BETWEEN RESURRECTION AND TRANSFORMATION:THE SEMANTIC ARCHITECTONICS OF THE APOCALYPSE OF IOANN
Abstract
The article presents a comprehensive philosophical and religious studies analysis of the mystical phenomena of experience, prophecy, and the idea of souls transmigration as structure-forming attributes of religious consciousness in the early Christian and medieval periods. The thesis is advanced that the idea of transmigration within the Christian tradition does not appear as an explicit doctrine, yet is latently present in the imagery of resurrection, spiritual rebirth, the new name, and apocalyptic judgment. It is demonstrated that the motifs of transmigration, retribution, and salvation constitute a unified semantic matrix that governs the logic of the individual’s spiritual evolution within the Christian worldview.
The methodological foundation of the study is an interdisciplinary approach integrating the philosophy of religion, religious studies, cultural anthropology, and the history of ideas. The phenomenological method serves as the principal analytical framework, enabling the examination of mystical experience and prophecy as forms of intentional engagement with the transcendent and as existential modes of surpassing empirical reality.
Through sustained intellectual inquiry, it is established that certain semantic dimensions of the metempsychosis idea were periodically reactivated within Christian consciousness. This idea manifests across a range of conceptual aspects: as the capacity of the spiritual substance to separate from the corporeal envelope after death and inhabit a new body; as the possibility of gods, spirits, and saints to assume bodily form; and as a process of transition, migration, or movement of the soul through corporeal forms — conceived as an actual, completed, and potentially reversible process, including the notion of “return to the body.”
The study further establishes that the idea of eternal life — understood in the context of the soul’s migration between the immanent and transcendent realms — functions as a pervasive and foundational meaning-constituting principle that organizes the Christian religious worldview. Transmigration, within the Christian and religio-philosophical tradition, operates as a deep-structural mechanism for ordering spiritual experience, ensuring the coherence of the religious vision of the world and determining the logic of the individual’s spiritual evolution.
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