Fr.

ANTHONY ALEVIZOPOULOS
Dr. of Theology - Dr. of Philosophy
Refuting the Dogma of Reincarnation

The Foundation of Reincarnation

If we want to determine the premise of reincarnation, we need to make reference to

its dogma that every person, according to their innermost self, is eternal and
subject to the eternal law of cause and effect, called karma. This law pushes the
person into consecutive births after each death. A basic cause which makes up the
'fuel', so to speak, for the continuous movement of this wheel of deaths and births
is a person's attachments and desires in connection with external reality. Each and
every thought, word or deed returns to that person during his new incarnation. His
new life composes a living movie, and he is now called to be like a perfect actor
to reenact this 'drama' on the new screen.

According to this concept, a basic aim becomes the passage through all the hardship
and experiences corresponding to the accumulated karma and the effort put into
restricting these activities and attachments, so that new karma accumulation can be
avoided.

A final objective is one's 'liberation' not only from death but from life as well.

In contrast, the 'western version' of reincarnation views this belief as potential

for a better, future life on earth, as a course leading to continuous greater
advances of development, reaching the level of a super-being.

Both perceptions on reincarnation are based on the holistic theory of the world,
forming an anti-Christian worldview.

According to the Christian faith, man is not uncreated and eternal, but a creation:
not a result of God's substance, but the fruit of divine will and love. In the Old
Testament the distinction between the Maker and his creations is underlined,
between the human and the rest of creation. Only the human being is made 'in God's
image'. His position in God's world is a position of authority, which according to
God's plan translates into a position of responsibility and love on man's part
towards all of God's creation.

There is no single 'evolutionary scale' between the human and the rest of beings.
The human as 'according to the image' of the personal God, who is a communion of
persons, meaning freedom and love, is not determined according to blind laws, but
he himself participates in determining his course. Following God's plan and God's
path in respect to human existence and the meaning of his life, he remains in
communion with God and becomes a bearer of God's benefaction.

Man was created as a psychosomatic entity from the beginning; his body is not
evaluated negatively but is a blessing. This is why man's hope rests not in
'liberation' from the body, but the resurrection, imperishability and immortality
of the body.

Interpretative Deadlocks

If we accept the view that life inside the body is a fall and a state of
punishment, with the aim of instructing the soul, this creates for the faithful
person, who accepts the Scriptures as divine revelation, interpretative deadlocks.

The Holy Scriptures tell us that God made man as a psychosomatic entity and gave
him His blessing and the commandment to be fruitful and multiply and 'fill' all the
earth. If this life inside the body is a 'curse', God would not bless man. It would
not be God's will for man to be fruitful and multiply and fill the world with
'cursed' beings.

If again, we assume that Adam, in a state of pre-existence sinned, and that is why
he was incarnated ― to be punished and instructed ― then why should the same thing
happen to all the other souls, and how could the protoplasts 'multiply' as
psychosomatic entities, actually taking this multiplication as a blessing? If Adam
sinned, then only he should become incarnate and not all people.

But the Scriptures mention that God placed man in paradise and not in a 'state of
hell'. The place that God gave man as a residence was a place of 'delight' and not
punishment. That is why man is called to serve God's paradise, preserve it and not
eliminate his relation with it (Gen. 2:15).

The Holy Scriptures underline that punishment for man is not life in the body, but
exactly the contrary. God warned man that his biological life would end if he
sinned but not so if he remained faithful. If this life was a result of 'karma' and
a negative stance of man in the state of a spiritual being, then sinners should
live and the righteous should die, since this life would be considered a curse and
not being released from life.

Denial of Salvation in Christ

The dogma of karma and reincarnation nullifies the mystery of salvation in Christ.
The incarnation of the Son and Word of God constitutes the foundation of the Church
and is linked with the mystery of man's salvation (Math. 16:17-18, 1 Tim. 3:16).
His 'taking on' the whole person, not only the soul but also the body, constitutes
the manifestation of God's glory (John 1:14, Hebrews 1:1-3). It cannot be
considered negative. But these grounds for salvation are cancelled when we accept
the beliefs of karma and reincarnation.

Christ conquered death, not through the liberation from the body, but through the
resurrection and incorruptibility of the body. This change in a person's life does
not come through continuous births and deaths, but 'in a moment', during Christ's
second coming. For the Christian, there are no repeated judgements, which define
the 'quality' of a new life each time, but only one biological life and only one
judgement, which will take place in front of Christ's judgement seat. In front of
the eternal Judge man will stand not only as a soul but also as a body, to answer
for his deeds, which occurred by way of this body.

This state of 'new creation', of incorruptibility, is lived by the Christian

already in this life during the Holy Eucharist. The teaching of reincarnation,
which regards the body negatively, not only nullifies the Christian's hope in
Christ but also the meaning of divine worship, the primary purpose of the Holy
Eucharist.

Pedagogy Requires the Feeling of Responsibility

The dogma of karma and reincarnation interprets this life's negative situations
with acts which took place in a supposed previous life. For those acts, man is
called to punishment, so as to erase his 'karma' and his attachments, aiming at
complete 'liberation'.

But man is not conscious of this fact. He does not remember those deeds that
supposedly 'drove' him to a new reincarnation and to those difficulties he is now
going through. He does not remember committing those deeds, for which he is
supposedly being punished. When we accept that man is punished for things he is
unable to remember, the significance of 'pedagogy' is abolished. When there is no
memory, then punishment does not have an educative end. It could be a result of a
blind law, which nonetheless rejects the existence of a God, who directs the course
of history, who is a communion of persons ― that is, freedom and love.

'Gospel' of the Serpent

According to the Christian faith, man is not autonomous. He is by nature 'according

to the image of God', and therefore, communion and love defines the person's life
and corresponds to his real nature. However, man was made autonomous, following the
serpent's advice, that is, a 'different gospel'.

The teachings of karma and reincarnation are another expression of that same
'gospel', not of the gospel of freedom and love in Christ.

The changes that take place within a person and the 'evolutions', as they are
perceived by the followers of this dogma, occur without contact with the absolute
existence, without communion with a personal God, Who is love. Man becomes
completely autonomous. He is not conscious of the existence of a God, which can
intervene in his life. He does not seek a god outside of himself. When he is happy,
he attributes this happiness to himself and is confined within himself. When he is
unhappy, he is led into passiveness; he does not seek a way out. Nor does he seek
help from anyone outside of himself.

He who believes in karma and reincarnation sinks into his misery and does not hope.
He does not seek a God, nor anyone from his surroundings. He is expected to
passively accept his state without 'attachment'. He cannot experience faith and
gratitude for God's presence in his life. Even if he refers to 'a law of grace', it
is aimed at mechanistic and automatic consequences of a blind law, and this is why
he is called on to act without internal involvement, without 'attachment', as he
claims. Nevertheless, man is by nature a communion of persons. This is why the
complete loneliness in which the dogma of karma and reincarnation immerses its
believer constitutes an 'unnatural' state.

On the contrary, the Christian believer accepts with gratitude all states in life
and seeks a solution that is external to himself. He seeks God's face and the
communion of love with Him. This gives him a deeper meaning in life. He feels that
God does not abandon him and resides close to him, even if he faces negative
situations. For the believer, sorrows and pain hold a deeper meaning. There are no
unchangeable situations for him in life, an unalterable 'destiny', which is
determined through a blind law. A person's will and God's grace can alter the
spiritual state and life of that person. A Christian does not face anything
passively but responsibly and with awareness of God's presence in his life. The
Christian has undoubtedly abandoned the path of being distant and autonomous and
follows the path of the 'new creation' in Christ, that is, the path of gratitude,
love and hope.

The dogma of the pre-existence of the soul and of reincarnation has been condemned
by the Church as foreign to the Christian faith. Still there are guruistic,
neognostic, theosophic, occult groups which claim that the dogma of karma and
reincarnation was an integral part of Christ's teachings and of the first Church.

These views rely on occult sources and are a result of parapsychological and
spiritual practices and 'experimentation'. This means that they are the fruit of
religious convictions from a sphere outside Christianity.

The occultists project examples of 'memory' and use 'recollection' techniques. But
if they do not concern situations which can be interpreted in a different way or
cases of conscious deceit, we still find ourselves in front of 'phenomena' and
'testimonies' that are of no scientific, but only religious value. In order for
them to be accepted, one must abandon the spiritual sphere of Christian faith and
move to the sphere of Asian spirituality.

Even people within the sphere of orthodox hinduism, who believe in reincarnation,
when referring to the phenomena of so-called 'spontaneous memory', underline that
they pertain to 'demonic seizures', meaning demonic states.

There is no Continuation in the Life of Personality

The followers of reincarnation claim that on the path to 'liberation' there exists
an intermediate state in the 'cosmic spheres' of the spiritual world. In this
state, the personality of the previous life is dissolved and disappears before the
soul is reborn into a new body. However, if the soul completely rejects its
previous earthly personality, then, when it returns to life in a new reincarnation,
it does not involve the same being, but another.

So with reincarnation there is no continuity between successive lives. The

destruction and disintegration of personality of every human after death does not
differ so much from the atheistic conviction regarding man's extinction. In
reality, the only thing that gets reincarnated is karma that is broken away from
the body. This conviction has as a consequence that the being, who receives a new
body, does not have, and cannot have any memory of a former existence, so that it
can then achieve correction of its life and perfection during the coming lives.

Consequently, it is possible that 'momentarily' the reincarnation theory satisfies

some, offering an explanation for injustice and inequality, but in essence, it does
not solve the problem, since man's personality dissolves and the being that is
reincarnated does not have the required memory of those crimes for which it is
being asked to pay. M. Albrecht brings up as an example the case of Joseph Stalin.
The reincarnation of this dictator could suffer for Stalin's terrible crimes,
without retaining any memory that indicates to him that he is Joseph Stalin.
Besides, there is no indication that it is possible to ensure the 'evolution' of
Stalin's new reincarnation; he could just as well increase his 'bad karma', instead
of living a life that would drive him into 'evolution' into a new reincarnation.

But since one's personality dissolves and there is no ontological connection

between the two beings, the possibility of 'another chance' proves ungrounded.

The 'Cosmic Game'

According to the views of the Theosophical Society, faith in divine providence

leads the Church into desertion. To regain lost ground, the Christian Church needs
to replace this faith with the belief of karma and reincarnation, which completely
satisfies the evolved intelligence of modern man, argues Cooper.

But this belief constitutes a religious conviction which 'exceeds' any possibility
of guarantee in the human intellect. This is accepted in the areas of guruistic –
occult groups that preach reincarnation as a 'key solution' for man's and the
world's existential problems.

The teacher of the 'harmonious life', following guru Sai Baba's steps, referring to
'the creation of the world' and the soul's 'involvement' in karmic relations and
'tendencies', writes:
“The question comes to mind as how this cosmic game got started. How and why was
the first samskara (impression or tendency) developed.” “The origin of the universe
has been a question which has enticed the human mind into reflection ever since
we've existed on this planet.” (Robert Najemy, Universal Philosophy, p.142,90).

Najemy makes reference to various religious groups, which each “offers their own
creation stories”, but that are “beyond the capacity of our limited mind to
understand” (Universal Philosophy, p. 90). The teacher of 'harmonious life'
presents as his own answer the belief in reincarnation:

“The idea is that the spirit, for some reason, has separated from its perfect
eternal state of union with God and is experiencing life in the physical world.
Although the Spirit, in reality, remains perfect in its union with God, its
projection on the earth plane, that is, the soul in the incarnated body, loses its
awareness of that divine state. The soul then begins to experience and experiment
with the physical world by entering into physical vehicles.

“At first the soul could manifest itself only through very simple vehicles such as
one-celled organisms like amoebas. Eventually as the soul has more and more contact
with the physical world, through repeated birth and death of these various simple
forms of life, it gradually develops the ability to incarnate into more advanced
physical vehicles, such as plants, fish, insects, animals, primates and finally
human beings”. (Robert Najemy, The Mystical Circle of Life, p. 140-141).

How is it possible for the soul, which is a 'projection' and 'reflection' of the
Absolute, to lose consciousness of its godly state and start wandering about in the
material world, to obtain something that evidently it did not have, the experience
of matter? How is it possible for the perfect Spirit to be 'trapped' in matter? How
and why did it have to be firstly reincarnated into 'inferior entities', such as is
the amoeba, before it begun the 'evolutionary course' upwards? Wouldn't it be more
natural to pass through in a contrary stream towards the bottom, from a manifested
spirit to be embodied into the entity of man and then to fall further down, to
become humanoid, animal, fish, plant, amoeba, mineral, since it 'desired' to
experience all levels of matter?

We see that the belief in reincarnation does not at all satisfy the 'evolved mind
of contemporary man'. In this Robert Najemy also agrees. He writes:

“Because our conceptual ability and language are limited by the concepts of time
and space, there is no way we can understand the final truth about creation with
words or the rational mind. The answer to this question lies within the higher mind
which is able to transcend time and space and realize the answer through direct
experience of the process of creation itself. That answer is, of course,
incommunicable as our language does not offer the necessary terminology”.
(Universal Philosophy, p. 90)

The 'mind' belongs to the 'world of dualism', says Najemy. So, to arrive at an
'experienced' answer to the problem of creation, we must 'overcome' the world of
'dualism'. “However, even if once you have experienced the answer, you cannot
communicate it because it is beyond duality and beyond the comprehension of the
mind. Accepting that it has started in some way...” (Universal Philosophy, p. 142-
143).

That which the 'harmonious life' offers as an answer to the problem of how the
first 'impression or tendency' (karma) developed, and of how the soul lost
'consciousness of its godly state', constitutes a religious view, which belongs
within the sphere of Asian perception, external to the Christian sphere. This is
how this religious view is expressed:

“The stance of Universal Philosophy is that creation is not an event that took
place millions of years ago but rather a process that is eternally happening every
second.” ... “There is a void, an infinite non-physical, unchanging, unmanifest
Reality from which creation is constantly being projected somewhat in the way that
an image is projected onto a screen by a projector.” (Universal Philosophy, p. 90)

A similar religious approach is attempted by so-called 'Esoteric Christianity'.

According to the 'Esoteric Orthodoxy' of Boris Mouravvief “Orthodox Tradition
teaches that the Universe was created by a sacrifice of God...God's sacrifice is
Self-limitation by manifestation.” “...life in the Universe is nothing but a
perpetual process of creation in every domain, on every plane, and at every step.”
(Boris Mouravieff, Gnosis, Volume 1-Exoteric Cycle, p. 70,75)

D. Dorizas of 'Esoteric Christianity' expresses this referring to man's purpose in

life: “You will be able to be diffused in the same way within forms and within the
Formless and Non-manifested Essence, that exists and governs the Infinite
Universes. A purpose and aim is to become Exhalation, and exhalation is the Word.
And the Word is Flow, which is continuously recycled and perpetually transmits
consecutively in a movement and vibrations so fast, that it seems not to palpitate
or vibrate. When you become Exhalation, the Word, the Endless Flow of the Universe,
you will be absorbed into the Formless, unifying with the Formless, but without
losing the possibility to manifest yourself in Infinite ways...” (D. Dorizas, 2001,
p. 84 [translated from Greek text]).

These beliefs move externally to Christian faith, are anti-Christian teachings,

which project absolute monism and the cyclical outlook of history, meaning a
pointless 'cosmic game':

“Although this physical creation is in a constant rhythmic process of creation and

destruction, this Ultimate Reality (as Spirit or Consciousness) cannot be created
or destroyed. All of creation alternates between expansion, manifestation and
contraction then back into the latent unmanifest state. Just as we have the
rhythmic cycles of night and day, summer and winter, we have the cycles of creation
and reabsorption of the universe back into the Unmanifest.” (Universal Philosophy,
p. 91)

This endless 'cosmic game' of continuous alternation between 'expansion towards

manifestation' and 'contraction towards absence, into a latent unmanifest state',
the continuous recycling of all, cannot possibly provide us with a satisfactory
answer to the question for a deeper meaning of life. It's a religious view that
does not offer solutions but leads to dead ends. It sinks a person into an endless
loneliness.
Based on this perception, man is indeed doomed to loneliness. He is deserted to his
'destiny' helpless. Nobody can change his fate, not himself, nor another person,
not even God. He has substituted Divine Love and Divine Providence with karmic
plans, which define events in his life just like episodes of a movie, which are
projected from a machine onto a screen. In the end, what is written in the movie
will be screened, irrespectively of how philanthropic or horrific the scenes of the
'movie' are which are played in each life.

According to the perception of the teachers of reincarnation, one must not even try
to change the 'scenario' of his life. But even if he did try, it would be in vain,
as the 'movie' will be played in any case. What one is called to do is to 'play his
part' without 'identification [with things]' and without 'attachment'. It does not
matter what the role is, if it is the role of a robber or of that being robbed, a
criminal or a victim!

The behavior of others towards him is also a result of 'karmic stipulations'. The
same applies to relations formed with one's relatives, school, profession. The
'roles' change continuously from life to life. In one life one is a mother, in
another one is a father, in the next a spouse, in another they afflict him, torture
him, treat him unjustly, rob him, lead him into wretchedness and death. Under no
circumstances is there the element of responsibility for one's fellow human or the
concept of injustice. There is no God-lawgiver, who institutes ethical laws and
calls on man to follow God's path, who will lead him into the fulfillment of the
meaning of man's life, according to God's will. Man is only subject to karma's
blind law and will not have to explain himself to anybody for his actions. He is
submerged in complete loneliness.

What is important is not what one does, but if he does it with 'attachment' or
without identifying with what he does. It does not matter if his action is
considered good or bad, but if he feels it is helping him in happiness and
'evolution'. “We want to see what’s useful for our evolution and not get caught up
in concepts of sin, guilt” (Universal Philosophy, p. 207). For teachers of absolute
monism, every action, regardless of whether it's considered good or bad, “is
equally an expression of the one Universal Consciousness and thus, each deserves
the same respect and love independent of what he or she does or does not do on the
external levels.” (Universal Philosophy, p. 71)

If someone is strong, and considers it 'useful' to oppress someone weak, he may do

it, 'without attachment'. If someone else is weak and is oppressed, he must also
endure 'without attachment' or 'empathy'. Both deserve the same love and respect,
regardless of whether they are oppressors or oppressed. Nobody wrongs anybody. The
ones who perceive things differently are moving in the level of 'dualism' and are
at a low evolutionary level. This is the theoretical foundation of ethics based on
reincarnation.

There is no injustice in reality. The ones who 'do us injustice' as we think, are
only carriers of actions that, according to the 'scenario' of our life's movie,
must take place, for our evolution's sake! If we endure without protesting, we will
have learned our 'lesson' and in a future life we will advance in evolution! (self-
evolution).

It becomes obvious that the precept of karma and reincarnation does not lead to the
development of man's personality, but to its destruction; it does not nurture
relations of mutual responsibility and love between people, but the maggot of
egocentrism. This faith does not know mercy and threatens the pillars of our whole
society and civilization.
The belief of karma and reincarnation means a reversal in the evaluation of our
society. Any form of sociability is negatively evaluated, because the aim is not
the development of society in all its expressions, but abstinence from every active
and essential participation in social relations. Every such participation and
relation is considered 'empathy' or 'attachment', which creates 'karma', and leads
a person to be bound to the endless wheel of samsara, to the continuous 'torture'
of successive births and deaths. This 'cosmic game', in which man also takes part,
does not at all make sense.

Nobody doubts that each person has the right to make his religious choice, to keep
his faith in the resurrection and hope in Christ or to become a follower of
reincarnation. But this choice must take place freely. That is why, one must
realize that both of these are incompatible with each other. One cannot believe in
reincarnation without denying the hope of resurrection. He cannot say, “I look for
the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the age to come” (The Niceno-
Constantinopolitan Creed), and at the same time confess belief in karma and
reincarnation.

For these beliefs to be taught as Christian, using Christian terminology and using
the Holy Scriptures, is a pitiable error ‒ if, of course, this does not occur on
purpose ‒ otherwise it is dishonest. Either way, it causes confusion and prevents
unsuspecting people from having a free choice.

If someone wishes to choose to believe in reincarnation, they must beforehand know

that apart from the fact that this path is anti-Christian, they are not led to a
'better life' or to the 'development of man's abilities'. Because the final aim,
according to the principle of karma and reincarnation is not a better life, but the
termination of life, the 'absorption' into an impersonal 'Universal Reality'.

On the contrary, the Christian faith, according to which God, out of love, created
the world and created man 'according to His image and to His likeness', not as a
result of His divine substance, but His divine will and freedom. It offers an
answer to the question of creation and deeper meaning in man's life. This meaning
does not end in an 'absorption' of a person into the 'Universal Reality', but into
his participation in God's life 'in Jesus Christ', with the eternal communion of
love with the Holy Trinity (for more information, please see our book The Orthodox
Church: Faith-Worship-Life, Preveza 1991).

Fr. ANTHONY ALEVIZOPOULOS

Dr. Of Theology - Dr. Of Philosophy
REINCARNATION OR RESURRECTION: AN ORTHODOX OUTLOOK ON EVIL

------------------------------

REINCARNATED “CHRISTIANS”
Igumen Nikon (Vorobiev)

One life did not work out—let’s live another one?!

Or, on the superstition of reincarnation
(From a sermon on the Transfiguration)

I recalled today these two holy prophets, Moses and Elias, who appeared and
conversed with Christ during His Transfiguration, in order to clarify the Orthodox
Church’s point of view on the Hindu theory of the transmigration of souls,
otherwise known as reincarnation.
There is a need for this, because even in church settings, and now occasionally in
village churches as well, sad as it is, you find cases when in conversation with
the priest, a person who considers himself an Orthodox Christian suddenly reveals
that he (or she) believes that man lives more than once on the earth, and as
various East Indian religious systems teach, can return to this life again and
again.

Such people, whom I even find hard to call Orthodox, believe that a person’s soul
can leave one body in order to then enter a new one—the tiny body of an embryo
within its mother’s womb. In this manner, the person can as if be born again, and
that is why he forgets about all his former incarnations. And so he comes and goes
from this earth many, many different times, supposedly ever perfecting himself and
finally attaining Nirvana, that is, complete merging with the Absolute, and more
exactly, with complete non-being.

No doubt, this false theory that has reached us from India brings up many
questions; for example: How did rational, self-aware personalities (that is,
people’s souls) come to be, if the Hindu god himself is no more than a certain life
principle, and not a rational, self-aware personality (that is, he is an impersonal
god)? Who then created and determined the quantity of souls that have existed from
the beginning? Where do the new souls come from that are needed to fill the new
human bodies that have come about as a result of demographic growth of the earth’s
population? After all, if you follow this teaching’s logic, the earth’s population
should be static: as many souls as have been freed from their bodies due to death,
so many should there be new bodies (and no more) ready to receive a soul and become
a human. There are many other questions as well, but the saddest one consists in
the fact that pseudo-Christian subscribers to the idea of incarnation try by citing
Holy Scripture to prove with the Bible the objectivity of this truly diabolic
theory.

In such cases they usually cite the ninth chapter of the Gospel of Mark, where it
is told how right after the miracle of the Transfiguration, the three apostles who
witnessed it came down with their Teacher from Mount Tabor, and asked Christ: Why
say the scribes that Elias must first come? And he answered and told them, Elias
verily cometh first, and restoreth all things; and how it is written of the Son of
man, that he must suffer many things, and be set at nought. But I say unto you,
That Elias is indeed come, and they have done unto him whatsoever they listed, as
it is written of him. (Mk. 9:11-13). Explaining this passage, the cunning
“reincarnationists” say, “There, do you see? This means that Elias the prophet was
incarnate in a new body! His soul transmigrated to the body of John the Baptist,
about whom Christ said, ‘Elias came, and you did with him as you wished’! After
all, it was John the Forerunner who came before Christ, preached, and then was
killed.”

The craftiness here, dear brothers and sisters, consists as always in the
deliberately false explanation of the citation, taken out of the general context of
the Holy Scriptures. However, the Church teaches that in order to properly
understand one or another complex or controversial passage it is necessary to look
at all analogous passages of the Scriptures that talk about the same thing. Only
then will what they are saying become clear. So, what then is being said about John
the Baptist and about Elias the Prophet in the Gospel of St. Luke? Let’s open the
first chapter: But the angel said unto him, Fear not, Zacharias: for thy prayer is
heard; and thy wife Elisabeth shall bear thee a son, and thou shalt call his name
John. And thou shalt have joy and gladness; and many shall rejoice at his birth.
For he shall be great in the sight of the Lord […] And he shall go before Him in
the spirit and power of Elias (Lk. 1:13-17). From this text we learn that not man,
and not even a prophet, but the very angel of God (according to the Church’s
teaching it was the Archangel Gabriel) who completely debunks the mythological
theory of the transmigration of the Prophet Elias’s soul into a new body.

From the words of the Archangel it becomes perfectly obvious that the new prophet,
who is yet to be born, will have the same spiritual power as the Prophet Elias had,
and acquire the same Divine Spirit. But besides this text we should take into
consideration also the prophecy that was spoken long before the Birth of Christ by
the Prophet Malachi concerning the future service of the Prophet Elias, who had
been taken up by God from the material world into the spiritual world long before
Malachi’s time. From Malachi’s prophecy it becomes clear that Elias the prophet
will again appear on the earth directly before the end of the world and the onset
of the Last Judgment. The Creator speaks precisely about this through the lips of
the prophet: Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the coming of the
great and dreadful day of the Lord: And he shall turn the heart of the fathers to
the children, and the heart of the children to their fathers, lest I come and smite
the earth with a curse (Mal. 4:5-6).

This prophecy, as we have already said, is completely consistent with the

Revelation of St. John the Theologian, and that is just how the entire fullness of
God’s Church understands it. Thus we see, firstly, that Elias the prophet is
preserved by God till the day of the Second Coming of Christ in his former, albeit
changed body; secondly, that throughout the entire age up to that moment his soul
did not transmigrate anywhere, and in fact it cannot transmigrate; and thirdly,
that he will come in that same body. Well then, tell me any of you
“reincarnationists” standing here: Into whom did the soul of Elias the Prophet
transmigrate if he is now here on Mount Tabor, standing next to Christ and talking
about His coming pain and suffering on the cross?...

But here is yet another proof of the falsehood of your theory of reincarnation,
which you are trying to justify with the help of the Gospels. Next to Christ, the
apostles see on Mount Tabor one other prophet of God—Moses. It would follow that
throughout the entire fifteen centuries that passed from the day he died to the
Birth of Christ, Moses did not reincarnate into a single other person?! Otherwise,
it would not have been Moses standing there next to Christ but an entirely
different person! Only it would be interesting to know which one, beginning from
Moses. After all, during these fifteen centuries his soul should have gone through
a multitude of bodily casings, each time not knowing anything at all about its
previous incarnation. Just the same, Moses on Mount Tabor saw himself as Moses! And
the apostles also knew that this was Moses. How did they know? Through the Spirit
of God, of course. Thus, the appearance of the Prophets Elias and Moses during the
Transfiguration of our Lord Jesus Christ show us plainly that no reincarnations
ever existed and do not exist. This is an absolutely false theory. But who needs
it?

Igumen Nikon (Vorobiev)

Translation by OrthoChristian.com

8/20/2014

Josie 6/23/2019 4:58 am

In Hasidic Judaism, an Eastern European movement over 200 years plus old,
reincarnation is believed & it’s not the same per say as Indian beliefs about
reincarnation,in Judaism it’s about coming back to have another go at fulfilling
ones mission as given by hashem, when you have you get a place in the next life.
It’s said by them that a murderer is reincarnated as a victim of murder as
punishment & that a convert to Judaism was a Jew in a former life who didn’t study
Torah & observe the 600+ laws applicable to them post temple destruction.
There are Jews in India that it’s said to be a lost tribe and they weren’t in
contact with the rest of Jewry ,so it’s not from them that this comes from

Benjamin Chung9/17/2014 3:50 pm

I had this very problem...someone mentioned that very verse about elias to suggest
that reincarnation is truth.....now I know that reincarnation is in fact false! And
the proof of it is given here. May truth reign forever! Amen

------------------------------------

CAN THE GOSPEL OF THE BLIND MAN BE USED TO SUPPORT BELIEF IN REINCARNATION?

Hieromonk Job (Gumerov). Photo: Anton Pospelov/Pravoslavie.ru

Hieromonk Job (Gumerov). Photo: Anton Pospelov/Pravoslavie.ru
Question:
We can look at the story about the blind man in the Gospel of St. John as yet
another testimony to the existence in early Christianity of belief in
reincarnation. Jesus walks past a man who was “blind from birth”. The disciples
ask, “Master, who did sin, this man, or his parents, that he was born blind?” Jesus
answered, “Neither hath this man sinned, nor his parents: but that the works of God
should be made manifest in him.” The most important phrase here is the disciple’s
question: “Who did sin, this man, or his parents, that he was born blind?” How
should we understand the first explanation that the man suffered for his own sins?
By including this in the Gospels, the author lets us know that he accepts
reincarnation as a logical explanation for the fact that people are born with
different problems. He would not have paid any attention to the question of sins as
the reason for being born blind if he did not believe that the man had not had
previous lives in which he sinned.

Answer:

The idea of reincarnation completely contradicts biblical teaching. And as it is

appointed unto men once to die, but after this the judgment: So Christ was once
offered to bear the sins of many; and unto them that look for him shall he appear
the second time without sin unto salvation (Heb. 9:27–28). The emphasis in this
citation is on the words that in both the Old and New Testaments are at the
theological core of the teaching on human life and death: to die but once.
Throughout all the books of Holy Scripture runs the portrayal of man as the image
and likeness of God, of the uniqueness and unrepeatable nature of each and every
human individual. The belief that a soul can reincarnate and become different human
being is utterly incompatible with this.

But man dieth, and wasteth away: yea, man giveth up the ghost, and where is he?
(Job 16:22 [KJV]). But my years are numbered and their end come, and I shall go by
the way by which I shall not return (Job 16:22 [Seputagint]).

If the author of this biblical book says that after death he will “go by the way
which he shall not return”, what does this have in common with the teaching that
after death a person receives a new body so that he can live another life?

Righteous Job expresses this thought many times:

For the sea wastes in length of time, and a river fails and is dried up. And man
that has lain down in death shall certainly not rise again till the heaven be
dissolved, and they shall not awake from their sleep. For oh that thou hadst kept
me in the grave, and hadst hidden me until thy wrath should cease, and thou
shouldest set me a time in which thou wouldest remember me! For if a man should
die, shall he live again, having accomplished the days of his life? I will wait
till I exist again? (Job 14:11–14 [Septuagint]).

One gets the impression that modern-day Western adherents to the idea of
reincarnation have so completely lost their Christian roots that they have never
once read the Bible in its entirety; they only know those portions that interest
them and in which they vainly seek proof of their false ideas.

Because man has gone to his eternal home, and the mourners have gone about the
market: before the silver cord be let go, or the choice gold be broken, or the
pitcher be broken at the fountain, or the wheel run down to the cistern; before the
dust also return to the earth as it was, and the spirit return to God who gave it
(Eccl. 12:5-7).

This theological concept is quite clear: immediately after his death man goes to
another world (to his eternal home), and not to another body.

Holy Scripture says most definitely that the soul leaves the body after death and
remains in a bodiless state.

For to me to live is Christ, and to die is gain. But if I live in the flesh, this
is the fruit of my labour: yet what I shall choose I wot not. For I am in a strait
betwixt two, having a desire to depart, and to be with Christ; which is far better:
Nevertheless to abide in the flesh is more needful for you (Phil 1:21–24).

The explanation given in the above-cited letter concerning the Gospel of the
healing the man born blind is a typical example of dilettantism. The author of this
letter has forayed into a realm about which she knows nothing; that is, she is not
familiar with the realities of Old Testament life. The disciples asked their
Teacher whether the man or his parents sinned because at that time there existed an
opinion amongst the rabbis that a child could have good or evil feelings from the
time of his conception in the mother’s womb, and is therefore capable of sinning.
These opinions were reflected in rabbinical literature. In the Midrash Ga-Gadol for
Gen. 25:32 it says that Esau was born first because while yet in the womb, he
threatened Jacob that he would kill their mother if he does not yield first place
to him. These ideas may seem quite strange to us, but here is what is important
about them: they were afoot in Judaic society, and they are what Jesus’ disciples
had in mind when they asked Him their question.

Those who believe in reincarnation also take for an example the passage in the
Gospels where the Jews ask the great Prophet John the Forerunner, Art thou Elias?
And he saith, I am not. Art thou that prophet? And he answered, No (Jn. 1:21). The
obvious absurdity of taking this to be proof of the soul’s reincarnation can be
seen in fact that the fiery Prophet Elias was taken alive into Heaven, which means
that he did not die, and that he never left his body. In the Gospels it is stated
outright about St. John the Baptist: he shall go before him in the spirit and power
of Elias (Lk. 1:17), and not in some mythical reincarnation. Questions arose also
because the Jews of that time considered that the ancient prophets could be
resurrected by the Lord and appear among the people. And there came a fear on all:
and they glorified God, saying, that a great prophet is risen up among us; and,
that God hath visited his people (Lk. 7:16). Herod the tetrarch thought that the
Savior was the resurrected John the Baptist, and some thought that Elias had
appeared; and … others, that one of the old prophets was risen again (Lk. 9:8).

Further completely foiling any attempts to find the idea of reincarnation in the
Holy Bible is the parable of Lazarus and the rich man:

And it came to pass, that the beggar died, and was carried by the angels into
Abraham's bosom: the rich man also died, and was buried; And in hell he lift up his
eyes, being in torments, and seeth Abraham afar off, and Lazarus in his bosom (Lk.
16:22–23).

No reincarnation here. Both of them died and found themselves in the world beyond
the grave: And as it is appointed unto men once to die, but after this the judgment
(Heb. 9:27).

The teaching of reincarnation has no evidence to support it. There are no examples
in the world in which man lives that could prove the laws of karma to be true. That
teaching agrees with neither Christian ethics, nor common sense, nor science. Any
reliance upon “recollections of past lives” is discounted by the field of
psychology, which has sufficiently studied the syndrome of false recollections.

Now the Spirit speaketh expressly, that in the latter times some shall depart from
the faith, giving heed to seducing spirits (1 Tim. 4:1).

Hieromonk Job (Gumerov)

5/19/2012

---------------------------------

Ancient Fathers on Reincarnation

Posted on June 23, 2020 | by Fr. George Maximov | Source

In view of the high prevalence of the idea of “transmigration of souls” in modern

society, it seems useful to pay attention to what our saints and other Orthodox
authors wrote about it. Many ancient saints of the Church were familiar with the
idea of reincarnation and gave it a quite specific assessment.

Thus, St. Epiphanius of Cyprus in his heresiological work “Panarion” mentions among
the heresies of Hellenic philosophers that “Pythagoras … allowed the migration of
souls from one body to another, even to the bodies of animals and wild beasts …
Plato … also allowed the migration of souls into the bodies, even those of the
beasts”.

Blessed Theodoritus of Cyrus writes, “Pythagoras fantasized about the migration of

souls, saying that they pass not only into the bodies of the speechless animals,
but also into plants. The same fable was followed by Plato. Manes and the impious
cohort of the so-called Gnostics took it to claim that it was a kind of punishment…
But the Church of the pious is disgusted by these and similar fables and, following
the words of God, believes that the bodies will be resurrected, the souls will be
judged with the bodies, those who lived viciously will be tormented, and those who
cared about virtues will be rewarded “.

Many Holy Fathers mentioned the idea of the transmigration of souls and always
condemned it as a delusion incompatible with the Christian faith. One can remember
here, in particular, St. John Chrysostom, who wrote, “As for the soul, the pagan
philosophers left the most disgraceful doctrine about it; they said that the human
souls become flies, mosquitoes, trees; they claimed that God himself is a soul, and
fantasized many other absurdities … There is nothing surprising in Plato, except
this one thing … If you cleanse this philosopher’s opinions from rhetorical
embellishments, you will see a lot of abominations, especially when he
philosophizes about the soul, both glorifying it and humiliating it without measure
… Sometimes he says that the soul is related to the divine being; and sometimes,
having exalted it so excessively and so wickedly, insults it to the other extreme
by introducing it into pigs and donkeys and other animals, even worse ones.”

We see a similar attitude in other saints, in particular St. Irenaeus of Lyon, St.
Gregory of Nyssa, St. Cyril of Alexandria, Blessed Jerome of Stridon and St.
Gregory Palamas.

Finally, the doctrine of reincarnation was condemned by the Orthodox Church at the
Council of Constantinople in 1076. The third paragraph of its decree read:

“Those who accept the reincarnation of human souls … and as a result, reject the
resurrection, the trial and the final reward for life – anathema”.

-----------------------------------

SOME OF MY BEST FRIENDS ARE HERETICS

WHAT DO ORTHODOX REALLY BELIEVE?
by Paul Ladouceur | Ελληνικά | српски

Orthodox pride themselves on belonging to the “one, holy, catholic and apostolic
church” founded by Jesus Christ—and with good reason. Orthodox point to the
loftiness of Orthodox theology, the beauty and solemnity of its liturgy, its
mystical spirituality, the holiness of its saints, and the transcendentalism of its
icons, liturgical music, and religious architecture. For many Orthodox, the
Orthodox Church is the sole Church of Christ, and other Christian ecclesial bodies
are decidedly “lesser,” perhaps not truly Christian, or at best “incomplete.”

But Orthodoxy on the ground, the actual beliefs and practices of Orthodox faithful,
Orthodoxy as “lived religion,” yields a different picture. Lived religion focuses
the beliefs, practices and everyday experiences of religious persons. Most lived
religion studies of Orthodoxy concentrate on measurable practices such as
attendance at church services, personal prayer, and fasting, with little attention
to religious beliefs. There are a few exceptions. The Pew Research Center report on
Religious Belief and National Belonging in Central and Eastern Europe (2017)
examines contemporary Orthodoxy in major countries of Eastern Orthodox tradition.
Results of this report were incorporated into the broader study Orthodox
Christianity in the 21st Century (also 2017), which focuses mainly on geographic
and demographic aspects of Orthodoxy, with attention to religious practices and to
opinions concerning the church’s positions on issues such as divorce, married
priests, women priests, and same-sex marriage. Questions concerning religious
beliefs cover basic beliefs in God, heaven, hell, miracles, the soul, and the
Bible. But an astonishingly high percent of Orthodox hold non-Christian beliefs
such as fate (70%), the evil eye (53%), magic, sorcery or witchcraft (40%), and
reincarnation (25%). More Orthodox Christians than Catholics in the region believe
in the evil eye and magic and sorcery, and differences between Catholics and
Orthodox concerning reincarnation are minimal. And considerably more people (59% to
75%) in countries of Orthodox tradition believe in fate than in the secularized
Czech Republic (32%).

A more personal indicator of religious belief comes from responses to a

questionnaire completed by students taking courses in Orthodox theology in Montreal
and Toronto. The students were adults, mostly Orthodox, studying theology from
personal interest. The questionnaire was intended to test a “hunch” (hypothesis)
that most Orthodox, even reasonably well-informed, practicing Orthodox, have
difficulty spontaneously identifying or articulating major Orthodox tenets. The
students were asked to mark each of thirteen statements as “Orthodox” or “Not
Orthodox”:
1. Tradition is the memory of things past.

2. Dogma is all the Orthodox Church believes and teaches.

3. The Bible is the word of God and is superior to Tradition.

4. Apophatic or negative theology means that we cannot know anything about God.

5. God is One because the three Persons of the Trinity share the same divine
essence.

6. Because God is present in all things, God and Creation are one.

7. In the Old Testament, God revealed himself as the Father, in the New Testament,
as the Son, and since Pentecost, as the Holy Spirit.

8. In Christ, the divine Son of God, is united with the human Jesus born of the
Virgin Mary.

9. According to Cyril of Alexandria’s Christological formula “One nature of God the

Word incarnate” (mía phýsis toû theoû lógou sesarkōménē), after the Incarnation,
Christ has a divine-human nature.

10. The Holy Spirit derives his being from the Father and the Son.

11. The Virgin Mary was immaculate because she was free from original sin.

12. We are saved because Christ’s sacrifice appeases the offence against the Father
caused by Adam’s transgression and our sins.

13. God’s love and mercy are such that in the end all will be saved.

Admittedly, the quiz was hastily prepared; some statements are subtly or
ambiguously worded (some deliberately so); some could be more carefully crafted.
Nonetheless, the results reveal something of the state of knowledge of the small
“population”—25 respondents.

The statements are framed such that none, as written, can be considered “Orthodox”
in the light of mainstream ancient and modern Orthodox teachings.[1] Some express
ancient doctrines declared erroneous (heretical) by ecumenical councils, some
reflect Catholic theology, and some Reformed theology. The closest to unanimity in
the responses concerned, unsurprisingly, the doctrine of the Filioque: 24 of 25
respondents recognized this as non-Orthodox. Only one respondent correctly
identified that none of the statements is Orthodox. Individual respondents named
between one and eight statements as Orthodox. The most problematic statements
relate to divine unity (statement 5, with 21 “votes” as Orthodox), and Christology
(statements 8, 10 votes; and 9, 18 votes). Eight statements (1, 2, 3, 4, 10, 11,
12, 13) garnered 2 to 4 votes.

The upshot of this exercise is not so much to point the finger at respondents’
erroneous beliefs as to highlight the gap between Orthodox theology, worship, and
actual beliefs of ordinary faithful—in fact, not so “ordinary,” since these were
theology students.

Orthodox neo-traditionalists are quick to label non-Orthodox Christians as

“heretics” because they profess non-Orthodox doctrines. “Outside the Orthodox
Church, there are only heresies and schisms” reflects this attitude. The underlying
assumption is that of course all Orthodox are quite “orthodox” in their beliefs,
since they are members of the one true Church of Christ, which is “without spot or
blemish” (Eph 5:27). The two sources used here suggest that the situation among the
faithful is otherwise.

Orthodox stress that worship and theology in Orthodoxy are harmonious. Typically,
though, more attention is paid to worship—especially regular participation in the
prayer of the Church, in rites and rituals—and much less to the content of the
faith, to theology, resulting in a gap between worship and theology suggested by
the examples here.

Neo-traditionalists would have us believe that profession of the one true faith is
the necessary key to the Kingdom of Heaven, the “membership card” automatically
acquired by members of the Orthodox Church.[2] But what does this membership card
mean when few Orthodox card-holders can identify or express Orthodox doctrine on
key issues? Yes, all Orthodox can recite or sing the Nicene Creed, but beyond its
actual words, how many can articulate correctly even major Orthodox dogmas and
teachings?

Does this mean that those who hold non-Orthodox beliefs (including non-Christian,
even superstitious beliefs) are not Orthodox, maybe even “heretics”? This category
may include a large majority of baptized and practicing Orthodox. Can they be saved
despite their erroneous beliefs? “Heresy” is a powerful, emotionally-charged
accusation which is best left in history books rather than being applied to our
contemporary brothers and sisters in Christ, both Orthodox and non-Orthodox.
Salvation is based on more than beliefs and formal membership in a particular
Christian body.

Indeed, are more than a few Orthodox characterized by Fr. John Erickson’s pithy
remark about “Eucharisticized pagans”? Perhaps we all are? On the evening before
his assassination, Fr. Alexander Men reminded his audience that “Christianity is
just beginning.”

[1] The interpretation of Cyril of Alexandria’s Christological formula in Statement

9 could be acceptable to some Oriental (non-Chalcedonian) Orthodox, but not to
Eastern (Chalcedonian) Orthodox, because it appears to violate the Chalcedonian
principle of “no (con)fusion” of the two natures of Christ.
[2] For a more elaborate version: “On Ecumenoclasm: Anti-Ecumenism in Orthodox
Theology,” St Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly, 61:3 (2017), 323-355.

I am grateful to Brandon Gallaher for helpful comments on this post.

Paul Ladouceur is Adjunct Professor, Orthodox School of Theology at Trinity College

(University of Toronto) and Professeur associé, Faculté de théologie et de sciences
religieuses, Université Laval (Québec).

Public Orthodoxy seeks to promote conversation by providing a forum for diverse

perspectives on contemporary issues related to Orthodox Christianity. The positions
expressed in this essay are solely the author’s and do not necessarily represent
the views of the editors or the Orthodox Christian Studies Center.

------------------------------

Flesh and Fire: Reincarnation and Universal Salvation in the Early Church

Charles Stang, director of the Center for the Study of World Religions and
Professor of Early Christian Thought, delivered the first Price Lecture of 2019 at
Trinity Church Boston on March 10, 2019.
♦♦♦

First of all, I’d like to thank Bill, Patrick, and Rita, and the entire Trinity
community for the opportunity to be with you this afternoon and to share my passion
for early Christian thought. It’s a great honor to give one of this year’s Price
lectures.

I’d like to begin my talk with the image on your handout. It is a modern icon, by
an iconographer named Eileen McGuckin. There are no ancient icons of Origen because
he was declared a heretic in the sixth century, almost exactly 300 years after his
death, and the orthodox church does not generally preserve icons of heretics. The
fact that a modern orthodox iconographer has chosen to paint or “write” an icon of
Origen suggests that there are others, like me, who would like to see him
rehabilitated in the church. I will return to the circumstances that led to his
condemnation later, but right now I want to draw your attention to a fantastic
irony embedded in the icon. You will notice that Origen is preaching from a pulpit,
from a scroll that reads, “attend above all else to the reading of the scriptures.”
Below him bent in pious attention to his words, are a crowd of characters,
including in the first row, right to left, Gregory of Nazianzus, Gregory
Thaumaturgus or the “Wonder-Worker,” Melania the Elder, Maximus the Confessor, and
Gregory of Nyssa. Behind them are rows of other mothers and fathers of the early
church, from both the Greek and Latin traditions.

If these names are unknown to you, suffice to say they are the men and women whom
the tradition remembers as the architects and defenders of Christian orthodoxy, the
authors and advocates of the Christian councils and creeds. Collectively they are
“the saints” and we can read their names from the saintly halos around each of
their heads. Notice, however, that Origen has no halo: he is not a saint. The icon
captures the historical irony that this heretic taught the saints. These saints
were avid readers of Origen, in some cases even anthologizing or translating his
work for wider audiences. What does this mean for the ongoing relationship of
orthodoxy and heresy? What does it mean that the architects of orthodoxy drunk deep
from the well of a man whose views were subsequently regarded as beyond the pale?
Is his influence still felt in the tradition as if it were an underground river, a
source of sustenance just beneath the orthodox surface? And is it time to bring
that source to the surface?

***

Origen was born in Alexandria in the late second century to Christian parents who
gave him a pagan name: Ôrigenês, “child of Horus,” the falcon-headed sky god of the
Egyptian pantheon. His was a life bookended by persecution: his father killed for
his faith when Origen was only sixteen years old; Origen himself died from tortures
suffered under the persecution of the emperor Decius in the year 253 or 254. His
tormenters wanted him to yield so that they would have a prominent apostate with
which to embarrass the church. That he did not yield, or die in their custody, but
expired only later from his wounds meant that he was not, strictly speaking, like
his father, a “martyr”—a witness to his faith unto death. He was only a
“confessor.” Ironically, had he died a martyr, he probably would never have been
condemned as a heretic, because martyrdom tended to inoculate someone from the
suspicion of heresy. If you died for the faith, this reasoning went, then you must
have been held the right belief, orthodoxia.

Between these violent bookends, Origen led a life of learning. Nicknamed

“Adamantius,” he was the first “man of steel”—although it is perhaps better to
think of the etymology of this title, adamas or “untameable,” for there is indeed
something wild and untamed about his thinking. He was a scholar, a teacher, and a
daring thinker.

(Re)incarnation
As my title suggests, I will be speaking about reincarnation and universal
salvation in Origen’s theology. But in order to understand what he says or suggests
about reincarnation, we need to know what he says about incarnation, both our own
incarnation and Christ’s. And in order to appreciate what Origen says about
incarnation we must first enter the landscape of his mind, and it is in many ways
alien territory. A good place to begin is the Book of Genesis, and its first two
chapters. Origen was not the first ancient reader to notice that Genesis seemed to
have two creation stories, not one: in the first, God creates the world and all
that is in it, including humankind, over the course of six days; in the second, God
creates Adam “from the dust of the ground,” then Eve from Adam’s rib, and then the
two of them run afoul of a serpent in the garden and are banished by God from this
Eden. Origen noticed that the two verbs used to describe the creation of humankind
in each story were different. In the first story, we read that “God made (epoiêsen)
the human, according to divine image he made (epoiêsen) it” (Genesis 1:27). God
“made”—Epoiêsen from poiein, “to make”—from whence we get “poetry.” In the second
story, we read that “God formed (eplasen) the human, dust from the earth, and
breathed into his face a breath of life, and the man became a living being”
(Genesis 2:7). God “formed”—Eplasen from plassein, “to form” or “to mold”—from
whence we get “plastic.”

Certain that every detail and difference in the Scriptures is significant, Origen
insisted that these two verbs, and these two stories, tell us of two distinct
creations. Origen says that God first made us as minds—the Greek word for mind is
nous, but in Greek this word is not so much a faculty of cognition (as we think of
mind) as it is a faculty of contemplation, intuition, and receptivity. Origen
equates the mind with the spirit (pneuma), the highest element in the tripartite
division of spirit, soul, and body. For Origen, the sole purpose of the original
mind-spirits was to contemplate their creator. Something distracted them, however,
some movement within themselves, some force eating away at their powers of
attention. All of the them, except one, turned away from God to varying degrees,
and God formed these fallen minds into angels, humans, and demons depending on the
degree of their distraction. Around them all he formed a world in which to house
them, to heal them, to restore them. If we were once God’s own poems, we have now
become like living plastics, stiff and rigid and enduring over many lifetimes.

So, we were first made as minds, and as minds we were made in the image of God,
imago dei. And since, as the scriptures tell us, “God is a consuming fire” (Deut.
4:24, 9:3; Heb. 12:29), minds were made in the image of this fire. In fact, they
were made to be like irons in the great fire of God: as long as they were plunged
into the fire, they were aflame. But just like irons, when they were removed from
God’s fire, they cooled and became evermore solid and slow. This cooling is our
mythological descent into souls and bodies, the fall into flesh.

For Origen, all of this is by God’s design. Our fall into flesh is in fact our
opportunity for rehabilitation. The original fiery mind moved quickly, too quickly,
and so it was easily distracted. The descent into this world slows the mind down,
now encumbered by a soul and a body, and trains it over many, many lifetimes to pay
steadier attention. Whenever we successfully pay steady attention to anything, this
or that, we inch closer to contemplation, and we blaze just a little brighter.

This rehabilitation, by the way, is something we share with our sibling minds, the
angels and demons. They too were fiery minds; they too have fallen. Angels help us
along the way, and demons hinder us—just like siblings (I’ve got six of them, so I
know). The transformation from flesh to fire must be free, Origen thought, and thus
it will take a long, long time: many, many lifetimes, and perhaps successive
worlds. In order for God to be “all in all,” as the apostle Paul promises, Origen
insisted that all the fallen minds must eventually be restored. He believed the
apostle Peter foretold of this when he spoke in the Acts of the Apostles 3:21 of a
“restoration of all things” (apokatastasis pantôn). Origen took Peter at his word:
all things, all the fallen minds, including Satan, must be restored—in other words,
he insisted on universal salvation, but worked out across many lifetimes and
successive worlds—in other words, reincarnation. In the end, the apokatastasis, the
last to be saved will be Satan. “Satan” is simply the name we give to the mind that
fell furthest, the mind most stubbornly entrenched in sin and ignorance.

Not everyone in his day, or since, has appreciated Origen’s insistence on universal
salvation, that God will not cease until all the fallen minds are gathered once
again around their creator. If pressed, Origen will even acknowledge that, strictly
speaking, “Satan” will never be saved, because by the time that fallen mind we now
call “Satan” is slowly and painfully rehabilitated, it will no longer bear the name
“Satan.” If it is fully restored, that soul, like any other, will bear the name
“Christ.” Clever as it is, this move has never seemed to satisfy those critics who
are certain that God intends eternal torment for the damned.

Two models of incarnation: ‘husk and kernel’ and ‘states of matter’

So, flesh and fire: these are, in the words of Ralph Waldo Emerson, the walls
between which the human being swings. Our core identity, as it were, is fire; our
accreted identity is flesh. And somehow the fall from fire to flesh helps
rehabilitate and restore ourselves. But how? How does our core identity as minds—an
identity we share, by the way, with demons and angels—how does our core identity
relate to our accreted identity, that is, to the souls and bodies that are part of
our human condition here and now? Are these two identities fully distinct? And if
so, what does the core identity have to gain, what does it have to learn, from the
accreted identity? What is the good, in other words, of our having souls and
bodies?

There are many ways to answer this question, but I wish to offer two models, both
of which can be found in Origen’s own writings. The first model we might call the
‘kernel and husk’ model, or indeed, the ‘core and accretion’ model. According to
this line of thinking, the human, like the demon and the angel, was first created
as a naked nous, a mind whose sole aim was to contemplate its creator. When this
mind fell, however, and was given a new place in the order of creation, it was
given a soul and a body to enable its new life. The soul and the body are like the
husk of a kernel, or the accretions on a mineral core. Imagine a Russian doll,
where the largest doll is your body, in which is neatly nestled your soul, and in
which is nestled you soul. This model for understanding the relationship between
spirit, soul, and body makes some intuitive sense: we can imagine the mind needing
to take on layers of clothing in order to inhabit its new world, or it acquiring
accretions of soul and body as it descends into this world. But this model also
raises certain crucial questions. If the mind is distinct from its encasements, how
do these encasements help the mind learn and grow? How do soul and body help the
spirit’s slow rehabilitation? And even if we could explain how soul and body
somehow help rehabilitate the spirit, still we would run into the question of
whether, in the final apokatastasis or “restoration of all things,” the soul and
the body would simply fall away, as the mind is returned to its rightful nakedness
before God. What would such a model, for example, mean for the doctrine of the
resurrection of the body? I will return that question near the end of my lecture.

The second model we might call the ‘spectrum’ model, or as I prefer, ‘states of
matter.’ The defining image in On First Principles is that of fire. As said, Origen
suggests that the unfallen mind was like an iron in the fire of God: “receiving the
fire throughout all its pores and veins and becoming wholly fire, provided that the
fire is never removed from it and it itself is not separated from the fire.” But of
course, with The Fall, the iron was separated from the fire, and it cooled. Here
Origen famously muses about the etymology of the word for soul, psyche [handout]:

As God therefore is fire, and the angels a flame of fire (Exod. 3:2), and the
saints are all aglow with the Spirit (Rom. 12:11), so, on the contrary, those who
have fallen away from the love of God are undoubtedly said to have cooled in their
love for him and to have become cold … If, then, those things which are holy are
termed fire and light and aglow, while those which are contrary are termed cold,
and if the love of sinners is said to grow cold, it must be asked whether perhaps
even the word ‘soul’ (which in Greek is ψυχή) is so called from a cooling down from
a more divine or better condition, and has been transplanted, that is, it is seen
to have cooled down from that natural and divine warmth, and therefore to have been
placed in its present position with its present designation … From all these
things, this appears to be shown, that the intellect, falling away from its status
or dignity, was made or named soul; and if restored and corrected, it returns to
being an intellect.

On this model, we are not minds encased in souls and bodies; neither cores with
accretions nor kernels with husks. Rather, our souls and our bodies are simply our
fiery minds in different ‘states of matter.’ Just as water exists as solid, liquid,
and gas, so too do we. As in physics, where the main difference between states of
matter is the density of the particles, so too with the Fall we descend into
density. We began as God’s poetry and have descended into plasticity. And if body,
soul, and spirit are on this material spectrum, then it is easier to understand how
the spirit might learn something about itself and its world by sojourning in cooler
and denser states, namely in soul and in body.

I have already quoted Ralph Waldo Emerson. Emerson was hardly an ardent Origenist.
As far as I know, he mentioned Origen only once, and in passing, in an essay on
Plutarch. But, appropriately enough, in his essay “The Poet,” Emerson identifies
these two models of incarnation in his own way. According to the first, he says
[handout], “[w]e were put into our bodies, as fire is put into a pan, to be carried
about; but there is no accurate adjustment between the spirit and the organ, much
less the latter the germination of the former.” The problem that attends this first
model is this: if we imagine ourselves as fire put into a pan or a lamp, then we
are left wondering what analogy exists between the fire and the form that holds and
sustains it. If we persist of thinking of them as distinct, we are left so
bewildered by the question of whether an “accurate adjustment” can obtain between
the two that we rarely ask the deeper question: whether the form might itself be
the outgrowth of the fire, whether the body might be the spirit in a different
state of matter. This second model is in fact precisely what Emerson goes on to
endorse: “[in fact] we are not pans and barrows, nor even porters of the fire and
torch-bearers, but children of the fire, made of it, and only the same divinity
transmuted, and at two or three removes, when we know least about it.” To my mind,
Emerson has captured Origen’s view perfectly. We are children of fire, which is to
say that we are children of God. At our best, we are at one remove: irons in the
fire of God, in Origen’s words, “becoming wholly fire.” At our worst, we are at two
or three removes: fire cooled into soul, soul cooled into body. We are, in
Emerson’s words, “divinity transmuted” and the degree of our remove is indexed to
our knowledge, both of ourselves and of God.

One of the consequences of this second incarnational model is this: our slow
rehabilitation and restoration, which will take place over many lifetimes and in
successive worlds, is not a process of shedding the body or the soul, but rather of
transforming them both, or as Emerson put it, transmuting them. The goal, then, is
not escape, but transformation. All flesh must once again become fire.

For Origen, “Christ” is the name we give to that single mind that did not falter in
its loving attention to God its maker, the one mind whose fiery ardor did not cool.
The fact that Origen places Christ on this side of the distinction between creature
and creator is no small matter. For Origen, insofar as Christ is a created mind, he
is the same as his sibling minds, who eventually become angels, humans, and demons.
Origen is clear as day about this; he insists, “it cannot be doubted that the
nature of [Christ’s] soul was the same as all others.” In the beginning, we were
all as Christ is—in rapt and loving attention of God our creator. You could say,
then, that before our fall, we were all Christs.

We know what happened to us—we cooled; fire became flesh; we descended into denser
states of matter. But what is the good of this descent? How does this cooling serve
to help us return to our former fiery selves? If our original sin was some
primordial lapse in our attention, some movement within us that broke our rapt
contemplation, and if God’s punishment must also be a remedy, then our descent into
souls and bodies must somehow serve to train our faculty of attention, our powers
of contemplation. But how could acquiring souls and bodies help train our minds?
The soul is what gives a naked mind the power of sense perception in this world.
But what good is sense perception in training the mind for contemplation, when the
senses present only a vast array of distractions, of things other than God to
attend to? And imagine the challenges of embodiment in the ancient world. Even if
you manage to stave off death until a ripe old age, embodiment presents a series of
distractions from the life of the mind: childbirth, the burdens of parenting,
disease, famine, never mind war and, for Christians such as Origen, state
persecution. How could embodiment be imagined as somehow the remedy for wayward
minds?

My suspicion is that the answer lay close to what I said earlier about states of
matter, namely that the descent from higher to lower states of matter has to do
with density. The mind becomes denser, heavier, as it cools into a soul and a body.
The density of our current condition is a remedy because it trains our minds to
attend to God while burdened with our own new weight. It is as if our minds before
the fall were like birds: aloft and fast as lightning; but instead of holding
formation around their source, they began to flit this way and that, looking for
sustenance elsewhere, in vain. When God ordained their descent, God did not strip
them of their wings, as happens to the hapless souls in Plato’s famous dialogue,
the Phaedrus. Instead, their wings acquired more and more weight, and perhaps so
much weight they forget that they were made to fly. But they must learn to fly
again, even with their newly burdened wings. Perhaps our souls and bodies, then,
are the new weight of our wings. And wings that take flight even when so burdened
are wings that more likely to stay aloft and steady in their formation.

Let me explore this idea a bit more by turning to the question of Christ’s own
incarnation. We know why we were incarnated: according to Origen, we deserved it,
and it serves as a slow therapy for our wayward minds. But the mind of Christ did
not deserve incarnation—he is the only one who did not. He descends to our
condition not out of any just deserts, but out of sheer love for us, his siblings—
what Paul calls philanthropia (Tit. 3:4). Christ’s sojourn among us serves as a
model of how a mind can maintain its unbroken contemplation of its creator, and can
do so while being weighted down with a soul and a body. And the very soul and body
Christ took on were especially weighted down—oppressed, you might say—as a first-
century Jew under Roman occupation, among a long-suffering people waiting for
rescue. So, even with these burdened wings, Christ was able to stay aloft.

And yet what of the crucifixion? What further challenge to contemplation could be
imagined than dying on a cross? Origen says very little about Christ’s crucifixion
in On First Principles, but what he does say is quite revealing. He explains that
“the aid of the Author and Creator himself was required, which restores the
discipline, which had been corrupted and profaned, of obeying to the one and of
ruling to the other.” Those who had been given rule had corrupted that rule. And
naturally those who were ruled were not keen to obey those rulers. This doesn’t
mean, however, that Christ took on flesh so as to teach Romans how to be better
rulers, and Jews better subjects. This worldly political conflict was just the
latest and lowest instance of a cosmic conflict among created minds, who were not
able to obey God’s command because they were not able to rule over their own unruly
passions. Minds were created with free will, but with this freedom they rebelled,
that is, they freely chose to obey their own will rather than God’s, and in failing
to rule over their own wayward will, they disobeyed. Their fall prompted a self-
perpetuating miasma of disobedience and misrule—and into this miasma Christ
descended in the flesh. How did his death on the cross transform this state of
affairs? Origen writes [handout], “[T]herefore the only-begotten Son of God, who
was the Word and the Wisdom of the Father, when he was with the Father in that
glory which he had before the world was (John 17:5), emptied himself and taking the
form of a servant became obedient even unto death (Phil. 2:7-8), that he might
teach obedience to those who could not otherwise than by obedience obtain
salvation.” Our salvation consists in our obedience, and our obedience requires
self-rule. But if we could not obey God before we had the further burdens of soul
and body, what makes us think we can learn to obey God now? According to Origen,
Christ on the cross is a model of obedience for us because he shows us that a mind
can be beset by all the pain and suffering that accompany a soul and a body—
psychological fear and physical torment, for example—and still maintain obedient
attention to God. The lesson seems to be: if someone can obey and attend even on
the cross, then you know that you can obey and attend to God even amidst the
distractions of soul and body. Jesus on the cross taught us that one can be
afflicted in the flesh and still be aflame.

Another way to understand Origen’s conviction that incarnation is a remedy for

wayward minds is to frame the question in terms of time. If different states of
matter are defined by their relative density, we might wonder whether we descend
into a denser experience of time. If the naked mind is like a flitting bird, then
perhaps the weight of soul and body is a means of slowing the mind down, forcing it
to move in and through thicker time, as it were. Perhaps our rehabilitation must be
long, not only because our rebellious wills resist the therapy of embodiment (which
they will of course), but because the therapy itself must be slow. Origen explores
this dimension of our embodied rehabilitation when he wrestles with the fact that
God is said to have hardened Pharaoh’s heart. The hardening of Pharaoh’s heart
presents Origen with two related dilemmas. First, and most obviously, it appears
that in hardening Pharaoh’s heart God violates his free will. Origen dismisses this
quickly enough by insisting that God did no such thing: God is like the rain that
falls on different soil; rich soil will teem with abundant life, whereas poor soil
will bring forth only nestles and weeds. Pharaoh’s heart is poor soil, and so God’s
rain only serves to bring forth the evil that is already latent in it. But this
leads to the second, and more interesting, dilemma. Why did God allow, even
encourage, Pharaoh to sink further into his own sinful miasma? Why did God abandon
Pharaoh to his own vice, and not entice him to virtue sooner, as we would expect
God to do?

The answer has to do with time. Origen explains that when it comes to “the
immortality of the soul and the limitless age,” we should not expect, nor even
want, that God’s help will come quickly. It is better, he says, that we are brought
to salvation slowly, and only after many trials and tribulations. Like a fever that
must run its course before it breaks, our sinful and wayward ways must be allowed
to play themselves out, even if, perhaps especially if, we suffer along the way. If
a soul receives succor too quickly, it is likely to lose it again. A more permanent
health is reserved for those who “have patience to receive over a longer period the
cultivation that accords with nature.” Why? Because long suffering slowly eats away
at our mind’s pride. Until that pride is breached, the mind will not recognize its
own weakness, and it so will not hear the saving word of God. Like waves on a
shore, time will eventually erode our proud resistance to God’s grace. If the
healing comes too soon, it may serve only to entrench the pride that must be rooted
out over successive lifetimes and worlds. As Origen says, “For God deals with souls
not with reference, let me say, to the fifty years of the present life, but with
reference to the limitless age.” If we wish to attain to the eternity of the
limitless age, in the apokatastasis, we must train ourselves in this temporality, a
denser time in which soul and body serve to slow the mind so that it’s pride can be
breached, and grace can find an opening.

“Attend above all to the reading of the scriptures”

Allow me to take a slightly different approach to the slow rehabilitation of the
mind. Recall that the scroll in Origen’s hands in the icon reads, “attend above all
to the reading of the scriptures.” It is no exaggeration to say that Origen spent
his life reading, teaching, and preaching. What survives of his enormous corpus is
mostly scriptural commentaries and homilies. Reading the scriptures was no pastime
for Origen. To read the scriptures was to be slowly restored, to inch closer to the
apokatastasis. He insisted that just as we are made up of body, soul, and spirit,
so is scripture: the body of scripture is its literal meaning; the soul and the
spirit are its deeper meanings. Clunky applications of Origen’s interpretive lens
tend to try to identify three discrete meanings: a bodily, a soulful, and a
spiritual. But Origen insisted that some passages in scripture have no bodily
sense, no literal meaning. Since the scriptures are not really authored by humans
but by the Holy Spirit, every detail—every word, phrase, and seeming infelicity—has
spiritual meaning.

The saving significance of the scriptures lies in these spiritual meanings, and,
crucially, there is no end to them, at least no end until the end of all ends, the
“restoration of all things.” Until then, there is no end to our understanding of
the scriptures, and so no end to our reading and rereading the scriptures. The
literal meaning of the scriptures is like a smooth surface over which we glide. We
read along, and then suddenly we trip over an oddity, an infelicity, or an
absurdity in the narrative. If we are lucky, we do not regain our footing, but we
fall flat on our faces, and we examine up close whatever it was that broke our
stride. But when we do so, we see that the bulging crack reveals an infinite depth
beneath our feet, an abyss of meaning over which we have been skating with false
confidence. For Origen, to read the scriptures is to be initiated into that abyss.

His understanding of the saving significance of the scriptures is a piece with his
view of incarnation. Christ is the only unfallen mind, and as such Christ is fully
open to the Word of God: he receives it as any mind was created to do. The Gospel
of John says of God’s Word, “he was in the beginning with God; all things came into
being through him, and without him not one thing came into being.” All of creation,
then, is in, of, and through God’s Word; all of creation is Worded. And the Word
made flesh, Jesus of Nazareth, the mind we name “Christ,” taught us then and
teaches us now how to read that worded world. We read creation for signs of God’s
providence, which is also working in and around us to restore us. And we read the
scriptures, the two testaments, old and new. For Origen, they provide all that we
will ever need to know, and they heal every spiritual ailment from which we will
ever suffer.

Christ has taught us to read the scriptures, and by his coming has transformed the
whole of scripture into gospel or “good news.” But even this gospel is but a
“shadow of the mysteries of Christ.” Lest we come to worship the words on the page
as we would a false god, Origen directs our eyes to the gospel in order to direct
them beyond the gospel, or to another gospel. If our gospel is the text whose words
we can read on a page, then there is another “spiritual” or “eternal” gospel always
on the horizon of our reading. He writes, “our task is to change the sensible
gospel into the spiritual gospel.” The task is to transform the bodily sense to the
spiritual sense, the flesh of the word to the fire of the word. We can set each
letter of the book aflame. The gospel of fire always exists out in front of us,
leading us through many dark nights, like Moses’ fiery pillar in the desert. As we
follow it, as we change the word’s flesh to fire, so too are we changed.
“The end is like the beginning” and the resurrection of the body
Let’s return to our central themes of reincarnation and universal salvation. And
let’s return to Christ, the mind all aflame with God’s fire. This was what was
meant for all minds. When, in the end, minds are restored, they will be restored as
Christs—even Satan, which is the name we give to the mind who fell furthest, will
be restored to his proper place as a Christ.

But Origen insists that the final restoration, the end that will end all ends, “is
always like the beginning.” Prima facie, this is not a difficult point to grasp: in
the end, we will be as we were in the beginning, fiery minds whose souls and bodies
have once again become absorbed into the original state of mind-matter. The crucial
point, however, is that the end is not exactly the same as the beginning; the end
is like the beginning. So, if it is like the beginning, what is the same, and what
is different? Again, it is easier to answer the former: what is the same? We were
naked minds, and we will be again. What makes the end different is that the naked
minds will not fall again. And that can only be the case if we are somehow
permanently changed by the long drama of having souls and bodies across lifetimes
and worlds. If minds are not permanently changed, then they will fall again.
Whatever happens to minds, then, through their descent into denser states of time
and matter, it must fundamentally transform them. The remedy and rehabilitation do
not amount to a restoration of the same, but rather to a restoration of the like.
And the end that is like the beginning must be an improvement on the beginning,
because it will be stable in a way the beginning was not. I cannot be the first to
be reminded of these lines from T.S. Eliot’s “Little Gidding,” the fourth and final
of his Four Quartets [handout]:

We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, unremembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;

In the apokatastasis, then, the minds will “know the place for the first time.”
They will have learned something, something they could not have learned were it not
for their sinful rebellion and long, painful rehabilitation. They will pass through
that “unknown, unremembered gate,” the very gate through which they passed on their
way out of the garden, a gate, we are told in Genesis 3:24, that is guarded by an
angel with a flaming, circling sword. Armed with the knowledge they will have
gained along the way, the minds will pass unharmed through this final trial by
fire, because they will once again have become all flame and will regard the sword
as a sign of welcome. The final lines of Eliot’s “Little Gidding” say this better
than I can:

And all shall be well and

All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flames are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.

Eliot may have Julian of Norwich’s apokatastasis more in mind than Origen’s when he
says that “all shall be well,” but his final lines on flames and fire make it seem
as if he were reading straight out of On First Principles: in Origen’s words, the
restored mind “receiv[es] the fire throughout all its pores and veins and becom[es]
wholly fire.” Collectively, the minds will form, in Eliot’s words, a “crowned knot
of fire” around the brow of God.
Origen understood the apostle Peter to be the one who clearly announced the
apokatastasis panton in Acts 3:21, but it is the fifteenth chapter of Paul’s First
Letter to the Corinthians that serves as the centerpiece of his doctrine of
universal salvation. In 15:28 Paul writes, “When all things are subjected to him,
then the Son himself will also be subjected to him who put all things under him,
that God may be all in all.” That final phrase, “that God may be all in all,”
serves as shorthand for the apokatastasis in Origen’s writings. And in On First
Principles, he offers an interpretation of what it might mean [handout]:

I reckon that this expression, where God is said to be all in all (1 Cor. 15:28),
also means that he is all in each individual person. And he will be all in each
individual in such a way that everything which the rational mind, when cleansed
from all the dregs of vice and utterly swept clean of every cloud of wickedness,
can sense of understand or think will be all God; it will no longer sense anything
else apart from God; it will think God, see God, hold God; God will be the mode and
measure of its every movement; and thus God will be all to it.

In other words, God will be all that the deified mind sees, thinks, and holds. And
when all the deified minds are so full, God will be all in all.

This description of the deified mind, however, immediately raises for Origen the
question of whether this is a condition that can be had in a body. The answer would
seem to be ‘no,’ because a deified mind would have reabsorbed its cooler and denser
states, that is, its soul and its body, as it returned to its fiery nature. The
answer would seem to be ‘no’ because in the apokatastasis all flesh will have
become fire. But of course Origen cannot let it rest there, not least because of
the fifteenth chapter of Paul’s Letter to the Corinthians, where the apostle speaks
of the soma pneumatikon, “the spiritual body” (e.g. 1 Cor 15:44).

Could it be then that the deified mind has, not a body like ours, but a spiritual
body, a body which could be deified along with the mind? This seems to suggest that
the mind, once freed of its body here—call it its flesh—can then acquire its proper
body, its spiritual body, in the apokatastasis. The question of incarnation is one
Origen explores throughout On First Principles, and it can justly be regarded as
one of, if not the, abiding questions of this text. Perhaps it is foolish of me to
try to raise this question near the conclusion of this essay. But I have to raise
it, because everything I have said so far depends on our answer to the question of
the body. I confess that I take as bedrock Origen’s claim that “a bodiless life
will rightly be considered only of the Trinity.” If we take this claim seriously,
only the three divine persons are without a body. It means that when God first
created, when God first made minds to receive his fiery nature, he made them with
bodies. Later, of course, he would form souls and what we have been calling bodies
in the second creation. But, nevertheless, there was once a primordial body, a
spiritual body. I think we mislead ourselves, though, if we speak of the first
minds as having been made along with spiritual bodies, because that suggests that
God made two things: minds and spiritual bodies. Whereas I think it is closer to
the truth to say that, for Origen, the minds are the spiritual bodies. In other
words, God has only and ever made one thing: call that one thing whatever as you
like—mind, spirit, or spiritual body. It is the one primordial matter that God
created ex nihilo. In its original state, it was capable of receiving God’s fire,
of being all flame. But this single mind-matter was also differentiated,
individuated, and each individual was given free will. And with this free will, the
many minds differentiated themselves even further, beyond mere numerical
individuation: only one remained as it was made to do; others turned away and their
mind-matter was formed into a diverse array of souls and bodies. This diverse array
served as the means of their rehabilitation, as we have already discussed.

I promised to return to the question of the resurrection of the body. Origen was
often suspected of undermining this doctrine, even though he clearly and
unequivocally affirms it. One can easily see why he fell under such suspicion: if
souls and bodies will eventually be reabsorbed into mind, then how can we confess a
final resurrection of the body? But with the help of the apostle Paul, Origen turns
this suspicion inside out, or on its head. The thing you are accustomed to calling
your body, he suggests, is only a cooler and denser declension of your true body.
If you want to imagine what your true body is, your spiritual body, made of the
same mind-matter as every other body, then observe the difference between the seed
you plant in the ground, and what grows from the soil. Your true body is as
different from its current form as the flowering plant is from the humble seed.
Origen not only confesses the resurrection of the body, but along the way
transforms what we think the body is. The resurrection of the body coincides with
the restoration of all things; or to put that in Greek, the anastasis coincides
with the apokatastasis.

I know that Origen’s interpretation of the resurrection of the body is

controversial, and almost certainly heretical from the perspective of subsequent
orthodoxy. With every passing year, however, I care less about controversy, and
even less about Origen’s orthodoxy. In that spirit, I wish to make one final
suggestion. In the end, I suggest, Origen wants us to think of God as having
created only one thing, a kind of primordial mind-matter, which was to serve as the
receptacle of his fire. In Eliot’s words, this was to be a crowning “knot of fire”
for the mind of God. In the end that is like the beginning, in the apokatastasis,
these fiery minds, all deified, will once again become spiritual bodies. It is only
a half-step further, perhaps less, to imagine Origen saying that God has made for
himself a body: us. We are God’s body. The drama of the minds’ fall and
restoration, led by their sibling Christ, is also the drama of the descent,
dissolution and eventual resurrection of God’s own body, of which we are each an
essential and inalienable part. According to Origen, God is quite literally
enticing us to restore to God God’s own body. Until then, God is in some sense
unmade, deformed even, not yet “all in all.” From flesh to fire: our successive
reincarnations are in the service of our eventual collective restoration; and our
restoration, our resurrection, is quite literally, and nothing less than, God’s
final reincarnation.

Origen today, and tomorrow

It’s time to wrap this up. Let me deliver on some earlier promises. First, Origen’s
condemnation: he was condemned in a sixth-century ecumenical council during a time
when the Byzantine emperor was desperately trying to unify his empire, fractured by
theological debates about the nature and person of the Incarnate Christ. Why did
Origen became a target 300 years after his death? In short, there was a small
monastic movement that found inspiration in his writings, and preached universal
salvation in which all fallen minds, including Satan’s, would be saved, and
restored as equals of Christs. While that sort of imagination was licit in the
third century, before the empire began actively policing the boundaries of
orthodoxy, it was no longer permissible in the time of the sixth century,
characterized as it was by anxious orthodoxy and political upheaval. The emperor
Justinian essentially condoned the condemnation of Origen as a means of appeasing a
faction that did not appreciate his daring interpretation of the resurrection of
the body, nor his insistence on universal salvation. Among other things, bishops
worried that preaching universal salvation would undermine people’s piety: if they
weren’t motivated by fear of judgment and eternal torment, so the reasoning went,
they would grow slack in their faith. Despite the condemnation, Christians in the
East and West continued to read Origen, and his influence continued to spread. One
can plausibly speak of a subterranean Origenism in the history of Christianity, an
underground river that occasionally surfaces.

It has been slowly surfacing since the early twentieth century, when a group of
Roman Catholic theologians led the charge of resuscitating Origen, in part by
making his writings available to a wider audience again. But overcoming a conciliar
condemnation is no easy thing, and so in many circles he is still dismissed as a
heretic, a warning to those who are prone to speculation and imaginative flights.
(Because of course God apparently wants to limit your imagination.)

Nevertheless, interest in Origen persists, and even grows. I began this afternoon
with Eileen McGuckin’s icon as evidence of that growing interest, and as a
sophisticated commentary on the irony of Origen’s influence and infamy. For several
years I served as a tutor of sorts to our late and beloved bishop Tom Shaw. In the
last years of his life, he read the entirety of Origen’s On First Principles, and I
can say he was quite absorbed in it, and took consolation, as I do, in Origen’s
faith in our eventual restoration. I have been approached to support efforts to
rehabilitate Origen in the Episcopal Church, through resolutions at General
Convention.

All this begs the question, however: what does Origen have to offer us today? I
have tried to give you a taste of that in the last hour, but let me close with an
attempt at summary. With Origen, we enter a Christian imaginary where every detail
of our incarnation—where and how we become flesh, and with whom—every detail is an
opportunity for progress toward rehabilitation. Our individual rehabilitation is
imagined as a single step in a long and communal choreography of universal
salvation, the restoration of all things, human and non-human, including our
siblings, the angels and the demons. With Origen, we come to understand our body
not as the antagonistic encasement of our spirit, but as the spirit longing to be
once again an iron in the fire of God. He teaches us to see ourselves reflected on
the page of the scriptures as if in a mirror: just as letters long to be spirit, so
flesh longs to burn. To free the letter from the literal is to free ourselves from
the flesh. And to stare into the mirror of the scriptures is to stare at a mise en
abyme, two mirrors placed opposite each other, producing what seems to be an
endless series of reflections. There will be an end to our many reincarnations, and
our many, ever deeper, readings of the scriptures, but thankfully—I would say
mercifully—that end is not yet in sight. What does Origen offer us today? Time, and
longing: time in which to long.

See also: History of Christianity, Orthodox Church, Faculty and Research,

Christianity

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When Christ Found Me in the HimalayasAug

28

*Dedicated to a soul who is struggling, entangled in this net, in a deadly embrace.

Buddhism wants you to empty yourself. Our faith is about filling yourself with
Christ. When you empty yourself, the demons enter. With love and poor prayers
Impossibility of Aloneness

I’m an Orthodox Christian living in Homer, Alaska and experienced Jesus Christ in
the Himalayas, in India.

I listen to the heartbeat of rain outside…

Cold, Alaskan fog blowing in off the bay, emerald hills now that autumn is here and
summer chased away into the mountains. But a milky white fog spreads over the bay
like a silken ghost. I used to visit Trappist monasteries, back when I was
Catholic, at the beginning of high school, and searching for a relationship of
love. I read plenty of philosophy then to know that knowing isn’t enough, that
having a realization in the mind is entirely different from experiencing a
revelation of the heart.

I spent two birthdays in the Himalayas…

Traveling along gravel roads that drop deep into icy gulches where the Ganges river
rages below not yet packed with the filth and mud and newspapers of villages, not
yet carrying remainders of Indians in her current, I found Christ found me. It’s a
difficult and strangely compelling atmosphere to confront oneself, – – India, – –
sandwiched with black corpses, white snow, pagan fires and virulent animals.

I took a bus north from Delhi. It was crowded, tight and cramped, flies buzzed
between my face and the windows smeared with brown slime. It’s so polluted in
Delhi, so much coffee-colored smoke, so much steam that you really can’t see the
sun. You saw it, a rising orange-reddish ball burning over the horizon fifteen
minutes in the morning, but then fifteen minutes slouching back down again, an
exhausted head over the mountains.

I grew up Catholic but turned to Buddhism when introduced to a self-hypnosis class

at my Catholic high school, experimenting with meditation and ‘mindfulness.’ I
experienced serious symptoms of manic depression then, partially because I’d
consciously turned away from the Judeo-Christian God, and also because life at home
was very, very difficult for me. I grew anxious and got into extremely self-
destructive habits, and so Buddhism seemed a perfect door to address – or not
address – my turning from God and family, and focusing my energy toward dissolving
into a Void, a dissolving bubble on an endless and personless river,
Tathāgatagarbha. The element that got me is to dissolve my desire, and abandon my
selfhood, in order to avoid suffering. But desire doesn’t seem so bad, especially
when it is for love, which requires more than one person, and thereby voids any
notion of abandoning self, – – and to love, to truly love, is to give, which may
require sacrifice, and suffering – –

So Tibetan Buddhism kept coming up, because the meditation helped calm my anxieties
and depression, and because the culture proved highly engaging, what with all her
colorful flags, her skulls, and metaphysical explanations of things, – – but what
is left, when ‘I’ disappear, and there is no one else for whom a relationship of
the heart can exist? Not to mention, what did the experiences of the Gospels, the
Cloud of Witnesses, the Holy Church, amount to? I knew nothing of Orthodoxy when I
reached into the closet of Buddhism, but in light of it, now, what does it all add
up to?

33190003
Joseph in Gangotri, where he met Christ in a cave.
Mindfulness worked as far as cleansing the window, the mind, is concerned, which is
important, but then many of its doctrines, – and I explored countless doctrines, –
really stop here. Clear sky. But what it did not do, and could not, really, is
orient me toward the sun, and the warmth of the sun, and the sunlight – – all
religions seem to contain some seed of truth, but fail in witnessing to the Triadic
God…and all my destructive habits, and relationships, and every mantra, and yoga,
all of which I’ve had my fill…this is how Christ brought me to Him.

Back to the story, I’m in Delhi, on a bus. And after an hour or two of sitting in
that cramped, stuffy and urine-soured air you hear the front breaks release, the
bus finally stretching her arthritic joints and creak slowly forward. She rolls,
head first, toward the busy main road. For fifteen minutes we cough and pop down
the road, away from my filthy, but greatly lovable refuge of Manju Ka Tilla, a sort
of Tibetan refugee camp criss-crossed with telephone wire, wet and narrow alleyways
packed with dogs and diapered babies, and polio. Cobblestone streets and bakeries,
copper trinkets and arms, this is the first place on earth I met leprosy, and her
sister polio. The beginning of my spiritual warfare.

I usually saw them together, these two, – polio and leprosy – crowding in around a
barrel of fiery rags, in the crayon-black darkness hands like chewed-up bread,
teeth pencil yellow and cracked. I see a boy attacked by a skinny, vicious-looking
dog with long, wet fur and crazy eyes – it looks like a red and yellow fox, – – a
tangle of fur and blood and whimper. The taxi cab drivers, waiting on their
afternoon customers near the stinking, feathered dumpsters launch after the monster
in a terrible raid of madness and darkness. They chase the thing down with bricks
loosened from neighboring grocery store steps leaving the boy warm and wet with his
own blood, a hound’s tooth broken off inside his leg.

Here is suffering, and personhood, and sacrifice…

He looks young but his face shows no signs of innocence. His dark eyes follow me as
I run a few feet away to pick up a bottle of water, then return. We look at each
other. His long, dangling arms and fingers started rubbing the area of skin that
have broken open and gush a strange, purple fluid.

Wet, mossy feet and the bitter odor of trash hang in the air. Cows streaked with
vomit pick through spoiled food and milk cartons nearby at the dumpsters. He waits
for a doctor but one never arrives. I don’t know what else to do. The boy looks
through me, limping into an alley and disappearing in the terrible darkness.

I will live here a total of five and a half months. I will have arrived here
practicing Buddhism and Hinduism for eleven years, and leave Christian…

I thought maybe I’d join a Buddhist monastery, or be discovered by wise sage in the
mountains, spend the rest of my life in the Himalayas experiencing exotic mystery
and enlightenment. I read dozens of sutras by various Buddhas, had an underlined
and well-worn copy of the Bhagavad-Gita and Upanishads, and was reading all the
California guys, Bhagavan Das, Ram Das, Krishna Das, and even met most of them, all
the 60s ‘hippy’ idols who dropped acid and flew to India to go ‘find the guru.’ I
read Be Here Now and did the whole drug scene, but despite all the colorful statues
and marijuana and tantra, no matter how ‘empty’ I became, there wasn’t enough and I
sensed…how can I say this…something was wrong.

I worked as a wilderness guide for at-risk youth in the sage deserts of Idaho.
Teaching primitive skills, meditation and mantra, and working with psychologists to
develop methods of emotional and behavioral therapy – – I was chased by a wolf, I
killed a rattlesnake. And while out there, – this is in the middle of my life
before Christ, – – toward the end of it, actually, – – I began experiencing strange
things – not only while traveling through India, but before that, and not only me,
but my girlfriend. We saw, and everyone involved with this recipe of mantra,
meditation, yoga, – and a lot of it sober, – – we saw shadows and demons,
experienced trembling and ungodly anxiety and fear. So I knew something was
strange, something was going on. It is not all opinion, all belief, for if I have
freewill, and exist outside the body, – and I had plenty experiences where I knew I
was more than my body, – – and this is one of the things that helped me dismiss and
eventually leave the bag of eastern religions, – in addition to God’s grace, – –
that if I am more than my body, and I have free will, and can choose to either
accept or reject love, then others can too, and this brought up the issue of good
versus evil, of right and wrong.

Was what I was doing, right? Who was I following? Are these things, these deities,
just archetypes, and if not, if they are ‘real,’ are they ‘good?’ It like jumping
into an ocean and realizing there are many different things floating around in
there, harmless creatures, some of them beautiful, and some, in fact, that will
attack you, that are poisonous, and the astral life, the spiritual life, is like
that. Very quickly, once I got to India, I understood this. And was scared.

The boy with the watermelon disease, his head swollen on a piece of cloth outside
my guest room door, a cloud of black flies wriggling over an empty ribcage and
hollow eyes, a human Jack-O-lantern, his mother’s long brown arm rung with silver
jewelry begging for rupees.

So why did I leave a supportive and beautiful girlfriend behind in Oregon to

experience this? I was beginning to mend my relationship with my parents, gain more
confidence, and had read Way of the Pilgrim a number of months before, but it was
with all my California stuff, and I never saw any relation to that and Orthodoxy,
never once asked, where is a church that deepens one’s relationship with the
living, loving, Truth? Where truth is a Person, as I’d later read from Father
Seraphim Rose?

I’d head up to the mouth of the Ganges River, to Gangotri, – – into a mountain. On
my 28th birthday, I listened to the heartbeat of the wind on the cliffs, on the
water, and experience not a realization of the mind, though that did happen, sure
enough, but only once the heart was struck by a sort of cherubim’s sword in my
heart, experiencing a revelation occurring in meeting the living God, Jesus Christ,
and myself peeling away from itself.

What can I say?

snow1
After Baptism Into the Holy Orthodox Church
Everything I’d learned, practiced, experienced for all of eleven years poured out
from my head, in one ear and out the other, replaced by their approximate Christian
terms, fulfilled, actually, and I knew reincarnation is impossible through the
resurrection, because I am a self, a soul, and I knew karma is impossible because
it operates independently of ‘God’ and there is Divine Intervention, I’ve witnessed
it, and experienced it. In the cave, a joyous ache in my heart, and in the cave, no
more aloneness, no more aloofness. In the Himalayas, and I mean immediately, like I
was zapped, I really met Christ, and was dumb for a moment, and in Eternity I saw
in my heart the Person of God as Christ, and I could never, ever be alone. Maybe
I’d FEEL alone, sure, (doubtful) but I ought to remember, the impossibility of
aloneness. Maybe that should be the title of this letter.

So what happened after? I picked up a Bible and read the thing in a guest house
back in Dharamsala, over 12 hours away, and then I’d return to America, after the
shaking bus trips and gargantuan ceremonies of burning bodies and yellow and black
gods and goddesses, and and I’d fall into the lap of the Orthodox Church, in
Eugene, and, I’m only skimming over it now, due to time constraints, and I’d visit
St Anthony’s Monastery, in Arizona, and all the monasteries and churches in
between, long enough to fill a book, and pray to St Herman who could, by his
intercessions, bring me straight to Spruce Island, and to where, kneeling before
his relics, find home. In Homer. There is more, but I’ll write later. So much has
happened to my heart. Forgive me for rambling, and going on. May the Father of
Lights enlighten us, and have mercy on us. Amen.

“It is one thing to believe in God, and another to know Him.” + St Silouan
By Magnus

February 18, 2013 by John Valadez

Printed in Issue 24

Editors Note: Joseph Magnus now lives in Port Townsend, Washington. He is a writer
of children’s books and helps the Father Lazarus Moore Foundation. To visit his
blog and read more of his poetry, short stories, and other writings, visit here:
Servant of Prayer

--------------------------------

question from a podcast listener and my response

february 17, 2011 by pearlofgreatpricebook, posted in orthodox view on
reincarnation
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Question:

I just heard your interview on AncientFaith Radio. I come from a Christian

background, but see myself as more of a Hindu these days, though I’m looking into
the Catholic and Orthodox Church. I was curious as to how whether you believed in
reincarnation/rebirth in your Tibetan Buddhist days, and, if you did, how your
belief was changed as a result of becoming Orthodox? Maybe you talk in depth about
this in the book: if so, could you give me just the basics of how you dealt with
this issue of rebirth/reincarnation? (Also: do you believe that
rebirth/reincarnation is necessarily incompatible with Christianity?) Thanks.

My response:

I did believe in reincarnation/rebirth not only in my Tibetan Buddhist days, but in

my early 20s when I started meditating and had a guru. I do not believe in
reincarnation now, but for a good 20 years I really was heavily into channeling,
metaphysics, and facilitating past life regressions. I talk about this in my book.
It was quite a process for me to move from being steeped in the new age and Eastern
religions to what I think is the most profound eastern religion, Eastern Orthodox
Christianity. My belief in reincarnation took time and much prayer and soul-
searching to resolve.

Acceptance of reincarnation in my early 20s was related to starting to have a

relationship with a guru. I was looking for something spiritual, but not
Christian. At the time I was seeking relief from severe depression and health
issues. I found the concept of reincarnation refreshing at the time–because of
the guilt I carried about sin. I was haunted unconsciously by the Western concept
of sin–related to being bad–going to hell for my sins–and many other
misunderstandings about Christianity from my early Catholic years. The thought of
having more than one life felt freeing at the time. Eastern Orthodox Christianity
approaches sin a very different perspective–actually a lot of things from a more
heartfelt less logic related or legalistic approach taken by Western Catholicism.

I explore so many of my reactions to Christianity and Western Catholicism in my

book. From where I am now as a convert to Eastern Orthodox Christianity–I can say
that rebirth comes through baptism/reincarnation is not compatible with Christian
doctrines and beliefs. This is because we believe that Christ resurrected body and
soul and that we will also.

I would like to give you this quote from St. Cyril of Alexandria which might be
helpful in understanding the complexity of the relationship between our
bodies/souls and the resurrection of Christ:

The prophet Isaiah therefore has said to us, ‘ your dead shall live; together with
my dead body they shall rise. Awake and sing, you who dwell in dust; for your dew
is like the dew of herbs, and the earth shall cast out the dead’. (Isa 26:19) And
by dew I imagine he means the life–giving power of the Holy Spirit, and that
influence which abolishes death, as being that of God and of life and the blessed
David also … says of all those upon earth,’ You take away their spirit, and they
die and return to their dust; You send Your Spirit, and they are created, and You
renew the face of the earth (ps103:29) … For ‘ it is sown,’ it says, ‘ in
corruption, it is raised in in corruption; it is sown in weakness, it is raised in
power; it is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory.” (1 Cor. 15:42) For the
prophet Isaiah again assures us that death which is entered in because of sin does
not retain its power over the dwellers on earth for ever, but is abolished by the
resurrection from the dead of Christ, Who renews the universe, and refashion set
into that which it was at the beginning–for God created all things for
incorruption, as it is written (wisdom 1:4): for he says, ‘He has swallowed up
death having waxed mightily: and God shall again take away all weeping from every
countenance: He shall remove the reproach of the people from the whole earth'(Isa
25:8) …But those who have maintained an honorable and elect life, full of all
excellence, and have, therefore, been accounted worthy of attaining to a glorious
and marvelous resurrection, will be necessarily raised far above the life which men
lead in this world; for they will live as become saints, who already have been
brought near to God. Since, therefore, all fleshly lust is taken away, and no place
whatsoever is left in them for bodily pleasure, they resemble the holy angels,
fulfilling a spiritual and not a material service, such as becomes holy spirits;
and are at the same time counted worthy of a glory such as that which the Angels
enjoy. Commentary on the Gospel of St. Luke, homily 136 B# 42, PP. 541–542.

Food for thought and prayer,

Veronica

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What is Lent? The fall of Adam relative to reincarnation and Lent

march 14, 2011 by pearlofgreatpricebook, posted in great lent and fasting, orthodox
view on reincarnation
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“Adam became through the fall mortal, that is, both in soul and body … Since a man
has body and soul, therefore he has to guess of the body likewise, there are also
two immortality’s one of the soul and one of the body … for the soul and the body
are one man.”

St. Symeon the New Theologian. The Sin of Adam, commonly 1,2.#76

By this passage from St. Symeon, we can see that reincarnation is an illusion.
Accepting the consequences of ‘the fall’ – even that there was a fall – was a
challenge for me. By this passage we can see that there is but one life for both
the soul and body, one physical death for each and no more.

The frightening thing about the seduction of reincarnation is that it takes us away
from what we need to do now for the salvation of our soul. “The fear of God is the
beginning of wisdom” (Proverbs) Without this ‘fear of God’ we cannot begin to
approach truly living, turning our thoughts and actions towards the living God,
preparing ourselves for our soul’s immortality with God. Even knowing all this,
practicing gratitude for each moment and realizing how precious each moment is – is
still a major struggle for me.

The wonderful thing about Great Lent is that everything I experience and do becomes
so much more timely and present because we are fasting and praying more intensely.
I have a greater opportunity to strive in the pressure cooker of Lent!

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Living One Life Fully vs. Believing in Reincarnation

march 13, 2012 by pearlofgreatpricebook, posted in eastern orthodox christianity,
eastern orthodoxy, orthodox view on reincarnation, saints of the church
2 Votes

What must grow and change in us while on earth to merit Heaven?

“The hereafter provides no more opportunities for change. So this leaves our life
on earth as the only time during which changes possible. St. Paul says, ’Behold,
now is the accepted time; behold now is the day of salvation’.” (I Cor. 6:12)

“Let us therefore strive for the mastery in the time of this gift. It is a day of
grace, of grace divine, wherefore with ease even we will obtain the crown (of
heaven)… so how do we use this ‘accepted time’ to benefit us for all eternity? The
Church, in her wisdom, has made available to us the sacraments for this purpose:
Baptism, Confession, Communion, and Holy Unction. But none of these can help us in
the depths of our being or effect the necessary essential change in us without our
own contributing effort and without that crowning virtue: humility. A baptism
casually buried in the mire of subsequent sin, upper functionary confession,
communion taken without the fear and devout love of God, and holy action received
without fervent belief in its power of healing–all these are useless to us. Indeed
they are a mockery and sacrilege.

The change must take place in us must be in our heart, ‘ with much groaning and
weeping’. (Rom. 8:23) It must be real. For only the real and the cured can enter
heaven.”

St. John Chrysostom, pp.775, The Bible and The Holy Fathers