Let us now pick up the strange suggestion that we are more than merely mortal. Let us consider what follows from such a suggestion.

When death inevitably separates us from our beloved, we grieve her mortality. Grief is possible because we can know what mortality is: this is death. But in knowing what mortality is, we stand above it. We pronounce upon it. In calling it what it is, in naming it mortality, we are already more than mortality. We are not engulfed by it. Being more than merely mortal is the condition for our grief. It is bound up with love. It also the possibility of hope.

Look at it this way. One’s pet cat is only mortal. The jellyfish washed up on the beach is only mortal. The mosquito that buzzes about one’s legs is only mortal. To be mortal only is to live bounded entirely by space and time. To be mortal only is to pursue the only goods available to merely mortal beings: the creature comforts of survival, nutrition, growth, reproduction. To be mortal only is to accomplish the modes of life appropriate to what things are by nature: running and barking and sniffing for a dog; climbing and swinging for an ape; swimming and building for a beaver; etc.

To be a human person is to be more than merely mortal. Surplus to what all other things can do, we can question, understand, affirm, value, and love. Did you not witness this surplus beyond mortality in the course of your beloved’s life?

Truth: She spoke the truth because the very lastingness of truth mattered to her. Truth was worth achieving because it stands above the ephemerality of passing opinion and timebound fashions.

Goodness: Her actions were often full of goodness because she somehow grasped that goodness outlasts the fact that all things must pass. It was goodness that drew her beyond her own convenience, profit, or pleasure in order to be the one who alone could dignify the undignified.

Beauty: She loved the beauty she caught hold of in things. The elemental significance of the beauty manifest in those things taught her to respond to the preciousness that places, times, and matter make present, but do not exhaust.

Truth, goodness, beauty: she was eminently worthy of them all. They called her forth in each passing moment of her life. It was she who affirmed their lasting presence in the midst of all that passes.

Truth, goodness, beauty: these are dimensions of being and “Being” is a term that has long been synonymous with “God.”[6] From a religious point of view, even the self-proclaimed atheist anonymously affirms the mysterious presence of God in affirming truth, goodness, and beauty. The self-proclaimed atheist affirms being or God-as-being when he or she speaks the truth, enacts the good, or loves the beautiful. Indeed, truth, goodness, and beauty are the ways in which the transcendent-divine ground of the cosmos becomes present in our midst, through our co-operation.

They are known as the “transcendentals” and it was your beloved who, in the ordinary things of life, became the co-operative agent of transcendent extraordinariness. She may not have been aware of being such an agent, but in the aftermath of her death, you grieve because it was precisely she who dignified the passing world with a quality that does not pass. How empty it all feels without her.

Your beloved was anonymously an embassy of the cosmos that holds all knowledge and mystery, all life and death, all mortality and immortality. In her life and death, she brings forth the reality of the cosmos. Even in death, she remains in the cosmos.

In life, she talked and cried and fixed and washed; she walked and slept and suffered and rejoiced; she testified by her actions to what passes away in time and space. But in her truth-telling, her enactments of goodness, and her responsiveness to beauty, she also bore witness to what does not pass away. She participated in both mortal things and in what abides immortally. She unknowingly gathered these together in her own personhood.

If death frames a life that was lived in the tension between mortality and immortality, then that “framing” is not synonymous with “finishing” or “extinguishing.” There remains the possibility that physical death is not final extinction, that physical death cannot quench the immortal soul of one’s beloved.

What our beloved’s death communicates to us and to the world is that death “enframes” us all.

Love, Grief, and Hope

We have considered love above. But how is it that a mortal can give their life to another in love? If life were only mortal, then the meaning of life would be interchangeable with the meaning of mortality. So, what then would love be? In giving one’s life in love to another, one would be giving one’s mortality to another mortal. What could this possibly mean? A cat cannot give its life to another cat. A cat is merely mortal. It does not stand above its own mortality, its own natural existence, in order to give its life to another.

But when a human person loves, he or she does give their life to another, just as they receive the other’s life in love. This becomes intelligible only if the ones who give and receive life stand somehow above their mortal lives, if and only if they are more than merely mortal.

I can give my life in love—in friendship, in matrimony, in self-sacrifice, in martyrdom—only if I have already transcended my mortality, only if I were always more than an animal seeking its own survival.

Correspondingly, I can receive the life of my beloved only if she can also love in a self-transcending way in order freely to give herself away. The giving and receiving of life is the work of love, and love is more than merely mortal. Love is the engine that drives grief and drives beyond grief. Recall that, for Plato, it is the immortal principle in the mortal creature. We grieve because we love, and our beloved’s mortality has resulted in their body having been taken away from us. But the love in grief still reaches out to the soul whose presence was never entirely dependent upon the physical proximity of the body.

Nothing can substitute for the physical absence that mortal death has brought about. But not even death can change the terms of love that had always involved the soulful presence of the beloved. It is true, in a searingly painful way, that we can no longer touch or kiss the beloved. Yet Emmanuel Levinas reminds us that touch was never just contact between two bodies. Touch pointed to what lay beyond what was touchable. The caress “transcends the sensible. . . . The caress seizes upon nothing, in soliciting what ceaselessly escapes its form toward a future never future enough, in soliciting what slips away as though it were not yet. It searches, it forages.”

Touching and being touched by one’s beloved was the way of tenderness between us, but it was already more than bodily. Touching was physical, but eminently soulful, an access by way of the body to the spiritual fullness of the beloved. The caress is “the way of remaining in the no man’s land between being and not-yet-being,” between the physical contact of bodies and the spiritual transcendence of souls in love.[7] It was through the caress of our beloved’s body that the surplus beyond her bodily mortality came into view.

In Summary

We grieve where we have rejoiced. We die where we have lived. The cosmos is the grand communion of all things immanent and transcendent, the ultimate context. From “ashes to ashes, and dust to dust,” we were always one and consubstantial with the cosmos. Within the context of the embracing cosmos, life and death are two sides of the same coin, and the coin lands where it was first lifted and tossed.

We grieve out into the silence and mystery of the cosmos; but we grieve from the depths of our hearts where the cosmos is also entirely and paradoxically present. In life or death, the human person is one with the cosmos.

The ancient Greek philosopher, Anaximander, referred to the grand communion of the cosmos as the apeiron, meaning “the Non-Limited,” or the boundless. The apeiron is the vault, the abyss of being. More comfortingly, if we listen to St. Augustine, that vault is arranged as a tranquility of order (tranquillitas ordinis) in which all things live and move and have their being. Of life and death in the apeiron, Anaximander cryptically writes,

The Non-Limited [Apeiron] is the original material of existing things; further, the source from which existing things derive their existence is also that to which they return at their destruction, according to necessity; for they give justice and make reparation to one another for their injustice, according to the arrangement of Time.[8]

The price to be paid for mortal life is mortal death. Life is what must be framed; it has context, it has meaning, value, and purpose. Mortality gives that frame in providing a limit. Death is no evil, death itself is not and injustice.

The cosmos, the apeiron, is the ultimate setting for all life and death, mortality and immortality, immanence and transcendence, time and eternity. So it is that where we grieve, there too we may eventually come to express our gratitude for life and love, a gratitude that outweighs sorrow.