Christianity and Reincarnation

or the Mission of Materialism

Reincarnation is traditionally considered incompatible with Christianity, but the danish thinker Martinus (1890-1981) argued that the continuation and renewal of Christianity must include the idea of reincarnation if Christianity is to become a spiritual science, among other things, promoting a clearer understanding of the purpose of the materialistic era in human evolution.

In the article "Falske profeter og falske Kristus” ("False Prophets and False Christ’s"), first published in 1971, the danish thinker Martinus (1890-1981) writes: "The existence of God, the immortality of living beings, the reincarnation or rebirth of beings, the existence of darkness as a condition for living beings' experience of light, and their future appearance as humans in the image of God after his likeness, …, universal love as the fundamental tone of the universe, the identity of beings with the Godhead, time, space, and eternity, …. These are the main points of enlightenment in the return of Christ, which is the same as the continuation, renewal, and perfection of Christianity."¹

Martinus (1890-1980)

According to Martinus this continuation, renewal and perfection of Christianity must take the form of a spiritual science and Martinus argued that the idea of reincarnation is an indispensable part of this continuation. For both dogmatic Christians and dogmatic materialists, this might be a surprising connection because noone has historically been fighting the idea of reincarnation more vehemently than the Christian culture, where Christian theologians repeatedly have argued that reincarnation and Christianity are incompatible concepts. In 2015 we had an example in Denmark where a priest caused a stir in the Danish national church by openly confessing to the idea of reincarnation in a television broadcast.

A colleague who was interviewed expressed her inner rebellion: "I watched a bit of the program, but had to turn it off because my nerves couldn't handle it. Transmigration of souls belongs in Buddhism, and it is completely incompatible with Christianity." The priest believing in reincarnation was subsequently suspended, had to answer to her bishop, and sign a declaration stating that her work is "...to interpret the scriptures, and the tradition, that are of the national church", before being reinstated in her position. However, this minor conflict is just yet another example of a millennium-long suppression of any move towards reincarnation within the Christian culture. But contrary to what the nervous colleague believes, the idea of reincarnation is not just a Buddhist idea, but has in fact been part of Western thought longer than Christianity.

The Unlimited Divine Will

Evidence of this can already be found among the Church Fathers of antiquity, who in the first centuries after Christ laid the foundation for later Christian theology. A common feature among several of the Church Fathers was the inspiration from Neoplatonism, which was a dominant philosophical conviction in antiquity, and on that basis, they also had to deal with Plato's (428-348 BC) doctrine of metempsychosis inherited from Pythagoras (570-495 BC). There is evidence that several of the Church Fathers flirted with the idea of reincarnation, either because of inspiration from Plato, or because of an interest in religious traditions that included the idea of reincarnation. They therefore openly discussed scriptural passages from the Bible, seen as supportive of the idea of reincarnation, but generally they rejected the idea as being incompatible with Christianity.

But what is it about the idea of reincarnation that has made it unpalatable for both ancient and modern Christian theologians? Evidence can be found in Augustine (354-430), the founder of the so-called voluntarism, which was mainstream in Christian theology for centuries. In his final work De civitate Dei (Eng. The City of God), he wrote: "… [W]e worship that God who has appointed to the natures created by Him both the beginnings and the end of their existing and moving."² This is followed by a long list of created natures before he continues: "But these things the one true God makes and does, but as the same God—that is, as He who is wholly everywhere, included in no space, bound by no chains, mutable in no part of His being, filling heaven and earth with omnipresent power, not with a needy nature. Therefore He governs all things in such a manner as to allow them to perform and exercise their own proper movements. For although they can be nothing without Him, they are not what He is."

Augustin af Hippo (354-430) Painted y Philippe de Champaigne, ca. 1645-1650.

It is the insurmountable contrast between the creating Deity and the created world that is the central concern for Augustine, and which became so significant, not only for Christian theology but later also for secularization within the Christian cultural sphere. Voluntarism emphasizes the unlimited divine will and the finite and powerless nature of the created world in relation to God, and it is this idea of an omnipotent creator God, "bound by no chains", that makes the notion of eternal existence of living beings, and reincarnation in ever new bodies, impossible. What is at stake here is not just a concept of God, but also a view of nature and humanity, and it is typical of the countercurrents within Western culture, which argue for the idea of reincarnation, that they argue for alternative perceptions of God, humanity, and nature.

Voluntarism became significant for secularization, because the idea of an omnipotent creator God who created the world as a watchmaker creates a watch, harmonizes very well with the mechanistic worldview that became dominant with the breakthrough of modern science in the 17th century. Sir Isaac Newton (1642 – 1727), who played a key role in this breakthrough, was himself a convinced voluntarist and e.g. suggested in Query 31 of the Opticks (1718) that infinite space is the sensorium of God and that God “is more able by his Will to move the Bodies within his boundless uniform Sensorium, and thereby to form and reform the Parts of the Universe, than we are by our Will to move the Parts of our own Bodies”. In contrast the created world was defined by Newton to be inert, unless acted upon by an outer force, ultimately the Will of God.

The rise of empiricism also agreed well with the dominating voluntaristic theology. If things are as they are because God wills it, and if God moves in mysterious ways, then the only way to ascertain the nature of things is to observe and describe one's observations. Voluntarism thus provided the Western world with a powerful thought structure that would prove to be of lasting significance, even after God was abolished and replaced with the secularized version of an inscrutable deity, called chance.

An infinite universe

However, the breakthrough of modern science was partly prepared by Christian thinkers with a radically different concept of God, nature, and humanity, who also became representatives for the idea of reincarnation as a logical consequence. From the 13th century, through the Arabs, ancient literature was rediscovered, including the classical Greek philosophers, but also writings attributed to the mythical godlike figure named Hermes Trismegistus. The Hermetic literature was rediscovered and further developed by Christian monks and reached a new culmination with thinkers like Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499) and later Giordano Bruno (1548-1600). While the former was hesitant to defy the church and therefore exercised some self-censorship, the latter openly rebelled against Christian orthodoxy and ended up paying dearly for it with 8 years of imprisonment, regular torture, and ultimately execution by burning at the stake.

It is not precisely known what led to Bruno's execution, but his argument for the idea of reincarnation was, it has been speculated, one of 8 points that attracted the interest of the inquisition³. The core of Bruno's philosophy and theology was his transformation of the concept of nature from a limited world to an infinite universe. In the dialogue De l'infinito universo et mondi (Eng. On the Infinite Universe and Worlds), he has one of the characters say: "Thus is the excellence of God magnified and the greatness of his kingdom made manifest; he is glorified not in one, but in countless suns; not in a single earth, a single world, but in a thousand thousand, I say in an infinity of worlds." In contrast to the voluntarists, Bruno finds an active principle in nature that "... [m]ake it plain to us that the motions of all the worlds proceed from inner forces and teach us in the light of such attitudes to go forward with surer tread in the investigation and discovery of nature!"

This active principle also works in humans, and the idea of reincarnation enables active participation by humans in their own perfection. For this reason, Bruno did not consider Christ as God's only begotten son, who will save us, but as a sage and prophet. Bruno also did not accept the opposition between religion and science and argued that through science, humans can achieve perfection: "… [W]e will be high minded, despising that which is esteemed by childish minds; and we shall certainly become greater than those whom the blind public doth adore, for we shall attain to true contemplation of the story of nature which is inscribed within ourselves, and we shall follow the divine laws which are engraved upon our hearts." Confident in this thought, Bruno, according to tradition, could say to his executioners with relative peace in his soul: "Perchance you who pronounce my sentence are in greater fear than I who receive it."

Close up of the monument to Giordano Bruno, created by Ettore Ferrari, and erected in 1889 at Campo de’ Fiore in Rome, where he was burned in 1600

Reincarnation and the Moral Value of Animals

After the breakthrough of modern science, one occasionally finds the idea of reincarnation embedded in a more general confrontation with mechanism, that is, the notion that the universe should be understood as a kind of machine. Examples include the co-author of the American Declaration of Independence, Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), the German philosopher Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729-1781), and the American transcendentalists Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) and Walt Whitman (1819-1892). An interesting case is related to a discussion about whether animals have a soul, stemming from René Descartes' (1596-1650) argument that animals are to be regarded as soulless machines on which one can conduct experiments with a clear conscience.

One of the opponents of this theory was one of the small minority of female philosophers in the 17th century, Lady Anne Conway (1614-1687), whose ideas had a significant impact on the influential German philosopher, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716), among others. She was associated with the Cambridge Platonists, an influential philosophical group in 17th-century England, a counter-current to the emerging mechanism. Conway argued that the entire reality is a unity, that everything in the world contains spirit, that everything is subject to change, and that living beings therefore reincarnate and have the opportunity to change towards greater perfection. She argued that stones could eventually become humans, and ultimately angels. In the same context, she argued that suffering contributes to a heightening of the moral level of living beings. A moral consequence of her analysis is that animals, contrary to what Descartes believed, have moral value.

Perspective View with a Woman Reading a Letter by Samuel van Hoogstraten. The painting is believed to depict Anne Conway

The Mission of Materialism

Reincarnation is thus not only an Eastern idea but has had its own life within the Western Christian cultural sphere, here illustrated by a couple of examples out of many more that could have been chosen. Although the idea has often been suppressed with more or less violent means, today, the violence is primarily symbolic, as in the example with the danish priest mentioned in the introduction, and it is still difficult to be taken seriously, both in science and in Christian orthodoxy, if one openly professes interest in, or adherence to, the idea of reincarnation. One might then ask, if there is a deeper meaning to this situation?

Martinus answers this question in the affirmative in the article “Kristendommens verdens epoke“ (“The World Epoch of Christianity”), where he writes that "... precisely because Christianity was built this way, it had to end with people completely surrendering to physical matter and thus experiencing the culmination of darkness and the realization that one cannot manage without being connected to God and the higher worlds. In this way, they mature to become able to be responsive to the ultimate Christianity or spiritual science."

Thus, according to Martinus, the mission of traditional Christianity was, among other things, to prepare the way for materialism and the idea that we live in a dead, soulless, mechanical universe, and this could only be done by suppressing the idea of reincarnation and the consequential idea, that living beings are cocreators of their own destiny. The modern era, where humans no longer know God, is also referred to by Martinus with the Christian concept of Judgment Day. Judgment Day was in this view prepared by keeping the idea of reincarnation out of Christianity. Conversely, according to Martinus, we can only understand the deeper meaning of the concept of a Judgment Day if, through spiritual science, we unite the idea of reincarnation with Christianity and come to see the individual and collective experience of the Judgment Day as life itself teaching us what not to do.

"To understand the mission and true analysis of "Judgment Day", it is of course a prerequisite that one understands that every being's current physical earthly life constitutes only a single link in an infinite chain of lives that, the same being has experienced, thus finding itself in the midst of an eternal existence. In the earthly lives that preceded the current life, it has, through its behavior, created the causes of its current life, or through its behavior created the causes of its current destiny, just as it, through its behavior in its current life, creates the causes of the destiny it will have in its future life. From this point of view, the "Judgment Day" has a meaning." (Martinus, Dommedag (Judgment Day), 1938).

And in his lifelong work he envisioned the larger evolutionary context within which the experience of godless materialism, with all its atrocities, is only a small part: “… the universe, all its details as well as its entirety, its laws and direction, all of it expresses love of the highest quality for individuals; the purpose of all things is that these individuals should reach the highest development of consciousness, of understanding and artistic capability; in short, the purpose of all things is that the living being should become a perfect image of God.“⁴

Christus, sculpture from 1833, in the Church of Our Lady in Copenhagen, Denmark

1. My translation

2. St. Augustine, City of God, Book VII, chapter 30

3. Firpo, Luigi (1993). Il processo di Giordano Bruno

4. Martinus, Easter, chapter 4