And the slowness and incompleteness of the development throughout the Hebrew Old Testament is strikingly illustrated by the great paucity of texts which yield, without the application of undue pressure, any clear conviction or hope of a heightened, or even a sheer, maintenance of the soul’s this-life consciousness and force after death. Besides the passages just indicated, Dr. Charles can only find Psalms xlix and lxxiii, and Job xix, 25-27, all three, according to him, later than Ezekiel, who died in 571 B.C.[198] The textually uncertain and obscure Job-passage (xix, 25, 26) must be discounted, since it evidently demands interpretation according to the plain presupposition and point of the great poem as a whole.—And the same result is reached by the numerous, entirely unambiguous, passages which maintain the negative persuasion. In the hymn put into the mouth of the sick king Hezekiah, for about 713 B.C., (a composition which seems to be very late, perhaps only of the second century B.C.), we hear: “The grave cannot praise Thee … they that go down into the pit cannot hope for truth. The living, the living, he shall praise Thee, as I do this day.” And the Psalter contains numerous similar declarations. Thus vi, 5: “In death there is no remembrance of Thee: in the grave who shall give Thee thanks?” and cxv, 17: “The dead praise not the Lord, neither any that go down into silence; but we praise the Lord.” See also Psalms xxx, 19; lxxxviii, 11.
Indeed the name for the Departed is Rephaim, “the limp, the powerless ones.” Stade well says: “According to the ancient Israelitish conception the entire human being, body and soul, outlasts death, whilst losing all that makes life worth living. That which persists in Sheol for all eternity is the form of man, emptied of all content. Antique thought ignores as yet that there exists no such thing as a form without substance. The conception has as little in common with the conviction of the Immortality of the Soul, which found its chief support in Greek ideas, as with the expectation of the Resurrection, which grew out of the Jewish Messianic hope, or with the Christian anticipation of Eternal Life, which is also based upon religious motives.”[199]
Yet, with respect to this objection from the lateness of the doctrine, we must not forget that fully consistent Monotheism and Monogamy are also late, but not, on that account, less true or less precious; and indeed that, as a universal rule, the human mind has acquired at all adequate convictions as to most certain and precious truths but slowly and haltingly. This process is manifest even in Astronomy, Geology, Botany, Human Anatomy. It could not fail to be, not less but more the case in a matter like this which, if it concerns us most deeply, is yet both too close to us to be readily appreciated in its true proportions, and too little a matter of mathematical demonstration or of direct experience not to take much time to develop, and not to demand an ever-renewed acquisition and purification, being, as it is, the postulate and completion of man’s ethical and spiritual faiths, at their deepest and fullest.
(3) And with regard to the unsatisfactory character of some of the earliest manifestations of the belief, this point is brought home to us, with startling vividness, in the beginnings of the doctrine in ancient Greece. For Rhode’s very careful and competent examination of precisely this side of the whole question shows conclusively (even though I think, with Crusius, that he has overlooked certain rudiments of analogous but healthy experiences and beliefs in pre-Dionysiac Greece) how new and permanently effective a contribution to the full doctrine was made, for the Hellenic world and hence indirectly for all Western humanity, by the self-knowledge gained in that wildly orgiastic upheaval, those dervish-like dances and ecstatic fits during the Dionysian night-celebrations on the Thracian mountain-sides. Indeed Rhode traces how from these experiences, partly from the continuation of them, partly from the reaction against them, on the part of the intensely dualistic and ascetic teaching and training of the Orphic sect, there arose, and filtered through to Pythagoras, to Plato, and to the whole Neo-Platonist school, the clear conception and precise terminology concerning ecstatic, enthusiastic states, the divinity and eternity of the human soul, its punitive lapse into and imprisonment within the body, and its need of purification throughout the earthly life and of liberation through death from this its incurably accidental and impeding companion.—Thus we get here, concerning one of the chief sources of at least the formulation of our belief in Immortality, what looks a very nest of suspicious, repulsive circumstances:—psycho-physical phenomena, which, quite explicable to, and indeed explained by, us now as in nowise supernatural, could not fail to appear portentous to those men who first experienced them; unmoral or immoral attitudes and activities of mind and will; and demonstrable excesses of feeling and conception as regards both the static goodness, the downright divinity, eternity, and increateness of the soul, and the unmixed evil of the body with its entirely disconnected alongsideness to the soul. Does not all this spell a mass of wild hallucination, impurity, fanaticism, and superstition?
Yet here again it behoves us, if not to accept, yet also not to reject, in wholesale fashion and in haste. For the profoundly experienced Professor Pierre Janet shows[200] us, what is now assumed as an axiom, and as the ultimate justification of the present widespread interest in the study of Hysteria, that “we must admit for the moral world the great principle universally admitted for the physical world since Claude Bernard,—viz. that the laws of illness are, at bottom, the same as those of health, and that, in the former, there is but the exaggeration or the diminution of phenomena which existed already in the latter.”
And if thus our recent studies of morbid mentalities have been able to throw a flood of light upon the mechanism and character of the healthy mind, a mind more difficult to analyze precisely because of the harmonious interaction of its forces, there is nothing very surprising if man, in the past, learnt to know his own fundamental nature better in and through periods of abnormal excitation than in those of normal balance. And the resultant doctrines in the case in question only required, and demand again and again, a careful pruning and harmonizing to show forth an extraordinary volume of abiding truth. The insuppressible difference between mind and matter, and the distinction between the fully recollected soul (intuitive reason), and explicit reasoning; the immeasurable superiority of mind over matter, and the superiority of that full reason over this “thin” reasoning; the certainty, involved in all our inevitable mental categories and assumptions and in all our motives for action, of this mind and intuition being more like the cause of all things than are those other inferior realities and activities; the indestructibleness of the postulates and standards of objective and infinite Beauty, Truth, Goodness, of our consciousness of being intrinsically bound to them, and of our inmost humanity and its relative greatness being measurable by just this our consciousness of this our obligation, and hence by the keenness of our sense of failure, and by our striving after purification and the realization of our immanental possibilities: all this remains deeply fruitful and true.
And those crude early experiences and analyses certainly point to what, even now, are our most solid reasons for belief in Immortality: for if man’s mind and soul can thus keenly suffer from the sense of the contingency and mutability of all things directly observed by it without and within, it must itself be, at least in part or potentially, outside of this flux which it so vividly apprehends as not Permanence, not Rest, not true Life. Let us overlook, then, and forgive the first tumultuous, childishly rude and clumsy, mentally and emotionally hyper-aesthetic forms of apprehension of these great spiritual facts and laws, forms which are not, after all, more misleading than is the ordinary anaesthetic condition of our apprehending faculties towards these fundamental forces and testimonies of our lot and nature. Not the wholesale rejection, then, of even those crude Dionysian witnessings, still less of the already more clarified Orphic teaching, and least of all of Plato’s great utilizations and spiritualizations can be required of us, but only a reinterpretation of those first impressions and of mankind’s analogous experiences, and a sifting and testing of the latter by the light of all that has been deeply lived through, and seriously thought out, by spiritually awake humanity ever since.—And we should remember that the history of the doctrine among the Jews is, as has already been intimated, grandly free from any such suspicious occasions and concomitances.
2. Two Philosophical Difficulties.
Yet it is precisely this latter, social, body-and-soul-survival doctrine which brings the second group of objections, the philosophical difficulties, to clear articulation. For thus we are unavoidably driven to one or other of the equally difficult alternatives, of a bodiless life of the soul, and of a survival or resurrection of the body.
(1) Christianity, by its explicit teachings, and even more by its whole drift and interior affinities, requires the survival of all that is essential to the whole man, and conceives this whole as constituted, not by thought alone but also by feeling and will and the power of effectuation; so that the body, or some unpicturable equivalent to it, seems necessary to this physico-spiritual, ultimately organic conception of what man is and must continue to be, if he is to remain man at all.—And Psychology, on its part, is showing us, more and more, how astonishingly wide and deep is the dependence, at least for their actuation, of the various functions and expressions of man’s character and spirit upon his bodily frame. For not only is the reasoning faculty seen, ever since Aristotle, to depend, for its material and stimulation, upon the impressions of the senses, nor can we represent it to ourselves otherwise than as seated in the brain or in some such physical organism, but the interesting Lange-James observations and theory make it likely that also the emotions,—the feelings as distinct from sensations,—ever result, as a matter of fact, from certain foregoing, physico-neural impressions and modifications, which latter follow upon this or that perception of the mind, a perception which would otherwise, as is the case in certain neural lesions and anaesthesias, remain entirely dry and unemotional.[201]—And the sense of the Infinite, which we have had such reason to take as the very centre of religion, arises ever, within man’s life here below, in contrast to, and as a concomitant and supplementation of, his perception of the Finite and Contingent, and hence not without his senses being alive and active.