Immortality and Transmigration

In Western culture practical minds decode the mechanics of fire and ice. Immortality is left to madmen. Plato’s Socrates was one such madman. A saint among the early Greek philosophers, Socrates discourses on the immortality of the soul while drinking poison. He points out that the psychic substance of the soul will live better without the body. This mortal frame is only a disturbance; imprisoned within the corporeal mass the soul is hardly free to soar to the heights of immortality.

Soaring to the heights...

As an idealist, Plato himself felt there must be a higher reality where the immortal soul discovers the true forms. Plato was a mathematician. In our world mathematics is the basis of what we call “hard” science; in Plato’s world mathematics was the basis of mysticism. Plato like Pythagoras before him saw perfection in such divine forms as the circle.

Pythagoras of Samos

While Pythagoras authored many formulas, such as his famous theorem on the triangle, he was considered a cult leader in his own time. His followers the Pythagoreans were suppressed as madmen by the orthodox Greeks of the time. Their idea of immortality included transmigration of the soul, metempsychosis or reincarnation.

His teachings survived through the oral tradition and through Plato’s affection for transmigration and mathematics. The Pythagoreans were early vegetarians. The ancient Greek historian Photius records:

The Pythagoreans abstained from eating animals on account of their belief in transmigration, and also because flesh-food engages digestion too much, and is too fattening. Beans they also avoided, because they produce flatulency, over-satiety, and for other reasons.

According to tradition it was Pythagoras, coined the word "philosophy" ("love of wisdom") and "philosopher" (lover of wisdom). He taught that "only God, not man, could be wise." He felt that it was premature to call philosophy "wisdom" and those who practice it - "wise men." A philosopher is someone who feels attracted to wisdom. According to legend, Pythagoras' teachers were sages from faraway lands. Not only was he schooled in childhood by Middle Eastern priests and astrologers, but also the famous mathematician Thales of Miletus. Thales as the first person to investigate the basic principles, the question of the originating substances of matter and, therefore, as the founder of the school of natural philosophy. Thales was a great natural philosopher erudite in history, science, mathematics, engineering, geography, and politics with theories on all these subjects. The Greek historian Herodotus wrote that Thales of Miletus predicted an eclipse in a year when the Medians and the Lydians were at war.

The account of Herodotus is apocryphal and is subject to some debate as to whether the eclipse in question occurred in on May 28, 585 B.C., or 25 years earlier in 610 B.C.  In any case, Pythagoras himself must have profited by sitting at the feet of such a great master of mathematics absorbing his teachings. It is believed that Pythagoras had visited Tibet when only a teenager and that he learned many of his esoteric doctrines regarding transmigration of the soul from ancient seers of the truth either in India or Tibet.

Plato’s ideas on the immortality of the soul clearly mirror those of Pythagoras, but were not shared by his own disciple Aristotle. Plato held that the body and soul are two distinct entities, the soul belonging to the ideal world and the body to the material world. Like Pythagoras, Plato felt that the soul was temporarily implanted within an embodied form but would one day return to the ideal world. Immortal and unchanging, the soul would seek out immortal understanding or knowledge in the perfect world of “forms. The external body operates in the sensual, empiric world, but the soul aspires for the perfect, ideal world.

Aristotle held a more materialistic view. He felt that body and soul are interdependent. The Renaissance painter Raphael’s “School of Athens” is a fresco of Plato’s academy. In the center of the painting we see Plato strolling with Aristotle, engaged in conversation. Plato points upwards. He seems to say, “It’s up there.” Aristotle’s hand, in contrast, faces the earth. He seems to say, “No, master, it’s down here.” The painting captures the dichotomy between master and student and the essence of their disagreement. Plato’s emphasis is with the ideal, Aristotle’s with the real.

Thomas Aquinas did his best to reconcile Plato and Aristotle with the teachings of the Church. The scientific ideas of Aristotle had recently entered the Western world by way of the Islamic world. Aquinas was commissioned with justifying the ways of God to man. And his justification is quite Aristotelian. Aquinas adopted Aristotle's classification of material objects as well as his views time, space, and motion. Aquinas used Aristotle’s idea of the prime mover as proof for the existence of a necessary being as one of his principle arguments. Aquinas borrows Aristotle’s cosmology just as would Dante later in his Divina Commedia. There is little room between the analysis of Thomas Aquinas and Aristotle's own account of sense perception and empiric knowledge. Not only did Aquinas borrow his cosmology: His moral philosophy is closely based on on Aristotle’s Ethics. Aquinas did his best to create a synthesis between faith and philosophy and was successful in that his system went unchallenged for hundreds of years.

Perhaps Plato is too pagan for the Angelic Doctor. His ideas about transmigration of the soul were avoided and faded into obscurity. Aquinas promotes the Church doctrine of immortality, which while owing much to the Greek philosopher, in the Christian world is distinct from the ideal forms of Plato. Aquinas believes in the objective world as did Aristotle and thinks that we can reason from the design of the world to the designer. Plato believes that the true forms of the ideal world exist beyond our sensual reality and that the senses and their perceptions are unreliable.

If Aquinas ignored the idea of reincarnation in his treatise on God and the immortality of the soul, he was only doing his job. By time Aquinas, working as papal theologican for Pope Clement IV, was writing his Summa Theologica in 1265, the doctrine of transmigration of the soul had been anathema and heresy for at least 700 years. The idea of reincarnation or metempsychosis became heresy the the 5th Ecumencial Council, the Second Council of Constantinople in 553.

2nd Council of Constantinople, 553

 
At the Second Council, the Church took great care to condemn as anathema the philosophy and teachings of Origen of Alexandria. Origen of Alexandria (185-254 AD), was one of the greatest Christian theologians of his time. His seminal On First Principles, is a masterwork of Christian Neoplatonism. Origen absorbs many of Plato’s ideas, including transmigration of the soul. The Alexandrian theologian lived through the troubled times of the Early Church. During those dark days Christians were persecuted, martyred and exterminated. There was little or no doctrinal consensus between the regional churches of his time. Gnosticism opposed Christianity while Origen offered its refutation. Origen offered an alternative Christian system to Gnosticism that was more rigorous and philosophically respectable than the mythological speculations of the various Gnostic sects, while supporting the idea of reincarnation.

A critic of pagan philosophy, he was an astute student of Plato and Plotinus and adapted the teachings of Plato and the Greeks to his interpretation of Christian faith. His explanation was influential. His version of immortality was later rejected by the authorities of the Constantine counsel who were determined to purge the idea of reincarnation from the teachings of the Church. The council asserted, for example:

“IF anyone asserts the fabulous pre-existence of souls, and shall assert the monstrous restoration which follows from it: let him be anathema.”

The critics of Origen attacked him on individual points, and did not create a systematic theology to oppose him.  Even so, one can glean from their writings five major points that Christianity has raised against reincarnation:

(1)   It seems to minimize Christian salvation.
(2)   It is in conflict with the resurrection of the body.
(3)   It creates an unnatural separation between body and soul.
(4)   It is built on a much too speculative use of Christian scriptures.
(5)   There is no recollection of previous lives.

It is surprising that it took at least two centuries for the Church to issue this condemnation of Origen’s particular interpretation of immortality which favored transmigration of the soul. The case against Plato’s view had been building for years.

During the period from A.D. 250 to 553 controversy raged, at least intermittently, around the name of Origen, and from this controversy emerged the major objections that orthodox Christianity raises against reincarnation.  Origen of Alexandria, one of Christianity's greatest systematic theologians, was a believer in reincarnation.

Origen was a serious philosopher and theologian, fascinated with the Greeks devoted to scriptural authority, a scourge to the enemies of the church, and a martyr for Christian faith.   But while he was an important spiritual teacher in the Alexandria of his day with a large body of writings and profound faith, his teachings were declared heresy by the bishops of the Constantine Council of 553. 

The debates over his so-called heresy reveals the antipathy over reincarnation in the theology of the Christian church. While Origen was a lion of the Church in his own lifetime objections were raised against his teachings from about fifty years after his death in the year. The case against him built over the centuries. Bishops opposing his views included Theophilus, Jerome, and the Byzantine Emperor Justinian one of the founders of the Eastern Orthodox Church. 

The bishops were opposed to the idea of the preexistence of souls as well as Origen's Platonic doctrine about the resurrection of the dead.  His teachings became the subject of heated debate throughout Christendom. Bishops began to oppose what they saw as questionable doctrine in Origen’s writings.  Transmigration of the soul would suggest that punishment in Hell, for example, is not eternal. The Doctrine of Eternal Punishment was espoused by Augustine.

In many ways, Saint Augustine of Hippo who succeeded Origen, working and writing some 50 years after his death was the most influential theologian among the Early Church Fathers. Disagreement with his writings is tantamount to heresy, and this applied especially in the case of Origen. Augustine had promoted the doctrine of Eternal Punishment. Origen had favored re-incarnation and temporary punishment. But if any one life is merely a way-station to further learning in a proximate life, then punishment can only be temporary. Eternal Punishment is vitiated by the idea of re-incarnation. This made it unacceptable doctrine, especially for the influential Augustine.

The battle was won after the controversy flared up around 535, and in the wake of this the Emperor Justinian composed a tract against Origen in 543, proposing nine anathemas against "On First Principles", Origen's chief theological work.  Origen was finally officially condemned to Hell forever in the Second Council of Constantinople in 553, when fifteen anathemas were charged against him.

The ninth anathema of Justinian clearly condemns the idea that Hell might be a temporary situation: If anyone says or thinks that the punishment of demons and of impious men is only temporary, and will one day have an end, and that a restoration will take place of demons and of impious men, let him be anathema. This anathema against Origen solidified the position of Saint Augustine and the doctrine of Eternal Punishment in Hell.  

Augustine’s doctrine of eternal torment was not a widely held view for the first five ccenturies after the advent of Christ. Eternal Punishment in Hell is nowhere found in the compassionate teachings of the Early Church, especially in the Eastern Orthodox Church. Early apostles and Church fathers such as St. Paul, Clement of Alexandria, St. Gregory of Nyssa, Origen, and others have no use for the Doctrine of Eternal Punishment.

But Eternal Punishment is especially useful for those who control the doctrine. The only way of escaping Eternal Punishment, after all, is to follow the authorities and maintain a good standing in the community of followers.

St. Augustine’s Doctrine of Eternal Punishment ensures dependence on the priesthood and the Church authorities who will define what behavior is acceptable and what is heresy. And so, with the council of Constantinople and its anathemas, Christian Orthodoxy preserved itself through fear and control, opting to protect it’s doctrinal “truth” through the active suppression of opposing ideas and by condemning its former saints to burn in hell along with their family members.

For the Orthodox, the heretical idea of reincarnation died and went to Hell along with the teachings of Origen and his followers.

But heretics have a way of becoming saints again. After trial by the Church for heresy, on May 30, 1431, Joan of Arc was burned at the stake at the Old Marketplace in Rouen, France. Her rehabilitation took nearly 600 years. Saint Joan of Arc was canonized into Sainthood by the Catholic Church on May 16, 1920. If heretics can become saints, ideas are also reborn and resurrected.

The ancient mysticism of Pythagoras was suppressed, but found new life in the teachings of Plato. Plato’s idealism has come and gone. Rejected by the pragmatists of science, Plato’s cave lives again in the science fiction of the Matrix.

Reincarnation, while sometimes condemned by Orthodox theologians has a way of resurrecting itself in the hearts and minds of those who contemplate the immortal character of the soul.

English poetry is not known for great flights of metaphysical fancy. Shakespeare rarely mentions the soul; his version of comedy and tragedy was moved by baser motives. Money, sex, and power suffice in Shakespeare to move his players across the stage. They strut and fret their lines on love and death. His poetry stabs the heart but rarely touches the soul.

And yet, transcending even the rhapsodical lines of Shakespeare, for higher heights there is the great metaphysical poet John Donne. Long out of favor, Donne has recently been rediscovered. While John Donne’s standing as a great English poet, and one of the greatest writers of English prose, is now assured, his metaphysical observations were out of favor during much of recent history. His reputation remarkable in that his poetry had fallen so far from favor; condemned as inept and crude during the Restoration. Just as Joan of Arc, John Donne had been considered a bit of a heretic, out of vogue with critics. He was rehabilitated with the help of T.S. Eliot and William Butler Yeats. His poem, Metempsychosis or “The Progresse of the Soul” is a long paean to reincarnation and the transmigration of the soul.

“SING the progress of a deathless soul,

Whom fate, which God made, but doth not control,

Placed in most shapes; all times, before the law

Yoked us, and when, and since, in this I sing.”

John Donne’s poem, thick with mythology, biblical reference and fable, chronicles the the predicaments of an immortal soul imprisoned in a series of material bodies. He documents the transmigrations of an individual soul through plant animal, and human forms. His poem takes us through the debates on immortality that occupied philosophers from Plato to Aquinas: Is the soul unique to the human form of life? What is the relation between body and soul? If we as souls transmigrate from one body to the next, do we remember our past lives? Donne’s metaphysical questions go to the core beliefs of civilization and the heart of the debate over immortality. As Plato and Pythagoras before him, Donne sees transmigration as a natural consequence of the immortality of the soul. The possibility that a soul might transmigrate from one body to the next, from vegetable to animal to human intrigues the Elizabethan poet whose insight is far deeper than Shakespeare.

He plans to write volumes on the subject, or at least a book whose insight will go beyond sacred scripture. He leaves us only a fragmentary poem on the Progress of the Soul. Donne begins with the soul whose spark inhabited the apple given by Eve to Adam. He imagines the same soul born in the womb of Eve as Cain who passes from one body to the next, even incarnating as Queen Elizabeth herself. His leaves the poem unfinished, a writing project to be completed at a later date. But while his poem is inconclusive, Donne’s poetry makes it clear that he believes that the immortal soul animates one body after the next in its journey through time.

Resurrection is possible for Christ who teaches us the meaning of Die to Live through his example of sacrifice and rebirth. Why wouldn’t the individual’s sojourn through time describe a similar parallax? The idea of reincarnation or transmigration is certainly not original with Plato.

The ancient wisdom of India is enshrined in the teachings of Krishna in the Bhagavad-Gita. There we find the following instruction (translation by A.C. Bhaktivedānta Swāmi Prabhupāda):

देहिनो ’स्मिन् यथा देहे कौमारं यौवनं जरा

तथा देहान्तर-प्राप्तिर् धीरस् तत्र न मुह्यति

dehino ’smin yathā dehe kaumāraṁ yauvanaṁ jarā
tathā dehāntara-prāptir dhīras tatra na muhyati

Bhagavad-Gita 2.13

“As the embodied soul continuously passes, in this body, from boyhood to youth to old age, the soul similarly passes into another body at death. A sober person is not bewildered by such a change.”

अविनाशि तु तद् विद्धि येन सर्वम् इदं ततम्

विनाशम् अव्ययस्यास्य न कश्चित् कर्तुम् अर्हति

avināśi tu tad viddhi yena sarvam idaṁ tatam
vināśam avyayasyāsya na kaścit kartum arhati

Bhagavad-Gita 2.17

“That which pervades the entire body you should know to be indestructible. No one is able to destroy that imperishable soul.”

न जायते म्रियते वा कदाचिन्नायं भूत्वा भविता वा न भूयः

अजो नित्यः शाश्वतो ’यं पुराणो न हन्यते हन्यमाने शरीरे

na jāyate mriyate vā kadācin nāyaṁ bhūtvā bhavitā vā na bhūyaḥ
ajo nityaḥ śāśvato ’yaṁ purāṇo na hanyate hanyamāne śarīre

For the soul there is neither birth nor death at any time. He has not come into being, does not come into being, and will not come into being. He is unborn, eternal, ever-existing and primeval. He is not slain when the body is slain.

वासांसि जीर्णानि यथा विहाय नवानि गृह्णाति नरो ’पराणि

तथा शरीराणि विहाय जीर्णान्य् अन्यानि संयाति नवानि देही

vāsāṁsi jīrṇāni yathā vihāya navāni gṛhṇāti naro ’parāṇi
tathā śarīrāṇi vihāya jīrṇāny anyāni saṁyāti navāni dehī

“As a person puts on new garments, giving up old ones, the soul similarly accepts new material bodies, giving up the old and useless ones.

(Bhagavad-Gita Chapter 2, verse 22)

As a person gives up old and worn out garments and accepts new apparel, similarly the embodied soul giving up old and worn out bodies verily accepts new bodies.

अच्छेद्यो ’यम् अदाह्यो ’यम् अक्लेद्यो ’शोष्य एव च

नित्यः सर्व-गतः स्थाणुर् अचलो ’यं सनातनः

acchedyo ’yam adāhyo ’yam akledyo ’śoṣya eva ca
nityaḥ sarva-gataḥ sthāṇur acalo ’yaṁ sanātanaḥ

This individual soul is unbreakable and insoluble, and can be neither burned nor dried. He is everlasting, present everywhere, unchangeable, immovable and eternally the same.

(Bhagavad-Gita Chapter 2, verse 24)

जातस्य हि ध्रुवो मृत्युर् ध्रुवं जन्म मृतस्य च

तस्माद् अपरिहार्ये ’र्थे न त्वं शोचितुम् अर्हसि

jātasya hi dhruvo mṛtyur dhruvaṁ janma mṛtasya ca
tasmād aparihārye ’rthe na tvaṁ śocitum arhasi

One who has taken his birth is sure to die, and after death one is sure to take birth again. Therefore, in the unavoidable discharge of your duty, you should not lament.

(Bhagavad-Gita Chapter 2, verse 27)

Commentary by Bhaktisiddhānta Saraswati Ṭhākura

In this last verse the cycle of life is clearly revealed. From birth comes death and from death comes birth. Just like in the spring new buds grow which blossom into flowers and leaves in summer and in autumn change to red, yellow and orange in fall and blow away and become dormant in winter to begin the process all over again in the following year. In the a similar way the soul enters new bodies for its seasons of infancy, youth, maturity and old age and at the end of its cycle of life is born again accepting a new body for another season. This is an inevitable process in the material existence and is the automatic process that governs the birth and death. All beings existing in the material manifestation completely follow this reality.