Come Again?
In every age, in some form or other, reincarnation seems to make its comeback. Today, reincarnation— the belief that, after bodily death, souls are reborn in yet another body—has returned as a New Age fad, backed by marketing hype.
And the doctrine is spreading so quickly that it's raising the eyebrows of many in the Church.
A 1990 Gallup poll found that 25 percent of Catholics in the United States believe in reincarnation. And it's not just America. Another recent survey, by the University of London, concluded that 28 percent of the people in France believe in reincarnation, while only 57 percent believe in God.
The Vatican called scholars from around the world to a March 17-20 conference on the subject, "Reincarnation and the Christian Message."
At the conference and in press interviews, major Church leaders emphasized that reincarnation is incompatible with Christian doctrine.
Cardinal Francis Arinze, president of the Pontifical Council for Inter-Religious Dialogue, made it clear that "belief in reincarnation must not be regarded as a minor mistake for people who profess the Christian faith. Indeed, it is a major challenge, if not a conscious or unconscious undermining of the Christian worldview."
Vatican Cardinals Joseph Ratzinger and Paul Poupard made similar statements in press interviews, with Cardinal Ratzinger condemning the doctrine of reincarnation, especially in its Western manifestations, in the strongest terms.
Same old story
Still, the phenomenon of belief in reincarnation is nothing new in the Church or in the world. It is an error as old, perhaps, as human desire.
Pope John Paul II acknowledged in his 1994 apostolic letter Tertio Millennio Adveniente ("As the Third Millennium Draws Near") that the belief in reincarnation expresses the human "inexpressible longing to live forever."
"How are we to imagine a life beyond death?" the Pope wrote. "Some have considered various forms of reincarnation: depending on one's previous life, one would receive a new life in either a higher or lower form, until full purification is attained. This belief, deeply rooted in some Eastern religions, itself indicates that man rebels against the finality of death. He is convinced that his nature is essentially spiritual and immortal."
Cardinal Arinze noted also that new belief in reincarnation might signal "the desire to escape the consequences of one's life choices and modern stress."
But the Pope states definitively in his letter: "Christian revelation excludes reincarnation, and speaks of a fulfillment which man is called to achieve in the course of a single earthly existence."
The stresses of life, the longing for immortality and existential angst tempted even some of the earliest Christians to consider reincarnation. It was in the first generation of the Church that the author of the Letter to the Hebrews thought it necessary to say, "Human beings die once, and after this [comes] the judgment" (9:27).
Yet that was not the final word of the Church. New sects mushroomed throughout the Middle East in the generations immediately after the apostles passed on, and these required response.
Many of the sects called themselves "gnostic"—that is, "knowing"—and claimed that they possessed Jesus' "secret" teachings offered only to His closest disciples.
It is difficult to make generalizations about Gnosticism because the various sects contradicted one another on almost every tenet. But a common Gnostic belief was that the spirit was a particle of divine light trapped in the rank prison of a human body.
Indeed, most Gnostics taught that all creation was evil and that Jesus' secret teaching was the spirit's only way to liberation from bondage in the material world. Without this "gnosis," the spirit would be trapped in matter again and again, through endless eons.
Thus, some Gnostic sects borrowed the doctrine of reincarnation, which was common at the time in the surrounding Greek and Far Eastern cultures. Scholars point to Hindus from India and Greek Pythagoreans as probable sources of influence.
What did the Gnostic "Jesus" have to say? "If the flesh came into being because of spirit, it is a wonder," he opines in the second-century so-called Gospel of Thomas. "But if spirit came into being because of flesh, it is a wonder of wonders. Indeed, I am amazed at how this great wealth has made its home in this poverty."
In contrast, the Church taught from the beginning that man is composed of body and soul and created thus in the image and likeness of God. The body is itself a good and is integral to the human person.
By rejecting the basic Christian regard for the human body, the Gnostics necessarily rejected other Christian doctrines as well. The Incarnation of God in Jesus Christ, for example, was abhorrent to the hyper-spiritual Gnostics. Contrary to the orthodox position, they believed that Jesus' flesh was an illusion at best. The Redeemer, in their view, could only be a ghost occupying a mortal machine until His earthly work was done.
Neither could they believe that their Redeemer really suffered in the flesh. So, in some Gnostic scriptures, "Jesus" appears laughing above the cross even as his body is heaving in its death throes.
And, since the Gnostics considered Jesus' bodily death an illusion, they held that any idea of physical resurrection was an absurdity. The Gnostic goal, after all, was to escape the body, not glorify it.
Another consequence of the Gnostic rejection of the Incarnation was their rejection of the institutional Church. They believed that revelation (knowledge) flowed directly from God to the individual disciple—thus their proliferation of "gospels" and wide diversity of beliefs.
They placed no value, then, on the witness of the apostles—who were the chosen witnesses of the physical resurrection of Christ—or the teachings of the bishops, who were the apostles' successors.
For these and other teachings, the ancient Gnostics defined themselves out of Christianity. Yet the idea of reincarnation found rebirth among later heretics, including some medieval Europeans called the Cathari.
Like the earlier Gnostics, the Cathari professed a loathing of the body. This belief manifested itself sometimes in severe asceticism, even to the point of suicide. Yet, at other times, the Cathari's belief led them to conclude that, since flesh was unimportant, believers could indulge it freely in debauchery.
But what does all this have to do with the Church today? Plenty. Take the new book "Reincarnation: The Missing Link in Christianity" (Summit University Press, $15), by Elizabeth Clare Prophet. Now briskly selling in New Age bookstores, the book offers nothing short of a revival of early Gnostic thought.
In a foreword, Prophet's daughter Erin caricatures traditional Christian teachings: "I find Christianity's take on life incredibly bleak. If we really have only one shot at eternity in either heaven or hell, what happens to those of us whose lives are cut short by war or cancer? And if Jesus can simply wipe away all of our past mistakes, is there a point to our actions on earth?"
To the Prophets, the Christian God's justice is monstrous, and His mercy is unjust; Jesus' redemption makes life unbearably easy, while reincarnation enables us to work out our problems, through endless lifetimes, on our own steam.
The authors heartily endorse the early Christian Gnostics as well as the Cathari (leaving out the part about suicide). And they revive all their predecessors' ethical confusion: The elder Prophet observes that "seemingly decent people commit murders.... Although murder is a serious crime, do those who commit it really deserve eternal punishment?"
Nowhere does she mention the possibility of repentance or forgiveness. Believers in reincarnation are left only with tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, a constant returning until they "complete their life plans."
Throughout her book, Prophet takes special aim at the Catholic Church, which she acknowledges has opposed reincarnation since the beginning.
"Can you believe in reincarnation and still be a Christian?" she asks. And in asking, she is not alone today. Perhaps she is joined by 25 percent of U.S. Catholics.
Prophet answers her own question in the affirmative. But, the Church might respond, only in the sense that you could do so in the second century or the 12th. You can affirm reincarnation only if you deny Incarnation—and only if you deny the Man who said, "Touch me and see, because a ghost does not have flesh and bones as you can see I have" (Lk 24:39).
Aquilina is editor of Our Sunday Visitor's New Covenant, a monthly magazine of Catholic spirituality
No second coming: The early Church and reincarnation
"Now the Canaanite Woman, having come, worshiped Jesus as God, saying, 'Lord, help me.' But He answered and said, 'It is not possible to take the children's bread and cast it to the little dogs' . . . Others, then, who are strangers to the doctrine of the Church, assume that souls pass from the bodies of men into the bodies of dogs, according to their varying degree of wickedness; but we . . . do not find this at all in the divine Scripture." —Origen, A.D. 229
" In this place [when Jesus said Elijah was come and referred to John the Baptist] it does not appear to me that by Elijah the soul is spoken of, lest I fall into the doctrine of transmigration, which is foreign to the Church of God, and not handed down by the apostles, nor anywhere set forth in the Scriptures."—Origen, A.D. 248
"One of their sages said that he, being one and the same person, was born a man, and afterward assumed the form of a woman, and flew about with the birds, and grew as a bush, and obtained the life of an aquatic creature—and he who said these things of himself did not, so far as I can judge, go far from the truth, for such doctrines as this—of saying that one should pass through many changes—are really fitting for the chatter of frogs or jackdaws or the stupidity of fishes or the insensibility of trees."—St. Gregory of Nyssa, A.D. 379
"As for doctrines on the soul, there is nothing excessively shameful that they [the disciples of Plato and. Pythagoras] have left unsaid, asserting that the souls of men become flies and gnats and bushes and that God himself is a [similar] soul, with some other the like indecencies.... At one time he says that the soul is of the substance of God; at another, after having exalted it thus immoderately and impiously, he exceeds again in a different way, and treats it with insult, making it pass into swine and asses and other animals of yet less esteem than these."—St. John Chrysostom, A.D. 391
"Avoid the nonsense of those arrogant philosophers who do not blush to liken their soul to that of a dog, who say that they have been formerly themselves women, shrubs, or fish. Have they ever been fish? I do not know, but I do not fear to affirm that in their writings they show less sense than fish."—St. Basil the Great, c. 350
— From Catholic Answers website: www. catholic. com
This item 198 digitally provided courtesy of CatholicCulture.org
