THE CITY
Christ was divine but not human, a heresy that lies at the heart of all post-Christian gnosticism, just as Arianism, the belief that Christ was human but not divine, lies at the heart of deism.
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ut perhaps the most destructive element of gnosticism is not its legalistic view of the flesh but its final rejection of the integrity of the individual. Many, though not all, believers who champion soul over body, who strip humanism away from Christianity, end up believing, in one form or another, in the transmigration of souls. In modern-day America, where this belief has come into vogue, there have been novels and films touting romantic tales of reincarnation. Of course, reincarnation is about as unromantic a teaching as possible. Love in its highest sense marks a moving out of oneself towards another, but that movement presupposes two fixed identities that maintain their integrity even as they move toward each other. Such a high view of love is profoundly and essentially incarnational; it parallels closely the core Christian belief that when God initiated his greatest act of love by moving out of himself to become fully the man Jesus, he yet continued to be fully God. But if reincarnation is true, then this foundational integrity is just a passing, ephemeral thing. For, in the final analysis, reincarnation not only teaches that the body will, in the end, be “shuffled off,” but that the personality, the selfhood, will also be discarded at death. The “doctrine” of reincarnation, whether explicitly or not, depicts the soul as a sort of pitcher filled with water. At death, this water—which represents the personality, hopes, dreams, and memories of the deceased individual—is poured out, and new water (a new personality) is poured in. Indeed, in the Platonic version of reincarnation, those souls designated to return to the earth must drink of the water of Lethe (the river of forgetfulness) before they can receive their new bodies and be reborn as new individuals. Of course, many reincarnationists believe that some drops of memory persist into the next life (hence the phenomenon of déjà vu), but, as the core of the personality has been effaced, these drops have little final meaning, and offer no real hope for the preservation of personhood after death. This leads us, finally, to a belief that is at once the equivalent and the obverse of reincarnation, a belief that, significantly, appears both in stoicism and gnosticism: the one soul. In this teaching, the departed soul, rather than being emptied and refilled, is taken out of the 62