1. Prayer is the expression of man's longing and yearning for God in times of dire need and of overflowing joy, an outflow of the emotions of the soul in its dependence on God, the ever-present Helper, the eternal Source of its existence. Springing from the deepest necessity of human weakness, the expression of a momentary wish, prayer is felt to be the proud prerogative of man as the child of God, and at last it becomes adoration of the Most High, whose wisdom and whose paternal love and goodness inspire man with confidence and love.
2. Every prayer is offered on the presumption that it will be heard by God on high. “O Thou that hearest prayer, unto Thee doth all flesh come,” sings the Psalmist.856 No doubt of the efficacy of prayer can arise in the devout spirit. There can be only the question whether, and how far, the Deity can allow its decrees to be influenced by human wishes. Childlike faith anticipates divine interference in the natural order at any time, because it has not yet attained the conception of a moral order in the universe and, therefore, expects from prayer also miraculous effects on life. As the Deity can suddenly send or withhold rain or drought, barrenness or birth, life or death, so the inference is that the man of God can do the same with his prayer. This is the point of view of the Biblical and Talmudic periods, as well as of the entire ancient world. It seems almost childish to our religious consciousness when, [pg 272] according to Talmudic tradition, the high priest petitioned God in the Sanctuary on the Day of Atonement for a year rich in rain and blessed with sunshine and with dew, and at the same time expressed the entreaty that the prayers of travelers for dry or cool weather should find no hearing.857 That the prayers of the pious may alter God's decree is not doubted for a moment by the rabbis; only they insist that God has taken into account beforehand the efficacy of this prayer in deciding the fate of the pious, in order that they may petition for that which He actually plans to do. “God longs for the prayer of the pious”; for that reason, they say, the Mothers of Israel were afflicted with barrenness, until the prayers of the Patriarchs had accomplished the transformation in their constitutions.858 On the other hand, the rabbis warn against excessive pondering over prayer and its efficacy, as through it that childlike faith would be weakened, which is the basis of all prayer.859
3. According to the rabbinic viewpoint, prayer has the power to reverse every heavenly decree, inasmuch as it appeals from the punitive justice of God, which has decided thus, to His attributes of grace and mercy, which can at any time effect a change. When the prophet Isaiah came to King Hezekiah with the message: “Set thine house in order, for thou shalt die,” he replied, “Finish thy message and go; I have received the tradition from my royal ancestor David that, even when the sword already touches the neck, man shall not desist from an appeal to the divine mercy.”860 Nay more, the rabbis believed that God Himself prays, saying, “Oh, that My mercy shall prevail over My justice!”861 Only after the divine judgment has been executed prayer becomes vain. In general, the entire Talmudic period ascribed miraculous power to prayer, especially the prayers of the pious, like the popular [pg 273] saint Onias or Hanina ben Dosa.862 In many such cases the invocation of God was combined with the use of the sacred name, the tetragrammaton, to which magical powers were ascribed.863
4. The two attributes of God, Justice and Mercy, correspond to the double nature of mankind, as the sinful man, who deserves punishment, is called to account by the former, while the righteous man may appeal to the latter. Accordingly, the efficacy of prayer could be so explained that, before it can influence the decision of God, it demands the reformation of man. While the unregenerate man meets an evil destiny, the reformed man has become a different being, and hence instead of justice mercy will control his fate. Albo pleads for this view of prayer, when he cites the Talmudic incident about R. Meir. It is said that R. Meir interceded for the people of Mimla, who all seemed to have been doomed to die on attaining manhood because they inherited the curse of the priestly family of Eli.864 But he also recommended to them that they should devote their lives to worthy deeds, as it is said in the Proverbs:865 “The hoary head is a crown of glory, it is found in the way of righteousness.”866
Other thinkers ascribe to prayer the power to change the fate determined by the stars, because it exalts man into a higher sphere of godliness, exactly like the spirit of prophecy. Of course, this conception is connected with the belief in astrology, which swayed even clear thinkers like Ibn Ezra.867
5. According to our modern thinking there can be no question of any influence upon a Deity exalted above time and [pg 274] space, omniscient, unchangeable in will and action, by the prayer of mortals. Prayer can exert power only over the relation of man to God, not over God Himself. This indicates the nature and purpose of prayer. Man often feels lonely and forlorn in a world which overpowers him, to which he feels superior, and yet which he cannot master. Therefore he longs for that unseen Spirit of the universe, with whom alone he feels himself akin, and in whom alone he finds peace and bliss amid life's struggle and unrest. This longing is both expressed and satisfied in prayer. Following the natural impulse of his soul, man must pour out before his God all his desires and sighs, all the emotions of grief and delight which sway his heart, in order that he may find rest, like a child at its mother's bosom. Therefore the childlike mind believes that God can be induced to come down from His heavenly heights to offer help, and that He can be moved and influenced in human fashion. The truth is that every genuine prayer lifts man up toward God, satisfies the desire for His hallowing presence, unlocks the heavenly gate of mercy and bliss, and bestows upon man the beatific and liberating sense of being a child of God. The intellect may question the effect of prayer upon the physical, mental, or social constitution of man, or may declare prayer to be pious self-deception. The religious spirit experiences in prayer the soaring up of the soul toward union with God in consecrated moments of our mortal pilgrimage. This is no deception. The man who prays receives from the Godhead, toward whom he fervently lifts himself, the power to defy fate, to conquer sin, misery, and death. “The Lord is nigh to all them that call upon Him, to all that call upon Him in truth.”868
6. To pray, then, is to look up to God and to pour out before Him one's wishes, thoughts, sorrows, and joys. Certainly the All-knowing does not require to be told by us what we desire [pg 275] or what we need. “For there is not a word in my tongue, but lo, O Lord, Thou knowest it altogether.”869 But we mortals merely aspire toward Him who bears the world on His eternal arms, to express in His presence our agony and our jubilation, because we are certain of His paternal sympathy. When we praise and extol Him for the happiness and the many pleasures which He has granted us, He becomes the Partaker and Protector of our fortune, just as He is our sympathetic Helper when we cry out to Him under the burden of sin or grief, in the anxiety of danger or of guilt. Every genuine prayer realizes deeply the truth of the words, “Cast thy burden upon the Lord, and He will sustain thee.”870
7. Self-expression before God in prayer has thus a double effect; it strengthens faith in God's love and kindness, as well as in His all-wise and all-bountiful prescience. But it also chastens the desires and feelings of man, teaching him to banish from his heart all thoughts of self-seeking and sin, and to raise himself toward the purity and the freedom of the divine will and demand. The essence of every prayer of supplication is that one should be in unison with the divine will, to sum up all the wishes of the heart in the one phrase, “Do that which is good in Thine own eyes, O Lord.”871 On the other hand, only the prayer which avoids impure thoughts and motives can venture to approach a holy God, as the sages infer from the words of Job, “There is no violence in my hands, and my prayer is pure.”872
8. Every prayer, teach the sages, should begin with the praise of God's greatness, wisdom, and goodness, in order that man should learn submission and implicit confidence before he proffers his requests.873 While looking up to the divine Ideal [pg 276] of holiness and perfection, he will strive to emulate Him, and seek to grow ever nearer to the holy and the perfect. But only when he prays with and for others, that is, in public worship, will he realize that he is a member of a greater whole, for then he prays only for that which advances the welfare of all. “He who prays with the community,” say the rabbis, “will have his prayer granted.”874
Another saying of theirs is that he who prays should have his face directed to the sanctuary, and when he stands on its sacred precincts, he should turn his face toward the Holy of Holies.875 By this they meant that the attitude of the suppliant should ever be toward the highest, making the soul soar up to the Highest and Holiest in reverent awe and adoration, transforming the worshiper into a new character, pure from all dross.
9. Therefore prayer offered with the community upon the sanctified ground of the house of God exerts a specially powerful influence upon the individual. In the silent chamber the oppressed spirit may find calm and composure in prayer; but the pure atmosphere of heavenly freedom and bliss is attained with overwhelming might only by the united worship of hundreds of devout adorers, which rings out like the roaring of majestic billows: “The Lord is in His holy temple; let all the earth keep silence before Him.”876 The familiar strains from days of yore touch the deep, long-silent chords of the heart, and awaken dormant sentiments and repressed thoughts, endowing the soul with new wings, to lift itself up toward God, the Father, from whom it had felt itself alienated. In the ardor of communal worship the traditional words of the prayer-book obtain invigorating power; the heart is newly strengthened; the covenant with heaven sealed anew. To such communal prayer, which springs from the heart, the rabbis refer the Biblical words, “to serve Him with the whole [pg 277] heart.”877 The synagogal worship exerts an ennobling influence upon the spirit of the individual as well as that of the community. For after all the main object is that the soul which aspires toward God may learn to find God. “Seek ye the Lord while He may be found; call ye upon Him while He is near.”878 No man is so poor as he who calls in agony: “O God!” and to whom neither the heaven above nor the heart within answers, “Behold, God is here.” Nor is any man so rich with all his possessions as he who realizes, like the Psalmist, that “the nearness of God is the true good,” and imbued with this thought exclaims, “Whom have I in heaven but Thee? And beside Thee I desire none upon earth.”879
1. The vision of man is directed upwards and forwards; he will not resign himself to decay in the dust like the beast. As he bears in his breast the consciousness of a higher divine world, he is equally confident of his own continuity after death. He cannot and will not believe that with the giving up of his last living breath his being would become dust like that of the animal; or that his soul, which has hitherto accomplished and planned so much, should now suddenly cease altogether to exist. The longing for a future life, however expressed, has filled him and buoyed him up since the very beginning of history. Even the most primitive tribe does not allow its dead to lie and rot like the carcasses of the beast, but lays them to rest in the grave with all their possessions, in the expectation that somewhere and somehow, under, over or beyond the earth, they will continue their lives, even in a better form than before.
This longing for immortality implanted in the human soul is so represented in the legend of Paradise that the tree whose fruit bestowed upon the celestial beings the gift of eternal life—like the Greek ambrosia, “the food of the gods”—was originally intended for mankind also in the divine “Garden of Bliss.” But after man fell through sin, all access to it was denied him, in order that he might not stretch out his hand for it and thereby attain that immortality which was vouchsafed only to divine beings.880 According to his original destiny, therefore, man should live forever; and, just as legend allows [pg 279] those divinely elected, like Enoch and Elijah,881 to ascend to heaven alive, so at a later period prophecy predicts a time when God will annihilate death forever.882 Accordingly, through the power of his divine soul man possesses a claim to immortality, to eternal life with God, the “Fountain of life.”
2. It was just this keen longing for an energetic life on earth, this mighty yearning to “walk before God in the land of the living,”883 which made it more difficult for Judaism to brighten the “valley of the shadow of death” and to elevate the vague notion of a shadowy existence in the hereafter into a special religious teaching. Until long after the Exile the Jewish people shared the view of the entire ancient world,—both the Semitic nations, such as the Babylonians and Phœnicians, and the Aryans, such as the Greeks and Romans,—that the dead continue to exist in the shadowy realm of the nether world (Sheol), the land of no return (Beliyaal),884 of eternal silence (Dumah), and oblivion (Neshiyah),885 a dull, ghostly existence without clear consciousness and without any awakening to a better life. We must, however, not overlook the fact that even in these most primitive conceptions a certain imperishability is ascribed to man as marking his superiority over the animal world, which is altogether abandoned to decay. Hence the belief in the existence of the shades, the Refaim in Sheol.886 But throughout the Biblical period no ethical idea yet permeated this conception, and no attempt was made to transform the nether world into a place of divine judgment, of recompense for the good and evil deeds accomplished on earth,887 as did the Babylonians and Egyptians. Both the prophets and the Mosaic code persist in applying their promises and threats, in fact, their entire view of retribution, to this world, nor do [pg 280] they indicate by a single word the belief in a judgment or a weighing of actions in the world to come.
3. Whether the Mosaic-prophetic writings be regarded from the standpoint of traditional faith or of historical criticism, the limitation of their teaching and exhortation to the present life can be considered narrowness only by biased expounders of the “Old Testament.” The Israelitish lawgiver could not have been altogether ignorant of the Egyptian or the Babylonian conceptions of the future world. Obviously Israel's prophets and lawgivers deliberately avoided giving any definite expression to the common belief in a future life after death, especially as the Canaanitish magicians and necromancers used this popular belief to carry on their superstitious practices, so dangerous to all moral progress.888 The great task which prophetic Judaism set itself was to place the entire life of men and nations in the service of the God of justice and holiness; there was thus no motive to extend the dominion of JHVH, the God of life, to the underworld, the playground of the forces of fear and superstition. As late as the author of the book of Job and of the earlier Psalms, Sheol was known as the despot of the nether world with its demoniacal forms, as the “king of terrors” who extends his scepter over the dead.889 Only gradually does the thought find expression in the Psalms that the Omnipotent Ruler of heaven could also rescue the soul out of the power of Sheol,890 and that His omnipresence included likewise the nether world.891 In this trustful spirit the Hasidic Psalmist expressed the hope: “Thou wilt not abandon my soul to Sheol, neither wilt Thou suffer Thy godly one to see the pit. Thou makest me to know the path of life; in Thy presence is fulness of joy; in Thy right hand bliss forevermore.”892
[pg 281]4. Biblical Judaism evinced such a powerful impetus toward a complete and blissful life with God, that the center and purpose of existence could not be transferred to the hereafter, as in other systems of belief, but was found in the desire to work out the life here on earth to its fullest possible development. Virtue and wisdom, righteousness and piety, signify and secure true life; vice and folly, iniquity and sin, lead to death and annihilation. This is the ever recurring burden of the popular as well as of the prophetic and priestly wisdom of Israel.893 In the song of thanks of King Hezekiah after his recovery, the Jewish soul expresses itself, when he says:894 “I said, I shall not see the Lord, even the Lord in the land of the living.... But Thou hast delivered my soul from the pit of corruption. For the nether world cannot praise Thee; death cannot celebrate Thee. The living, the living, he shall praise Thee, as I do this day. The father to the children shall make known Thy truth.” Therefore the author of the seventy-third Psalm, ennobled by trials, finds sufficient comfort and happiness in the presence of God that he can spurn all earthly treasures.895 Job, too, in his affliction longed for death as release from all earthly pain and sorrow, but not to bring him a state of rest and peace like the Nirvana of the Indian beggar-monk, or an outlook into a better world to come. Such an awakening to a new life seems to him unthinkable,—although many commentators have often endeavored to read such a hope into certain of his expressions.896 Instead, his belief in God as the Ruler of the infinite world, with His lofty moral purpose far outreaching all human wisdom, lent him courage and power for further effort and persistent striving on earth. Since to this [pg 282] suffering hero, impelled to deeds by his own energy, life is a continuous battle, a hereafter as a “world of reward and punishment” can hardly solve the great enigma of human existence in a satisfactory manner for him. The wise ones—says a Talmudic maxim—find rest neither in this world nor in the world to come, but “they shall ascend from strength to strength, until they appear before God on Zion.”897
5. In the course of time, however, the question of existence after death demanded more and more a satisfactory answer. Under the severe political and social oppression that came upon the Jewish people, the pious ones failed to see a just equation of man's doings and his destiny in this life. The bitter disappointment which they experienced made them look to the God of justice for a future, when virtue would receive its due reward and vice its befitting punishment. The community of the pious especially awaited in vain the realization of the great messianic hope with which the prophetic words of comfort had filled their hearts. They had willingly offered up their lives for the truth of Judaism, and the God of faithfulness could not deceive them. Surely the shadowy realm of the nether world could not be the end of all. So the voice of promise came to them from the book of Isaiah, where these encouraging and comforting words were inserted by a later hand: “Thy dead shall live; thy (My) dead bodies shall arise. Awake and sing, ye that dwell in the dust, for Thy dew is as the dew of herbs, and the earth shall cast forth the shades.”898 Even before this time the God of Israel had been praised as “He who killeth and maketh alive, who bringeth down to Sheol, and bringeth up.”899 So was also the miraculous power of restoring the dead to life ascribed to the [pg 283] prophets.900 Furthermore, the vision of the prophet Ezekiel concerning the dry bones which arose to new life, in which he beheld the divine revelation of the approaching event of the restoration of the Jewish nation,901 shows how familiar the idea of resurrection must have been to the people. Hence the minds of the Jewish people were sufficiently prepared to adopt the Persian belief in the resurrection of the dead.
6. This, however, led to a tremendous process of transformation in Judaism with a wide chasm between Mosaism and Rabbinism, or, more accurately, between the Sadducees, who adhered to the letter of the law, and the Pharisees, who embodied the progressive spirit of the people. On the one hand, Jesus ben Sira, who at the close of his book speaks with great admiration of the high-priest Simon the Just as his contemporary, knew as yet nothing of a future life, and like Koheleth saw the end of all human existence in the dismal realm of the nether world. Yet at the same time, the Hasidim or pious ones and their successors, the Pharisees, were developing after the Persian pattern the thought of a divine judgment day after death, when the just were to awaken to eternal life, and the evil-doers to shame and everlasting contempt.902 This advanced moral view, frequently overlooked, transformed the ancient Semitic Sheol from the realm of shades to a place of punishment for sinners, and thus invested it with an ethical purpose.903 After this the various Biblical names for the nether world became the various divisions of [pg 284] hell.904 Indeed, the Psalmists and the Proverbs had announced to the wicked their destruction in Sheol, and on the other hand held out for the godly the hope of deliverance from Sheol and a beatific sight of God in the land of the living. Thus the transition was prepared for the new world-conception. All the promises and threats of the law and the prophets, when they did not receive fulfillment in this world, appeared now to point forward to the world to come. Moreover, the Pharisees in their disputes with the Sadducees made use of every reference, however slight, to the future life,—even of such passages as those which speak of the Patriarchs as receiving the promise of possessing the Holy Land, as if they were still alive,—as proofs of the continued life of the dead, or of their resurrection.905 Thus it came about that the leading authorities of rabbinic Judaism were in the position to declare in the Mishnah: “He who says that the belief in the resurrection of the dead is not founded on the Torah (and therefore does not accept it) shall have no share in the world to come.”906
7. The founders of the liturgy of the Synagogue, in opposition to the Sadducees, formulated therefore the belief in resurrection in the second of the “Eighteen (or Seven) Benedictions” of the daily prayer in the following words: “Thou, O Lord, art mighty forever. Thou revivest the dead. Thou art mighty to save. Thou sustainest the living with loving-kindness, revivest the dead with great mercy, supportest the falling, healest the sick, loosest the bound, and keepest Thy faith to them that sleep in the dust. (This refers to the Patriarchs, to whom God has promised the land of the future.) Who is like unto Thee, O Lord of mighty acts, and who resembleth Thee, O King, who killest and bringest to life, and causest salvation to spring forth? Yea, faithful art Thou to [pg 285] revive the dead. Blessed art Thou, O Lord, who revivest the dead.” In this prayer dating from the age of the Maccabees907 the Jewish consciousness of two thousand years found a twofold hope,—the national and the universally human. The national hope, which combined the belief in the restoration of the kingdom of David and of the sacrificial cult with the resurrection of the dead in the Holy Land, can be understood only in connection with a historic view of Israel's place in the world, and is treated in the third part of this book. The purely human hope for the continuity or the renewal of life rests on two fundamental problems which must be examined more closely in the next two chapters. The one belongs to the province of psychology and considers the question: What is the eternal divine element in man? The other goes more deeply into the religious and moral nature of man and considers the question: Where and how does divine retribution—reward or punishment—take place in human life? To both of these questions our modern view, with its special aim toward a unified grasp of the totality of life, requires a special answer. This can be neither that of rabbinic Judaism, which rests upon Persian dualism, nor that of medieval philosophy, which was under the Platonic-Aristotelian influence.
1. The idea of immortality has been found in Scripture in a rather obscure and probably corrupt passage,908 “In the way of righteousness is life, and in the pathway thereof there is no death.” In the same spirit Aquila, the Bible translator, who belonged to the school of R. Eliezer and R. Joshua, renders the equally obscure passage from the Psalms,909 “He will lead us to immortality,” reading al maveth, the Al with Alef, for al muth, the Al with Ayin. There is more solid foundation for the view that the verse, “God created man in His own image” implies that there is an imperishable divine essence in man. In fact, that which distinguishes man from the animal as well as from the rest of creation, both the starry worlds above and the manifold forms of life on earth about him, is his self-conscious personality, his ego, through which he feels himself akin with God, the great world-ruling I Am. This self-conscious part of man, which lends to his every manifestation its value and purpose, can no more disappear into nothingness than can God, who called into existence this world with all its phenomena, who set it in motion and directs it. Whatever thought the crudest of men may have of his ego, his self,910 or however the most learned scholar may explain the marvelous action and interaction of physical and psychical or spiritual [pg 287] forces which culminates in his own self-conscious personality, it appears certain that this ego cannot cease to be with the cessation of the bodily functions. There is in us something divine, immortal, and the only question is wherein it may be found.
2. The creation of man which is described in the Bible in the words, “God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living soul”911 corresponds to the child-like conceptions of a primitive people. On the other hand, Scripture speaks of death in parallel terms, “The dust returneth to the earth as it was, and the spirit (Ruah, the life-giving breath) returneth unto God who gave it.”912
The conception that the soul enters into man as the breath of life and leaves him at his death, flying toward heaven like a bird,913 is quite as ancient and as universal as the other, that the soul descends into the nether world as a shadowy image of the body, there to continue a dull existence. The two are related to one another, and in the Bible, as well as in the literature of other peoples, they have given rise to diverse definitions of the soul. This was the point of departure for the development of the conception of immortality in one or the other direction, according to whether the body was considered a part of the personality which somehow survives after death, or only the spiritual substance of the soul was thought to live on in celestial regions as something divine. The former led to the theory of the resurrection of the body and its reunion with the soul; the latter to the belief in a future life for the soul, after it had been separated or released from the body.
3. When once the soul was felt to be a “lamp of the Lord,” filling the body with light when man is awake,914 it was easy to imagine that the soul had escaped and temporarily returned [pg 288] to God in sleep. This induced the teachers of the Synagogue to prescribe a morning prayer of thanks which reads, “Blessed art Thou, O God, who restorest the souls unto dead bodies.”915 The conception underlying this prayer throws light upon the entire belief in resurrection. Death to the pious is only a prolonged sleep. On that account the prophet in the passage from Isaiah already referred to, as well as the Hasidic author of the Book of Daniel,916 could express the hope that “those who sleep in the dust shall awake.” As at every awakening from sleep in the morning, so at the great awakening in the future, the souls which have departed in death shall return again to their bodies. These bodies could then hardly be conceived of as subject to decomposition, and the picture in Ezekiel's vision of resurrection917 had to be accepted as fact. Still R. Simeon b. Yohai in the especially instructive thirty-fourth chapter of Pirke de R. Eliezer assumes the complete disintegration of the body, in order to render the miracle of resurrection so much the greater. Later still arose the legend of an indestructible bone of the spinal column, called Luz, which was to form the nucleus for the revival of the whole body.918 The name Luz, which denotes an almond tree and is the name given in the Bible to a city also,919 seemed to point to a connection with two legends, a fabulous city into which death could not enter,920 and the tree of resurrection in the Osiris cycle.921
4. Still, no clear, consistent view of the soul prevailed as yet in the rabbinic age. The popular belief, influenced by Persian notions, was that the soul lingers near the body for a certain time after it has relinquished it, either from three to seven days or for an entire year.922 Furthermore it was said that after death the souls hovered between heaven and earth [pg 289] in the form of ghosts, able to overhear the secrets of the future decreed above and to betray them to human beings below. In fact, the rabbis of the Talmud, especially the Hasidim, never hesitated to accept these ghost stories.923 Some sages of the Talmudic period taught that the souls of the righteous ascend to heaven, there to dwell under the throne of the divine majesty, awaiting the time of the renewal of the world, while the souls of the godless hovered over the horizon of the earth as restless demoniacal spirits, finally to succumb to the fate of annihilation, after they had been cast down into the fiery pit of Gehenna or Sheol.924 Of course, this view, which prevails in both the Talmud and the New Testament, according to which the souls of the wicked are to be consumed in the fire of Gehenna, is inconsistent with the conception of the purely spiritual nature of the soul.
Nevertheless at this same epoch we find the higher idea expressed that the soul is an invisible, god-like essence, pervading the body as a spiritual force and differing from it in nature in much the same way as God is differentiated from the world.925 “Thou wishest to know where God dwells, who is as high as are the heavens above the earth; tell me then where dwells thy soul, which is so near,” replied R. Gamaliel to a heathen.926 The prevailing view of the schools is that God implants the soul in the embryo while in the mother's womb, together with all the spiritual potentialities which make it human. In fact, R. Simlai, the third-century Haggadist, advances the Platonic conception of the preëxistence of the soul, as a being of the highest intelligence, which sees before birth all things throughout the world, but forgets all at birth, so that all subsequent learning is only a recollection.927 In Hellenistic Judaism especially the doctrine seems to have been general of the preëxistence of the soul, or of the creation of all human souls simultaneously [pg 290] with the creation of the world.928 Of course, the soul which emanates from a higher world must be eternal.
5. The first clear idea of the nature of the soul came with the philosophically trained thinkers, who were dependent either on Plato, main founder of the doctrine of the immortality of the soul, or on Aristotle, who ascribes immortality only to the creative spirit of God, the supreme Intelligence as a cosmic power. The nearest approach to Plato was Philo,929 who saw in the three Biblical names for the soul, nefesh, ruah, and neshama, the three souls of the Platonic system,—the sensuous soul, which has its seat in the abdomen; the courageous or emotional soul, situated in the breast; and the intellectual soul, which dwells in the brain and contains the imperishable divine nature. This last is kept in its physical environment as in a prison or a grave, and ever yearns for liberation and reunion with God. The soul of the righteous enters the world of angels after death; that of the wicked the world of demons.
Saadia, who was under the influence of Aristotle interpreted from the neo-Platonic viewpoint, did not share the Platonic dualism of matter and spirit, nor did he divide the soul into three parts, seated in various parts of the human body. He finds the soul to be a spiritual substance created simultaneously with the body, and uniting the three forces of the soul distinguished in Scripture into one inseparable whole, the seat of which is in the heart,—wherefore soul and heart are often synonymous in the Bible. This indivisible substance possesses a luminous nature like that of the spheres, but is simpler, finer, and purer than they, and endowed with the power of thought. It was created by God out of the primal ether from which He made the angels, simultaneously with the body and [pg 291] within it. By this union it was qualified to display that moral activity prescribed for it in the divine teaching, the neglect of which would defile and tarnish it. According to Saadia some kind of material substance adheres to the soul as well as to the angels, and on that account he does not hesitate to accept the Talmudic expressions about the abode of the soul after death, or the last judgment which is to take place as soon as the appointed number of souls shall have made their entrance into their earthly bodies, when the souls of the righteous will have their angelic nature recognized, and those of the wicked will have their lower character revealed. However, Saadia combats with so much greater fervor the Hindu teaching of metempsychosis, which had been adopted by Plato and Pythagoras.930
Bahya connects his theory with the three souls of Plato, and likewise ascribes to the soul an ethereal essence.931 He holds that its destiny is to raise itself to the order of the angels through self-purification, and finally to return to God as the divine Source of light. To this end the intellectual soul, which has its being from the primal light, must overcome the lower sensuous soul which leads to sin.
6. The conception that the soul is a substance derived from the luminous primal matter, like the heavenly spheres and the angels, was now persistently retained by the Jewish thinkers, who explained thereby its immortality. In adopting the Aristotelian theory that the soul is the form-principle of the body, the Platonic doctrine of its preexistence was gradually relinquished, and its existence ascribed to a creative act of God at the birth of the child or at its conception. But Jehuda ha-Levi, the most pious of all the philosophers, emphasized vigorously the indivisibility of the soul, its incorporeality and [pg 292] its reality apart from the condition of the body, and—in opposition to the Aristotelian free-thinkers, who expected the human soul to be absorbed into the divine soul, the active intellect,—he declared the immortality of the individual a fundamental article of faith.932
Now some of the Jewish thinkers, following Jehuda ha Levi, Ibn Daud, and others, though Aristotelians, shrank from the logical conclusion of denying all individuality to the soul, and attributed to it rather a process of purification, which ends with the elevation of the soul-essence to angelic rank and thus guarantees its immortality. Not so Maimonides, who accepted with inexorable earnestness the Aristotelian idea of form as the perfection of matter. The essence of the human soul is, for him, that force or potentiality which qualifies it for the highest development of the intellect, and is alone capable of grasping the divine. Yet it can acquire a part in the creative World-spirit only in the same degree as it unfolds this potentiality to share the divine intellect, whose seat is the highest sphere of the universe. By dint of this acquired intelligence it can live on as an independent intellect, in the image of God, and thus attain beatitude in the contemplation of Divinity.933
7. Naturally the view of Maimonides, that a certain measure of immortality is granted only to the wise,—though they must be morally perfect as well,—aroused great opposition. Hasdai Crescas proves its untenableness by asking, “Why shall the wise alone share in immortality? Furthermore, how can something that came into existence in the course of human life suddenly acquire eternal duration? Or how can there be any bliss in the knowledge of God where there is no personality, [pg 293] no self-conscious ego to enjoy it?” Therefore Crescas ascribed to the soul an indestructible spiritual essence whose perfection is attained, not by mere intellect or knowledge, but by love of God manifested in a religious and moral life, and which is thereby made to share in eternal bliss.934
8. All these various thinkers find the future life either expressed or suggested in the Scriptures as a truth based upon reason. This is especially the conception of Abraham ibn Daud, who, contrary to his Aristotelian successor Maimonides, sees in self-consciousness, by which the soul differentiates itself from the body as a personality, the proof that it cannot be subject to dissolution with the body.935
Besides the philosophic doctrine of the immortality of the soul, however, the traditional belief in the resurrection of the body demanded some consideration on the part of these philosophers. Saadia defends the latter with all his might, endeavoring to reconcile the two as best he can.936 All the rest leave us in doubt whether resurrection is to be understood literally or symbolically. Maimonides especially involves himself in difficulties, inasmuch as in his commentary on the Mishna he considers the resurrection of the dead an unalterable article of faith, whereas in his Code937 and in the Moreh he speaks only of immortality; and again before the end of his life he wrote, obviously in self-defense, a work which seems to favor bodily resurrection, yet without clarifying his conceptions at any time.938 The belief in resurrection had taken too deep a root in the Jewish consciousness and had been too firmly established through the liturgy of the Synagogue for any philosopher to touch it without injuring the very foundations of faith.
[pg 294]Moreover, beside external caution a certain inner need seems to have impelled toward the acceptance of resurrection. As soon as one thinks of the soul as existing or continuing to live in an incorporeal state, one is involuntarily led toward the belief in the soul's preëxistence or even in the possibility of metempsychosis. Thus it seemed more reasonable to believe in a new formation of the human body together with a new creation of the world. Therewith came the disposition to assign to the soul in the future world a body of finer substance, like that assumed by the mystic Nahmanides,939 in order to assure to the new humanity a wondrous duration of life like that of Elijah.
9. While the popular philosopher Albo rightly declares that the nature of the soul is as far beyond all human understanding as is the nature of God,940 the mystics sought all the more to penetrate its secrets. The Cabbalah also divides the soul into three different substances according to the three Biblical names, assigning their origins to the three different spheres of the universe, and reiterating the Platonic theory of the preexistence of the soul and its future transmigration. This division into three parts provided scope for all types of theories concerning the soul in its sensuous, its moral, and its intellectual nature. Fundamentally the Cabbalah considered the soul an emanation from the divine intellect with a luminous character just like the philosophers. But in the Platonic view of the ascending order of creation, which forms the basis of the Cabbalah, this mundane life is an abyss of moral degradation, so that the soul yearns toward the primal Source of light, finally to find freedom and bliss with God.941 Thus the later Cabbalah returned to the teachings of Philo, the Jewish Plato, for whom death was only the stripping off of the earthly frame in order to enter the pure and luminous world of God.
[pg 295]10. With Moses Mendelssohn, who in his Phædon tried to translate Plato's proof of immortality into modern terms, a new attitude toward the nature and destiny of the soul arose in Judaism among both the philosophers and the educated laity. Mendelssohn not only endeavored to prove the immortality of the soul through its indivisibility and incorporeality, as all the neo-Platonists and Jewish philosophers had done before him; he also attempted to show from the harmonious plan which pervades and controls all of God's creation, that the soul may enter a sphere of existence greater in extent and content than the little span of earthly life which it relinquishes. The progress of the soul toward its highest unfolding, unsatisfied in this life, demands a future growth in the direction of god-like perfection.942 At this point the philosopher enters the province of faith, and thus furnishes for all time the cardinal point of the belief in immortality. The divine spirit in man, which is evinced in the self-conscious, morally active personality, bears within itself the proof and promise of its future life. Moreover, this corresponds with the belief in God as One who rules the world for the eternal purposes and aims of perfection, who cannot deceive the hope of the human heart for a continued living and striving onward and forward, without thereby impairing His own perfection. For we all close our lives without having attained the goal of moral and spiritual perfection toward which we strive; and therefore our very nature demands a world where we may reach the higher degree of perfection for which we long. In this sense we may interpret the Psalmist's verse: “I shall be satisfied, when I awake, with (beholding) Thy likeness.”943 That is: our spirit, when no longer bound to the earth, shall behold the divine glory,—a vision which transcends our powers of thought.
11. In the light of modern investigation, body and soul are seen to be indissolubly bound together by a reciprocal relation [pg 296] which either benefits or impedes them both. Wherein the spiritual bond exists that renders both the physical organs with their muscular and nervous systems and the magnetic or electric currents which set them in motion subservient to the will of the intellect; what the mind actually is, into whose deepest recesses science is casting its search-light to illumine its processes,—these are problems which will probably remain ever incapable of solution by human knowledge, and will therefore always afford new food for the imagination. Yet it is just in periods like ours, when the belief in God is weakening, that the human spirit is especially solicitous to guard itself against the thought of the complete annihilation of its god-like self-conscious personality. This gives rise to the superstitious effort to spy out the soul by sensory means and to find ways of seeing or hearing the spirits of the dead,—a tendency which is as dangerous to the spiritual and moral welfare of humanity as was the ancient practice of necromancy.944 It is therefore all the more important to base the belief in immortality solely on the God-likeness of the human soul, which is the mirror of Divinity. Just as one postulate of faith holds that God, the Creator of the world, rules in accordance with a moral order, so another is the immortality of the human soul, which, amidst yearning and groping, beholds God. The question where, and how, this self-same ego is to continue, will be left for the power of the imagination to answer ever anew.
12. Certainly it is both comforting and convenient to imagine the dead who are laid to rest in the earth as being asleep and to await their reawakening. As the fructifying rain awakens to a new life the seeds within the soil, so that they rise from the depths arrayed in new raiment, so, when touched by the heavenly dew of life, will those who linger in the grave arise to a new existence, clad in new bodies. This is the belief which inspired the pious founders of the synagogal [pg 297] liturgy even before the period of the Maccabees, when they expressed their praise of God's power in that He would send the fertilizing rain upon the vegetation of the earth, and likewise in due time the revivifying dew upon the sleeping world of man. Both appeared to the sages of that age to be evidences of the same wonder-working power of God. Whoever, therefore, still sees God's greatness, as they did, revealed through miracles, that is, through interruptions of the natural order of life, may cling to the traditional belief in resurrection, so comforting in ancient times. On the other hand, he who recognizes the unchangeable will of an all-wise, all-ruling God in the immutable laws of nature must find it impossible to praise God according to the traditional formula as the “Reviver of the dead,” but will avail himself instead of the expression used in the Union Prayer Book after the pattern of Einhorn, “He who has implanted within us immortal life.”945