As he went on his way Jesus saw a man blind from his birth. His disciples put the question, "Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents? Why was he born blind?"
Reincarnation was certainly not part of the principal ideological furniture of the Bible as it was of the literature of India that was the heritage of the Buddha. Nevertheless, it was not entirely alien to the late Hebrew thought that was current at the time of Christ, which was already extensively affected by notions from the Hellenic world. It is possible that the Tanaiim, who were to be found in Jerusalem as early as the third century B.C. and were later acclaimed as the spiritual ancestors of the medieval kabbalists, may have taught reincarnationist views. Such views seem to have been congenial to Jewish teachers nearer the time of Jesus. Hillel and the Alexandrian Philo Judaeus may have been among these.
The Lord's word to Jeremiah is: "Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee; and before thou camest forth out of the womb I sanctified thee, and I ordained thee a prophet unto the nations."1 By the time of Christ the notion that the human soul is immortal had become part of the teaching of various Jewish groups and sects. The Pharisees, for instance, were among those who subscribed to that doctrine. Josephus, the Jewish historian, reports that they held that the souls of all men are incorruptible, and that while the souls of the wicked are to be consigned to eternal punishment, those of good men are removed into other bodies.2 The Essenes, he tells us, held that while the human body is corruptible the soul is immortal. It comes out of "the most subtile air." By a sort of natural magnetism it is enticed into the prison of the body, but at death it is released and mounts joyfully upward.
In the kabbalistic tradition, claiming hidden or secret wisdom, reincarnation is a central notion. Rabbi Chajim Vital, expounding the teaching of Rabbi Isaac Luria, the sixteenth century founder of a kabbalistic school in Spain, wrote a work called Otz Chum (The Tree of Life) which expresses typically reincarnationist teachings. Yalkut Reubeni, reflecting an attitude that sounds very chauvinistic today, warned that a man who is stingy with his talents and possessions shall be punished by being reincarnated as a woman! Reincarnationist notions are so deeply written into that esoteric Jewish literature that those Jews who follow the kabbalistic way make reincarnation sound almost an essential of the Jewish faith.
Not disconnected with kabbalism is the mystical movement called Hasidism, which has been very influential in Jewish life. In Hasidism reincarnation became a universally accepted belief, familiar in Yiddish literature, being clearly taught in recent times in, for instance, the Dybbuk, a popular mystical legend by S. Ansky (Solomon Judah Lob Rapoport) and in the writings of Sholem Asch.
Since Judaism is capable of such a striking development of reincarnational doctrine, the suggestions of it that we find in the New Testament need come as no surprise. According to John the Evangelist, when the disciples saw a man blind from birth, they wondered aloud who had sinned, he or his parents.3 If it had been he, then he must have sinned in a previous life. The question appears to be, then: "How is the presence of an innate affliction like this to be squared with the justice of God? By the inheritance of the results of sin or by reincarnationist doctrine?" According to Matthew, the disciples, when Jesus asked whom people took him to be, ventured various possibilities they had heard, for instance, Elijah or Jeremiah.4
Reincarnationist views were commonplace in the Gnostic climate in which Christianity developed. Gnosticism, an amalgam of presuppositions that permeated the Mediterranean lands, is known to have been influential in primitive Christianity, and recent textual discoveries are showing more than ever how influential it was. Though Gnostic tendencies came under suspicion and eventually under the condemnation of the Church, Gnostic teachings were a live option for the earliest generation of Christians.5 To belong to the group called the pre-existiani, who taught a transmigrationist type of doctrine, was by no means looked upon with the disfavor that adherence to such views eventually evoked. Clement of Alexandria, though his teaching is not unambiguous, was certainly interested, to say the least, in speculation about what he called metensomatosis.6 The fact that Tertullian, one of the earliest of the Latin Fathers of the Christian Church, writes as vehemently as he does against reincarnationist interpretations of Christian belief is eloquent witness to the widespread influence of such views that, according to him, merited such denunciation.
The case of Origen merits special notice. Not only is his name associated with reincarnation, rightly or wrongly; he was beyond doubt the greatest biblical scholar as well as the most original philosophical mind of his age. Born about 185, he died about 254. His aim was to produce a systematic Christian philosophy, firmly based on the Bible. For one reason or another, he came to be associated with views that were accounted heretical. The political circumstances attending his condemnation and the theological consequences of his teaching are both such complex questions that a separate chapter will be devoted to him and his school. As we shall see in that next chapter, reincarnationist views, being associated with Origen, fell into disrepute because people erroneously supposed that a general council of the Church had condemned him and therefore his doctrine of the pre-existence of the soul.
The Council of Lyons in the thirteenth century and the Council of Florence in the fourteenth seem to presuppose that reincarnation had been anathematized, and they insisted that at death souls go immediately to heaven, hell or purgatory. We have seen, however, and we shall see more fully later, that a doctrine of purgatory such as was developed in the Middle Ages is compatible with a form of reincarnationist theory. Orthodox theological opinion during the Middle Ages nevertheless certainly discountenanced reincarnationist doctrine. Despite its repudiation by the custodians of Christian orthodoxy (what was taken to be the deposit of faith delivered to the apostles), it persistently appeared over and over again in innumerable sects, notably the Albigenses (Cathari) in the West, who were especially influential in southern France, the Paulicians and Bogomils in the East, and various esoteric societies, heretical groups, and underground movements all over Europe. The Albigenses, who, because of their uncompromising spirit-matter dualism, have been called the medieval Manichees, were conspicuously neo-Gnostic in their general outlook. They were clearly reincarnationist, teaching that the reason for our being on this earth at all is that we are fallen spirits forced to be incarcerated in bodies and to work out our liberation through transmigration from one body to another. Their teaching on reincarnation closely resembled forms of karmic doctrine in India; but they saw in Christ the instrument of divine redemption from the wheel of rebirth.
The seventh century of the Christian era saw the rise of Islam. Muhammad had sought acceptance from Jews and from Christians and had been ill received by both. The establishment of Islam is perhaps the most astonishing story of rapid missionary success in the history of religion. Islam spread quickly throughout the Arab lands. Before long it extended from Persia to Spain; eventually it spread to that region of the Indian sub-continent we now call Pakistan, and even to the Far East. The Islamic Empire, however enlarged by jihad (holy war), was sustained by a popular faith in the unity and sovereignty of Allah, a faith intentionally monolithic in its simplicity. It could be summed up in a few words that the muezzin still proclaims from the minaret of the mosque. La ilaha illa Allah; Muhammad rasal Allah: there is no God but Allah, and Muhammad is his prophet. The popularity of the Muslim faith and practice owes much to that startling simplicity. Anyone—however unlettered—can quickly grasp the fundamentals of Islam, finding peace in its ethical ideals and satisfaction in the uncomplicated principles of its faith.
Yet the very simplicity of that faith as understood by the masses left open vast areas of philosophical speculation. From early in the history of Islam a tension developed between what today we should call religion and science: the revelation of the Qur'an on the one hand and, on the other, philosophical inquiry and those scientific researches for which, in the Middle Ages, the Arab world was famed. Within that larger frame of reference, ideas alien to the simplicity—not to say naivety—of popular Muslim teaching, could move freely. The Arab philosophers were especially dependent upon Greek sources. No less than St. Augustine, and through him the whole of Western Christendom, the Arab thinkers were deeply indebted to the Neo-Platonic tradition. With such an intellectual heritage, and in the peculiar kind of freedom the Arab thinkers devised for themselves within Islam, transmigrationist notions inevitably appeared within a culture that at first sight might seem to be inhospitable to them. While the unlettered unquestioningly accepted the basic principles they were taught and the thoughtless among the better educated read the Qur'an with uncompromising literalism, others held, not implausibly, that it had an internal as well as an external meaning. With such an esoteric interpretation, reincarnational views found a foothold.
In the teaching of the Sufis, who claimed to know the esoteric teaching behind the Qur'an, reincarnation had a prominent place. Some of the great Sufi teachers got into trouble on account of their special claims. In the tenth century, Mansur Al-hallaj, for instance, claimed to be one with God, which of course was treated as the height of blasphemy. He was executed; but others of the Sufi Way exercised great influence in Islam. Through them and other channels, reincarnationist ideas passed into Islamic literature. The Druses (one of the most interesting groups in the Middle East today) have an obscure history, and they are notoriously disinclined to discuss their religious practices in detail; but reincarnation is indubitably both basic to and prominent in their beliefs. Being responsible members of society, they generally command the respect of their neighbors. The group who received me in northern Israel some years ago were singularly attractive people, cleanly, courteous and hospitable. The women, dressed in modest dark blue dresses, struck me as especially fine representatives of the best in the culture of the Middle East.
Judaism, Christianity, and Islam belong to a group of institutional religions whose ideas are culturally rooted in Semitic life and patterns of thought. Yet even in this relatively unpromising soil, reincarnational understandings of human destiny found an unexpected home, patristic controversies, conciliar anathemas, and medieval persecutions notwithstanding. In the post-medieval world right down to the present day, wherever ideas have flowed freely, its influence, among those who have any interest at all in questions about afterlife and human destiny, and who find no particular reason to repudiate reincarnation on dogmatic grounds, has continued to be astonishingly persistent. We must look at that spectrum of influence, however cursorily, if only to take the measure of what reincarnationist views may mean for our own culture and what their acceptance might portend for the future of Christian thought and life. First, however, let us consider, as promised, the early Christian controversy that had its focus in the work of Origen, who was by far the most remarkable genius, with the possible exception of Augustine, among the Christian Fathers, whose writings have commanded a greater authority in the Church than any other literature other than the Bible itself.
REFERENCES AND NOTES
1 Jeremiah 1:4—5. On sources for the doctrine of reincarnation in Judaism, see A. Orbe, "Textos y pasajes de la Escritura interesados en la teoria de la reincorporacion" in Estudies Ecelesiasticos (1959), pp. 77—91.
2 Flavius Josephus, The Jewish War. Translated by W. Whiston, II, 8, 14.
3 John 9:1—3.
4 Matthew 16:13—14.
5 For recent studies of Gnostic influence, see Geo Widengren, Proceedings of the International Colloquium on Gnosticism (held in Stockholm, August 1973). Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1977.
6 See Stromata
4:26, for example. Not all would take such passages in Clement as decisive. Nevertheless, Photius, in the ninth century, charges Clement with having taught reincarnationist doctrine. (Libr. 109.)