One of the greatest cosmological questions that have harried the human mind over the millennia is that of retribution. Stated in another way, humans have ceaselessly been bothered by the question of the consequences of human deeds beyond the cultural and institutional sanctions of superiors (such as parents, guardians, teachers, employers etc.) and state apparatuses like the police, courts and prisons. In other words, are there cosmological consequences for good and bad deeds?
The answer to this question may appear to lie beyond our empirical reach, hence little wonder popular attempts to answer the question have mainly emanated from religion. Christianity and Islam teach that good and bad deeds are to be rewarded and punished in paradise and hellfire respectively. The Eastern religions teach that good and bad deeds are rewarded on this earth by the operation of the law of karma, either in the present lifetime or (usually) in future reincarnations.
However, it is common to hear people of other faiths, including Christians and Moslems, also refer to karma while talking about retributive justice. For anyone who actually understands the concept of karma as originally espoused by the ancient eastern religion and philosophy will be curious to understand what exactly Christians and Moslems mean when they talk about karma. This is given that the very idea of paradise and hellfire does not leave room for karma as understood in the religions that originally taught the doctrine. First, paradise and hellfire are everlasting rewards that contradict the time-bound reward of karma. Second, while karma is of this world, paradise and hell are necessarily of the “other world”. So when a Christian, for example, believes that one has suffered sickness or any other misfortune because of whatever evil he may have done, will that mean his retribution has been accomplished and so no more hellfire for him? Lastly and more importantly, karma implies that one is rewarded and punished exactly to the extent his good and bad deeds respectively warrant, but on the contrary, paradise and hell mean equal reward and punishment for all irrespective of differences in extent of good and bad deeds. We shall return to these issues later.
Karma is a Sanskrit word literally translating to “action”. Sanskrit, one of the world’s oldest languages spoken in India, is notable for words that are deep and very dynamic in meaning. This quality fully manifests in the profundity of the connotation lying beneath the ordinary translation of the word karma. The term karma connotes the eternal and immutable law of the universe wherein every action must produce a corresponding effect, and in this effect lies retributive justice – every good deed must produce a corresponding good effect for the doer and every evil deed must do just the opposite. Famous Hindu mystic, Swarmi Prabhupāda, puts it simply this way: “Law of karma is you touch fire, your finger will be burned. This is the law of karma. You cannot avoid it.”
Believers in this law of natural justice, like Prabhupāda, always point to nature as it manifests around us as the indisputable evidence of this law. Nature’s law is such that every action will – and this is inevitable – only produce an effect appropriate to it. Sir Isaac Newton, in his groundbreaking work “Principia Mathematica Philosophiae Naturalis” published in 1686, espoused with unfaultable ingenuity this irrepressible law of nature, in what has become known as his third law of motion – “action and reaction are equal and opposite.” This law has since been validated beyond reproach through its successful application in building rockets, jet engines and in other similar technologies.
Against this backdrop, Eastern mystics and other believers in the law of karma see this law as nothing more than nature working according to its intrinsic principles. An orange tree cannot sprout apples, and a monkey mating a monkey will only yield a monkey offspring and never a human offspring. The law of karma, therefore, is the principle of what you sow you reap.
Abdrushin, in GRAIL MESSAGE, aptly used the phrase “the law of reciprocal action” to refer to karma. To buttress how this law operates, he told a hypothetical story of a woman who, out of obsessive love for his son, is so attached to him that she did everything to prevent him from getting married and become separated from her. This son suffers mentally as a result of this attitude of the mother. This woman’s love, according to Abdrushin, is selfish and therefore not true love as true love is selfless and thinks about the good of the loved. Hence she deserves retribution for her act of selfishness. What then happens? The soul of this woman, after death and in the process of reincarnation, will, by the operation of the law of attraction (things of like nature attract each other), be attracted to another soul that is selfish. But this time the tables will turn and she will become the child in the womb to be born by that other woman who, as mother, will, through obsessive and selfish love, inflict on her in equal measure the mental torture she had inflicted on her son during her previous lifetime.
Abdrushin averred that this law solves the puzzle of differences in fate of humans – while some persons are born in affluence, others are born in penury; while some live in good health, some others are afflicted with terrible ailments; and while some persons are generally successful, others find themselves always struggling between one misfortune and the other. All these are by no accident, but a product of the perfectly working laws of nature as made by God – this time the law of reciprocal action. Abdrushin writes: “A man’s karma which appears to be one-sided predestination is, in reality, the inevitable result of his past, in so far as it has not yet been redeemed through reciprocal action.”
Thus, there is no room for people to think that nature (God) is unfair to some persons or that there is any coincidence or accident in the way the universe unfolds. Everything works perfectly based on God’s perfect design – there is no error or imperfection in God’s work. This principle means that no one enjoys any benefit he does not merit and no one endures any suffering he does not deserve. This is the perfect justice of God.
Writing in his book THE MYSTICAL LIFE OF JESUS (published posthumously in 1956), founder of the Ancient Mystical Order Rosae Crucis (AMORC), Dr. Spencer Lewis, wondered how people will behold a man born without limbs and lament “life is unfair to this man” without noticing that they have just accused God of unjustness or even wickedness. “The man born without limbs deserves to be born without limbs; that is his karma, that is justice served upon him because God is beyond error and cannot do injustice. This is what the Rosicrucian Order (AMORC) teaches, and this old wisdom is reechoed by the Scriptures – ‘Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he reap’ (Gal. 6:7). This is not to be disputed,” Lewis stated.
Like Abdrushin and the eastern mystics, Lewis believed that everyone is a designer of his own destiny by virtue of how he lives his life. Nature imposes no destiny or fate on anyone. He wrote: “The law [of compensation] has efficiently demonstrated itself in the lives of millions of human beings and is a very definite principle. It shows that we can and do bring upon ourselves in the immediate or near future the conditions and circumstances which constitute our lot in life.”
Abdrushin reasoned that the law of reciprocal action resolves the contradiction between fate (destiny) and human freewill. He wrote that when we see people experiencing good or bad fortune, we will likely misconstrue it to be a product of sheer and undeserved luck, but then the truth becomes clear when we see beyond the present lifetime to appreciate that whatever that happens now is a continuous thread running from previous lifetimes. Each person has, through his deeds, mapped a destiny path for himself, a path laid with pleasant and/or unpleasant fortunes as of course determined by the nature of the deeds in question.
Instructively those who preach karma, do not, in the strict sense, consider suffering as something negative. On the contrary, they view it as a necessary process a soul will undergo to remedy the effect of bad deeds. It represents redemption and not punishment as explained by Abdrushin: “Therefore there can be no question of any punishment. Punishment is a wrong expression, for in these laws (karma) lies the greatest love, the hand of the Creator stretched out for forgiveness and liberation.” So, arrival of a newborn child on earth, he wrote, is always a thing to be celebrated, as it is a manifestation of the infinite love and mercy of God who has given a soul another opportunity for self-redemption through the experiences he will live through.
To allay the fears of those who may dread what awaits them in future not knowing how they may have lived in their previous earth life, Abdrushin stated that everyone can avoid the negative consequence of his previous acts through doing good acts that will balance the effect of the bad deeds. Thus, everyone still has his destiny in his own hands. Karma doesn’t render humans helpless; one can still reverse one’s negative karma through good work.
Making this same point in regard to the apology issued by Pope John Paul II in 2000 for the wrongdoings of the Catholic Church in the past 500 years, S. B. Audifferen, writing in CHRISTOM OF A NEW AGE RELIGION, noted that while the Pope’s oral apology was of great symbolic effect, the said deeds of the church will only get remedied through centuries of charity work done by the Catholic Church in education, health and in other humanitarian endeavours around the world. It is these good deeds, in other words, that will neutralize the negative karma incurred through years of inquisitions and other inhuman treatments meted out to enforce creedal conformity in the Middle Ages.
Having explored the essence of karma as espoused by the above religious authorities, let me return to the issues raised at the beginning regarding the contradiction between the belief in karma and the Christian and Moslem doctrine of paradise and hell. Obviously, this doctrine completely runs contrary to the spirit and principles of karma. While karma reflects the very spirit of natural justice, paradise and hellfire contradict this in two major ways. First, as far as heaven and hell are concerned, one is rewarded or punished based on whether at the point of death he was living an upright life or not, meaning that if one led an upright life at the time of death, all the bad deeds he may have done earlier counted no more and vice versa. This is outrageously counter-justice. A student on an-eight semester course who works hard for seven semesters making excellent results but failed to do same in the last semester and makes a poor result just for that semester but ends up with an excellent result overall is surely to be rewarded over his counterpart who, on the contrary, whiles away his time for seven semesters only to work hard in the last semester and makes an excellent result for the semester but a very poor result overall. Anything to the contrary is a silly level of injustice that should never be attributed to a perfect God.
The second way the doctrine of paradise and hell runs contrary to karma is the everlasting nature of the punishment. (Eternal reward in paradise does not pose so much problem here as will be seen shortly.) The suggestion that one must suffer eternally for an evil deed profoundly challenges the love and mercy of God as well as His power of redemption. The usual argument that a dead sinner has irremediably run out of opportunity is of course another way of saying that the mercy and power of God are bound by time, they become exhausted when the lifetime of one who needs mercy gets exhausted. Needless to say, this contradicts the biblical characterisation of God as infinitely merciful (cf. Pslm 100: 5). Anything that’s infinite is inextinguishable by time or event – including death.
The sheer cruelty of the hellfire punishment makes this point even more glaring. Despite all our imperfection in virtue, not many humans will ordinarily withstand the sight of a ruthless robber and murderer being burnt to death, but ironically we feel okay attributing to an infinitely merciful God an even more outrageous degree of cruelty of burning people forever in hell. Worse is the suggestion that this God will be happy receiving praises from a few of His creatures in heaven while the rest billions – for many are called but few are chosen – will be burning in hellfire. To persist in defending this doctrine amounts to placing God far below humans in terms of love and kindness.
Rev. Fr. R. C. Arazu, CSSp, in his best seller, MAN KNOW THYSELF, made the following poser: “One question Christians have failed to answer is why sin committed in time will be punished eternally.” Addressing a retreat of priests and religious of Onitsha Regional District of the Holy Ghost Congregation, Nigeria Province, he said: “the idea of hell satisfies certain people because they would like to see their enemies burn forever and ever. And it is this idea that helped the inquisition in the Middle Ages to born heretics alive. But we realise that beyond the physical realm, you cannot talk about fire. You can talk about punishment but the crude way in which it is presented need not be. So this heaven-hell idea you have, you might have to refine it. Don’t leave it at the crude level of where you find people burning in fire forever and ever. First of all, do they go there with their physical bodies? This physical body would have got rotten in the grave. So those who have died, before the final resurrection, how can they be burning in hellfire? They don’t have bodies that can burn.”
Beyond the question of heaven and hellfire, the law of karma has availed us a quite promising perspective for approaching the big question of evil and suffering in the world. This question was over 2, 000 years ago sensationally framed by Epicurus thus: “Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is sadistic.” The problem is not just that the world is full of evil and suffering, but also that this suffering is not equally shared among humans. It is a question of God’s love and justice. Does God derive joy in punishing humans and does He love some humans more than others? Questions like these have posed a serious challenge to Christian theologians as early as the 2nd century of our era. Origen of Alexandria (c.185 – c.253AD), St. Athanasius of Alexandria (c.296 – 373AD), and St. Augustine of Hippo (354 – 430AD) are all famous for their attempts to resolve this puzzle. However, the question remains unanswered, and till date still occupies the attention of philosophers and theologians. I know a person who, in his Bachelor of Divinity project at a Catholic seminary, took up the topic “The Injustice of God” still in the attempt to address this enduring problem.
But there are also many, who faced with absence of any logical way out of the contradiction, do resort to the dismissive defence of “God’s ways are not our ways.” Obviously, this creates more problems than it solves. If we as humans don’t have the natural capacity to understand God’s ways, how then does God expect us to do his will? But then the Bible makes it clear that we are innately endowed with this ability when it says that God’s laws have been inscribed in the hearts of men (cf. Jerem 31:33–34; Rom 2:14-15).
However, those who profess karma seem a bit fortunate here, as this doctrine saves them some of the headache being endured by Christian and Moslem theologians and philosophers in their quest to reconcile these unyielding contradictions.
Also, it’s a fact that most Christians and Moslems, having been indoctrinated in the eschatology of paradise-versus-hellfire, will be struggling with the idea of reincarnation which is intrinsically tied to the workings of karma. Obviously, it is not easy proving or disproving such a supra-empirical phenomenon. There have been accounts of persons who have claimed to have been able to recall their previous lifetimes (see for example, PSYCHIC SELF-DEFENCE by Dion Fortune, 1974, Northamptonshire, The Aquarian Press; COMING BACK TO LIFE (ILO UWA): A MYSTERY IN IGBO TRADITIONAL RELIGION by R. C. Arazu & Ebele Ibida, 2005, Awka, O. C. Martins).
For some thought-provoking empirical studies, interested researchers may also read up RECALLING PAST LIVES: THE EVIDENCE AFTER HYPNOSIS by psychologist Dr. Helen Wanbach (1978, New York, Harper & Row), and LIFE BEFORE LIFE: A SCIENTIFIC INVESTIGATION OF CHILDREN’S MEMORIES OF PREVIOUS LIVES by psychiatrist Dr. Jim B. Tucker (2005, New York, St. Martins Press).
While I wouldn’t want to delve into the tenability of the idea of reincarnation, let me observe that the most common challenge against it is the fact that people do not ordinarily remember their previous lifetimes if actually such periods existed. The question goes: if I had actually existed before now, why don’t I recall what I did then? I will simply comment that our memories are not inseparably bound to our being. Our memories can be wiped out by certain injuries or diseases to the brain or after hemispherectomy – a surgical procedure to address epilepsy. If that’s so, can a reincarnated soul whose previous body (with the brain component) had died and decayed still keep any memories? Various faiths that believe in reincarnation, however, have their own explanations as to why humans don’t ordinarily remember their past lives, but then this is outside the scope of the subject matter of this piece.
Henry Chigozie Duru, PhD, teaches journalism and mass communication at Nnamdi Azikiwe University, Awka, Nigeria.
