November is the month dedicated to prayer for the faithful departed. Many Catholics visit cemeteries during November. For that reason I want to share Father Józef Tischner’s reflections on cemeteries, found in the just-released translation of one of his seminal works, The Philosophy of Drama.

Tischner is most known as chaplain to the Polish Solidarność movement. His Spirit of Solidarity was translated in 1984. Although he was a priest, his focus is philosophy, not theology. And while his anti-Thomistic bias is problematic to me, Tischner nevertheless is worth attention. Kudos to University of Notre Dame Press for publishing this first book of his important trilogy.

Tischner reflects on cemeteries from three angles: inheritance, transience, and space. By inheritance, he means that man is heir to the social contributions that preceded him, which are not the works of some amorphous society but of concrete individuals — this parent, that teacher, this leader — lying in the graveyard. Cemeteries challenge the myth of the “self-made man” or “autonomous individual.” By transience, he means that cemeteries remind us that man has no permanent home in this world. “Not here” says the cemetery.

I want to focus on Tischner’s third point: space. Cemeteries are a truly unique kind of space. Normal human spaces have active, functional purposes. They serve human beings doing things in them. Cemeteries are not functional in that sense, at least in the sense that human beings actively make use of that space. The world’s “functional spaces” in ordinary human life lull our awareness that our presence in this world is fleeting and impermanent. By contrast, the space of the cemetery demonstrates “the contingency and fragility of [the] world…” Cemeteries, in contrast to almost all other human spaces, expose the lie that man is in active control of his world. The cemetery is not a space of which man is in charge.

From a theological perspective (which is not Tischner’s focus) the cemetery reminds us that death is punishment. Why? Because, as another Polish thinker, the late modern Dominican philosopher Fr. Mieczysław Krąpiec pointed out in his I-Man: An Outline of Philosophical Anthropology, man cannot really think death. Human thinking about death is always incomplete and inadequate because there is always a thinking subject who is thinking about death, something death precludes (at least on the material level; this is more an argument for man’s post-mortem existence).

I’d suggest what Tischner is getting at in the “non-functionality” space of the cemetery is what Hans Urs von Balthasar observed in his “mystery of Holy Saturday.” Reflecting on Jesus’ time in the grave, His entombment displays utter human loss of material/corporeal control. Death and cemeteries refute the conceit that man is in charge. Cemeteries are the ultimate sign of “letting go” of the illusion of autonomous self-control. That is a reality our times deny but every cemetery affirms, which is perhaps why moderns are fleeing cemeteries and earth burial. In accepting cremation, are they not rather pretending nonexistence and disappearance is preferable to the reminder that death may be a punitive wait for “what we shall be that has not yet been revealed” (I Jn 3:2)?

Tolstoy asked “how much land does a man need?” I’d ask how much space? He needs the space of the grave not out of purely utilitarian requirements — because you have to do something with a rotting corpse — but because the grave reminds him of essential truths about himself: that this world is not his permanent home; that he is heir of those who preceded him; and that, in the passivity of death, he is not in charge. The non-functional space of the cemetery reminds man that not everything is valuable simply because it is useful.  

And what does the space — or, rather, lack of space — we now allot to the cemetery say? Today, cemeteries — to the degree they exist — are often far removed from where we live. Contrast that to here in northern Virginia where, all across Arlington and Fairfax counties, one can spot small roadside cemeteries, remnants of what were family plots on family farms (when those farms existed). There’s one such plot in Vienna, bounded on one side by Lee Highway, on the other by a strip mall. The same can be said of New Jersey’s Garden State Parkway which, at exit 144 (South Orange Avenue), is bordered visibly on both sides by Holy Sepulchre Cemetery, or Mount Carmel Cemetery that gazes over northbound I-95 just past the Harbor Tunnel in Baltimore. In the midst of all those very lively places, the cemetery space reminds us of another reality the others cannot. Banishing such reminders from our daily sight serves us ill.

Visiting a cemetery is, therefore, not just a pious act of prayer done and gone. It is a profound encounter with those words many saints kept near themselves (often along with a skull) as they meditated on human contingency: mihi hodie, tibi cras, “me today, you tomorrow.”

[A link to Fr. Józef Tischner’s book, The Philosophy of Drama, is here.]