Sometime ago, I wrote two articles for Al Kimel’s blog, Eclectic Orthodoxy, reviewing David Bentley Hart’s Roland in Moonlight. The second of those, “Roland, Rebirth, and Resurrection: A Comparative Eschatology of Paramahansa Yogananda and Origen of Alexandria”1 compared and contrasted the eschatological systems of the third-century Christian theologian and the 20th century yogi on the grounds of a few comments Roland makes to Hart towards the end of the book. In that essay, I tried to stick strictly to a comparison of the three-bodies doctrine as it exists in contemporary Yoga and Vedanta and has been popularized in Modern Western Yoga with the doctrine of embodiment and resurrection that Origen develops throughout the De Principiis. What became immediately clear is that “rebirth” and “resurrection” are more interchangeable than we typically think of them as being: the yogic goal is to escape a “starting-over” sort of rebirth in the mutable world of plant, animal, and human life for becoming on a higher plane of reality where personal continuity with previous lives is more directly maintained and where greater opportunity exists for further spiritual ascent, from the astral world to the causal world and from the causal world to moksa with brahman. Likewise, Origen envisions an immediate postmortem resurrection of the soul in a spiritual body, where the matter of the flesh body has been rearranged into a new state in accordance with what is fitting for the salvation of the soul, whether a punitive, demonic state or a palliative, angelic state. Upon achieving the latter, the soul begins a cosmic ascent to God that leads it “from glory to glory” in contemplation and therefore in reflection of the divine glory. Origen does not envision a literal metempsychosis on the material plane of reality, but it is clear that his system shares a great deal in common with South Asian tradition, as Roland suggests concerning the Christian doctrine of resurrection.
Roland and Hart also talk, though, about a theory of rebirth (or, as Hart corrected me in our interview, “re-becoming”) that is closer to home for the Abrahamic or Adonaistic traditions: namely, the stratification of the soul and the cosmic narrative of rebirth that we find in Kabbalistic Judaism. So notes Roland:
“We’ve talked before, I know, about the irreducibility of intentional consciousness to material forces—its teleological orientation toward a transcendental horizon beyond nature, its origination in a pure awareness prior to empirical identity—and about how the whole world of nature is constituted only in the relation between these two poles outside of physical nature…”
“I believe…”
“That’s where the real work of translation is done: that original pure act of consciousness, more inward than our inmost, higher than our utmost, to which the mystics ascend by going inward. Oh, you know, Ekhart’s Seelesburg, or whatever word he used, in the heart of which dwells the Funklein Gottes. Or the atman that’s more original in its universality than the jiva in its individuality. Do you know the Sufi idea of the seven layers of the soul?”
“Yes, I do. I…”
“The more one descends into the nafs, the higher one rises, and the nearer one comes to the hidden garden, till one reaches the secret soul, the ruh sirr, which remembers God, and beyond that—more inward yet—one draws near to the secret of secrets, the sirrul-asrar, where the divine spark shines. Then, of course, there’s the Qabbalistic hierarchy of nefesh, ruah, and neshamah, which you sometimes see assimilated to the Aristotelian scale of vegetal, animal, and rational soul. But that’s a mistake. Nefesh already possesses all the faculties of a sensitive, deliberative agent. It’s more like a distinction in spiritual aptitude, like the ancient Christian hierarchy of somatics, psychics, and pneumatics. Everyone has a nefesh, but ruah and neshamah are of more celestial origin, and in a sense descend into the living soul. Some say the neshamah really only takes up its habitation in the greatest of mystical adepts. Some believe, in fact, that it’s only the nefesh that ever suffers transmigration—gilgul—from one incarnation to another—though that’s not the view expressed in the Ra’aya Mehemna, of course. And, too, other schools speak of two yet higher souls, the Chaya—the eternally living soul—and then the Yehidah—the unique soul, the one, the end that awaits humanity perfected, the highest unity with the divine power itself, the first manifestation of the Ein-Sof…a divine spark that’s also at one with the keter, the crown of the sefirotic tree…”2
Part of the reason that Christian theology, I wager, has traditionally been at a loss to try and interact with other mystical systems is its impoverished and oversimplified view of the human being. In Western theology this simplification is most commonly the dichotomy of “soul” and “body,” understood in Aristotelian/Thomistic categories, and today there is a movement towards a supposedly more biblical physicalism of collapsing even those two into a monistic appreciation of the human being as a psychocorporeal unity. This latter trend does not lack justification—the Hebrew Bible does not speculate at great length on the nature of the human being as a spiritual and material organism, and the New Testament assumes rather than articulates a fully coherent set of opinions on the subject, conditioned both by Jewish and Greco-Roman influences (since, indeed, Judaism was a Greco-Roman religion in antiquity)—but it can obscure the fact that, in antiquity and the middle ages, most people, Pagan, Jewish, Christian, or Muslim, believed in a hierarchically stratified spiritual essence of the human being. Sometimes, as in Kabbalah and certain Sufi sects, this has led to a doctrine of rebirth—gilgul or tanasukh—that was never articulated in the Christian context, where clear beliefs on eschatology were never fully ratified.3
As Kabbalah was synthesized and expanded from older mystical traditions within Judaism, some of them directly related to Jewish apocalyptic and sapiential thought from the Second Temple and early proto-Rabbinic periods, there is something to Kabbalah that puts it much closer to the thought-worlds of Christianity and Islam than South and East Asian traditions are, at least superficially.4 If there is to be a Christian doctrine of rebirth, or a way for Christians to integrate rebirth into their eschatology, it is likely to come somewhat more naturally through comparative work with Kabbalah than with Vedanta, for all of the myriad benefits that come from engaging in Christian theology in a Vedic mode.
“The kabbalists,” notes Marvin Sweeney, “were fundamentally interested in the means by which the transcendent, infinite, and heavenly presence of G-d,” the Ein-Sof, “manifested immanently in the finite world, as well as in the means by which finite human beings and creation at large embodied the heavenly divine, perceived it within themselves and the world at large, and consequently acted upon its qualities and expectations.”5 For the kabbalists, the relationship between God and the world “was a two-way street, a dialogue, and an experience of encounter, and they set out to uncover the nuances by which the divine personality took on its various layers and aspects so that its different qualities might find expression in the world and motivate humans to establish relationship with the divine.”6 The mediatory means for this relationship in the classic kabbalistic text, the Zohar, are the sefirot—“emanations of G-d” which are “intangible aspects of the Ein Sof conveyed to the finite world of creation and the role of Israel within that creation.”7 The tenth sefirah—the Shekhinah, the “Dwelling” presence of God in creation in rabbinic literature—is recast as the nuptial bride of God, the feminine receptive to the masculine divine presence, and Israel as the human bride of God, “the means by which divine holiness is manifested in the world.”8 From this perspective, it is the “task” of Israel, as God’s bride and partner in the creative act, “to complete and thereby sanctify the finite world of creation according to the will of G-d, the Ein Sof, as expressed in the revelation of divine Torah.”9 Human beings thus “play a primary role in establishing the relationship between the upper and lower worlds,” and “are a primary venue for channeling the Ten Sefirot that enable the Ein Sof to manifest in the finite world of creation as the Shekhinah.”10 The Sitra Ahra of the theophanic creation, the “Other Side” of the panentheistic God, is the origin of evil, both yetzer hara (the evil inclination) and the moral and natural evil of angels (Samael especially) and humans whose sin “introduced evil and chaos into the world of creation,”11 making the human task one of pedagogic education through punishment and reward to leave behind the yetzer hara and cultivate yetzer hatov, inclination toward the good, thus bringing about the union of God and the world. In particular, Israel does this through the worship of the Temple and the practice of the Torah, the latter of which currently substitutes for Temple worship, with the proper kavanah or “intention,” that is, education concerning the mystical meanings of the mitzvoth; righteous gentiles do this through proper observance of the Noachide commandments.
This basic metaphysical narrative gets further expanded and reworked in successive generations of kabbalistic thought. Lurianic Kabbalah in particular—the most influential stream on later Judaism, and the origin of gilgul theories—makes a few key inflections to the system. Moses Cordovero was the first to articulate the sefirotic system of creation as “vessels” meant to contain the divine light of God, and after his death in 1570, Rabbi Isaac ben Solomon Luria (1538-1572) succeeded his school in Safed.12 Luria’s principal contributions to Kabbalah are the concepts of Tzimtzum, Shevirat Hakelim, and Tikkun Olam.13 Tzimtzum is “the contraction of G-d’s infinite presence to create the finite world”14: God’s infinity requires that, for there to be finite beings, God must empty himself in order to enable their existence, in a process Christian theology would recognize as kenosis. Luria’s unique suggestion is that tzimtzum “is not an act of revelation and emanation, but instead…an act of concealment and limitation of the Ein Sof.”15 Tzimtzum is, for Luria, God’s presence-as-absence in the created world, his deigning to dwell in the finite “series of kelim or vessels that contain the divine essence of G-d” which is, by its nature, incomprehensible; chief among these is Adam Kadmon, the “Primal Adam” or “Primal Human,”16 a spiritual humanity inclusive of every individual human soul in a primordial unity. The ten sefirot are really contained within or are the Adam Kadmon: Adam Kadmon is both blueprint and eschatological destiny of the creation. Shevirat Hakelim, “the Shattering of the Vessels,” is the idea “that the ten finite vessels that received the infinite presence of the divine light poured into them at creation were unable to withstand the infinite presence of the divine”; hence, seven of them “shattered, scattering sparks of divine light throughout the world where they are encased in the broken fragments of the seven shattered vessels.”17 Hence, all but three of the sefirot within the Adam Kadmon shattered, all but the most mental and spiritual realities unable to contain the divine presence. Adam Kadmon itself “is therefore shattered, and the divine light that constitutes his presence in the world is scattered about and in need of collection and reassembly in order to ensure the integrity of the divine Ein Sof, Adam Kadmon, and the tangible world of creation.”18 This leads to “Tikkun Olam, the mending of the world, points to the role of human beings in the world as partners with G-d to bring about the restoration of the flawed and shattered world.”19 As a result, the face of God is also shattered in the created order into the partzufim, the aspects or faces of God: Arikh Anpin (the Long-suffering Face), Abba (Father) and Imma (Mother), Zeir Anpin (the Impatient One), and Malkhut/Shekhinah. The goal of this system is to reunite these into a single manifestation of the divine presence in the world. Hence, “By acts of holiness as defined in Jewish practice, the Jewish people are tasked with going into exile into the world to gather the various sparks of the divine presence that are hidden in the broken shards of the seven shattered vessels of the moral and material realms; regathered, they then realize the holy presence of G-d in the world.”20
This is where gilgul comes in. Because “[i]t is the task of human beings to ensure the smooth and proper functioning of this system of sefirot and divine partzufim in the world of creation,”21 the practical emphasis is on the performance of mitzvoth, albeit with a more mystical focus on “theurgical and experiential efforts at promoting holiness within the self and the world in which we live.”22 For Luria, “human beings are obligated to observe and perform all of the commandments in Judaism except for those that they are constitutionally unable to perform,”23 and so the observance of the mitzvoth regulate the integration of the self. If one needs assistance, one might join one’s self ritually to a departed tzaddik, creating devequt or “binding” of the nephesh of the student to the nephesh of the saint, so that disciple and master might together “join with the root of the original soul of Adam.”24 But it also might be the case that “the soul of a past tzaddik is embodied in the soul of a later tzaddik.”25 Because “[t]he primal Adam’s (Adam Kadmon) soul apparently contained all the souls that would ever exist in humankind,” human souls belonged to an original unity anyway, and all of their various incarnations were so many diminutions from the primordial unity in the glorious body of the Adam Kadmon.26 Through the various incarnations of the lower souls, especially the nephesh, they could attain purification through proper practice of the mitzvoth with the correct kavvanah. Transmigration, at least of one’s nephesh, is therefore guaranteed for most Jews, and especially for gentile converts to Judaism, as the majority will not perform all of the mitzvoth correctly in this life so as to purify the soul and do their essential part in tikkun olam.
In beginning to do comparative theology with Christianity, there are three introductory caveats to make about the systems described above. The first is that insofar as Christianity originated as a sect of apocalyptic, messianic Judaism in the first century, throughout which it continued to consider itself a form of Judaism, and after which many pockets of actively practicing Jews who believed in Jesus as Lord and Christ continued to exist throughout Israel-Palestine and the Diaspora, Christians and the later kabbalists are working to some extent with common traditions that influence their respective mysticisms. The second is that rabbinic Judaism and catholic Christianity continued to influence one another even as the latter became a gentile-majority movement and the former gradually came to consider Christ-faith as out of bounds for normative Jewish belief and practice.27 The third is that Christian reception of Kabbalah and attempts to naturalize its theology within Christianity are not new: they were excessively popular in the Renaissance and Early Modernity, so the ground I propose to tread has been walked before. When we read the kabbalists, we are reading both one stream of internal mystical reflection on the prophetic, apocalyptic, and sapiential traditions of ancient Israel and Early Judaism, as they were received in the rabbinic community, as well as authors who are unavoidably influenced by other, even antagonistic streams of such reception, like Christianity and Islam. The opportunities for comparison in that context are both obvious and perilous.
Continuandum in Parte Secunda.
https://afkimel.wordpress.com/2021/04/05/roland-rebirth-and-resurrection-a-comparative-eschatology-of-paramahansa-yogananda-and-origen-of-alexandria/.
David Bentley Hart, Roland in Moonlight (New York: Angelico Press, 2021), 290-291.
A plurality of afterlife schemata proliferated in late antiquity, none of which received any kind of official backing until much later. See, for instance, J. Edward Wright, The Early History of Heaven (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); Nicholas Constas, “‘To Sleep, Perchance to Dream’: The Middle State of Souls in Patristic and Byzantine Literature,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 55 (2001): 91-124; Alan F. Segal, Life After Death: A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion (New York: Image Books, 2010); Vasileios Marinis, Death and the Afterlife in Byzantium: The Fate of the Soul in Theology, Liturgy, and Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017); Bart D. Ehrman, Heaven and Hell: A History of the Afterlife (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2021).
See Joseph Dan, Kabbalah: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), and Marvin A. Sweeney, Jewish Mysticism: From Ancient Times Through Today (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2020).
Sweeney, Jewish Mysticism, 297.
Sweeney, Jewish Mysticism, 297.
Sweeney, Jewish Mysticism, 304. Dan gives a good introduction to the history and development of the sefirot in Kabbalah, 41-45.
Sweeney, Jewish Mysticism, 305.
Sweeney, Jewish Mysticism, 305.
Sweeney, Jewish Mysticism, 316.
Sweeney, Jewish Mysticism, 309.
Sweeney, Jewish Mysticism, 340-341.
Sweeney, Jewish Mysticism, 342.
Sweeney, Jewish Mysticism, 343.
Sweeney, Jewish Mysticism, 343.
Sweeney, Jewish Mysticism, 343.
Sweeney, Jewish Mysticism, 344.
Sweeney, Jewish Mysticism, 345.
Sweeney, Jewish Mysticism, 345.
Sweeney, Jewish Mysticism, 347.
Sweeney, Jewish Mysticism, 347.
Sweeney, Jewish Mysticism, 348.
Sweeney, Jewish Mysticism, 348.
Sweeney, Jewish Mysticism, 352.
Sweeney, Jewish Mysticism, 353.
Sweeney, Jewish Mysticism, 354.
See, e.g., Daniel Boyarin, Borderlines: The Partition of Judaeo-Christianity (Philadelphia: Princeton University Press, 2006); Peter Schafer, The Jewish Jesus: How Judaism and Christianity Shaped Each Other (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014).
This is right in the pocket I have sent my own Dodgers and Olivers out into the wordworld to pick. Thanks.
This is a series, if you ever have the time, would be joy to read if you continued it. Of course after you finish your God-Jesus-Spirit series