Rebirth and Resurrection

On Afterlives

Nota bene: A Perennial Digression is still, for the time being, fluttering about the cavernous maw of Hades; this article’s release does not constitute a formal resurrection (or rebirth, I suppose) of the publication at this time. Such may eventuate later, but I remain dogged by responsibilities too constant and constraints too threatening to commit myself to substantial writing at the moment. However, this completed article deserves to see the light of day; and so one may consider it a kindly phasma briefly elapsed from those Asphodelian meadows.

The classical Christian tradition mostly resisted the Greek concept of the transmigration of the soul (e.g., Tim. 90e-91e; Laws 872e, 940ae; Irenaeus, Adv. Haer. II.33.1-4; 34.1; Tertullian, De an. XXIII.5-24; XXVIII.1-2; Origen, C. Cels. IV.17.10-17; Eusebius, P.E. XIII.6). The most serious Christian proponents of it were Clement and Origen of Alexandria, the latter of whom tried to contrast his view with transmigration but still posits a psychology in which a preexistent intelligence assumes numerous embodiments across distinct ages; both were heirs of Philo of Alexandria, who taught it in his writings as a key aspect of his eschatology (Somn. 1.137-139; Cher 114; QE 2.40).

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Josephus also potentially witnesses to the viability of rebirth as an eschatology in Early Judaism.

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After Clement and Origen, the most explicit affirmation comes from Nemesius of Emesa, about whom I will have more to say below (De Nat. 2, 34.6).

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For my part, I think this resistance was a mistake. While as a Christian I confess expectation of “resurrection of the dead” (Grk: anastasis nekrōn), I think transmigration or rebirth offers more solutions to hermeneutical and philosophical quagmires than Christians typically realize they have, without displacing resurrection. I contend that in and of itself, transmigration is not incompatible with resurrection, which also admits of multiple possible interpretations, and that it does not, for the same reasons, posit any special problem for the importance of one’s personal identity or the moral significance of one’s embodied life. Indeed, as re-becoming, rebirth, or transmigration and resurrection are both, in any scheme, concepts which broaden the meaning of personal identity, bodily integrity, and the endurance of life beyond what is perceptibly obvious in this life, any accusation one could make against one in this regard would logically apply to the other.

Consistently, the problem with transmigration in the early sources appears to be a problem with the concept of the preexistence of the soul; several early Christian writers, while generally pro-Platonic, disliked the idea that the soul preexisted the body, because it challenged their notions of God as Creator and of the eschatological significance of the body. But there are several caveats to be issued here. The first is that most pagan philosophers and most Christian philosophers alike held that there were either multiple intelligible components to the human being, particularly a higher element (nous, pneuma, and/or the rational element of the soul, potentially not fully descended into the material body) and a lower element (psyche, the discursive element of the soul, the irascible and passionate parts of the soul, etc.), and so to speak of or object to the preexistence of “the soul” requires specification about what exactly is denied to have preexisted. If one holds, for example, that there are multiple intelligible components to the human, and that soul is specifically the life breath or life force that animates the human body, then denying the preexistence of the individual soul simply follows as a matter of logical consequence: the life force animating this particular body and as delimited by it could not logically have begun to be as this soul before this body so delimited it. This chain of reasoning does not, however, amount to a counterargument to the preexistence of life force generally, or that the particular mind, consciousness, or intelligence that presides over and indwells the life force existed before the psychocorporeal unity was effected. Since pagan philosophers generally used psyche for the higher element of the self (particularly after Plotinus’ correction to Middle Platonism’s bifurcated Soul/World Soul) and Christian philosophers generally used pneuma, which for the pagans denoted a lesser reality (as pneuma was a kind of cosmic element and therefore inferior to the noetic, intelligible Soul, of which it was more usually the vehicle), it is likely the case that at least some disputes between pagan and Christian philosophers about transmigration were often conversations held past one another. The Christian problem is that the Fathers are on the hand beholden to a then-recently emerging scriptural corpus written during the early Imperial era, when Stoicism was still the dominant philosophical school in the empire as it had been during the Hellenistic period, but they are writing in an era where respectable philosophy was generally Middle and Neoplatonic, and this tradition was in fact more agreeable to their overall project. Several of the Fathers who take issue with preexistence and transmigration are more agreeable to Stoic physics than to Platonism: Tertullian, for instance, holds like a good Stoic that God is a corporeal pneuma pervasive in the universe and that the soul is also corporeal. It is this trend in Christian philosophy that thinkers like Justin Martyr, Clement, and Origen were explicitly trying to counteract: reading the necessity of presenting Christianity as a philosophically viable tradition to the Greco-Roman world, these authors opted for Platonic metaphysics even when they were less agreeable to the literal text of Scripture.

Second, it is neither a good argument theologically speaking nor a good argument philosophically speaking to pretend that simple denial of transmigration by the Fathers constitutes something like an argument against rebirth. One has to analyze the individual systems and arguments of each thinker that deals with the question and assess the extent to which their answers succeed in achieving internal logical coherence and external persuasive power. In general, the Fathers made important contributions to philosophy: the Cappadocian coinage of ousia and hypostasis, the “close connection of cosmogony with theodicy” and both with psychology, and “the limits of the human ability to achieve happiness and attain salvation.”

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But they also make clear mistakes from the perspective of the longer history of philosophy: departing from Origen’s theodicy which requires the preexistence of the intellect, “Christians made the…unfortunate choice to confine wickedness to the sphere of human activity and follow the Stoics in taking for granted that divine providence always arranges things for the good”;

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this amounts to a habit in those authors who deny some kind of preexistence to deny also that inequality is a real problem for theodicy. In other words, the choice of the Christian Tradition to ignore Origen’s central point—the diversity of natures, aptitudes, opportunities, and conditions bespeaks a cosmic unfairness, because visibly not all beings enjoy the same realistic access to the possibility of cosmic success through saving knowledge of God—is a mistake, because it assumes that evil exists exclusively in the affairs of human morality. This, too, is a Stoic leftover of Early Christian thought. But this offends against reason: nature is ceaselessly offensive towards the demands of human moral reasoning and a regular source of human suffering, most noticeably in the fact that accidents of birth—family, ethnicity, geography, language, culture, money, religion—determine so much of one’s life and condition the kinds of choices one makes. It is precisely this paradox that characterizes Origen’s theory of “transmigration”—though Origen does not call it this and objects to the idea that this is what his view entails—and that characterizes all theories of transmigration.

I wrote about Origen’s system here; I will point out that though Nyssen formally rejects Origen’s specific theory of preexistence, the general notion of human preexistence in a pretemporal, heavenly collective is otherwise essential to Nyssen’s cosmology and anthropology, so the point is somewhat moot, and a question more of how the language is being used and what in particular is being objected to rather than of “transmigration” or “preexistence” or “rebirth” as such. (There are no such things “as such”; there are only specific theories of what these things are and how they work.) At the end of the day, Nyssen faces the same question as Origen and gives simply a variant of his answer: how can God be just, and how can people be free, in a world that seems captive to evil not just morally but in some sense naturally, cosmically?

Over the summer, in the cosmological series that consumed me through that season, I talked about the problem of evil and the question of cosmic corruption as it challenged gnostics, Neoplatonists, and Christian theologians in late antiquity. One thing I pointed out in those posts was that the question of evil was effectively the question of how God could be both the Good itself and the sole origin of intelligible and sensible reality: the options are in fact only that either a.) evil is metaphysical nothingness, raw unrealized potency that has failed to be manifest in actuality, which Plotinus associated with matter but which Nyssen would later exorcise even further by suggesting that matter qua matter did not exist or b.) that God is not provident (unthinkable to the ancients for all but the Epicureans) or c.) that the god who is provident over the world is not good. It is of interest that only in the Plotinian, Origenian, and Nyssenian systems is it simultaneously the case that God is the Good, evil is truly nothingness, providence is possible, and, indeed, some intelligible aspect of the human is preexistent of the human incarnation and might (will) take on new incarnations in the future, whether in wholly new (Plotinus) or psychologically informed and spiritually glorified, reconstituted corpora (Origen and Nyssen).

A third caveat is that rebirth cannot be treated as resurrection’s opposite; that would be to misunderstand the possibilities of both in ancient sources. Specifically, belief in resurrection could be spoken about by Greek-speaking Jews in the language of reincarnation; that is to say, anastasis and metempsychosis are not far apart in the ancient landscape of possible afterlives. Philo of Alexandria clearly taught metempsychosis as the ordinary circuit of souls until they transcend the need for embodiment through virtue and deification by assimilation to the Logos (this is Karjanmaa’s excellent read). Josephus speaks about belief in transmigration among the Essenes and Pharisees among first-century Jewish sectarians, more likely, than any doctrine of “resurrection".” Of interest here are a few related observations: we know from the evidence of Paul, our only self-described Pharisee, and other New Testament texts that Pharisees believed in resurrection (Grk: anastasis); but we also know that resurrection, at least among the Pharisees known to us, was corporeal immortalization in a pneumatic or angelic form, not, necessarily, a fleshy reanimation as in the Empty Tomb stories of the Gospels. Further, we know that Jews and Christians did not generally envision resurrection as forthcoming for all the dead. Most texts envision a future resurrection for the righteous as a form of reward, whether terrestrial (and often temporary) or celestial (and perennial); resurrection of all the dead, some for reward, others punishment, is relatively late in the Jewish and Christian traditions.

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Moreover, in addition to locational diversity, neither Jews nor Christians were unified in their description of the resurrection’s timing. Some texts speak of resurrection in the form of a postmortem reward, others as taking place in a futuristic eschaton, and still others as taking place in the ritual and moral life of the present. The tendency of some modern scholars, represented by figures like NT Wright, to collapse resurrection into a single, future, post-postmortem reanimation of a corpse flattens what is increasingly recognized as a diverse landscape of resurrection-based afterlives in ancient religion.

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These caveats in place, I would make two related arguments for the compatibility of rebirth and resurrection in an eschatology: first, the argument that there is at least one biblically defensible instance of reincarnation, and second, the fact that the other two Abrahamic monotheisms include eschatologies that feature both outcomes of a human life. The biblical case to which I refer is that of Elijah and John the Baptist. Centuries of apologetically inclined exegesis have tried to resist this conclusion, but this itself evidences how strong and straightforward the claim is. If all one had were the Synoptic Gospels, in which, for two of them, no birth story is narrated about John, the one that does narrate a birth story for him says he will proceed “in the spirit [pneuma] and power of Elijah” (not long before Jesus’s own conception by divine spirit/pneuma, suggesting we ought to take the claim more than metaphorically; Lk 1:17, 35), in all three of which the heavenly, deified Elijah is seen after John’s death at the Transfiguration, and in two of which John is explicitly identified as Elijah by Jesus, then, given the landscape of possible afterlife beliefs in ancient Judaism and Greco-Roman circles, one would likely conclude that John the Baptist was a reincarnation of the prophet Elijah, or perhaps a kind of avatar or proxy for the heavenly Elijah in which some kind of gemination between heavenly and earthly double was afoot.

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It is true that John denies that he is Elijah in the Gospel of John (Jn 1:21), which may well mean that the Fourth Evangelist did not believe this to be the case; but such a denial would directly imply, of course, that John the Evangelist was aware of beliefs that the Baptist was a reincarnated Elijah in his own day. But is it the case that simply because a character, even a good character, in a Gospel says something to someone, that this reflects the Evangelist’s own perspective or the final truth? Is there no room here for literary intrigue—that the Evangelist’s Baptist character is being reticent when he speaks to his audience of priests and Levites (1:19), and not telling the whole truth? We are later told that the Johannine Jesus is keeping his cards close to his chest (2:24); he is asked in the Gospel to stop being so cryptic and speak plainly what he means (10:24); he clarifies that his revelation of the truth of his own identity is selectively for his followers (14:18-24). It is not impossible that John as a reincarnated Elijah, or an Elianic avatar, or earthly double, or whatever might constitute a similarly esoteric, elite kind of gnosis not commonly available to ordinary people. So when John dies, in his heavenly, resurrected, deified form, is he Elijah or John? Yes: that is the substance of the answer the Synoptic Jesus gives in Mark and Matthew to the disciples about John’s identity. And it is not like Jesus’s own teaching on resurrection in the Gospels is so fleshly and concrete as to elide the possibility. The righteous will “shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father” (Matt 13:43), a resurrectional text because it alludes to Daniel 12:3; in the resurrection, we will be like or equal to the angels (Mk 12:25; Lk 20:36), and have transcended precisely the kinds of concerns about individualized, privatized identity that evoke Sadducean contempt for the doctrine by a putative case of Levirate marriage. (One may object that the issue at stake is the relevance of marriage, specifically, to resurrected life, and that is certainly the primary topic at hand; but why is it that angels and resurrected people neither marry nor are given in marriage, if not because the sort of embodiment they receive is not the kind that marriage can regulate? And is identity so disconnected from embodiment as to mean that a change of embodiment does not imply a change in identity? Etc.)

Second, it is worth pointing out that esoteric strains of both Judaism and Islam have found ways of accommodating rebirth without denying an ultimate eschatology of resurrection. Kabbalistic Judaism teaches it in the form of gilgul, the cycle of lower souls being reborn until they have fulfilled the mitzvot across numerous lifetimes. In some Sufi thought, a similar delineation of the higher and lower souls leaves open the possibility of rebirth while holding that the ultimate destiny of the individual on the Day of Judgment is in fact resurrection (though what the resurrection body is taken to be is variously understood as well). Of course, dharmic traditions by and large accept rebirth as a fundamental feature of life in samsara, from which liberation is sought (but back into which the liberated might willingly descend again).

All in all, then, Christians may wish to find room for rebirth in their eschatology, if not as an explicit doctrine, then minimally as a possibility to which they are open, especially as they seek cosmopolitan parity with other traditions in the global commons. It is here that I think Nemesius is instructive. A Syrian Platonist and Christian bishop, Nemesius knew that no respectable philosopher in his day could get away without some kind of doctrine of rebirth a la the systems of the Late Platonists, whose philosophy was largely eclectic and inclusive of the rival Aristotelian school. He sought a doctrine of human nature that was available to reason, to the humane studies of the wider culture, and that could be agreeable for Christians and for others across their cultic and cultural boundaries; and so he embraced rebirth as a fact of human existence, while also, as a Christian, holding resurrection (however understood) as the ultimate horizon of human becoming. Modern Christians may find that they have other compelling reasons to adopt some theory of rebirth: if not also a way of embracing the possibilities of dialogue with other traditions, then perhaps by way of finding some kind of account which takes seriously what we know scientifically about the interdependence of all life and all human communities, about the natural recycling of our bodies and the implications this might hold for what becomes of our souls with them, and, indeed, the real experiences that many people seem to have of remembering with a kind of uncanny accuracy the experiences of others who have died before them. In none of this do Christians have to surrender the hope that the ultimate goal of this life is to, through dying with Christ, to also rise with him in the hereafter, in a glorified, immortalized expansion of ourselves. If anything, rebirth might reinvest resurrection with moral urgency: I have the opportunity always to make this life the one that will count, this life the one that will continue to be a face by which I gaze upon God’s face, even as I am never limited in my capacity to repent by the boundaries of any one life.

1. The most serious commentator on Philo in this regard is Sami Yli-Karjanmaa, Reincarnation in Philo of Alexandria (Atlanta: SBL Press, 2015).

2. Karjanmaa, “The New Life of Good Souls in Josephus: Resurrection or Reincarnation?” JSJ 48 (2017): 506-530.

3. See George Karamanolis, The Philosophy of Early Christianity, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2021), 29, 32, 49, 175, 178, 186, 188 for these references.

4. Karamanolis, The Philosophy of Early Christianity, 234.

5. Karamanolis, The Philosophy of Early Christianity, 234.

6. See Thomas D. McGlothlin, Resurrection as Salvation: Development and Conflict in Pre-Nicene Paulinism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018).

7. See M.David Litwa, Iesus Deus: The Early Christian Depiction of Jesus as a Mediterranean God (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2014), 141-180; Outi Lehtipuu, Debates Over the Resurrection of the Dead: Constructing Early Christian Identity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015); see also C.D. Elledge, Resurrection of the Dead in Early Judaism, 200 BCE-200 CE (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019); Candida Moss, Divine Bodies: Resurrecting Perfection in the New Testament and Early Christianity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019).

8. See, e.g., Andrei Orlov, The Greatest Mirror: Heavenly Counterparts in the Jewish Pseudepigrapha (New York: SUNY, 2018), for the idea of gemination between an earthly and heavenly figure in Jewish texts; see also Litwa, “‘I Will Become Him’: Homology and Deification in the Gospel of Thomas,” JBL 134 (2015): 427-447.