The Spirits and the Family CrestAmong all the arguments against the reincarnation doctrine, presented by certain individuals, there is one that we must examine because it seems tricky at first sight.
They say that such doctrine would tend to break family links by multiplying them and someone who held great affection towards a father would have to share it with so many others as the number of reincarnations grows. How could one then be able to reconcile that when returning to spirit world? On the other hand, what becomes of the descendent of a given predecessor if someone who believes he descended directly from the lineage of Hugh Capet or Godfrey of Bouillon has in fact lived many times? If after having been a Grand Lord, one can become a commoner? There you have a whole lineage in disarray.
To begin with, we respond that it is one or the other: either it is or it is not. If it is then whatever personal objections they have will not preclude it from being so. God does not request anyone’s advice to regulate things; otherwise each one would like to have the world ruled according to their own will. Regarding the multiplicity of family links we say that certain parents have only one child while others may have ten, twelve or more. Have you already thought of accusing God of forcing them to share their affection with so many? And those children, that in turn have their children and all that forming a large family that makes grandparents and great-grandparents proud instead of feeling sorry?
You who take your family tree back five or six centuries, once you are in the spiritual world, won’t you share your feelings with all the ancestors? If you find a dozen of forefathers you then have a double or a triple and that is all! However, you have a very petty image of your love since you fear that it will not be enough to feel for so many people. Rest assure, though. I will demonstrate that your feeling will be less divided with than without reincarnation.
In fact let us suppose that you counted fifty great-grandparents in your genealogy both direct ancestors and collateral, which is not much if we go back to the time of the Crusades. Through reincarnation it may well be that some among them return several times and that instead of fifty that you counted on Earth you will in reality find only half of them in the spiritual world.
Now let us move on to the issue of affiliation. With your system you get to a different result from the one that you expect. If there is no pre-existence, previous life of the soul, then the soul has not lived. In such a situation there is no relationship with any of your predecessors. Suppose you descend directly from Charlemagne. What is it that is common between you and him? What has he passed on to you intellectually and morally? Nothing, absolutely nothing. Why are you attached to him? For a series of bodies that have been decomposed, rotten and destroyed? There is nothing to be proud about it. With the pre-existence of the soul, on the contrary, you might have had real, serious and more flattering relationships with your predecessors. Therefore, with the reincarnation all that there exist is a corporeal relationship through the transmission of organic molecules of the same nature as those arnation there is a spiritual relation.
Which one is better?
You will certainly object that with reincarnation a strange spirit may infiltrate in your lineage and that instead of counting only on gentlemen you might be able to find a shoemaker there. That is perfectly true but means nothing. Saint Peter was a poor fisherman. Wouldn’t he come from a sufficiently noble house to the point of making us feel ashamed for having him in our family?
Besides, among your ancestors of brilliant names, have they all lived a spotless life, the only thing that, to a certain extent, could make us proud since their merit has nothing to do with ours? Have the lives of those paladins thoroughly investigated, the lives of those great barons who robbed the passersby without scruples; they would be simply taken to the courts for their great deeds in our days; the lives of certain lords to whom life was not worth more than a day’s hunt since they were used to hang a man for the price of a habit. All these things were little sins that stained no family crest. However, an imbalanced marriage, the introduction of a plebeian blood in the family these were unforgiving sins. Now, regardless of how much one does, when the time of farewell comes – and it comes to the great as to the little ones – the fancy outfits and the parchments will do no good before the supreme judge who pronounces this terrible sentence: "For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted!"
If it were good enough to descend from any great person to have one’s place previously marked in heavens we would be able to pay it for a low price since it would only cost someone else’s merit. Reincarnation provides a more meritorious nobility – the only accepted by God – that of having animated a series of good men. Fortunate is the one who can deposit at the feet of the Eternal the tribute of services provided to humanity in each of their existences for the sum of the merits will be proportional to the number of existences. God, however, will ask the one who only provides the feats of their predecessors: “Where are your own feats”?
Another system could apparently conciliate the requirements of self-love with the principle of non- reincarnation. It is the one through which the father would not only transmit the body to the son but also a portion of the soul so that if you descended from Charlemagne your soul could have been stemmed out from his. Very well. Let us see the consequences of such a theory. According to this system Charlemagne’s soul would have its trunk on his father’s soul and so forth, link by link, until reaching Adam. If Adam’s soul is the trunk of every soul of humanity that transmits to their descendants a portion of their own then the present souls would represent the product of a fractioning that would surpass all subdivisions of homeopathy. It would result that the soul of a common father would be more complete than the most complete soul of a descendant. It would result still that God would have created only one soul that would be subdivided to the infinity and thus each one of us would not be a direct creation of God.
As a matter of fact, such a system would leave a huge problem to be solved: that of the special skills. If the father transmitted the attributes of his soul to his children he would necessarily transmit his virtues and vices, talents and ineptitude, like certain genetic illnesses. How then can we explain that virtuous persons or geniuses have bad or mentally challenged children and vice-versa? Why would a lineage be mixed with the good and the bad? Say, on the contrary, that each soul is an individual; that has its own and independent existence; that progresses as a consequence of its own free-will through a series of corporeal existences, acquiring something good, leaving something bad behind in each one of them until perfection is achieved and everything is then explained, everything complies with reason and God’s justice, and even to the benefit of self-love.
Mr. Salgues from Angers that we mentioned in our previous issue is not a partisan of reincarnation. After the appearance of The Spirits’ Book he sent us a long letter in which he fought that doctrine with arguments based on its incompatibility with family links. He gives us his genealogy in the letter dated September 18th, 1857, a genealogy that goes back to the Carolingians and he asks what becomes of such glorious ancestry with the mix of Spirits through reincarnation. We extracted the following passage from the letter:
“But what would be the point of family trees? I have my own, complete, regular. From one side since the predecessors over Charlemagne’s time and on the other since the daughter of Emir Muza, one of Mohamed’s descendants from the Abbasid Caliphate, tenth generation of her marriage with Garcia, prince of Navarra, parents of Garcia Jimenez, king of Navarre; and finally such genealogy continued through alliances and sovereigns of almost every European court, up to the time of Afonso VI, king of Castela, and then the houses of Comminges, Lascaris Vintimille, Montmorency, Turenne and finally to the Counts and Sirs Pelhasse de Salgues in Languedoc.”
“All that can be confirmed in the Art of verifying dates, in the Benedictines of Saint-Maur, in the Dictionary of French Nobility, in the Amorial, with Father Anselmo, Noreri, etc. However, if we are only connected to our parents through matter do not we find blanks and broken links all over the place? It is a path drawn in the sand that gets lots in thousands of directions.”
“We must then be allowed to believe that the spirit is not transmitted and the soul is to a person what the perfume is to a flower. Do not Swedenborg says in the Celestial Arcanes that nothing is lost in nature and that the perfume of the flowers produces other flowers in other places away from the original one? It is thus through the soul, which is not spirit, that there would perhaps be a semi- spiritual chain of generations. If it was up to my spirit to skip eight or ten generations from time to time, how could I recognize my ancestors?”
As from above, Mr. Salgues limits his system to the origin of the body. However, how to conciliate the relations among the Spirits with the non-preexistence of the soul? If there were any necessary relationship among them through affiliation how could a simple owner of the Anjou be descendant of so many sovereigns?
We do not question the authenticity of his genealogy and congratulate him for that if it pleases him but we say that we take him more for his personal virtues than those of his predecessors.
Swedenborg’s authority is very much contestable when he attributes the reproduction of flowers to their perfume. The essential and volatile oil that gives them the aroma has never had a reproductive faculty that resides exclusively in the pollen. Hence, the comparison lacks accuracy for if the soul just influences another soul with its aroma one does not create the other. However, it should transmit its own skills and in that case we cannot see why a descendant of Charlemagne would not have spread the light of his actions around the world while Napoleon would have been supported by a vulgar soul. Say, however, that Napoleon descended from Charlemagne and that he came to the nineteenth century to continue his work initiated in the eighth and one can understand. With the principle of a single existence, though, there is nothing connecting Charlemagne to his descendants but that aroma that is transmitted bit by bit upon souls that were not created. In that case how can one explain why there were so many null and unworthy persons among his descendants and why Napoleon is a much greater genius than his obscure ancestors?
Regardless of what is done without reincarnation we struggle against insoluble questions every step of the way, difficulties that are only resolved by the preexistence of the soul in a simple and at the same time logical and thorough way because it gives the reason for everything.
Here is another issue. A well-known fact is that families degenerate when the alliances do not veer off from the straight line. The same that happens to animal species also happens to the human race.
Why then the need for cross marriages? What becomes of the unit of the trunk? Isn’t miixture of Spirits, an intrusion of alien Spirits into the family?
We will one day discuss this grave issue with all the developments that it requires.
