A. How was Spiritism developed?
B. Can it be said that Spiritism is a direct consequence of the Christian Faith?
C. What is the crucial point of the Christian revelation?
Text for reading
50. Moses, as a prophet, revealed to humans the knowledge of one sole God, the sovereign Lord and Creator of all things. Moses promulgated the law of Sinai and laid the foundations of the true faith. As a man, he was the lawgiver of the people through whom this primitive faith, after becoming more refined, would one day spread over the entire earth.
51. CHRIST, taking from the ancient law what was eternal and divine and rejecting that which was only transitory, purely disciplinary and of human conception, added the revelation of the future life, about which Moses had not spoken: that of the punishments and rewards that await the individual after death.
52. The most important part of Christ’s revelation – in the sense that it is the primary source, the cornerstone of his entire doctrine – is the entirely new point of view by which he portrays the Divinity. It is no longer the terrible, jealous and vengeful God of Moses; the cruel and merciless God who drenches the earth with human blood, who ordains the massacre and extermination of peoples – including women, children and the elderly – and who chastises those who spare their victims. It is no longer the unjust God who punishes an entire people for the wrongs of their leader, or who takes revenge on the guilty by striking the innocent, or who castigates children for the wrongs of their father; rather, God is one who is kind, supremely just and good, full of tenderness and mercy, who forgives the repentant sinner and renders to each one according to his or her deeds. It is no longer the God of a single, privileged people, the God of armies, presiding over battles to support his own cause against the gods of other peoples, but the common Father of all humankind, who extends his protection over all his children and calls them to his divine presence. It is no longer the God who rewards and punishes solely through the things of the earth, and whose glory and joy consist in the servitude of rival peoples and in the multiplicity of progeny, but one who says to humankind, “Your true homeland is not in this world; it is in the heavenly kingdom; it is there that the humble of heart will be uplifted and the proud will be abased.” It is no longer the God who makes vengeance a virtue and who ordains the retribution of an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, but the God of mercy who says, “Forgive others’ offenses if you yourself want to be forgiven; do good in exchange for evil; do not do unto others what you would not want them to do unto you.” It is no longer the grudging and meticulous God who imposes, under the severest penalties, the way in which he wants to be worshiped, and who becomes offended at the non-observance of some formula, but the great God who considers the thought and who is not honored by the form. Finally, it is no longer the God who wants to be feared, but the God who wants to be loved.
53. Since God is the focal point of all religious beliefs, the aim of all forms of worship, then the character of all religions conforms to their idea of God. Religions that depict God as vindictive and cruel believe they honor God through acts of cruelty, through burnings at the stake and torture. Those that depict God as partial and jealous are intolerant; they are in varying degrees meticulous as to form, depending on how much they believe God to be tainted by human weaknesses and pettiness.
54. Christ’s entire doctrine is based on the character that he attributed to the Divinity. With an impartial, supremely just, good and merciful God, he was able to make love for God and charity toward one’s neighbor the express condition of salvation, and state: Love God above all things and your neighbor as yourselves; such is the whole law and all of the prophets, and there is no other.
55. Upon this belief alone, he was able to establish the principle of the equality of individuals before God and that of universal fraternity.
56. This revelation of the true attributes of the Divinity, together with the immortality of the soul and the future life, profoundly changed mutual relations among human beings, imposing new obligations on them and enabling them to view the present life in a different light. For that reason, it had to impact customs and societal relations. Due to its consequences, it is incontestably the crucial point of Christ’s revelation, one whose importance has not been sufficiently grasped. Regrettably, it is also the point from which we are the furthest removed and the one that we have ignored the most in the interpretation of his teachings.
57. However, Christ adds, “Many of the things that I am saying to you, you cannot yet understand, and I have many other things to tell you as well, but you would not understand them either; that is why I speak to you in parables; later, however, I will send you the Consoler, the Spirit of Truth, who will reestablish all things and explain them to you.” (John chapters 14 and 16; Matthew chapter 17).
58. If Christ did not say all that he could have said, it was because he believed certain truths should be left veiled until humans were capable of comprehending them. By his own admission, his teaching was thus incomplete, since he announced the coming of the one who would complete it. Hence, he foresaw that we would misinterpret his words and that we would deviate from his teachings; in other words, that we would undo what he had done, since all things would have to be reestablished; now, one only reestablishes that which has been undone.
59. Why did he call the new Messiah the Consoler? This name, significant and unambiguous, is an entire revelation in itself. He foresaw then that humans would have need of consolation, which implies the insufficiency of the consolation they would find in the beliefs they would formulate. Christ was never clearer or more explicit than in these last words, of which few individuals have been aware, perhaps because bringing them into focus and delving into their prophetic meaning has been avoided.
60. If Christ could not develop the teaching completely, is that the men lacked knowledge they could only acquire over time and without which would not understand. There are many things that would have seemed absurd in the state of knowledge at that time. Complete your education must be understood in order to explain and develop, not to enclose it with new truths, because everything in it is in a state of germ, lacking only the key to grasping the meaning of words.
61. In this century of intellectual emancipation and freedom of conscience, the right of examination belongs to everybody, and the Scriptures are no longer the Holy Ark on which no one would dare to lay a finger without the risk of being struck down. As for the need of special knowledge, without contesting that of theologians, and as enlightened as the medieval theologians may have been – the Church Fathers in particular – they were not sufficiently enlightened not to condemn the movement of the earth and the belief in antipodes[1] as heresy.
62. People could explain the Scriptures only with the aid of what they knew and the erroneous or incomplete notions they held concerning the laws of nature, revealed later on by science. That is why theologians themselves could in all good faith be mistaken about the meaning of certain words and certain incidents in the Gospel. Wanting at all costs to find in the Gospel the confirmation of a preconceived idea, they continued going around in the same circle without abandoning their point of view, so that they always ended up seeing in it only what they wanted to see. As scholarly as those theologians might have been, they could not comprehend causes that depended on laws unknown to them.
63. However, who will be the judge of the diverse and often contradictory interpretations given outside of theology? The future, logic and common sense. As people become more enlightened to the degree that new facts and laws are revealed, they will be able to separate utopian theories from reality. Thus, science makes certain laws known; Spiritism makes others known; both are indispensable for understanding the sacred texts of all religions, from Confucianism and Buddhism to Christianity. As for theology, it cannot judiciously allege that there are contradictions in science, when it is not always in agreement with itself.
64. By means of Spiritism, men and women know that the soul progresses unceasingly through a series of successive existences until it reaches the degree of perfection that can bring it close to God; that all souls have the same point of departure and are created equal, with the same aptitude for progressing in virtue of their free will; that all are of the same essence, and that there are no differences among them except the degree of progress they have accomplished; that all have the same destination and will reach the same goal more quickly or less so according to their labor and goodwill. They know that there are no disinherited individuals, nor are some more favored than others; that God has not created anyone privileged and exempt from the efforts that have been imposed on others for their progress; that there are no beings devoted forever to evil and suffering; that those designated by the name demons are spirits who are still little-evolved and imperfect, and who practice evil in the spirit state just as they did in the corporeal state, but who will advance and improve themselves nonetheless; that angels or pure spirits are not beings created apart in creation, but are spirits who reached their goal after having followed the path of progress; that there are, therefore, neither multiple creations nor different categories among intelligent beings, but that the whole of creation has resulted from the great law of unity that governs the universe, and that all beings gravitate toward a common objective, which is perfection, without some being favored at the expense of the others – they are all children of their own deeds.
65. Through the relations that humans can now establish with those who have left the earth, they not only possess material proof of the existence and individuality of the soul, but they understand the solidarity that connects the living and the dead of this world, and of those of this world with those of other worlds. They know about the situation of the dead in the spirit world; they can follow them on their migrations; they can witness their joys and misfortunes; they know why they are happy or unhappy and the fate that awaits them according to the good or evil they have done.
66. Such relations have initiated humans into the future life, which they can observe in all its stages, in all its small details of sudden turn of events. The future is no longer just a vague hope: it is a positive fact, a mathematical certainty. Thus, death holds nothing to be feared, because it is deliverance, the door to the true life.
67. By studying the situation of spirits, humans know that happiness or unhappiness in the spirit life is inherent to their degree of perfection or imperfection; that each spirit suffers the direct and natural consequences of its wrongs; in other words, that it is punished wherein it has erred; that such consequences last as long as the causes that produced them; that the guilty would, therefore, suffer forever if they were to persist forever in evil, but that their suffering ceases with repentance and reparation.
68. Thus, since it depends on all to improve themselves, they each can, by virtue of their free will, prolong or shorten their sufferings, just as those who are ill suffer from their excesses as long as they do not put an end to them.
69. If reason rejects as incompatible with the goodness of God the idea of unforgivable, eternal, and absolute punishment – frequently inflicted for a single wrong – and the torments of hell that cannot be lessened even by the most ardent and sincere repentance, the same reason bows down before that distributive and impartial justice that takes everything into account, never closes the door to repentance and unceasingly extends its hand to those who have fallen overboard instead of pushing them into the deep.
70. The plurality of existences, whose principle Christ established in the Gospel, but without defining it more than many others, is one of the most important laws revealed by Spiritism, in the sense that it demonstrates the reality and necessity of progress. Through this law, humans can explain all the apparent anomalies that life presents: differences in social position; premature deaths, which, without reincarnation, would render a shortened life useless to the soul; and the inequality of intellectual and moral aptitudes due to the age of the spirit, who has learned and progressed to a greater or lesser extent, and who, upon being reborn, brings with it what it had acquired in its former lives.
71. With the doctrine of the creation of each soul at birth, one falls again into the theory of privileged creations; individuals are strangers to one another, nothing connects them, and family ties are purely physical; family members are not linked together by a past in which they did not exist. With the doctrine of nothingness after death, all their relationships cease with life; they have no commonality in the future.
72. Through reincarnation, they are in solidarity regarding both the past and the future; their relationships continue both in the spirit and corporeal worlds; fraternity is based on the very laws of nature; good has an objective; evil, its inevitable consequences.
[1] Antipodes: Places diametrically opposite each other on the globe (Random House, Webster’s College Dictionary, 1991). – Tr.
Answers to Proposed Questions
A. How was Spiritism developed?
Spiritism proceeded in the same way as the positive sciences, using the experimental method. New facts were presented, which could not be explained by known laws; Kardec observed, compared and analyzed them, connecting effects to causes, came to the law governing them; then deducted from them the consequences and sought their applications. He didn’t establish any preconceived theory; thus didn’t present as hypotheses the existence and intervention of spirits, nor perispirit, or reincarnation, or any of the principles of Spiritism. Concluded the existence of spirits, when this existence underscored the apparent observation of facts, proceeding in the same way as the other principles. It weren’t the facts that came later to confirm the theory: is the theory that came later to explain and summarize the facts.
Let us mention an example. In the world of spirits a very odd occurrence may be observed, which certainly no one would have suspected: there are some spirits who do not believe they are actually dead. Well then! Highly evolved spirits, who know this fact perfectly well, did not come to say beforehand, “There are spirits who believe they are still living the earthly life, who have retained their tastes, habits and instincts”; rather, they caused spirits of this category to manifest themselves so that we could observe them. Consequently, having observed spirits who were uncertain of their state, or who stated that they were still in this world and believed they were attending to their normal occupations, from the example was derived the rule. The great number of such phenomena showed us that this was no exception, but one of the phases of spirit life. It enabled us to study all the varieties and causes of this odd illusion, to realize that this situation is principally characteristic of spirits who are only slightly advanced morally, that it is peculiar to certain kinds of death, and that it is only temporary, although it can last for days, months or years. It was thus that the theory was born from the observation. The same has occurred with all the other principles of the Doctrine. (Genesis, Ch. I, items 14 and 15. See also items 49, 50, 51 and 52)
B. Can it be said that Spiritism is a direct consequence of the Christian Faith?
Yes, Spiritism, taking its point of departure from the very words of Christ – just as Christ drew his from Moses – is a direct consequence of his doctrine. To the vague idea of the future life, Spiritism adds the revelation of the existence of the invisible world that surrounds us and populates space, and thereby renders belief clear; it gives it body, consistency and reality of thought. Spiritism has defined the ties that unite the soul and the body, and has lifted the veil that once hid from humans the mysteries of birth and death. By means of Spiritism, men and women know where they have come from, where they are going, why they are on the earth and why they suffer temporarily; and they see everywhere the justice of God. (Genesis, Ch. I, items 20 to 23. See also item 30.)
C. What is the crucial point of the Christian revelation?
Christ’s entire doctrine is based on the character that he attributed to the Divinity. With an impartial, supremely just, good and merciful God, he was able to make love for God and charity toward one’s neighbor the express condition of salvation, and state: Love God above all things and your neighbor as yourselves; such is the whole law and all of the prophets, and there is no other. Upon this belief alone, he was able to establish the principle of the equality of individuals before God and that of universal fraternity. This revelation of the true attributes of the Divinity, together with the immortality of the soul and the future life, profoundly changed mutual relations among human beings, imposing new obligations on them and enabling them to view the present life in a different light. For that reason, it had to impact customs and societal relations. Due to its consequences, it is incontestably the crucial point of Christ’s revelation, one whose importance has not been sufficiently grasped. Regrettably, it is also the point from which we are the furthest removed and the one that we have ignored the most in the interpretation of his teachings. (Genesis, Ch. I, items 24 and 25)
