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CHAPTER XVII
SUCCESSIVE LIVES - HISTORIC PROOFS
Our studies would be incomplete if we did not cast a glance across the role which a belief in
successive lives has played in history. This belief dominates all history, and we find it in the greatest religions
of the Orient and in the most elevated philosophies. It has guided civilizations on their march, and has been
perpetuated from age to age. In spite of persecutions and temporary eclipses, it reappears and persists across
the centuries and in all countries. From India it spread over the world, and long before the great revelations of
historic times, it was formulated in the Vedas, and notably in the Bhagavad Gita. Brahmanism and Buddhism
are inspired with it, and Egypt and Greece adopted this same doctrine. Under symbols more or less obscure,
everywhere it appears. It was known to the Roman world, and was the belief of Pythagoras, of Socrates, of
Plato, Apollo, and Empedocles. Ovid, Virgil, and Cicero, in their imperishable works, make frequent allusions
to it. Virgil, in the Aeneid, speaks of the soul plunging into Lethe, and losing memory of former lives. The
school of Alexandria gave it great éclat, by the works of Philon, Plotinus, Ammonius, Saccas, etc. The sacred
books of the Hebrews, the Zahar and the Kabala, affirm pre-existence, and under the name of resurrection,
reincarnation. It was the belief of the Pharisees and Essenes. The old and the new Testaments, in the midst of
obscure and altered texts, contain numerous traces of it - for example, in certain passages of Jeremiah; and in
Jesus’ own words concerning John the Baptist, Mathew, chapter XI, ‘And if ye will receive it, this is Elias
which was for to come.’ Also chapter XVII, ‘But I say unto you, that Elias is come already, and they knew
him not, but have done unto him whatsoever they listed. Likewise shall the Son of man suffer of them. Then
the disciples understood that he spoke unto them of John the Baptist.’ Primitive Christianity possessed, then,
the true idea of destiny. But with the subtlety of Byzantine theology, the hidden sense disappeared little by
little, and the virtue of secret rites of initiation vanished like a delicate perfume. Scholasticism smothered the
first revelations under the weight of syllogisms, or ruined it by specious arguments.
Nevertheless, the first fathers of the Church, and above all, Origen and Clement of Alexandria,
pronounced in favor of the transmigration of souls. Origen, in his work called Principles, speaks of the preexistence
and survivance of souls in other bodies. Saint Gregory of Nyssa said that it was a necessity of nature
for the immortal soul to be cured and purified, and if it is not done here and now it must be done in the future
lives. But in place of this simple and clear conception of destiny, an ensemble of dogmas was given to the
world by scholasticism, revolting to the reason and separating man from God.
The doctrine of successive lives reappears again at different epochs in the Christian world under the
forms of great heresies and secret schools. But it was often drowned in blood and smothered under the ashes
of funeral pyres. In the Middle Ages it was almost wholly eclipsed, and ceased to influence the Occidental
thought, to its great detriment. From this came the errors and confusion of this somber epoch, the cruel
persecution, the prison of the human spirit. A sort of intellectual night fell upon Europe. However, from afar
came a ray of light, an inspiration from on high, illuminating some intuitive souls, and this doctrine remained
for the deep thinkers the only possible explanation of the profound mystery of life.
Not only the troubadours in their poems and chants made allusions to it, but powerful minds like
Bonaventura and Dante Alighieri mentioned it in a formal fashion. Ozanam, a Catholic writer, recognized the
plan of the Divine Comedy as following closely the great lives of antique initiation based on the plurality of
lives. Cardinal Nicholas de Cuza sustained in the Vatican the theory of many lives and inhabited worlds with
the consent of Pope Eugene IV. Thomas Moore, Paracelsus, Jacob Bochme, Giordano Bruno, Campanello,
affirmed or taught the grand truth, often to their cost. Van Helmont, in De revolutione Animarum, gave in two
hundred problems arguments in favor of the reincarnation of souls. Are not these superior intelligences
comparable to the summits of the Alps which are the first to receive the fires of the day, and which conserve
them when the rest of the earth is plunged in night? Philosophy in the late centuries is enriched with this
doctrine. Cudworth and Hume considered this theory of immortality the most rational. Lessing, Hegel, Herder,
Schelling, Fichte the younger, discussed it with elevation. Mezzini, in his work Del Concílio a Dio, said: ‘We
believe in an indefinite series of reincarnations, each one of which constitutes a progress on the preceding: we
can recommence the state where we left off, not meriting to pass to a superior one, but we cannot retrograde or
perish.’
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