Incarnation

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INCARNATION

INCARNATION . The concept of incarnation (Lat., incarnatio, "being in flesh") has been applied in the Christian community to the mystery of union between divinity and humanity in the person of Jesus Christ. More generally, the concept has been extended to take into account a variety of forms of incarnation that the history of religions has described in various lands and among different peoples. The term incarnation is broadly defined here as the act or state of assuming a physical body (as a person, an animal, a plant, or even an entire cosmos) by a nonphysical entity such as the soul, the spirit, the self, or the divine being.

Typologically speaking, there are two sharply contrasting evaluations of incarnation. One of them is a tragic view, according to which the union of the soul, the spirit, or the self with the world of matter, hence with the physical body, is interpreted as a fall from its proper place into an alien abode, an imprisonment, or an enslavement. Salvation consists, according to this view, in the soul's escape from the world into which it has fallen by dissociating and liberating itself through purifications, rites of initiation, or meditation, from the chains of its captivity. There is, on the other hand, a positive interpretation of incarnation, which sees the assumption of a bodily form by the soul, the spirit, or the divine being as occurring for the purpose of saving or sanctifying the phenomenal world. This type of bodily manifestation is seen, for example, in the leaders of small tribal communities, the founders of religions, and the heads of theocratic states. In a certain sense, the history of religions has been the history of persistent battles fought between these two distinctive visions of the incarnation.

The "Primitive" Tradition

The belief in the divine incarnate can be attested as early as the late Paleolithic period, in a considerable number of pictures of human beings in animal forms, often in dancing posture. Among the best known is a figure of the "great sorcerer" in a Trois Frères cave, sporting a deer's head crowned with huge antlers. The same cave has also preserved the portrayal of a dancer disguised as a bison, playing a bow-shaped instrument, possibly a kind of flute. It is certain that the early hunters wore masks and skins of animals for the celebration of their magico-religious ceremonies. These masked figures and many parallel examples were probably believed to be the incarnations of spirits or divine beings akin to the Lord of the Animals.

Wearing masks has been one technique for incarnating souls or spirits in premodern societies. In Inner Asia, for example, a shaman's mask symbolizes the incarnation of a mythical personage (ancestor, mythical animal, or god). For its part, the costume transforms the shaman into a spiritual being. In Polynesia and Melanesia, the souls or spirits of dead ancestors are believed to come from the land of the dead at certain fixed times, especially when the old year passes into the new year. They appear in disguise, wearing terrifying masks and strange costumes; the "dead" call on villagers, praising them for their good conduct and rebuking them severely for any wrongdoing they have committed. The "dead" also perform the rites of initiation for young novices. Finally, they give blessings for a good crop in the coming months and, after receiving hospitality from the villagers, return to their homeland far across the sea. In fact, the spirits of the dead are impersonated by members of secret societies (e.g., the Dukduk of the Bismarck Archipelago, the Arioi of the Marquesas Islands), but these awe-inspiring "sacred visitors" wield such terror over the noninitiated that they are truly believed to be the incarnations of the ancestral spirits. Significantly, the arrival of the spirits from the world beyond announces the renewal of time, the advent of the new year, and the renovation of the entire universe. A similar belief in the sacred visitors (marebito ) is also attested in Japan.

The belief in the preexistence and incarnation of souls is abundantly documented in the "primitive" world. According to the Caribou Inuit (Eskimo), for example, the immortal soul of a dead person leaves his body, ascending to the supreme being Pinga in heaven who receives it. If the person lived properly according to the rules of life, Pinga lets the soul assume a bodily form, human or animal. Such a belief is also widespread among the North American Indians. Especially noteworthy is the belief found among the Aranda in central Australia, according to which every human being has two souls: the mortal soul, which comes into being with the fetus as a result of intercourse between the parents, and the immortal soul, which predates and really creates the entire human personality. More concretely, the immoral soul is a particle of life of the totemic ancestor who unfolded his sacred history in the beginning of mythical time; every individual is what he is today because of the incarnation in him of the immortal soul, a spark of his primeval ancestor's life. The Aranda becomes aware of this mystery of life as he undergoes the rites of initiation, in which he learns the sacred history of his ancestors. It is a sort of anamnesis, a remembering of the preexistence of his immortal soul in the mythical sacred history—a recollection accompanied by the acute realization of the immortal soul's involvement in temporary, phenomenal existence.

Greece, India, Iran

The ancient Greek doctrine of metempsychosis presupposes the incarnation of preexistent and immortal souls in successive bodies, human and animal, and even in inanimate substances. Pythagoras certainly believed in the transmigration of souls (Xenophanes, frag. 7); according to him, the human soul, despite its immortality, has been imprisoned in the body and condemned to a cycle of reincarnation due to the fall from its original state of bliss. A similar idea was held by Empedocles: The immortal human soul has fallen from its proper abode into the world, into the physical body, due to its primal sin. Condemned to the physical world, the fallen soul is destined to wander through a series of incarnations until it is restored to the primeval state of bliss from which it has fallen. Plato contrasts the immortal part of the soul, which the Demiurge has created, with the mortal part, including perception, which is added by the created deities at the moment of union with the body (e.g., Timaeus 69c–d). Immediately before incarnation, the immortal soul drinks from the waters of Lethe ("forgetfulness"); "burdened with a load of forgetfulness and wrongdoing," the soul "sheds her wings and falls to the earth" (Phaedrus 248c), that is, it falls into the physical world, into the body that is a "tomb" (Gorgias 493c), imprisoned by the cycle of becoming and incarnation. But, it is still possible for the immortal soul to learn, to recall its extraterrestrial experience of the perfect condition that existed prior to the fall (cf. especially Meno 81c–d). For Plato, to live fully and meaningfully is, after all, to remember a discarnate, purely spiritual existence; it is an anamnesis of the soul's true identity, that is, a recognition of its heavenly origin.

This Greek mythology of the soul, more or less hostile to the world of matter and the physical body, was incorporated into Gnosticism, a set of doctrines characterized by anticosmic dualism. Humankind, as viewed by the Gnostics, is constituted by three components: the self, the soul, and the body. The physical body belongs to the deficient world of nature (phusis ), but the soul is also part of this evil world. Psychic human activities arise from and are limited by the continual flux of natural events. It is only the self that transcends the evil world. It is divine in nature, hence not subject to time and change; it is indestructible. Where is the original home of the divine self, the spiritual part of humanity? The Gnostic myth narrates, with manifold variations, the fate of the self, its origin in the world of light, its tragic fall into the alien world, and its imprisonment in the physical body. Salvation consists, in the last analysis, in the emancipation of the self from the dark world of matter and the physical body and its return to its genuine home, the world of light.

India presents a doctrine similar to gnosticism, namely, Sāṃkhya-Yoga, whose central message may be summed up as follows: (1) humanity's destiny in the world is conditioned by the mysterious interplay between the self (puruṣa ), which is indestructible, eternal, and not subject to change, and matter (prakṛti ), which is subject to time and transformation and which constitutes humankind's psychophysiological complex; (2) the self is essentially a stranger to the world of matter, into which for unknown reasons it has fallen and been enslaved, resulting in the oblivion of its original, true identity; and (3) deliverance (mokṣa ) begins when the self remembers its eternal freedom and tries to dissociate itself through the practice of yoga from the world of matter.

However, in India the tragic view of the incarnation coexists peacefully with another, more positive view. The Hindu god Viṣṇu, out of his profound concern for the welfare of the universe, has frequently embodied himself wholly or partially in the phenomenal world. According to one of the earliest versions of the doctrine contained in the Bhagavadgītā, he incarnates himself in the person of Kṛṣṇa, but he is also able to manifest himself in other bodily forms, human and animal. "Whenever the law of righteousness withers away," Viṣṇu declares, "I come into being age after age for the protection of the good, for the destruction of evildoers, and for the setting up of the law of righteousness" (Bhagavadgītā 4.7–8). While Hindu myths and rituals have concentrated attention on Viṣṇu's ten primary incarnations, in some formulations four saviors appear as his avatāra s, or incarnations, each ushering in one of the four cosmic ages constituting a mahāyuga, a complete cosmic cycle. In the kṛtayuga, which lasts 4,800 divine years (with one divine year corresponding to 360 human years), Viṣṇu makes his appearance as the sage Kapila, while in the tretāyuga, lasting 3,600 divine years, he appears as the universal monarch Cakravartin. In the third cosmic age, dvāparayuga, of 2,400 divine years, the supreme being incarnates himself as the sage Vyāsa, and in the final cosmic age, kaliyuga, lasting 1,200 divine years, he will manifest himself as Kalki, a sort of messianic figure who will come in glory to establish the golden age, judging the wicked, rewarding the virtuous, and ruling over the entire universe in peace and prosperity.

The ancient Iranians of the Parthian period had an ardent hope or expectation for Mithra incarnate, who would come at the end of the world as the great universal monarch and savior. This king and savior will descend on the Mount of Victories in the form of a column of light or a shining star to be born in a cave. He will be given birth by a human mother, but in truth he is of heavenly origin; he descends from above with the light, that is, he is the child of light. There were, in fact, magi who lived near the Mount of Victories; every year, at a certain fixed date, they climbed the mountain in which there was a cave, and quietly prayed to the heavenly god for three days, waiting for the appearance of the star.

Kings, Emperors, Imams

The status of kings was often defined in terms of God incarnate. In ancient Egypt, for example, the king was believed to be divine in essence. His coronation, usually celebrated at the beginning of the new year, signified not an apotheosis but an epiphany, a self-manifestation of the god. As long as he ruled, the king was identified with the god Horus; in fact, he was Horus incarnate in his early existence, but upon his death he was mystically assimilated to Osiris, the god of rebirth and immortality.

The Greco-Roman world generally dissociated itself from the notion that the king was the incarnation of a certain god, despite the fact that royal titles such as The Young Dionysos and Epiphanes were often used by kings in the Hellenistic period. According to Arthur Darby Nock, the only exception was Ptolemy XIII of the mid-first century bce, who demonstrably considered himself to be Dionysos incarnate, probably under the influence of the pharaonic conception of the king as Horus incarnate.

While the Chinese emperor was generally called Son of Heaven (tianzi ) and as such was considered the earthly representative of Heaven or heavenly will, some emperors were regarded as incarnations of the Buddha. For example, the founder of the Northern Wei dynasty (386–534), Taizi, was regarded by the eminent monk Faguo as the Tathāgata in person, an incarnation of the Buddha. This idea was iconographically represented in the caves of Yungang to the west of Datong, the capital of the empire until 494. Moreover, toward the end of the seventh century the Empress Wu Zhao, who was a strong supporter of Buddhism, was considered to be the incarnation of Maitreya, the future Buddha. Among the Tibetans, the Dalai Lama has been accepted as an incarnation of the bodhisattva Avalokiteśvara.

In ancient Japan, the emperor was explicitly called the akitsumi kami ("manifest kami "), that is, the god who manifested himself in human form in the phenomenal world. The essential part of the Japanese conception of sovereignty was the belief in the emperor's heavenly origin, and this belief was clearly expressed in the myths of Ninigi, the grandson of the sun goddess Amaterasu. Ninigi is born in the heavenly world and then descends onto the summit of Mount Takachiho, carrying the three items of the sacred regalia as well as the heavenly mandate guaranteeing his eternal sovereignty on earth. The emperor was identified with this mythic figure at the annual harvest festival as well as on the occasion of his enthronement festival.

In Islam, more particularly among the Shīʿah, the imam enjoyed a truly exalted and significant status; while among the Sunnīs an imam is no more than a leader of congregational prayer at a local mosque, among the Shīʿah the imam was endowed with a power at once political and religious. Like the caliph, he was one who ruled the community in mercy and justice, but unlike the caliph, who had no legal authority, the imam was empowered to interpret the ḥaqīqah, or esoteric meanings of the Qurʾān and Islamic law. This power was based on the Shīʿah conviction that Muḥammad's charisma, or spiritual gift, which he received from God, would be transmitted genealogically only within his household. It was natural that the imam became the central focus of Shīʿah faith to such an extent that he was believed to be the embodiment of the divine light. Some extreme sects of the Ismaʿīlī movement went even further in believing that the imam was the incarnation of the godhead itself. The Druze of the Lebanon Mountains hold the Caliph Ḥākim (r. 996–1021) of the Fatimid dynasty in Egypt to be the incarnation of the godhead, now in concealment but with the promise of a return.

Buddhism

Buddhism was founded by Siddhārtha Gautama of the Śākya clan in India, who left his home in quest of truth, devoted himself to the practice of meditation, and finally attained enlightenment. Hence he is also called the Buddha, the Enlightened One. During the early centuries of the history of Buddhism, this historical Buddha commanded the primary attention of Buddhists.

However, as a new trend of the Buddhist movement called the Mahāyāna developed in the course of the second century bce, a shift occurred in Buddhology; emphasis was now placed less on the historical Buddha than on the Eternal Buddha. This Eternal Buddha is transcendent, absolute, and infinite, embodying the universal and cosmic truth. Hence he is called the dharmakāya ("body of the law"), the essential Buddha who is the ultimate reality as viewed by Mahāyāna Buddhism. The Eternal Buddha does not wish, however, to hold himself aloof from the phenomenal world; out of his deep compassion for humanity in pain and suffering he has incarnated himself in the person of Siddhārtha Gautama, as the nirmāṇakaya ("body of transformation").

This doctrine is elaborated, for example, in the Saddharmapuṇḍarīka Sūtra, also known as the Lotus Sūtra. The scripture presents the Buddha in two aspects: his absolute aspect in the form of the Eternal Buddha, which is dealt with in the section following chapter 15, while the section preceding this chapter is concerned with his relative aspect in the person of the historical Śākyamuni Buddha, who assumed human form for the sake of benefiting all sentient beings. According to the doctrine of the "Tendai school" in medieval Japan, the absolute and the relative are in essence qualitatively equal; they represent the two different aspects of the Buddha but, in reality, are one and the same.

Japanese Buddhism, more particularly, the Shingon school of Buddhism, has also unfolded what may be called a cosmotheism, a fascinating conception of the cosmos as the embodiment of the Buddha Mahāvairocana. The place of central importance in Shingon Buddhism is occupied no longer by the historical Buddha but rather by the Cosmic Buddha Mahāvairocana (Jpn., Dainichi, "great sun"); just as the sun is the source of light, illuminating the whole universe and giving life to all forms of existence, so Mahāvairocana is the Great Illuminator of all existence, both animate and inanimate. He is transcendent, absolute, and eternal because he is identified with the dharmakāya. However, Mahāvairocana is not only transcendent but also immanent in the universe. This Buddha is cosmic in nature because, according to Shingon Buddhism, he embodies himself in the six great elements constituting every form of existence in the universe: earth, water, fire, wind, space, and mind. These six elements are interfused and in a state of eternal harmony. In fact, the whole universe is viewed as the "samaya (symbolic) body" of the Buddha Mahāvairocana. When the universe is referred to as the Buddha's samaya body, it means two things at the same time: First, the cosmos symbolizes and points to the ultimate reality, Mahāvairocana identified with the dharmakāya; and second, while the ultimate reality embodies itself in the cosmos, for its part the cosmos participates substantially in the ultimate reality itself. Accordingly, the cosmos is a sanctified world endowed with the quality of the sacred, assuming profound soteriological value.

Christianity

That God was incarnated in the person of Jesus of Nazareth in order to save humankind is a basic tenet of Christianity. One of the earliest confessions of faith pronounced by the primitive church (Phil. 2:6–2:11) speaks of the preexistent divine figure Christ Jesus, who condescended to take on human form, won victory in his death over the cosmic forces of evil, and reigns now with God in heaven. In the Gospel of John, dating from the end of the first century, Christ Jesus is presented as the incarnate Word (Logos) of God (Jn. 1:1–1:14). In sharp contrast to the portrait of the life of Jesus in the synoptic Gospels, John identifies him as the preexistent divine being who, descending from heaven, moves mysteriously through human life, proclaiming heavenly messages and working miracles, and who even foretells his ascension to heaven following his impending suffering and death. John's language may sound preeminently Gnostic, but the content of his central message, namely, that the divine Logos had become human flesh, was certainly anti-Gnostic.

Christian Gnostics accepted the belief that Christ was the divine Logos, the chief intermediary between God and humans. However, they rejected the idea that the Logos took on human flesh, because to them the flesh was both evil and insubstantial. Characteristically, they denied the reality or historicity of the incarnation: The human life of Christ was spiritual but not material; Christ hovered over mortal life, never really participating in the birth, suffering, and death of the historical Jesus. The Christian church set itself against this docetic view in such affirmation of the Apostles' Creed as "God the Father Almighty, creator of heaven and earth." By implication this was an affirmation of the goodness of all God's creation, material as well as spiritual. Similar affirmations concerning Jesus' birth, suffering, and death were directed against the Gnostic denial of the incarnation of Jesus Christ. Moreover, the assertion in the Apostles' Creed of the resurrection of the dead affirmed the salvation of the whole person and not merely the discarnate soul, spirit, or self. It is thus significant that Christian orthodoxy affirmed the humanity of Christ and the goodness and reality of the cosmos against Gnosticism and any form of the Gnostic view of man and the universe. "After the Incarnation," Mircea Eliade states in his Myth and Reality (p. 172), "the World has been reestablished in its original glory." The phenomenal world, humanity's world, the world as it is, is a sanctified cosmos because Jesus Christ the Savior has dwelt in it.

The Christian church attempted to articulate the nature of the person of Jesus Christ as God incarnate at the First Council of Nicaea (325). It adopted a creed that included such phrases to define Christ as "begotten not made," "begotten before all ages," and "of one essence with the Father." Thus Christ was declared to be homo-ousios, "consubstantial," with God the Father, a doctrine that was to be formulated later by Augustine as una substantia tres personae ("one substance in three persons"); Christ was essentially divine without being a kind of "second God." Once this result was generally accepted, a further question arose: How are the divine and human elements related to each other in the person of the historical Jesus? After apparently endless debates and anathemas, the orthodox view was formulated at the Council of Chalcedon (451): Two natures of Christ, divine and human, are perfectly blended in one person; Jesus Christ is vere Deus vere homo ("truly God and truly man").

Twentieth-Century Views

While the affirmative view of incarnation has apparently won the victory, the tragic view of the destiny of the soul, as it was classically expressed by Plato, Gnosticism, and Sāṃkhya-Yoga, is far from dead; on the contrary, it has often asserted itself ever since. In fact, as Martin Buber has aptly stated, human self-understanding has gained "depth" in those crisis periods in history when humankind has felt homeless in the physical world in which it lives, becoming aware of its acute alienation from the world. The twentieth century, one such crisis period, demonstrated a keen interest in the Gnostic outlook on life and the universe, as it is reflected in the writings of C. G. Jung, Hermann Hesse, and Martin Heidegger. For Heidegger, for example, the world is no longer a home for modern humankind but an alien realm; humanity is homeless in the world. Moreover, humankind lives in a period of cosmic night, and the darkness of this cosmic night is to continue for some time. According to him, the soul is not in its proper place in this evil world; here, it is a stranger, imprisoned in the physical body. The soul is destined to leave this world behind and, becoming "a blue soul," to set out for the dark wandering, journeying toward the land of the evening.

Bibliography

There is no single book dealing with the problem of incarnation in the general history of religions. On masks and their religious meaning in prehistory, see Johannes Maringer's Vorgeschichtliche Religion: Religionen im steinzeitlichen Europa (Einsiedeln, Switzerland, 1956), pp. 184ff., edited and translated by Mary Ilford as The God of Prehistoric Man (New York, 1960), pp. 146ff.

Hutton Webster offers basic information on the periodic return of the ancestral spirits in Polynesia and Melanesia in his Primitive Secret Societies (New York, 1980). On the Aranda conception of the immortal soul, there is a fascinating account in Mircea Eliade's Australian Religions: An Introduction (Ithaca, N.Y., 1973), pp. 44–59.

The incarnation of the soul in the Greek philosophical tradition has been competently discussed by W. K. C. Guthrie in The Earlier Presocratics and Pythagoreans (pp. 306ff.) and The Presocratic Tradition from Parmenides to Democritus (pp. 249ff.), volumes 1 and 2 of his A History of Greek Philosophy (Cambridge, U.K., 1962 and 1965). The best single book on the Gnostic view of the destiny of humankind and its immortal soul in the world remains Hans Jonas's The Gnostic Religion, 2d ed., rev. (Boston, 1963). On Sāṃkhya-Yoga, there is a concise account in Robert C. Zaehner's Hinduism (London, 1962), pp. 67ff. Focusing his attention on the fate of the immortal self in the world, Mircea Eliade has compared Gnosticism with Sāṃkhya-Yoga in his essay "Mythologies of Memory and Forgetting," now included in his Myth and Reality (New York, 1963), pp. 114–138. There is a fine comparative study of the avatar beliefs of India and the Christian doctrine of the incarnation in Geoffrey Parrinder's Avatar and Incarnation (New York, 1970).

The eschatological expectation of the birth of the savior Mithra in ancient Iran has been elucidated by Geo Widengren in his Iranisch-semitische Kulturbegegnung in parthischer Zeit (Cologne, 1960), pp. 62–86. See also Mircea Eliade's Méphistophélès et l'androgyne (Paris, 1962), pp. 60ff., translated by J. M. Cohen as The Two and the One (Chicago, 1965), pp. 51–55.

Major problems of Greco-Roman kingship have been discussed authoritatively by Arthur Darby Nock in volume 1 (pp. 134ff.) and volume 2 (pp. 928ff.) of his Essays on Religion and the Ancient World (Cambridge, Mass., 1972), with an introduction by Zeph Stewart. On the conception of kingship in ancient Japan, see my article "Sacred Kingship in Early Japan: A Historical Introduction," History of Religions 15 (1976): 319–342.

Mahāyāna Buddhism has attempted to explain the historical Buddha Śākyamuni as an incarnation of the Eternal Buddha. See, in this connection, a brief but illuminating account of the doctrine of the "three bodies" (trikāya ) of the Buddha by T. R. V. Murti, The Central Philosophy of Buddhism, 2d ed. (London, 1970), pp. 284–287. On the conception of the cosmos as the embodiment of the Buddha Mahāvairocana, see Kūkai: Major Works, translated, with an account of Kūkai's life and a study of his thought, by Yoshito S. Hakeda (New York, 1972), pp. 76ff.

On the history of the Christian doctrines of the incarnation, there is an admirable account by Jaroslav Pelikan in The Emergence of the Catholic Tradition, 100–600, volume 1 of his The Christian Tradition (Chicago, 1971).