On Reincarnation

Olivier Clément

Prayer is the “bloodstream of Christ’s body, circulating glory between heaven and earth in an unlimited communion.”

Translated From:
Olivier Clément. Corps de mort et de gloire: Petite introduction à une théopoétique du corps. Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1995 pp 121-127.

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The diffuse “spirituality” that finds expression today in proclamations of a “New Age” speaks readily of reincarnation. According to various surveys, many French people believe in it. The Christian conception — or more particularly (though who realizes it?) the Augustinian one — is denounced as absurd and cruel: how could one accept that a person plays out his eternal destiny in a life so brief, so dull, or so subject to opposing circumstances? How could one accept that God has prepared for so many souls a torture chamber without reprieve — an indefinite Auschwitz? At this point, people turn to the Asian wisdoms of Hinduism and Buddhism, which teach successive reincarnations in the great “wheel of existence.” These reincarnations, it is said, are the fruit of one’s own thoughts and actions, of one’s karma. The one born into a miserable, crushed condition, or who dies a tragic death, is merely purifying himself of evil attitudes that were his in a previous life. His next incarnation may mark progress along the path to ultimate liberation.

Thus, all is well, everything makes sense — evil is not only legitimate, it is useful — and the soul rises back to its divine origin through a series of existences that allow it to purify itself, to pay to the uttermost farthing its “karmic debts.” Similar conceptions are said to be found among the old peasantries of Europe, where the moon poured into furrows — and into wombs — the souls of the dead longing for new existence. Moreover, it is pointed out that many of our contemporaries have strange recollections: they remember their previous incarnations, and our most stirring encounters are nothing more than reunions. Naturally, the New Age claims scientific backing for this: in some American (and even French) universities, parapsychology labs study such cases of recollection and manage to trace in the archives of, say, the 18th century, the very individual described by a contemporary — complete with details — who claims that he is that person. Television news programs have shown a delightful Tibetan baby recognizing the clothing and familiar objects of a lama who had just died. Films built on such themes reach us from India or the United States (California, of course, being the meeting point of the Far East and the Far West), and even our most Christian newspapers report on them as though they were self-evident. The New Age also emphasizes experiences of “channeling” — that is, communication with the dead...

I would like to offer a few observations in response:

1. The concept of reincarnation that is presented to us in the name of Asian wisdoms is, in fact, distinctly Westernized. It assumes that the transmigrating individual possesses a stable, permanent identity. But such a notion is unmistakably Judeo-Christian. Among traditional peasant cultures, and today in parts of sub-Saharan Africa that remain animist, people believe that the individual dissolves at death. In Hinduism and Buddhism, the self is an illusory appearance — an impermanent aggregate of states of consciousness — which indeed continues from life to life, but without any proper “someone” traveling through these successively disengaging tubes; for in reality, Buddhism says, there is nothing, and Hinduism says there is only the anonymous and universal Self at play with itself. Accordingly, reincarnations are denounced as the hell of Nothingness (or of the Self), the terror of time, its absurd wheel — whereas our “reincarnationists” portray them as a pleasant journey, with a delightful game of inversions: the husband becomes the wife, the father the son, and so forth. Fantasies fit for psychoanalysts...

2. The Western theory of reincarnation assumes that the body is nothing more than a garment, which one can easily shed and replace. After all, we are told, our cells are constantly renewing, and the body we have at age fifty is no longer the one we had as a child.

But as we have seen, the body is the form that the person impresses upon the “dust” of the world that continually passes through it; this form is not merely physical but spiritual. If the person is in the image of God, called to ever greater likeness, then the body — even in its frailty — is meant to become not a superficial garment but a face. The person gradually weaves his face on the complex loom of his relations with nature, society, others — with God. Christianity is the religion of the Incarnation, and therefore, in the risen Christ, of the resurrection of the body unto a transfiguration foreshadowed in the mode of Jesus’ existence between Pascha and Ascension, glimpsed sometimes in the light of a gaze or a smile, in the supernatural peace resting for a moment on the face of the dead.

As for the succession of ages, it is not, if I may say so, melodic but symphonic: the Gospel counsels adults to adopt the spirit of childhood, and I am sure that in the Kingdom of God, we shall have all our ages at once!

3. Karma — the implacable submission to the laws of universal existence — is shattered by grace. In light of the parable of the laborers hired at the eleventh hour, what is the meaning of having to “pay to the uttermost farthing”? What is the central message of Christianity if not Christ’s victory over death and hell? New Age proponents often speak of a warm, peaceful, and gentle light experienced by those brought to the edge of death — a light in which they begin to reread their lives and judge themselves. Such light cannot help but evoke in us the regret of offended love: a single tear I unjustly caused will be my hell, when I finally understand it. But the Love that is offended is none other than the Love crucified — and therefore risen, and raising us as well. The only real sin, said St. Isaac the Syrian — and it is important to recall it here — is to fail to attend to the Resurrection: “Like a handful of sand in the vast sea, so are the sins of all flesh compared to the mercy of God.” This is echoed in Christ’s words to the bewildered Julian of Norwich: “All shall be well,” and in that overwhelming affirmation cited above by Thérèse of Lisieux. As we have said, prayer for the salvation of all characterizes the highest Christian spirituality, for salvation cannot be individual — it can only be an entry into the vast communion of the saints, those sinners who accept being forgiven. Prayer, yes — but carried by boundless hope: “to hope for all,” as [Hans] Urs von Balthasar wrote in one of his last books.

4. The body of Christ encompasses all humanity and draws it out of nothingness. The Church is only the visible tip of the iceberg, gathering those who give thanks, who struggle, who serve and pray “for the life of the world.” In this unity — whose center we know to be the Eucharist, though whose boundaries we do not know — the dead are not dead: we pray for them and they pray for us. Our prayer for the dead and the prayer of the dead for us (which we ask confidently when we know they are saints, but which we should always ask with humble trust) constitute something like the bloodstream of Christ’s body, circulating glory between heaven and earth in an unlimited communion. The true channelling is not some revival of spiritism or shamanism — it is this prayer, especially in the celebration of the Eucharist. For the dead — who are not dead — participate in that celebration, as the ancient Church believed.

In the vast Christic unity, the distances of space and time are abolished. We can meet people who lived long ago — such as that monk of Mount Athos who took as his master, in no merely metaphorical sense, St. Isaac the Syrian, who lived in Iraq thirteen centuries ago. Thus might be explained the remembrance of past lives which are “mine” only insofar as there exists in Christ but one single Man — in the most realistic sense — but which are nonetheless unique personal existences, in communion with my own, because I am especially bound to them: for spiritual, emotional, or even ancestral reasons — it does not matter.

5. In some “reincarnationist” circles, it is claimed that the early Church once taught reincarnation but later rejected it under the influence of a crude exotericism. Names like Origen, Evagrius Ponticus, and Didymus the Blind are sometimes mentioned. Let us try to clarify the matter. I will leave aside the story of St. John the Baptist coming “in the spirit of Elijah”; one must simply look at what the words mean.

For the Origenists, each soul, stamped with the seal of the infinite, desperately seeks the Infinite. It passes through not reincarnations but demonic or angelic states, through supra- or infra-terrestrial eons. At the end, having exhausted all forms of evil or distraction, it cannot help but realize that only God answers its thirst for the infinite; through Christ, the only spirit who has remained always faithful, it returns to the original fullness: this is the apokatastasis, the saving “restoration” of all souls.

These Origenist hypotheses were rejected by the Fifth Ecumenical Council, held in Constantinople in 553. But several Fathers of the Church, both before and after that date, taught — in a most orthodox fashion — the exodus of the soul after death through such eons. So: a purifying journey through spiritual worlds, but by no means a Christian doctrine of reincarnation.

There are great riches in Christianity. The “New Age” and the encounter with Eastern religions lead us to explore them. Incarnation or reincarnation: a good example of those “spiritual wars” Nietzsche spoke of — wars that we will increasingly need to wage.