Today is the Eve of All Hallows’ Day, Hallowe’en, the first day of the three days of Allhallowtide, the Fast before tomorrow’s Feast which begins with the Vigil this night, with the First Evensong of All Saints’ Day, Hallowmas. Allhallowtide shall then conclude, as ever it does in the eternal cycle of the Church Year, the Kalendar, on the third day, the day after tomorrow, with the Feast of All Souls. And in the Commonwealth, for obvious reasons, Allhallowtide is held to stretch to St. Martin’s Day or the Sunday nearest … because that is now Remembrance Sunday, and All Saints include all martyrs fallen in the good fight against evil.
There is even amongst nominal Christians nowadays much confusion and much ignorance surrounding Allhallowtide; and even more amongst those of other faiths and none. I shall, as usual, explain. Not everyone shall be interested; but even they deserve to be better informed, at least. And God He knoweth they’ll not hear it from, say, TEC in these thin and piping times.
The Eve of All Hallows is not about costumes or chocolate. (Which is a relief to those of us who don’t play dress-up and are diabetics.) It is not about paganism or pranks. And it accordingly does not deserve the commination of the First Redneck Church of Jesus Christ the White Republican ’Murican, or the co-option of the Coven of Blotchy Drumming Wymyn and that sort, which it gets from the mudsills and the morons, the Calvinists and the cranks and the Klan of Star-soul Karens, every year.
(Charity is not my strong suit. Lack of charity is one of my besetting sins.)
Allhallowtide is about saints, not Samhain.
Has it been commercialized? Yes. So have the Feasts of the Nativity and of the Resurrection, the two observances of the Church Year on which merchants of every faith and none join in a rousing rendition of ‘What A Friend We Have in Jesus’. That does not invalidate the Feasts.
Has a right smart of guff and folk-tradition and vaguely heathen-hangover nonsense been attached to it by the commons? Yes. The same is true of Christmas and Easter; and is in all cases immaterial.
So let us consider—and keep—this Feast as it is.
Celtic and Northumbrian Christianity—the real thing, not the retrospective fakelore—began to keep the Feast of All Saints on 1 November rather than on other dates—many of which, frankly, interrupted the agricultural calendar intolerably, which was not so great a problem for the new date—in the late VIIIth Century; and Alcuin introduced this date to Charlemagne, and it was then adopted throughout Western Christendom. There is no good evidence of the date’s having anything to do with any pagan ritual or observance falling on or about the date.
There are many traditions in many times and places amongst many folk and many faiths which involve mumming and guising. But it should be rash to assert that the costumes associated with All Hallows’ Eve derive from these. The evidence is that part at least, and likely the purest source and headwater, of the tradition is simpler. Most cathedrals at the time, and some abbeys, had relics to display; not all major churches, even in shire towns, even collegiate churches, had relics, and lesser parishes in market town and village almost never had. But all churches had and have patronal dedications. On All Saints’ Day as at other times, one way of reaching the congregation, in days almost as illiterate or subliterate as our own, was to stage a liturgical dramatization of the Lessons or the Gospel for the day appointed: and these involved some degree of stage costuming. Even without a play, in the absence of relics the patronal saint and all saints could be symbolized and recalled to immediate memory by mimesis: a mimesis representing the saint with that saint’s usual attributes in ecclesiastical art, which commonly involved the instruments of the saint’s martyrdom if the saint were, as many were, a martyr.
If your parish were dedicated to Our Lady, the BVM, or to St George, say, neither being a martyr, this was easily done so far as props and costuming went. If the patron saint of the parish were St Lawrence, dress a chorister as a deacon and let him carry a gridiron; if, as was likely in East Anglia, he were St Edmund King and Martyr, stick a few blunt arrows through the deacon’s surcoat and put a tinsel crown on him. St. Margaret of Antioch was a bit trickier: where do you find a stuffed dragon? St Bartholomew was readily enough handed a flensing knife; but the butchers, the Fleshers’ Guild, might want to sponsor his stage depiction by providing also a flayed hide.
After all: ‘all saints’, as a class, includes the subset ‘martyrs’, and many of these ‘red’ martyrs. All saints have won through to their crowns by resisting and combating temptation and the forces of Evil. And liturgical drama had a prop room full of prop swords and devils’ costumes ready to hand.
Those today who shriek But Thank of them Chil-derrrrn at the very idea of gory modern Hallowe’en costumes, secular as these are, should break down gibbering if we sent the tots through the suburbs made up and dressed up realistically to resemble John Baptist and St Andrew and St Barbara and St James the Greater and St Magnus and St Thomas and Charles I King and Martyr.
As for the begging… The old tradition of All Saints is handing out soul cakes. No: this is not some occult rubbish or some cult o’ the dead. These are pastries marked with a cross: the Allhallowtide equivalent to hot cross buns on Good Friday, which day marks a far greater martyrdom. What is happening, beneath the modern secularized distribution of high fructose tooth-rot, is the distribution of alms.
And why? But … why?
Well: what is a saint? The class, All Saints, is comprised of the Church Triumphant and At Rest, whether officially recognized as saints for Kalendar purposes or not, and includes also the visible, mortal Church Militant, every Christian, in potential: the blessèd company of all faithful people, together with those proven faithful to the last and now in the immediate presence of God, the faithful departed. Of those yet in their earthly pilgrimage, you may have had a drink with one at the country club last month; you are very likely to have shared an aisle with one at Walmart; one may well be at the till at Whataburger; if there’s one at Tony’s, it’s likelier the busboy than the cash-splashing patron; one or two might even be amongst the lawyers and judges you know; one well might be the EMT who took you to the hospital, another, your mail-carrier, another, the neighbor you nod to but don’t care to speak much with, another, the stern teacher you still resent. You. Don’t. Know.
And neither does the Church. The Church—Roman, Eastern, and (continuing, trad, orthodox) Anglican—does not make saints. The Church Triumphant, that cloud of witness all about us (which ought to give you blushing pause), must be stuffed to the gunwales with those you’d never think should make it to Heaven, and be noticeably missing a right smart of people who were sniffily certain they’d be there with front-row seats.
What the Church Catholic does do is occasionally to recognize one or another saint as proper to be held out, with a Feast on the Kalendar, as a template and exemplar for and to the rest of us.
But because these are not by any means all of the saints … we have the Feast of All Saints. And although all the faithful departed are saints stricto sensu, we have also, because of the emphases of All Saints’ Day, the Feast of All Souls on the day next after, commemorating all the faithful departed.
At this point, of course, the usual Protty McProts start howling about ‘worshipping saints’ and ‘Mariolatry’ and ‘invoking saints’ and ‘Romish paganism’ and the rest of that happy horseshit. This is what comes of letting pettifogging provincial French notaries, Edinburgh bully-boys, and the like play at being theologians.
Living in the South as I do, I am all too familiar with this shrieking ignorance. These are not people who understand—or have ever heard of—the distinction between dulia and latria. (This was so of a right smart of rednecks in the Eastern Roman Empire as well, particularly in the Levant and particularly as to ikons, and the sorry result of it all was the invention if Islam.) The funny thing about these people—many of whom may well end up in the Church Triumphant after all, because we aren’t the ones who pick and choose—is that they are big on prayer-groups and telephone trees.
Saints matter to us because they are examples: yes. But they matter for other reasons as well, as very present helps in time of trouble. To be an actual Christian, rather than a nominal or cultural one, requires assent to a few propositions, and these are set out in the three creeds: the Apostles’ Creed, the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed, and the Athanasian Creed, the Quicunque Vult. Key amongst these, for our present purposes, is this affirmation:
And I believe one Catholick and Apostolick Church. I acknowledge one Baptism for the remission of sins. And I look for the Resurrection of the dead, And the life of the world to come.
What, then, is that one Church? It is the Church Triumphant and the Church Militant together: one. To be a Christian means to believe in the Communion of Saints: that mere death of the body does not separate us from our fellow Christians, who are as ready to aid us and pray with us as ever, their souls living forever on. This may not have occurred to the First Self-Righteous Church of Pascagoula, but it really ought to have done. Certainly it ought to have done to the little old blue-haired church ladies forever mixing the pleasure of gossip with the piety of enlisting as many of them as are available for petitionary and intercessory, common, communal prayer.
‘Maybelle? Charlene here. C’n you hear me on this-a-here line? I dunno iffen you heard ’bout the youngest Mutterspaugh girl … that’s right, Dreama, and whut her Momma was thankin’, that name and all … well, she’s done fallen preg’nt aaay-gin … I know, I know, but Jim Bob, ’sumin’ it’s his’n, ain’t a-goin’ t’ he’p, you know he’s back in jail after that set-to in that nip-joint up Irish Creek … no, we done got a mite of money together to he’p with the baby, but Dr Byrd says she’s riskish … well, whatever she done, she needs prayin’ fer … you call Anna-Lee up, and Sally, and Betsy, I done called May and Nancy a’ready and they’re prayin’ for her … Oh! And Bob Ed’s down in his back again, and Becky cain’t hardly deal with that and him, and you know that son of theirs ain’t a-goin’ to lift ary finger, so they’s a-needin’ prayer, too…’
Congregants who mobilize half the congregation to pray for Darlene’s youngest and Bubba’s cancer screening but who will not invite the joined prayers of Wite and Alban and David and Patrick and Andrew and George, of Birinus, Petroc, Piran, Osmund, Swithun, Boniface, Cuthbert, Cedda, Chad, and Dubricius, of Winifrid, Jordan, and Kenelm, of the Blessed Virgin Mary and of Michael the Commander of the Host, and generally of Angels and Archangels and all the company of Heaven … seem to me to have booted an easy, inning-ending double play.
The Church does not pray, in the sense most mean by the word, to saints or angels; the Church prays, in that sense, solely to God. Even John Calvin, having some legal knowledge, ought to have known that much. Every lawyer is very familiar with this point, though he may never have applied it here. No lawyer regards the Court, including any appellate court you care to name, as divine; still less shall she mistake the temporary occupant of the Bench for Almighty God—though far too many judges seem to make that error. But every pleading ends with some form or other of a prayer for relief.
That is because prayer retains two meanings. As does petition, as anyone who has filed a lawsuit knows. Nowadays, these terms are usually used by non-lawyers only in respect of asking, begging, imploring God for something. Prithee tell me why that is, I pray. Of course, it is because in common demotic speech, we have shifted to asking, politely or otherwise, things of other humans, or simply demanding them (Karenism is rampant), and without formality. But in two of the Four Professions, Divinity and Law, these formalities are preserved and observed.
To pray, in that sense, of a saint that he or she add his or her intercession to God with yours and the whole parish’s for a particular end, is simply to ask politely: ‘Our departed sister Sidwell, our departed sister Juthwara, our departed sister Urith, who are now in God’s immediate presence, join, please, us, who are of the Church Militant, in imploring Him to comfort Jane in her distress, to heal Nell and Jim, to bless, console, and defend the congregation of the poor’ and so on.
The saints—All Saints—and the faithful departed—All Souls—are our families, those we love, our brothers and sisters in the Faith, our models and exemplars, our witnesses, and our helpers. (And no matter how much one likes, quaintly, the Baroque-cum-Rococo exuberance of Neumann’s Vierzehnheiligen Basilica, there are a right smart more of them than fourteen.) They are there to help. They doubtless do so without being asked; but there is no sin in asking. Politely.
And because they are who they are in all these roles, it is meet and right that we observe their Feasts and so call them to our remembrance that we may better model ourselves on their virtues and examples.
So do relax about Allhallowtide if you are a fundie white with foam (at the mouth); and if you are not Christian, do stop filching from it as an excuse to dress up with your freak flags flying and to bully people out of treats and carry on like Bassarids and Luperci. As for the rest of us … let us keep the Feasts.
Markham Shaw Pyle, author & historian 