ONE AND MANY: THE ONLY TRANSMIGRANT
I am going to trace here, in this series, a line from unity to nothingness, and try to bridge the mystery of the “problem of the intermediate state” that is best seen in the three very silent days following Jesus’ death before the very mysterious “Resurrection event” that broke the Mediterranean world apart. Questions like “where does a soul go without the body?” and “why the need for a resurrection?” are given speculative answers, or at least answers that reframe the question itself, which is the point. I want to look at this from another angle, an angle that unites the seemingly opposed ideas of glorification and liberation of the immortal “soul” from the “flesh”, and the unity of soul and body in “resurrection”. The former is familiar to many Christians as a form of “Gnosticism”, or maybe “Dualism”, and because many other religions have similar perspectives, they regard this perspective with a similar trepidation, viewing the latter perspective as a more “complete” due to the events in Palestine. It is important to note here that Jews and Muslims also believe in the resurrection, it is not an exclusively Christian doctrine, it both predates and antedates us. However, the doctrine is central in a way it isn’t in our Abrahamic sister religions, due to our founder and Lord being a living example of resurrection “of the flesh”. So, as someone who believes in the “Transcendent Unity of Religions” as Schuon would put it, I would like to offer this speculative gift, which will be divided into three posts, to the inquiring mind, based on my intuitions, and the light I see in the “Perennial Tradition”.
I
THE ONE “IMMORTAL SOUL”
God goes forth in all beings and in all beings returns to himself—as, moreover, an expression not of God’s dialectical struggle with some recalcitrant exteriority, but of an inexhaustible power wholly possessed by the divine in peaceful liberty.
David Bentley Hart [1]
Verily, there is no other transmigrant but the Lord
Ananda Coomaraswamy, translating Adi Shankara [2]
And there are diversities of activities, but it is the same God who works all in all
1 Corinthians 12:6
When The Teacher behind the words of the book of Ecclesiastes says “All is Vanity”, we tend to forget, perhaps instinctively, that he is not just talking about physical things. All is Vanity is not Some is Vanity. “All” includes Angels and Demons. It includes Heaven and Hell. It includes the “individuality” we all value so much. The only reality is God, whose works are forever (Eccl. 3:14). It is from this perspective Jesus can say “Heaven and Earth will pass away, but my words will never pass away” (Matt. 24:35).
You may be thinking something along the lines of “If Heaven is passing away, why would I want to go there in the first place? What is the point of it all?” This is a valid concern, I don’t want to demean anyone’s struggle with the seeming futility of life, a struggle I go through also. However, I also want us to “let go of ourselves” for the length of this post and see what it means to say “He who loses his life for me will gain it”. There is something more glorious than our individuality, if we have the eyes to see it.
The eye of the heart glimpses the fragmentary nature of our seemingly unified “individuality” in many places. For example, it sees that one is not truly “one” or “complete” in its experience of loneliness. You are not you without others. You, that is, your so called “individual self”, are constituted by relations. You are at once a sibling and an offspring, and a citizen, and so on. Without those relations, you as an individual do not exist, and when we are cut off we groan in agony at the spiritual equivalent of cutting off one’s limb. As David Bentley Hart put it:
After all, what is a person other than a whole history of associations, loves, memories, attachments, and affinities? Who are we, other than all the others who have made us who we are, and to whom we belong as much as they to us? We are those others. [3]
When we search our hearts, what we see is a search for true unity, the beginnings of which is unity with other human beings. Not a superficial unity like conventions or book clubs or even social causes (which are venerable in their own sphere, but cannot replace natural communities), but real unity in Love and relations with people as human beings, as “persons” (and Dr Hart chose the word “person” deliberately), and not as so called “individuals”. This is the beginning of true personhood, the realization of trans-personhood and the non-individuality of true personhood. But this is just the beginning, because then the question comes up: Where is the centre of this “person”, where is this unity from? If it is not found in my “individuality”, where is it?”
St. Paul answers this with “Yet not I, but Christ in me” (Gal. 2:20), the ecclesiastical teacher says “Fear God and keep His commandments, for this is man's all.” (Eccl. 12:13). You see the glimpse of this shared “self” in Genesis when Adam is given the “breath/spirit of life” directly, while Eve isn’t also breathed into directly. That same Spirit in Adam resides in Eve because she was taken from Him. The scripture says they shall “become one flesh” (Gen. 2:24). This is only so if there is one Spirit that unites the two. That Spirit is Christ, as St. Paul realized when commenting on that same scripture (1 Cor. 6: 16-17). To do God’s commandments, as the ecclesiastical teacher says, is to do God’s acts, and to act as his body. By implication, it is to acknowledge that God is your true person, the centre of your being, the “head of the church, which is his body” (Col. 1:18). There is one Spirit from Adam to all men, the spirit that “returns to the God who gave it” (Eccl. 12:7). This is the true man, who is also true God, the only “immortal soul”, and the only one who is “reincarnated” in Hindu religion [2] as the many bodies it animates. This is what it means to call God “Atman”, which is translated as both “Self” and “Spirit”.
But does this negate the individual? What then is the purpose of my particularity? That is the question for the next post in this series.
Hart, D. B. (2015). God, Creation, and Evil: The Moral Meaning of creatio ex nihilo. Radical Orthodoxy, 3(September), 1–17.
Coomaraswamy, A. K. (1944). On the One and Only Transmigrant.pdf. Journal Of The American Oriental Society, 3, 28. He argues that Hinduism does not teach about "reincarnation of individuals", rather it teaches "reincarnation" in the sense that God, or Atman, or Brahman, is the true Being and Self of all things. Atman "reincarnates" whenever things, including humans, come into being, which is another way of saying that "Creation is Incarnation", as I have written on a few times. The former perspective concerns that of our experience of time, while the latter concerns eternity.
Hart, D. B. (2019). That All Shall Be Saved. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctvnwbzd4