Like many of the Church Fathers the Cabalists used as their main
argument in favor of the doctrine of metempsychosis the justice of
God. But for the belief in metempsychosis, they maintained, the
question why God often permits the wicked to lead a happy life while
many righteous are miserable would be unanswerable. Then too the
infliction of pain upon children would be an act of cruelty unless it
is imposed in punishment of sin committed by the soul in a previous
state. Isaac Abravanel sees in the commandment of the Levirate a proof
of the doctrine of metempsychosis for which he gives the following
reasons: (1) God in His mercy willed that another trial should be
given to the soul, which having yielded to the sanguine temperament of
the body had committed a capital sin, such as murder, adultery, etc.;
(2) it is only just that when a man dies young a chance should be
given to his soul to execute in another body the good deeds which it
had not time to perform in the first body; (3) the soul of the wicked
sometimes passes into another body in order to receive its deserved
punishment here below instead of in the other world where it would be
much more severe. (Commentary on Deuteronomy, XXV, 5.)
Christianity is not exempt from this idea. Origen and other Church
Fathers believed in it. Origen says: "For God, justly disposing of his
creatures according to their desert, united the diversities of minds
in one congruous world, that he might, as it were, adorn his mansion
(in which ought to be not only vases of gold and silver, but of wood
also and clay, and some to honor and some to dishonor) with these
diverse vases, minds or souls. To these causes the world owes its
diversity, while Divine Providence disposes each according to his
tendency, mind and disposition." He also says: "I think this is a
question how it happens that the human mind is influenced now by the
good, now by the evil. The causes of this I suspect to be more ancient
than this corporeal birth." The idea of Reincarnation spread so fast
amongst the early Christians that Justinian was obliged to suppress it
by passing a law in the Council of Constantinople in 538 A.D. The law
was this: "Whoever shall support the mythical presentation of the
pre-existence of the soul, and the consequently wonderful opinion of
its return, let him be Anathema." The Gnostics and Manichaeans
propagated the tenets of Reincarnation amongst the mediaeval sects
such as the Bogomiles and Paulicians. Some of the followers of this
so-called erroneous belief were cruelly persecuted in 385 A.D.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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