George MacDonold and Reincarnation

[Michael]

Did George MacDonald believe in some form of reincarnation?

…I believe that Jesus loved Judas even when he was kissing him with the traitor’s kiss; and I believe that he was his Saviour still. And if any man remind me of his words, “It had been good for that man if he had not been born,” I had not forgotten them, though I know that I now offer nothing beyond a conjectural explanation of them when I say: Judas had got none of the good of the world into which he had been born. He had not inherited the earth. He had lived an evil life, out of harmony with the world and its God. Its love had been lost upon him. He had been brought to the very Son of God, and had lived with him as his own familiar friend; and he had not loved him more, but less than himself. Therefore it had been all useless. “It had been good for that man if he had not been born;” for it was all to try over again, in some other way—inferior perhaps, in some other world, in a lower school. He had to be sent down the scale of creation which is ever ascending towards its Maker.

afirstnewssource.net/sermons/Mac … rgiven.htm

[stellar_renegade]

No, I think he was just referring to the afterlife and how people who become evil tend to turn more and more beast-like:

“A beast does not know that he is a beast, and the nearer a man gets to being a beast the less he knows it.”
-The Princess and Curdie

[SLJ]

I think MacDonald played with the possibility, but more as an illustration of a spiritual state than, say, a literal Hindu-style reincarnation. He taught that we are always either growing toward God or sinking lower than what we were created as.

From the Unspoken Sermon “The Truth”:

The man who lives a hunter after pleasure, not a labourer in the fields of duty, who thinks of himself as if he were alone on the earth, is in himself a lie. Instead of being the man he looks, the man he was made to be, he lives as the beasts seem to live–with this difference, I trust, that they are rising, while he, so far as lies in himself, is sinking. But he cannot be allowed to sink beyond God’s reach; hence all the holy–that is, healing–miseries that come upon him, of which he complains as so hard and unfair: they are for the compelling of the truth he will not yield–a painful suasion to be himself, to be a truth.

That passage that Stellar quoted from The Princess and Curdie is very illustrative, and I wanted to post it here, but it’s rather long, so I’ll just link to the chapter: online-literature.com/view.php/princess-and-curdie/8

Sonia

[JasonPratt]

Actually, yeah, MacD had some relatively strong speculations in favor of reincarnation, though not with the philosophical and theological concepts attached to it in Hinduism and Buddhism (and Brahminism?) of various sorts. I think you’re reading that excerpt from whichever sermon it was (I forget at the moment) exactly right.

That excerpt from Chapter 8 of The Princess and Curdie is followed later in the story by literal examples of sinners being reborn in the bodies of animals, and coming to repentance that way; it’s a highly important plot point in fact.

However, MacD only seems to have speculated about it outside of his fantasy work, as one way in which God might judge sinners and help lead them to repentance (apparently meaning in the general resurrection of the Day of the Lord to come.)

[Michael]

Actually, yeah, MacD had some relatively strong speculations in favor of reincarnation, though not with the philosophical and theological concepts attached to it in Hinduism and Buddhism (and Brahminism?) of various sorts. I think you’re reading that excerpt from whichever sermon it was (I forget at the moment) exactly right.

That excerpt from Chapter 8 of The Princess and Curdie is followed later in the story by literal examples of sinners being reborn in the bodies of animals, and coming to repentance that way; it’s a highly important plot point in fact.

However, MacD only seems to have speculated about it outside of his fantasy work, as one way in which God might judge sinners and help lead them to repentance (apparently meaning in the general resurrection of the Day of the Lord to come.)

Thank you Jason.

[anon47460357]

George MacDonald’s sermon, “The Hope of the Universe” (which is the last sermon in The Hope of the Gospel, published in 1892), includes this passage:

That there are difficulties in the way of believing thus, I grant; that there are impossibilities, I deny. Perhaps the first difficulty that occurs is, the many forms of life which we cannot desire again to see. But while we would gladly keep the perfected forms of the higher animals, we may hope that those of many other kinds are as transitory as their bodies, belonging but to a stage of development. All animal forms tend to higher: why should not the individual, as well as the race, pass through stages of ascent. If I have myself gone through each of the typical forms of lower life on my way to the human—a supposition by antenatal history rendered probable—and therefore may have passed through any number of individual forms of life, I do not see why each of the lower animals should not as well pass upward through a succession of bettering embodiments. I grant that the theory requires another to complement it; namely, that those men and women, who do not even approximately fulfil the conditions of their elevated rank, who will not endeavour after the great human-divine idea, striving to ascend, are sent away back down to that stage of development, say of fish or insect or reptile, beyond which their moral nature has refused to advance. Who has not seen or known men who appeared not to have passed, or indeed in some things to have approached the development of the more human of the lower animals! Let those take care who look contemptuously upon the animals, lest, in misusing one of them, they misuse some ancestor of their own, sent back, as the one mercy for him, to reassume far past forms and conditions—far past in physical, that is, but not in moral development—and so have another opportunity of passing the self-constituted barrier. The suggestion may appear very ridiculous, and no doubt lends itself to humorous comment; but what if it should be true! what if the amused reader should himself be getting ready to follow the remanded ancestor! Upon it, however, I do not care to spend thought or time, least of all argument; what I care to press is the question—If we believe in the progress of creation as hitherto manifested, also in the marvellous changes of form that take place in every individual of certain classes, why should there be any difficulty in hoping that old lives may reappear in new forms? The typical soul reappears in higher formal type; why may not also the individual soul reappear in higher form?

The sermon in its entirety is about animals having an afterlife. The above passage is pretty clear, I think, that MacDonald was comfortable with the concept of reincarnation.