Punishment through remorse and return to good through repentance

The concept of punishment, little understood in the Spiritist context today, was widely understood and disseminated among Rational Spiritualists and Spiritists in Allan Kardec's time, representing nothing more than the consequence of our actions. We discuss this in the article "Punishment and reward: you need to study Paul Janet to understand Allan Kardec“Until recently, however, the understanding of the topic was not perfectly clear to me — not until we approached the study of the article Remorse and regret, in the Spiritist Magazine of May 1860:

“[…] Remember that sincere repentance obtains forgiveness for all sins, so great is God's goodness. Remorse has nothing in common with repentance. Remorse, my brothers, is already the prelude to punishment. Repentance, charity, and faith will lead you to the happiness reserved for good spirits.“

This small, profound passage sparked in us the idea of researching the term “remorse” throughout Kardec’s work, and oh, how much we learned from it.

Remorse, dear reader, is the divine tool that leads the Spirit back to goodness. It is the result of consciousness of having disrespected divine law, and the worse it will be the more this disrespect is conscious. That is why remorse depends on the development of moral sense:

Remorse is a consequence of the development of the moral sense; it does not exist where the moral sense is still latent. This is why savage and barbaric peoples commit the worst actions without remorse. Anyone who claims to be inaccessible to remorse would be like a brute. As man progresses, the moral sense becomes more refined; it becomes clouded at the slightest deviation from the straight path. Hence remorse, which is the first step toward returning to goodness.

Spiritist Magazine, August 1867

That is why, revisiting the evocation of the Assassin Lemaire, in the Spiritist Magazine of March 1858, we will find the following:

6. Immediately after your execution, were you aware of your new existence?

—I was plunged into an immense disturbance, from which I have not yet emerged. I felt great pain; it seems like my heart felt itfelt it. I saw something roll at the foot of the scaffold. I saw the blood flow and my pain became more acute.

7. Was it a purely physical pain, similar to that caused by a serious injury, such as the amputation of a limb?

- No. Imagine remorse, great moral pain.

8. When did you start feeling this pain?

— Since I got free.

9. Was the physical pain caused by the torture felt by the body or by the Spirit?

—The moral pain was in my Spirit. The body felt the physical pain, but, separated, the Spirit still felt it.

[…]

41. Could we give some relief to your sufferings?

— Make wishes that it may come to atonement.

Since atonement is the result of the sincere repentance of the Spirit, which then choose new tests, and a new life, aiming to overcome the imperfection acquired by his departure conscious of good. It has nothing to do with the false idea of “law of return” or punishment, although the Spirit, when evoked, may refer to his atonement as a punishment, imposed, however, by himself:

[…]; if I returned to endure this trial of poverty, it was to punish me of a vain pride that had made me reject what was poor and miserable. Then I suffered this just law of retaliation, which made me the most horrible poor person in this region; and, as if to prove to me the goodness of God, I was not rejected by everyone: this was all my fear; thus I endured my trial without murmuring, foreseeing a better life from which I would never again return to this land of exile and calamity.

Thus, through prayer or evocation, help a guilty Spirit to awaken remorse, without judging him, it is a great charity that we can do and that the Spiritist Movement practically no longer does:

And if, on the one hand, I suffer less, on the other, the tortures increase due to remorse. But, at least, I have hope.

The Story of a Damned Man — Spiritist Magazine, February 1860

For our part, this entire study brings enormous learning about our attitude toward suffering Spirits, toward hardened Spirits, but also, and most importantly, toward ourselves. When our conscience shout While we choose to do wrong, we must not stifle these cries. On the contrary, we must listen to them and heed them, taking care to correct our attitudes and make better choices. Otherwise, we will be consciously cultivating imperfections, and the day will come when the conscience, once stifled, will throw us into a true personal hell, that will seem to have no end — until we surrender to ourselves and repentance.

It remains to be remembered that sincere repentance leads the Spirit back to goodness and happiness, as we find in the original, unadulterated edition of Heaven and Hell, by Allan Kardec (which you can download by clicking on here):

“8º) The duration of the punishment is subordinated to the improvement of the guilty spirit. No condemnation for a fixed time is pronounced against him. What God requires to put an end to suffering is repentance, atonement, and reparation—in short: a serious, effective improvement, as well as a sincere return to the good.”

The spirit is thus always the arbiter of its own destiny; he can prolong his sufferings by his hardening in evil, alleviate them or abbreviate them by his efforts to do good.