Saturday, March 26, 2022

M. David Litwa on the Transmigration of Souls in the theology of Carpocrates of Alexandria

  

Transmigration

 

We now turn to information derived solely from heresiological reports. Heresiologists were interested in connecting “heresies” to ancient philosophies, such as Pythagoreanism. Accordingly, they underscored Carpocrates’s doctrine of transmigration (souls moving from body to body)—held to be a classically Pythagorean doctrine. Interestingly, Carpocrates and Basilides—both contemporaneous Alexandrian theologians—both upheld a form of transmigration on the basis of biblical texts. Basilideans appealed to Rom. 7:9 and Deut. 5:9 . . . Carpocrates, in turn, drew attention to a text of increasing authority—John 1:21—where the Judean leaders ask John the Baptist, “Are you Elijah?” The Form of the question gave Carpocrates pause. The leaders could have asked, “Are you the prophet like Elijah?” but they did not. According to Carpocreates, these Judeans assumed that the soul of Elijah had returned to the body of John. Such a theory would explain John’s strange behavior, for he wore the same camel-hair clothes as Elijah, ate the same food, and was a desert-dweller like the prophet of old. Christ himself affirmed that “Elijah has come” in the person of John—yet unrecognized; and in another passage Jesus said about John: “He is Elijah”—not a prophet “like” him (Matt. 17;12; 11:14-15) (cf. Tertullian, On the Soul 35.5).

 

For Carpocrates, however, Jesus incarnated a soul much greater than that of Elijah. The soul that came to indwell Jesus was one of those could that remembered what it saw when it went around in the great cosmic revolution with the unborn Father (Irenaeus, AH 1.25.1). This image alludes to a passage in Plato’s Phaedrus, where unborn souls circle the outer rim of the universe following the gods and beholding (in Plato’s language) the very Form of Beauty (Plato, Phaedrus 247 a-e).

 

For Carpocrates, the Beauty beheld was the vision of the unborn Father. Jesus remembered this vision, for his soul was pure and vigorous. So it was that when his soul descended into a body, his limbs perfectly obeyed his sovereign mind, Jesus lived a life of virtue and integrity, uprooting his bodily passions—violent emotions like rage, jealousy, and grief (Irenaeus, AH 1.25.1; Pseudo-Tertullian, AAH 3.1, Among the virtues of Jesus, Epiphanius noted self-control and righteousness [Pan. 27.2.2]). Such passions were designed to punish human beings (for passions as punishments see Corpus Hermeticum 10.20-21; Stobaean Hermetica 23.46). Jesus overcame them and so attained the state of the Stoic sage—apatheia, or freedom from negative emotions. (M. David Litwa, Found Christianities: Remaking the World of the Second Century CE [London: T&T Clark, 2022], 128)