'The most intimate participation of the communion of Saints': Jeremy Taylor and the month of the departed

November is the month of the departed. The month begins with All Saints' Day, particularly commemorating those "blessed Saints" whom we have known, and then moves into the solemn national and communal recollections of Remembrancetide. The last of the falling leaves, the darkness of the last days of Autumn, and the approach of the year's end evoke a sense of our mortality. It is a month made for walks in old churchyards and mulling over the Burial service.

Each week during this month on laudable Practice, there will be a post meditating on the month of the departed through words from Jeremy Taylor, We being with Taylor's 1650 sermon at the funeral of Frances Vaughan, Countess of Carbery, in which he describes how we share with the faithful departed in the Communion of Saints:

But then we should do well also to remember, that in this world we are something besides flesh and bloud; that we may not without violent necessities run into new relations, but preserve the affections we bore to our dead when they were alive: We must not so live as if they were perished, but so as pressing forward to the most intimate participation of the communion of Saints. And we also have some ways to express this relation, and to bear a part in this communion, by actions of intercourse with them, and yet proper to our state: such as are strictly performing the will of the dead, providing for, and tenderly and wisely educating their children, paying their debts, imitating their good example, preserving their memories privately, and publickly keeping their memorials, and desiring of God with hearty and constant prayer that God would give them a joyful Resurrection, and a merciful Judgment, (for so S. Paul prayed in behalf of Onesiphorus) that God would shew them mercy in that day, that fearful, and yet much to be desired day, in which the most righteous person hath need of much mercy and pity, and shall find it. Remember that we shall converse together again. For though, as to us, they are like water spilt; yet, to God, they are as water fallen in the Sea, safe and united in his comprehension, and inclosures.

The final lines of this extract are a quite beautiful example of Taylor as 'the Shakespeare of divines'. (While this version of the phrase comes from Emmerson, it was the 18th century clergyman and poet William Mason who had first described Taylor as "the Shakespeare of English prose".) It is echoed elsewhere in the sermon:

although our Dead are like persons banished from this world, yet they are not expelled from God.

Taylor here wonderfully gives voice to the joyful hope of the Communion of Saints, even in the very face of death, loss, and grief, and does so in a manner that touches the heart.

It is also touching that Taylor incorporates into belief in the Communion of Saints the quite ordinary piety associated with care for and memory of the departed: care for the interests of the departed's family "and publickly keeping their memorials". That belief in the Communion of Saints would not incorporate such piety would be a denial of that which Hooker unambiguously affirms:

The end of funerall duties is first to show that love towardes the partie deceased which nature requireth (LEP V.75.2).

The Communion of Saints does not stand apart from or deny our natural duties towards the departed. Instead, it gathers these up into, in Hooker's words, "the hope wee all have concerning the resurrection of the dead". Taylor's reference to maintaining the memorials of the departed is a reminder to us that the memorials we often see in parish churches and cathedrals, and the headstones in graveyards, recording name and years, are not to be dismissed as 'secular' statements but, rather, as an expression of our hope in the Communion of Saints, for, while lost a while to us, the faithful departed are "safe and united in [God's] comprehension". To this, our memorials of them are witness.

Taylor also notes that we share with the faithful departed in the Communion of Saints by "imitating their good example". This phrase may bring to mind the petition in the 1662 Prayer for the Church Militant: "beseeching thee to give us grace to follow their good examples". Such a petition was, of course, not to be found in BCP 1559. Taylor, however, would have been very familiar with the phrase because of its appearance in the authorised Bidding Prayer, required by the Canons of 1604 to be said before sermons:

Finally, Let us praise God for all those which are departed out of this Life in the Faith of Christ, and pray unto God that we may have Grace to direct our Lives after their good Example; that this Life ended, we may be made Partakers with them of the glorious Resurrection in the Life everlasting; always concluding with the Lord’s Prayer.

It is, perhaps, a too easily dismissed expression of the Communion of Saints, often regarded as inferior to notions of invocation, merit, and patronage. We should not, however, overlook or minimise the richness of 'good examples' within the Communion of Saints: of those faithful departed, particularly those who have been known to us, whose examples of faith, hope, and love can sustain and strengthen us on our earthly pilgrimage. 

Finally, there is Taylor's counsel that, after the example of Saint Paul's prayer for Onesiphorus, we might pray "that God would give [the faithful departed] a joyful Resurrection, and a merciful Judgment". There is here something of an echo of the prayer at the graveside in the Burial of the Dead in BCP 1559:

We mekely beseche the (O Father) to rayse us from the deathe of sinne unto the lyfe of righteousnes, that when we shall depart thys lyfe, we may rest in hym, as our hope is thys oure brother doeth, and that at the generall resurrection in the laste daye, we maye be founde acceptable in thy syghte, and receive that blessing which thy welbeloved sonne shall then pronounce to all that love and fear the, saiynge: Come ye blessed children of my father, receyve the Kyngedome prepared for you frome the begynnynge of the worlde.

But while the "us" and "we" in this prayer may be understood as also embracing "thys oure brother" it is carefully couched so as not to be a petition for the departed apart from "us". It is almost impossible to think that Taylor was seeking to be provocative considering the context, the funeral of his friend ("she was an excellent friend") and the wife of his patron. Much more likely is that Taylor was merely following the view of Grotius (often praised in Taylor's writings) regarding Onesiphorus as deceased, with the Apostle therefore giving prayerful voice to the Christian hope. Likewise in 1660, the Cambridge Platonist Henry More would also regard the Apostle as referring to Onesiphorous as deceased, but rejected the notion that Saint Paul's words meant that the faithful departed are in a state of need:

it is a weak kinde of Argument, Because the Souls of the Saints receive not their great reward till the Day of Judgment, that therefore they receive nothing at all.

In other words, there was nothing distinctively Laudian about such an interpretation of the Apostle's words. In a similar fashion, in the second part of his Dissuasive (1667), Taylor rebuts an argument from a Roman apologist that the Apostolic reference to Onesiphorous vindicates petitions to deliver the departed:

For though the Fathers prayed for the souls departed that God would shew them mercy; yet it was, that God would shew them mercy in the day of judgment, In that formidable and dreadful day, then there is need of much mercy unto us, saith S. Chrysostom. And methinks this Gentleman should not have made use of so pitiful an argument, and would not, if he had consider'd that S. Paul prayed for Onesiphorus, that God would shew him a mercy in that day; that is in the day of judgment, as generally interpreters Ancient and Modern do understand it, and particularly S. Chrysostom now cited. The faithful departed are in the hands of Christ as soon as they die, and they are very well.

This could not be more explicit: the faithful departed are most certainly not now state of need. To pray for them as the Apostle prayed for Onesiphorous is to give voice to the Christian hope, that we will find mercy on that Day ("and shall find it"). Nor is it without significance that Taylor in his funeral sermon for Frances Vaughan does not have any petition for her. There is no prayer that she 'may rest in peace', for Taylor knows that the faithful departed are assured of rest in Christ:

they rest from all their labours; all tears are wiped from their eyes, and all discontents from their spirits; and in the state of separation before the soul be reinvested with her new house, the spirits of all persons are with God, so secur'd and so blessed, and so sealed up for glory, that this state of intervall and imperfection is in respect of its certain event and end, infinitely more desirable then all the riches and all the pleasures, and all the vanities, and all the Kingdomes of this world.

Taylor's sermon concludes, therefore, not with earnest, urgent petition for his departed friend, but, rather, in the sure and certain hope that, if we follow her good example in the faith, we will, with her, know "the most intimate participation of the communion of Saints":

And we also, if we live as she did, shal partake of the same glories; not only having the honour of a good name and a dear and honour'd memory, but the glories of these glories, the end of all excellent labours, and all prudent counsels and all holy religion, even the salvation of our souls in that day, when all the Saints, and amongst them this excellent Woman shall be shown to all the world to have done more, and more excellent things then we know of or can describe.