The following passage from St. Athanasius, patriarch of Alexandria, one of the fathers of the Greek Church, seems to have be written under the inspiration of today’s Spiritist ideas.
“The soul does not die but the body does when away from the soul. The soul is its own motor; life is the movement of the soul. Even when imprisoned by the body and attached to it the soul is not restricted and contained by the limits of the body but frequently when the body is at rest and like inanimate the soul is awaken by its own virtue; despite being still connected to the body the soul conceives and contemplates existences beyond the terrestrial globe; the soul sees the saints freed from their bodies; sees and rises to the angels in the freedom of its pure innocence.
When it is entirely separated from the body and when God decides that it is time to remove the shackles wouldn’t the soul have, I ask you, a much more clear vision of its immortal nature? If right now and under the chains of the flesh the soul already enjoys a life that is completely exterior, it will live much more after the death of the body thanks to God that from the Verb made the soul in that away. The soul understands, absorbs the ideas of eternity and infinity because it is immortal. In the same way that the perishable body can only perceive what is material and perishable, the soul that sees and meditates about immortal things is necessarily immortal and will live forever because the thoughts and images of immortality are always with the soul and are like a living focus that ensures and feeds its own immortality. (Sanct. Athan. Oper., vol. I, page 32, Image of Christian eloquence in the IV Century).”
Isn’t that in fact an accurate image of the external irradiation of the soul during its physical life and its emancipation during the sleep, ecstasy, somnambulism and catalepsy? Spiritism says exactly the same thing and demonstrate it by experience.
The whole modern Spiritist Doctrine can be constituted with the sparse ideas found in the Bible, Gospels, in the Apostles and Fathers of the Church, not to mention the profane writers. The remarks made about those texts were generally from an exclusive point of view and from preconceived ideas and many of them only saw what they wanted to see or they lacked the key to see something else. Spiritism today, however, is the key that gives the true meaning of passages that are poorly understood. Up until now those fragments are collected partially but there will be a day when patient and knowledgeable people whose authority cannot be ignored will turn such a study into the object of a serious and thorough project that will shine light upon all of these questions so that one will have to surrender before the clearly demonstrated evidence.
We believe we can say that such a considerable work will be the endeavor of eminent members of the Church that will be assigned with such a mission because they will understand that religion must be progressive like humanity or else be overcome because there are backward ideas in religion as there are in politics. In that case the price of not advancing is to move backwards.
It is precisely because religion has fallen behind the progressive and scientific movement that there is a surge in disbelief. Religion does even more than that by declaring that such a movement is the works of the devil and by always combating it. It turned out that science that was repelled by religion repelled it in turn.
The result is an antagonism that will not end until religion understands that it must not only march with progress but also be an element of progress. Everybody will believe in God when religion does not present God in contradiction with the laws of nature that is the work of God.
