Many times man lives and dies
Within his two eternities,
That of race and that of soul.
And ancient Ireland knew it all.
Is reincarnation compatible with Christian faith? Before even seeking an answer to that question, we had better consider whether it is a good question. If, moreover, it is a good question, to whom is it important?
The notion of reincarnation, we have seen, is both widespread in the history of religion and extraordinarily persistent in the literature of the world. Besides, it is exercising renewed influence on the minds of thoughtful men and women today, not least on younger people. Most people assume that, even apart from the philosophical and scientific objections to which a later chapter is to be devoted, reincarnation is a notion so alien to the central tradition of the Christian Church, and so contrary to the Bible, that it could not be entertained within the structure of even the most liberal, not to say easygoing, interpretation of Christian faith. The assumption is natural and seems prima facie justified. The notion of reincarnation with the concept of karma that attends all the developed forms of it that are worthy of consideration by civilized human beings, must be said to be generally associated with oriental forms of religion that are profoundly alien to what historians commonly call the great monotheistic faiths: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. These faiths, which all stress the concept of God as the One who acts in history, are in important respects so different from religions such as Buddhism and its Hindu parent that it seems at first sight unlikely that a doctrine so peculiarly associated with one group should be assimilable by the other. When, therefore, people in the West, who, in so far as they have any religious allegiance at all, are usually Christians or Jews, are attracted to reincarnationist ideas, they tend to think they have to make a choice. Either they accept the Bible as containing in some sense the Word of God, in which case they cannot honestly flirt with reincarnationist notions, or else they renounce the uniqueness of the Bible, relegating it to a mere place among the religious literatures of mankind, and perhaps not a particularly important place at that. If they are Christians, they will also be likely to feel that either they must confess the apostolic faith as set forth in the ancient creeds, and live the Gospel as best they can within the Household of Faith that is the Church, being sustained therein by the sacraments (in which case they think they must renounce reincarnationism as untenable), or else they must abandon their Christian heritage.
It may be, indeed, that reincarnationism is simply not a viable option for a Christian. It may even be that it is, as some think, a pernicious occult teaching that is a snare for those who would walk the Christian Way. Certainly, it is often accounted at least a strange deviation for a Christian, if it be nothing worse. No less noteworthy is the fact that such a view of the matter is by no means a recent development. There is no doubt that in Western Christendom, at any rate, the myth of reincarnation would have seemed as strange to a medieval Catholic theologian such as Anselm or Thomas Aquinas as it would have appeared to Luther or Calvin, or to the average Christian today, whether he dub himself Protestant or Catholic. Yet an examination of the history of Christian thought, in the light of the very complex issues that emerge through the application of modern scholarly methods, suggests that the answer to the question is likely to be much less decisive. Cardinal Mercier is among those who, in modern times, have opined that reincarnationism has never been formally condemned by the Roman Catholic Church.1
Nicolas Berdyaev, a highly original Christian thinker whose Russian Orthodox background gives his thought on such matters a different dimension from that of most Western thinkers, has many interesting things to say on death and immortality. “Victory over death,” he writes, “is not the last and final victory. Victory over death is too much concerned with time. The last, final and ultimate victory is victory over hell.”2 “After alluding to the injustice of the traditional notion of hell in which people are tormented eternally for “sins committed in time,” he goes on to note: “There is more justice in the doctrine of Karma and reincarnation, according to which deeds done in time are expiated in time and not in eternity, and man has other and wider experience than that between birth and death in this one life.” But then he goes on to affirm roundly: “Theosophical theory of reincarnation cannot be accepted by the Christian mind.” After so saying, however, he points out at once: “But it is essential to recognize that man’s final fate can only be settled after an infinitely greater experience in spiritual worlds than is possible in our short earthly life.”3 If this be so, as seems to me an inescapable conclusion for Christians and one supported by the long and ancient tradition of an “intermediate state,” why the rejection out of hand of reincarnationism as something quite unacceptable “by the Christian mind”?
The Bible does not explicitly teach reincarnationism. That is to say, there is no pronouncement on the subject, either in the Old Testament or in the New, to which one could point and by means of it compel the acceptance of a person who felt bound to receive as divine revelation everything that is clearly and unequivocally affirmed in Holy Scripture. No such biblical warrant for reincarnation exists.
That, however, does not take us far, since much the same could be said of the doctrine of the Trinity, which is surely held to be a classic expression of orthodox Christian belief about God. Except for the text in the first letter of John (1 John 5:7), known to scholars to be a very late interpolation, no direct biblical warrant exists for the doctrine of the Trinity as formulated by the Church.4 That absence of direct biblical warrant for the doctrine of the Trinity does not mean, however, that the trinitarian formula is antipathetic to the teaching of the New Testament writers. On the contrary, it was held to be—and within Christian orthodoxy it has continued to be accounted—a proper formulation of a great truth about God that is implicit in New Testament teaching. There is no reason at all why the doctrine of reincarnation might not be in a similar case. Whether it is so in fact remains to be seen. As we shall see, there is remarkable support for it in Scripture, in the Fathers, and in later Christian literature. There are also serious philosophical and theological difficulties.
From a Christian standpoint, the most fundamental objection to reincarnationism, as commonly presented, is the notion that man is a part of God, a spark of the divine. According to Christian teaching, and true to the Jewish heritage in Christianity, man is made in the image of God, yet he is no more than an image. He is a creation of God, not an emanation. All attempts at blurring this distinction have been vigorously resisted, for they are evidences of a failure to understand what the Bible says about the human condition, its grandeur in having God as its creator and its limitation in being nevertheless a fallen creature. In Judaism and Islam, the gulf between God and man is such that the notion of the Incarnation of God in Christ is blasphemous and therefore abhorrent. In Islam, shirk (idolatry, the association of any creature with God) has always been the supreme sin. Christianity is deeply sympathetic to that concern, for it shares with Judaism and Islam a profound awareness of the gulf between the human and the divine; nevertheless, it proclaims the supreme paradox of the Christian faith: God bridged that gulf in the Person of Christ. The gulf, however, remains. In recognizing the gulf, Christianity is at one with Judaism and Islam.
The typical Hindu teaching is quite different. It is shared, moreover, by many other systems, such as various forms of Buddhism in the East and, in the West, Stoicism and Neoplatonism. There man is seen as an emanation of God, not a creation. Characteristic of much Hindu teaching on this subject is the view that God has two modes of being, a substantive and an emanating one. The whole cosmos, as the emanation of God, may be called an extension of the divine being. The human soul manifests in a special way this God-like nature of all things. The highly developed soul, the spiritual leader or prophet or saint, manifests God more clearly still. From there it is very easy to go on to recognize avatars of deity as illustrious examples of such a manifestation, much as one might recognize Plato and Kant and Spinoza as more than ordinarily great figures in the history of human thought and, similarly, Planck and Einstein as very special giants in modern science. Jesus would be certainly a great avatar of deity; but neither he nor any other “holy man” or prophet, however eminent in spirituality, could ever be properly called (as Christians call Jesus Christ) radically different from all others such as Gotama and Shankara and Moses, all of whom are high on the scale of holiness. To the Hindu mind, to say that Jesus Christ is so to be distinguished would be like saying that Einstein is not merely one of the greatest geniuses in the history of science but is fundamentally and qualitatively different from all other men of science who ever have existed and ever could exist. Plainly, not even the most ardent admirer of Einstein would claim that. Indeed, he would probably be the first to laugh at it. Yet that is precisely the claim Christians make about Jesus Christ.
The type of attitude we have been considering as typical of Hinduism and Neoplatonism springs from a presupposition that every human being is essentially divine, as every biological entity is essentially endowed with life: the difference between a jellyfish and a horse is only a matter of degree in the manifestation of divinity. Now, it is true that reincarnationism is historically much associated with that presupposition and the attitudes that it engenders. It does not follow, however, that reincarnationist notions are inseparable from these attitudes.
Given that presupposition, the seeker believes he has a clear vision of the purpose of human life and, if he is willing to work at his beliefs, he will try to realize his identity with the divine, for that is, on his view, the way to advance his spirituality. In Hindu language the purpose of life is to realize the complete identity of atman (the God-who-is-within-me) with brahman (the God-who-is-the-Absolute). So close is the connection in Indian thought that the achievement of this unity has a name: it is called brahman-atman.
When we ask, as naturally we must, how atman ever came to be so separated from brahman as to call for efforts toward that achievement, we get an answer that is in itself not very different from the Christian answer: the individual has fallen into an estrangement from his proper condition. For the Christian, the estrangement consists in the failure of fallen humanity to acknowledge and delight in its creaturely relationship to its Creator. The essence of this “original” sin is pride. In the Hebrew creation myth, the serpent in the Garden of Eden successfully tempted Eve by pointing out to her that the reason God had forbidden the tree in the middle of the garden was that God knew very well that if she and her husband ate it they would be “like gods.”5 For the Hindu and other emanationists, humanity has been estranged from its proper condition, not through an arrogant and futile attempt at identification with God but, on the contrary, through a failure to recognize as reality that very identification with God that the biblical tradition accounts illusory and fundamentally evil, an aim that is to be above all avoided by those who would put themselves in the right way. At this point, then, the two understandings of man’s relationship to God are diametrically opposed. Moreover, there is no doubt that, historically, reincarnationist views are associated with the Hindu type of understanding rather than with the orthodox Jewish and Christian one.
According to the emanationist view, the model we are to have in mind is that of the soul entrapped and enmeshed in a distorted, warped vision of reality. Instead of seeing the cosmic state of affairs as it is, plainly, as if through still, clear water, the soul sees it distorted, as fractured through a troubled, muddy, sea. This spiritual astigmatism is due to enslavement to what Hindu literature calls maya, a Sanskrit term signifying a condition into which all manifestations of the divine fall in the very act of becoming manifest. It might be conceptualized as a sort of cloud that accompanies the divine wherever the divine manifests itself, shrouding it in such a way as to give the illusion of a reality different from the only reality there is: the divine.
Now, this view, unlike the view that presupposes identification with the divine as humanity’s true goal, is not entirely alien to Christian tradition. Christianity inherited something like it, not only through the channels of early Christian modes of thought in the Gentile world, but also through biblical and intertestamental Judaism, which was already much influenced by Greek ideas in the centuries immediately preceding the birth of Jesus. Moreover, Christianity, when influenced by this view, can also be hospitable to reincarnationism, because then it can encourage the notion that for the soul to find its way back to a proper vision of reality and a right relationship to it, we must expect along evolutionary, purgatorial process. The task is not only too complex and too arduous to be quickly accomplished; it is of such a nature that set-backs are to be expected. When a man is waist-deep in slimy mud and struggling manfully to extricate himself from it, he may sometimes seem to be slipping back two feet for every foot he advances. Salvation, however quickly assured (as some Christians believe it to be) is not quickly achieved. The rescue operation, even with the help of those life belts thrown to the endangered soul (the “amazing grace” and “bountiful providence” that Christians joyfully acknowledge), is likely to take a long time. “Heaven is not won with a wish,” as the seventeenth century Zachary Boyd quaintly writes in The Last Battle of the Soul, a treatise of the soul’s struggle with the forces of evil that seek to engulf and stifle it. The soul’s progress is not to be seen in a small slice; we must look at the whole graph.
In all this, the emanationist view—as exemplified in Hindu lore, and the creationist view—as presented in the Bible, do not radically conflict, as do their respective presuppositions about the aim of the redemptive process. Why, then, might not reincarnation be assimilated by Christians as part of their faith? Though orthodox Christians could not accept the typical Hindu view of the aim of the spiritual life, they can agree—at least in some measure—on its nature and the difficulties attending it. Might not the Indian notion of the inexorable spiritual law of karma, which governs all moral action and spiritual endeavor, be adapted to the Christian outlook? Might not an orthodox Christian see the samsara or chain of incarnations, of which we hear so much in Hindu lore, as the most satisfactory way in which to conceptualize the journey of the soul to the state that Christians traditionally call heaven or the Beatific Vision, in which the soul at last is so completely purified that it can stand in the right relation to God and, as the old Scottish Catechism promises, “enjoy Him for ever”? At first sight, at any rate, it would now seem that Christians—far from resisting reincarnationism as an exotic, alien idea—should be ready to embrace it as one that might both enlighten their minds and add a new and exhilarating dimension to their faith.
That is not to say, of course, that a Christian could ever honestly take over all the paraphernalia of oriental presuppositions. Still less does it entitle him to select uncritically, from a variety of ideas in Hinduism and other traditions, those that happen to please his fancy. Such eclecticism is not by any reckoning allowable to an honest man. Even the most elementary acquaintance with Christian history would show us that the Church had to face such dangers in its early days and, but for resistance to the temptation to become a general repository for all religious ideas that came its way, would have been swallowed up in the general Mediterranean melting-pot. Nevertheless, as we shall see, the notion of rebirth was so widespread in the primitive Church that the answer to our question may turn out to be more ambiguous than seemed to be at first likely. Moreover, resurrection was, of course, a fundamental part of the Christian kerygma, the message of salvation, that the early Christian apostles proclaimed, and its exact nature is never specified. We shall find, too, that although, for various historical reasons, reincarnationist ideas fell out of favor and came to be associated with sects that were far removed, by any reckoning, from the Christian Way, they have also been entertained by eminently responsible thinkers committed to the ancient Catholic faith. They have also been very widely held by great men and women in the profoundly religious kind of humanist tradition that goes back to Socrates and flourished in the Quattrocento and later.
Even the popularly held notion that the doctrine of reincarnation is peculiar to India is, of course, erroneous. The doctrine is so widespread that India cannot even be said to be its cradle. The Indus Valley, through a very great focus and clearing-house of religious ideas, is by no means the only source of the reincarnationist theme. Reincarnation occurs in many forms, some crude, some highly sophisticated and profoundly ethical. In crude forms it appears in many societies. Sir James Frazer reported long ago that the Eskimos around the Bering Strait believe that the souls of dead sea-beasts, such as seals and whales, are reincarnated in fresh bodies. He also mentions that the Kwakiutl Indians of British Columbia think that when a salmon is killed its soul returns to the salmon country, so “they take care to throw the bones and offal into the sea, in order that the soul may reanimate them at the resurrection of the salmon.”6 No doubt India has been more deeply affected by reincarnationist concepts than has been any other surviving civilization and Indian thought has developed the notion along very noble lines, but other civilizations have also independently developed forms of reincarnationist belief, including, of course, Plato’s mythological heritage of it from Pythagoras.
Reincarnation is known in the history of religion under several names: transmigration, rebirth, or metempsychosis. These terms are sometimes used synonymously by historians of religion. Sometimes one term is used in opposition to another. Modern theosophists, for example, generally prefer to reserve the term “metempsychosis” for the more primitive, magical forms of the doctrine that envision movement from a human to a bestial existence, and they use the term “reincarnation” of the more developed, ethical forms of the doctrine, such as are found, for instance, in their own view and have played such a fundamental role in Mahayana Buddhism. For the purpose of our present study we need not be much concerned with making that distinction, since we are presupposing, of course, an ethical and karmic form of the doctrine. Within the Christian tradition of “resurrection,” the term metensomatosis, used by Clement of Alexandria, might be accounted more accurate for Christian use; but since it would seem pedantic I shall use it only in special contexts and shall adopt no special vocabulary for distinguishing forms of reincarnationist theory. The term “reincarnation” often implies, for instance, the mind-matter dualism of the Gnostics; but it need not do so. The term “pre-existence,” however, may sometimes have to be used distinctively, since it refers to a particular doctrine in the history of Christian thought that may but does not necessarily encompass the notion of reincarnation.
The widespread notion that Christianity must wholly exclude all forms of reincarnationism is very understandable. It has never been officially entertained by the Church, has sometimes been officially frowned on, and has generally been at least suspect. Nevertheless, the supposition that there is a clear, unambiguous biblical or patristic or conciliar teaching about immortality and resurrection would be mistaken. On the contrary, though the expectation of an afterlife is certainly an integral part of Christian faith and constitutes Christian hope, its form is far less clearly defined than is popularly supposed. True, heaven and hell have been seen as alternative destinies for the good and the wicked respectively, and within central Christian traditions, Greek, Roman and Anglican, purgatory has also played a role as a key concept. Nevertheless, attempts to say anything specific about these states have often, if not generally, ended in intellectual confusion, not to say disaster. The wisest of theologians have tended to be reticent about detailing the celestial and infernal geographies.
Dante , in the greatest Christian epic of all time, drew a vivid picture of all three (hell, purgatory and paradise), in the earthy terms in which the medieval mind loved to clothe its most ineffable ideas. So precise and definite is he that with modern technology any geographer today ought to be able to discover the exact location of the Gates of Hell and find his way to the mountain slopes of purgatory, if only he could be literalistic enough to pursue such a quest. Since Dante places the various heavens on known astronomical bodies, with the moon as the site of the lowest heaven, we may hope to make excursions thither and back in the foreseeable future. Of course Dante’s very poetic precision is possible for him only because he, like his contemporaries, were so accustomed to allegorizing that they could afford the use of concrete images of the kind in which he delights. No educated, thoughtful person could ever be misled into taking such images literally, either in Dante’s day or in our own. When it comes to theological definition, the less said about the exact nature of our final destiny the better. So heaven becomes simply the clear vision of God, hell the final loss of that vision, and purgatory the intermediate state of purification.
Yet of course, as we shall abundantly see, there are other considerations. The attitude of people toward the notion of an afterlife is governed by a wide variety of presuppositions, especially their understanding of the nature of God. Christianity has inherited a long tradition on that subject, both from the Bible and from the thought of the Gentile world that moulded the intellectual form of Christian belief from the first century onwards. So despite the deliberate vagueness and salutary ambiguity among theologians that has often been a welcome relief from the hell-fire sermons and pearly-gate promises in which popular preachers have from time to time indulged, Christians have generally geared their vision of the afterlife to their understanding of the nature of God. One cannot overestimate the importance of the truth that our vision of the future life is a corollary of our concept of God. We must also not overlook and should not underestimate the difference between the Christian understanding and the thought of, say, impersonalistic Vedanta. The Christian mode of conceptualizing God, rooted in its Jewish heritage, and therefore uncompromisingly monotheistic, is very different indeed from that of the pantheism characteristic of much Hindu and Buddhist thought. That difference is reflected in the respective attitudes to the destiny of man. The latitude available to Christians within the structure of their faith may turn out to be, therefore, less hospitable to reincarnationism than some might hope and others fear. Any sanguine hopes we may harbor for bringing such ideas within the Christian Household of Faith should be tempered with caution.
When all that is said, however, we should also be prepared for surprises in the other direction. The hospitality of the Christian Way to reincarnationist notions may turn out to be greater than we may have believed possible. Certainly they appear unexpectedly and persistently in the history of Christian thought. The hostility they have encountered cannot easily be shown to have any profound philosophical or theological justification undergirding it. On the contrary, it sometimes suggests trivial or unworthy causes, such as ignorance, prejudice, intellectual confusion, or fear. Political fears have too often inhibited theological development. Notoriously, religious prejudices often arise for very superficial reasons. One has only to think of the long-standing prejudice in the Roman Catholic Church against cremation, which many no doubt took to have some theological basis but which originated, like so many other human prejudices, by a sort of guilt by association: pagans cremated their dead, so Christians should do otherwise. It is true, of course, that the doctrine of the resurrection of the body is likely to have made cremation repugnant to many Christians from early times; but there could have been no well-considered theological objection to it, since it does what burial does, only more quickly and efficiently. That reincarnationist doctrine may have been in a similar case is a possibility we should bear in mind as our study proceeds.
No honest Christian could be entirely content with the Hindu or Buddhist understanding of the religious situation of mankind. For these great Asiatic religions, which have been rightly called “religions of eternal cosmic law,” imply a state of affairs that orthodox Christians have always believed to be that which Jesus Christ came to end. There is truth in the slogan of some modern theologians that Christianity is not a religion but the end of religions. That is, indeed, precisely what the primitive Church saw behind the Death and Resurrection of Christ. The apostolic teaching was and is that the old rites are done away and the old bonds broken. So there is a dimension in the Christian faith that no karmic principle or reincarnationist doctrine could fully contain, since Jesus Christ is held to be victorious over the very state of affairs they represent. Karma is the Indian expression of belief in a moral order in the cosmos. Whatever Christian teaching is, it certainly goes beyond the limits of any moral order we could conceive.
Nevertheless, it does not purport to destroy that order. In the culture into which Jesus was born, the Torah was the expression of such a moral order. It was the Law of God delivered to Moses and set forth in the first five books of the Bible. Second only to the Torah in importance was another part of the Bible, known as “the Prophets.” In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus is reported as expressly telling his hearers: “Do not imagine that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets. I have not come to abolish but to complete.”7 By the same token, the karmic law that is an oriental expression of the cosmic moral order is not to be accounted subject to abolition by the Gospel, only to completion.
In the midst of the German Enlightenment in the eighteenth century, Kant gave the West a concept of duty that is based on the notion of a moral order not radically different from that which lies behind karmic doctrine, allowing, of course, for great differences in cultural expression. Kant deeply influenced many Christians in the nineteenth century, and his influence has not by any means entirely eroded. Many educated Christians today would not boggle at writing “Duty” for “Law” in the context to which we have just referred. Jesus does not come to abolish Duty but to complete it. Why, then, might not Christians speak of “Karma and the Gospel” with a similar relationship in mind? We shall return to this Kantian theme in a later chapter devoted to the notion of moral evolution.
From the time of Justin Martyr in the first century—who was, by the way, an early Christian reincarnationist—Christians have been ready to express themselves in the categories of Gentile thought. The doctrine of the Trinity, which was finally formulated a few centuries later, is a celebrated example of that accommodation to an idiom alien to the culture out of which Christianity emerged. The presuppositions underlying the doctrine of karma are more intelligible to many Christians today than those undergirding the venerable and beautiful doctrine of the Trinity have been for a long time. It is unlikely, indeed, that the underpinnings of the doctrine of the Trinity will be ever again intelligible to any but a comparatively small group of Hellenistic scholars. (After all, even the Latin world, at the time the doctrine was so skillfully devised, did not really understand it, as modern scholars now see very well.) The notion of reincarnation, with the karmic doctrine underlying and morally justifying it, is by comparison easy for anyone to grasp who is in the least inclined to think in any sort of religious terms. If, then, one could show that there is as much truth in it as in, say, the biblical Torah, might not it conceivably play a role in Christian thought at least similar to that extremely important role that the Torah, the Law of Moses, has played from New Testament times onwards in the thought and lives of Christians?
Contrary to a popular misunderstanding in the West, the doctrine of karma does not eliminate or even diminish human freedom. It is no more a determinism than is the Torah. Of course it entails a deterministic aspect; but so do all doctrines of human freedom, as every student of twentieth century existentialism knows. If there be any sense at all in talking of human freedom, it can only be within the context of some pattern of determinism. I can no more exercise freedom in a vacuum than I can escape from a prison that is not there. So of course the karma I am constantly making for myself operates according to a cosmic law that is a foil to my freedom; nevertheless, it is I who make it. Nowhere could there be a notion that more patently entails that of moral responsibility. It is indeed precisely on that account that it can be interpreted in such a way as to expose the doctrine of karma to the objection that it engenders a salvation-by-works outlook that would not measure up to what orthodox Christians, especially in the Pauline and Augustinian teaching, account the Gospel of Grace. That is no more reason to repudiate it, however, than the Gospel is a reason to renounce the Ten Commandments or, for that matter, the summary of the Law: “Thou shalt love the Lord with all thy heart . . . and thy neighbor as thyself.”8
I am not asking the reader to make up his mind in advance about the question I have put before him in this chapter. I ask only that he open his mind to an important and interesting possibility. As we conduct our inquiry we must see, each one for himself, what the evidence warrants.
REFERENCES AND NOTES
1 See Bibliography: Spencer, Frederick A. M. Roman Catholics will also note that no papal encyclical against reincarnation has been issued.
2 N. Berdyaev, The Destiny of Man (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1937), p. 336.
3 Ibid., p. 349.
4 “For there are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost; and these three are one.” (K.J.V.) These words, not found in any independent Greek text, or in the Old Latin versions or the Vulgate as issued by Jerome, are omitted from scholarly modern translations such as the Jerusalem Bible, the New English Bible, and the Revised Standard Version.
5 Genesis 3:4-5.
6 J. G. Frazer, The Golden Bough (abridged edition) (New York: Macmillan Company, 1930), p.526.
7 Matthew 5:17 (J. B.)
8 Matthew 22:37–40; cf. Deuteronomy 6:5; Leviticus 19:18.