Ukrainian Orthodoxy		Orthodoxie ukrainienne

Reincarnation

Question:

What is the Orthodox Church's stance on reincarnation?

Answer:

Very Reverend Ihor Kutash kutash@unicorne.org

The Orthodox Church is quite firm in rejecting the doctrine about human destiny known as reincarnationi.e. that souls are re-born in different bodies. Here are some reasons:

1. The doctrine of reincarnation indicates that the human body is of secondary importance and that only the soul, i.e. the spiritual component of the human person survives death. If that were so, the Second Person of the Trinity, our Lord Jesus, would not have become incarnate. By His incarnation He united the entire human person with God and would not separate from His human body no matter what physical, psychological and spiritual torments were inflicted upon Him. He rose again in His perfected human body and so appeared to His disciples who ate with Him, touched Him and generally were entirely convinced that they were not communicating with a disembodied Spirit, but with a concrete, glorified Human Person. Moreover they (and so does the Church to this day) believed that the Risen Jesus was as each human is created to be, and by God's mercy shall be - unless this mercy is consistently and persistently refused, for God's irrevocable gift to each one of us the capability of making authentic decisions, out of our own essence, to accept or refuse fellowship with Him. This capability is called in Greek "autexousion". Jesus is now and forever what He will be, i.e. truly Divine and also truly Human: a unity of body, soul and spirit - and by the way, apparently also bearing the marks of what He experienced in His earthly sojourn among us, for Thomas was invited to not only see but also touch the wounds of His crucifixion, which must at that point not been a horror to behold but glorified as He was (and is forever). Jesus will not be re-born as another human or other sort of person. And neither will anyone of us.

2. Similarly, we reject the doctrine of re-incarnation because it trivializes human experience and human relationships. It implies that the only lasting significance of what we do and say is the extent to which it improves our ultimate destiny: the being which will finally either dissolve into the collective bliss of nirvana or otherwise exist in some blissful state. And what sort of intimacy, or indeed relationship, could there really be between beings who are changing their fleshly vessels and thus their proximity and interaction with other beings in other vessels, together with all that this involves, every century or so? There is some attractiveness, to be sure, to the idea that such would be the case with us. It would mean that we would not bear our wounds for all eternity and that we ought to be detaching at least as much as we attach ourselves to those we love, so that people could be "free" to love others - all sorts of others, rather than just that relatively small group of others whom we know in the small space of our earthly sojourn in this particular vessel. But, as Bob Dylan sings in "All Along the Watch Tower", this is not our fate - according to the Bible and the Church, the Divine-Human Community in and through which the Bible comes to us. We shall indeed bear our wounds for all eternity, but they will be glorified as were those of our Lord, and shall contribute to our wholeness - as well as the wholeness and integrity of all the cosmos. And those whom we know and love, we shall know and love forever - and infinitely better than we do now and the circle will indeed be expanded to include every being. This is so, we are convinced, not in spite of the reality, but because all we do and say has a significance, a lasting one and is "not but a joke" as Bob Dylan's thief observed to his joker. It moves us and the whole cosmos forward in the dance of ever-growing integration, communion and perfection. As C.S. Lewis says in last book of The Narnia Chronicles, The Last Battle, we shall ever be going "farther up" and "farther in", not as self-sufficient god-figures, but as integral members of the Family which is God, Angels, Humans and other Non-Humans. This could not be if all we thought, said and did were relevant only to our own self-development and self-transcendance.

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