Palingenesis
Palingenesis is the term used by the Stoic philosophers to describe the recovery or apocatastasis the world after the fire has destroyed it in an Eternal Return. The word used in Greek () means "born again", "regeneration". Such is the cosmic palingenesis.
But palingenesis is, more simply, the return to life, in nature, the various elements of nature. The plants feed on minerals, animals eat plants, people eat animals or their products in every living breathing assimilates germs and dust ... In this way, the elements of life are exchanged, are redistributed after death, everywhere, always. It is the universal palingenesis.
Summary |
Antiquity
The Orphism origins does not teach, it seems, the reincarnation or metempsychosis . Orphism believed palingenesis rather, return to life. All souls return to other forms of existence, eg from father to son, from human to animal and plant at once. Births are dead.
"When the soul of beasts and winged birds sprang from the body ... she aerobatic thereby, useless, until another animal the snatch, mingled with the breath of air ... The same, in homes, becoming one of the fathers and wives and fathers and son in finery and mothers and daughters through the generations that succeed one another ... The human soul, according to certain cycles of time, goes into animals , the latter in this one, sometimes it becomes a horse, sometimes a sheep, sometimes terrible to see a bird ... or it creeps on the earth divine offspring of cold snakes "
- Orpheus, fragments 223-224 ed. Kern, taken from Proclus, Commentary on 'The Republic' Plato
Plato exposes palingenesis Orphic:
"There is an ancient tradition In East
In one version of the Vedic individual eschatology, that the deceased is burned up in smoke, and the various elements which consisted fall to earth as rain and then come back to life in plants , which will be eaten by animals that eat men, in turn, etc..
In the Bible
The word "palingenesis" change.
Old Testament
In the Old Testament , the prophets announce palingenesis two perspectives: one closer and more limited, consisting in the return of exiles and the rebuilding of the Holy City (for example, in Deuteronomy ), the other more universalist and more eschatological , that is in the final reconstruction of Jerusalem and the call to it from all nations (for example, in Isaiah ).
The idea of cycle is absent from two perspectives: the world will be the world permanent.
New Testament
In the New Testament , the "palingenesis" means the situation will happen with the coming of the Kingdom of God and the word "regeneration" is on the lips of Jesus himself: "Yes I will tell you that m 'have followed: when the regeneration when the Son of man sit on his glorious throne, you sit on twelve thrones you too ... "(Matthew XIX, 28).
In the Epistle to Titus, Paul says that the Christian palingenesis is given through baptism: "He saved us ... by a bath of regeneration and renewal ... "(III, 5).
While remaining within the context eschatological , the biblical concept of "palingenesis" oscillates between the idea of renewal of the individual in connection with his being a Christian and that of the final reconciliation of all reality in the cross by the parousia or coming of Christ in glory.
In the utopian socialism
Pierre-Simon Ballanche in its test palingenesis social (1827-1829) had laid the foundations for collective regeneration through the accumulation of individual redemption. Metempsychosis allowed him to escape the contradiction between the fate of mortal man and the sustainability of human societies by referring to the millennium debate on the preexistence of souls at birth. "Palingenesis" was part of the vocabulary of early socialists such as Pierre Leroux (1797-1871) and Proudhon (1809-1865).
Pierre Leroux and Jean Reynaud were friends. Pierre Leroux , a defender of religious socialism, in his book Mankind (1840), believes in the transmigration of souls in humanity itself. These are the men who keep re-emerging. It is an individual immortality and not personal. The individual is not absorbed into the absolute substance, but by entering into another individual body, he loses his memory and personality.
Jean Reynaud , in Heaven and Earth (1854), to preserve the personality and responsibility, admits that transmigration is from star to star with all the moral consequences required by the principle of merit and demerit. The worlds are inhabited and are for humans successive mansions, each of us is an eternal wrestler passing incessantly from Earth Earth, falling, rising, making amends, until it finally reaches the summit of progress under the eyes of the Creator, who remains his guide, his support and his judge.
References
- No metempsychosis in Orphism by Adolf Krger (1934), Herbert Long (1948), Walter Burkert (1962), Monique Dixsaut (1991). Metempsychosis in Orphism by Erwin Rohde, Martin Nilsson (1950), Erwin Dodds (1951).
- Proclus, Commentary on 'Republic' of Plato, II, 338. G. Zuntz, Persephone. Three Essays on Religion and Thought in Magna Graecia, Oxford, 1971, p. 321 and 337.
- Orpheus Poetry magical and cosmological, Oxford University Press, 1993 144-145.
- History of Religions, Gallimard, coll. "Pliade," t. I, p. 609-610.
External Links
Related articles
- Apocatastasis
- Beyond
- Eschatology
- Eternal return
- Metempsychosis
- Transmigration of souls
- Life after death
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