FATHER FRANK’S RANTS - Reincarnation

Rant Number 529       5 March 2013

‘We don’t stay dead long’, handsome young actor Ben Whishaw says in the Cloud Atlas movie, before sticking a gun into his mouth and blowing his brains out. Ghastly but still, an exalted profession of faith in reincarnation? Trendy and alluring hypothesis, perhaps, yet incoherent, I suspect.

Whishaw plays a gay composer, Robert Frobisher, as well as other post-mortem roles separate in space and time. The suggestion is that his soul has transmigrated into each. But now consider: a clerk in musical record shop today suddenly announces: ‘I remember being Frobisher! I am back!’ And he provides plenty of evidence to that effect. You think hard and examine the evidence then decide to buy that: Frobisher has truly reincarnated as the clerk. Unfortunately a day later another chap, a City stock broker, turns up and claims: ‘I am Frobisher! I did not stay dead long!’ He too produces amazing proof, documents, memories only the defunct Frobisher could have known. What do you conclude? Two Frobishers? How can that be? But trouble has only begun: a third Frobisher-claimant surfaces, a vagrant in Chelsea. He too only knows intimate facts and secrets about the historical Frobisher. Threefold reincarnation then? And it could go on...

The logical point is that memory claims, however astounding, could never be the basis for personal identity, as we know it. You need a well-certified bodily continuity for that and that is precisely what the notion of reincarnation can never provide. How the several Frobisher-claimants can know what they know is tantalising but...they can’t all be Frobisher, can they?

Leaving this knotty epistemic point aside: could a soul transmigrate into another body? It depends. On the Aristotelian conception of the soul, for example, it could not. The soul is the form of the body. A human person is an ensouled body, a unity of form and matter. When a body dies, it rots away and disintegrates. Its form then falls apart too. It cannot be re-formed into another body. Hence no personal survival after death for Aristotle.

Much later of course Descartes postulated a total dualism of mind and body, each a separate kind of substance, capable of existing independently. But Descartes never could give a convincing account of how the two disparate entities can interact in us, beings made of both material body and immaterial mind. How does your immaterial mind get you to raise your material hand, for instance? If they are two totally distinct substances...

Nonetheless, ancient philosophers like Empedocles, Pythagoras and Plato advocated reincarnation. When Pythagoras saw a man chastising a dog he intervened: ‘Wait! He is the soul of a departed friend! I recognised him when he yelped!’ As to Empedocles, he remembered being successively a plant, a fish and a girl. Very poetic assertions. But, when it comes to forms of life remote from us, what would it really be like to remember being an asparagus plant? Is it at all conceivable? Or a bat, for instance? (No Batman jokes, please!)

Anyway, Christian doctrine opposes metempsychosis, another word for soul transmigration. Some cussed theosophists have invoked verses like St Matthew 11: 14, in which Jesus seems to identify John the Baptist with the prophet Elijah. An outlandish and unwarranted exegesis. Surely Jesus was implying that St John had the spirit of prophecy, the same spirit that inspired Elijah. Reincarnation is nowise asserted by the Lord. St John 9 implies perhaps a belief by certain rabbis in the pre-existence of the soul before birth and that brings it Kabbalah mysticism.

According to the Jewish scholar Gershom Scholem ‘Gilgul ‘is Hebrew for reincarnation. Jewish philosophers rejected it but it is part of the body of spiritual and magical teachings known as Kabbalah. Kabbalists quoted biblical verses like Ecclesiastes 1:4, ‘A generation goes and a generation comes’. To them it meant that the generation that dies is reincarnated as the generation that comes – again, a stupid distortion of the plain meaning of the Scriptural words. By the way, most kabbalists restricted transmigration to between fellow human beings but some taught that a man’s soul could enter the body of animal – as a punishment, note, for sexual transgressions in a previous life. I wonder what sort of animal Robert Frobisher would have ended up into...

To be fair, Scholem points out how belief in Gilgulhad an ethical component. Look around you: cot deaths, babies are born blind and men’s fortunes are staggeringly unequal. Ever so often the wicked prosper and triumph, while the righteous suffer and are crushed. Gandhi is assassinated while Stalin dies in his bed. In the Bible the case of Job springs to mind. Appalling torments for no just reason. Kabbalists rationalised these things as punishments for past lives’ sins. (The wicked, on their part, would expiate their guilt in a future existence: neat.) The justice and mercy of God are then seen as underpinning the whole mechanism of transmigration.

Kabbalistic writers enjoyed themselves, I imagine, in tracing connections between biblical characters in successive Gilgul stages. Thus Moses and Jethro would have the souls of Abel and Cain, while David, Bathsheba and Uriah would be respectively Adam, Eve and the serpent. (Don’t quite get this: wasn’t poor Uriah innocent? But never mind...) Guess you could construct fascinating biographies of many present-day people by reference to previous or even future incarnations. Hitler as Haman (look it up!), Tony Blair as Mussolini and Berlusconi as a baboon.

But from where did the Kabbalists get their bizarre transmigration ideas? Amazingly, Scholem fingers...Islam! There is an Arabic word, ‘Tanasukh’, meaning the death of an heir before he has received his inheritance. It also means transmigration of misguided souls. Moreover, the famous Muslimmu’atazila rationalist philosophers would have played a part in this...enough, I think!

Please, whatever you do, don’t be tempted to experiment and follow Ben Whishaw’s example inCloud Atlas. The dead stay dead. They only come back at the Last Judgment. After that...only God Most High, the Supreme and Merciful Judge knows.

Revd Frank Julian Gelli