If you turn to a minister of a Christian church, Catholic or Orthodox, and ask your opinion about reincarnation, you will hear an unambiguous answer: faith denies it, and someone who believes in rebirth cannot be a Christian and can be anathema. Everything is clear and understandable.
It seems that it has always been, and no one has ever doubted it. It seems that this is natural and does not contradict anything in one of the most widespread religions, harmonious and perfected over the years.
But this is the official point of view, which has been so clearly and categorically formed only in recent centuries. Once upon a time, everything was completely different. And if we observe complete objectivity, then we can confidently assert that the rejection of the phenomenon of the rebirth of souls occurred in Christianity far from the will of its founders and ideological leaders of antiquity. There was only one person in history who took this path, and not in a completely honest way, as reliable historical sources say.
First, let's look at how Christianity sees the share of the average believer in the immediate past and immediate future.
First, we are born on Earth not only physically, but our soul is also born for the first time. Secondly, figuratively speaking, a kind of rebirth awaits us only after death, when our soul leaves the mortal body and goes to heaven or hell, where the soul will live forever.
However, this position seemed illogical thousands of years ago. How can an immortal soul be born? The immortal must be eternal, and that which is born dies. It was this reasoning, in conjunction with the stable ancient ideas about the rebirth of souls, that forced even the founders of Christianity to adhere to the concept of the immortality of the soul, which implies the absence of its origin in any form.
So how did it happen that eventually Christianity became one of the few religious movements that denies metempsychosis, as reincarnation is also called? Indeed, the Bible does not directly mention the transmigration of souls. The riddle is added by the revelation of John, which forbids the introduction of new scriptures.
The fact is that it is very difficult to say which sacred texts were before and which were not. There is a stable theory according to which the doctrine of reincarnation was long before the "Apocalypse" and, possibly, was included in the so-called "pre-censored" Bible, when the current view of birth, hell and heaven was generally atypical for early Christians.
Promotional video:
With all this, there are also such interpretations of the scriptures that assert that even in their current state, they still do not contradict the theory of the transmigration of souls, although they do not explicitly indicate this.
For example, such an idea or something close to it is supported by the famous writer and priest of the Methodist Church Leslie Whitehead, professor of theology at Fordham University John J. Hearney and many others, including the famous psychic of the first half of the 20th century Edgar Cayce, who is also a former Sunday school teacher.
Many of these writers are also convinced that even Jesus was not just an adherent of reincarnation, but was also reborn many times. In general, it does not look like something special, when many prophets in the Old Testament … were born several times in different guises.
In fact, the Catholic idea of purgatory, like reincarnation, is not directly mentioned in the Bible, but no one in this direction of Christianity doubts its existence. Such key personalities for Christianity as Clement of Alexandria, Gregory of Nyssa, Arnobius, Jerome and even Blessed Augustine did not doubt the existence of rebirth.
But most of all, one of the most significant holy fathers of the dawn of Christianity, Origen (Origenes Adamantius), who lived in the III century, spoke most frankly on this topic.
This most serious and respected thinker was literally irritated by the view of the nature of the born soul, which we all know. He also denied the day of judgment and the resurrection of the dead, saying that this is complete nonsense, since the bodies of the dead, decaying and entering the food chain, eventually become part of other people.
However, Origen had his own unique understanding of the transmigration of souls. He believed that for sins, people are reborn as animals, and then they can become plants altogether. Conversely, in order to reach the kingdom of God, one has to go up without doing bad deeds. In some ways, this is very close to modern Buddhism, but the idea of such punishment for misdeeds is unusual even for him.
However, later, after the death of the thinker, the Roman Catholic Church radically changed its attitude towards him: from very positive to negative.
Self-castration of the young Origen added fuel to the fire, by which he tried to maintain eternal chastity. But a person who is capable of mutilating himself will never be able to achieve holiness, as the canons say … As a result, he was not canonized, despite his works and merits, and they began to listen to his opinion less.
The final point in the debates around reincarnation in Christianity was put by the Roman emperor Justinian in the 6th century.
Justinian - East Roman emperor; born in 483; significantly expanded the territory of the empire; built the temple of St. Sophia in Constantinople; was influenced by his wife Fedora, who was a former rider in the circus; died in 565.
At that time, he sought to spread the faith as much as possible throughout the empire in order to control the peoples in this way. However, at this time, in fact, the world was dominated by just views similar to Origen's position, which was not at all beneficial to Justinian, because a person is less responsible for his actions and less stubborn in life if he knows that he will have other lives.
Only this forced the church to put the last point in the debate about rebirth. It turns out that the purely selfish interest of not the most virtuous person in history has made us all believe in hell, heaven and the birth of the soul.
Unfortunately for everyone, this man had an extraordinary mind, and he used religion purely to unite the masses and control them (now the situation is similar in many countries). For this, he did not disdain to govern the laws of the same Christianity.
And so, at the Second Council of Constantinople, which took place on May 5, 553, where the Patriarch of Constantinople presided and representatives of the church authorities of the western and eastern parts of the Christian world were present, the issue of Origenism and its continuity for Christianity was decided.
Some believe that the outcome was influenced by a conspiracy against Westerners who were most susceptible to the transmigration theory. And here is the result: "If anyone believes in the unthinkable existence of the soul before birth and in the most absurd rebirth after death, he should be anathematized."
Since then, there has been no reincarnation in Christianity, but the existence of hell and heaven has already been determined. It was then that our unshakable faith parted with the possibility of soul rebirth, which was actually accepted by voting, as in the elections …
What is the common man to do now? If you deviate from the dogmas offered by the Orthodox Church, you will deviate from it. But how much do you really break some divine law?
Author: Mikhail Raduga, from the book "Riddles of Man"