientists, like physicists. Unless ‘subtle bodies’ show up on some physicist’s apparatus…what kind of ‘bodies’ could they be? Never mind how subtle or ethereal, they must register on scientific instruments, like an X-rays machine, Geach demands. Otherwise how can you tell them from hallucinations, even collective ones? Physical bodies impact on one another, whether observed or not. If ectoplasms produce no physical, material effects, they cannot be bodies at all, i.e. they have no real existence, except in some people’s imagination.

Mediumistic experience does not impress Geach. That people in a trance may play the part of ancient Romans or Japanese samurais, even show knowledge of the relevant languages, that they may relate messages from the Beyond proves nothing. Never mind how dramatically a medium may behave or speak, it is better explained (when not a case of straightforward fraud) by reference to hysteria or self-deception or the unconscious. Maybe a sign of the abnormal condition of the medium’s mind, what else?

If you find the philosopher’s critique uncongenial you may then wonder what it is like to be an ectoplasm. ‘Subtle bodies’ are not material, hence they have no need of food or other acts connected to physicality. They cannot engage in various activities distinctive of human beings. As an ectoplasm you cannot eat chips or kebab or drink wine (or apple juice, if you prefer). You cannot have sex, generate children and build a family, you can’t go hunting or fishing, walk your dog, play snooker, go cycling or jogging, milk cows, chat to friends, play cards or chess, click away on your computer or…you get my drift. Most of the things that give content and value to life are impossible to you as an ethereal, bodiless being. Would that be a life worth living?

Does that mean the existence of disembodied beings is logically impossible? That would devastate the spiritual world, e.g. thoroughly cleanse it of, say, angels. Belief in angels is part of Christian and Islamic doctrines, yet they have no physical body. What then? Well, theologians like St Thomas Aquinas denied angels are capable of sensations and feelings – states impossible without being corporeal. Nonetheless they can think thoughts and will things. Bad angels for example, the Saint contended, suffer through the frustrations of their evil will, not via aches and pains or stinks, like creatures of flesh and blood. Good angels, on the other hand, can delight in thoughts of adoration and will the service of God and men.

Intellectual existence. Too thin and rarefied to be desirable by human beings like you and I? It depends. To be an intellectual is deemed a high status in some cultures (but not, perhaps, in Britain and the US). Even physicists and mathematicians may hanker after more earthy pleasures, though. No less than a materialist thinker like Karl Marx went as far as to make intellectual activity part of his communistic utopia. Writing in The Germany Ideology Marx mentions doing ‘literary criticism’ amongst the items instantiating the full range of men’s needs and desires. And that you could do as a pure mind, presumably. I personally could live with that – just – but what about the riff-raff who rave about football matches, boxing and the like? Incapable of enjoying the life of the intellect? Deprived of lower pleasures, their post-mortem life would be a kind of hell.

To sum up. Pace mediums and spiritualists, evidence for entities like ectoplasms populating the life after death is poor, if not irrational. Besides, to exist as a ‘subtle body’ would be impossibly dreary. But that is not the whole story. That in our ultra-rational and super-scientific age some people persist in believing in them can’t be simply a case of superstition or gullibility. Rather, it reminds me of what Hegel calls ‘the cunning of Reason’. Because irrationality in a tortuous way points to the Supreme Reason. To the eternal truth that that this life, here and now, is not the end. As the Scriptures proclaim, there is a world to come. The glorious resurrection Bible and Qur’an teach is not that of a ghost but that of the body – the whole person. That is what ‘God has prepared for those who love him’, as St Paul assures. Jolly good, eh?

Revd Frank Julian Gelli

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