6. This sound view was disseminated by the rationalistic school in its contest with the Cabbalah, and has exerted a wholesome influence upon modern Judaism. Thus Satan is rejected by Jewish doctrine, while Luther and Calvin, the Reformers of the Christian Church, still believed in him. Milton's “Paradise Lost” placed him in the very foreground of Christian belief, and the leaders of the Protestant Churches, up to the present, accord him a prominent place in their scheme of salvation, as the opponent and counterpart of God. In his work on Christian dogmatics, David Friedrich Strauss observes acutely: “The whole (Christian) idea of the Messiah and his kingdom must necessarily have as its counterpart a kingdom of demons with a personal ruler at its head; without this it is no more possible than the north pole of the magnet would be without a south pole. If Christ has come to destroy the works of the Devil, there would be no need for him to come, unless there were a Devil. On the other hand, if the Devil is to be considered merely the personification of evil, then a Christ who would be only the personification of the ideal, but not a real personality, would suffice equally.”[587] At present Christian theologians and even philosophers have recourse to Platonic and Buddhist ideas, that evil is implanted in the world from which humanity must free itself, and they thus present Christianity as the religion of redemption par excellence.[588] Over against this, Judaism still maintains that there is no radical or primitive evil in the world. No power exists which is intrinsically hostile to God, and from which man must be redeemed. According to the Jewish conception, the goodness and glory of God fill both heaven and earth, while holiness penetrates all of life, bringing matter and flesh within the realm of the divine. Evil is but the contrast [pg 196] of good, as shade is but the contrast of light. Evil can be overcome by each individual, as he realizes his own solemn duty and the divine will. Its only existence is in the field of morality, where it is a test of man's freedom and power. Evil is within man, and against it he is to wage the battles of life, until his victory signalizes the triumph of the divine in his own nature.[589]
Chapter XXXII. God and the Intermediary Powers
1. In addition to the angels who carried out God's will in the universe, the Biblical and post-Biblical literature recognizes other divine powers which mediate between Him and the world of man. The more a seer or thinker became conscious of the spirituality and transcendency of God, the more he felt the gulf between the infinite Spirit and the world of the senses. In order to bridge this gap, the Deity was replaced by one of His manifestations which could appear and act in a world circumscribed by space and time.[590] As we found in prophecy the direct revelation of God giving way to a mediating angel, so either “the Glory” or “the Name” of JHVH takes the place of God himself. That is, instead of God's own being, His reflected radiance or the power invested in His name descends from on high. The rabbis kept the direct revelation of God for the hallowed past or the desired future, but at the same time they needed a suitable term for the presence of God; they therefore coined the word Shekinah—“the divine Condescension” or “Presence”—to be used instead of the Deity himself. Thus the verse of the Psalm:[591] “God standeth in the congregation of God,” is translated by the Targum, “The divine Presence (Shekinah) resteth upon [pg 198] the congregation of the godly.” Instead of the conclusion of the speech to Moses, “Let them make Me a sanctuary, that I may dwell among them,”[592] the Targum has, “And I shall let My Presence (Shekinah) dwell among them.” Thus in the view of the rabbis Shekinah represents the visible part of the divine majesty, which descends from heaven to earth, and on the radiance of which are fed the spiritual beings, both angels and the souls of the saints.[593] God himself was wrapped in light, whose brilliancy no living being, however lofty, could endure; but the Shekinah or reflection of the divine glory might be beheld by the elect either in their lifetime or in the hereafter. In this way the rabbis solved many contradictory passages of Scripture, some of which speak of God as invisible, while others describe man as beholding Him.[594]
2. Just as the references to God's appearing to man suggested luminous powers mediating the vision of God, so the passages which represent God as speaking suggest powers mediating the voice. Hence arose the conception of the divine Word, invested with divine powers both physical and spiritual. The first act of God in the Bible is that He spoke, and by this word the world came into being. The Word was thus conceived of as the first created being, an intermediary power between the Spirit of the world and the created world order. The word of God, important in the cosmic order, is still more so in the moral and spiritual worlds. The Word is at times a synonym of divine revelation to the men of the early generations or to Israel, the bearer of the Law. Hence the older Haggadah places beside the Shekinah the divine Word (Hebrew, Maamar; Aramaic, Memra; Greek, Logos) as the intermediary force of revelation.
Contact with the Platonic and Stoic philosophies led gradually to a new development which appears in Philo. The [pg 199] Word or Logos becomes “the first-created Son of God,” having a personality independent from God; in fact he is a kind of vice regent of God himself. From this it was but a short step toward considering him a partner and peer of the Almighty, as was done by the Church with its doctrine that the Word became flesh in Christ, the son of God.[595] In view of this the rabbinical schools gave up the idea of the personified Word, replacing it with the Torah or the Spirit of God. The older term was retained only in liturgical formulas, such as: “Who created the heavens by His Word,” or, “Who by His Word created the twilight and by Wisdom openeth the gates of heaven.”[596]
3. As has been shown above,[597] Wisdom is described in the Bible as the first of all created beings, the assistant and counselor of God in the work of creation. Then we see that Ben Sira identifies Wisdom with the Torah.[598] Thus the Torah, too, was raised to a cosmic power, the sum and substance of all wisdom. In fact, the Torah, like the Logos of Plato, was regarded as comprising the ideas or prototypes of all things as in a universal plan. The Torah is the divine pattern for the world. In such a connection Torah is far from meaning the Law, as Weber asserts.[599] It means rather the heavenly book of instruction which contains all the wisdom of the ages, and which God himself used as guide at the Creation. God is depicted as an architect with His plan drafted before He began the erection of the edifice,—a conception which avoids all danger of deifying the Logos.
4. Several other conceptions, however, do not belong at all to the intermediary powers, where Weber places them.[600] This applies to Metatron (identical with the Persian Mithras),[601] [pg 200] whom the mystic lore calls the charioteer of the heavenly throne-chariot, represented by the rabbis as the highest of the angels, leader of the heavenly hosts, and vice-regent of God. That no cosmic power was ascribed to him is proved by the very fact of his identification with Enoch, whom the pre-Talmudic Haggadah describes as taken up into heaven and changed into an angel of the highest rank, standing near God's throne.[602]
5. The only real mediator between God and man is the Spirit of God, which is mentioned in connection with both the creation and divine revelation. In the first chapter of Genesis the Spirit of God is described as hovering over the gloom of chaos like the mother bird over the egg, ready to hatch out the nascent world.[603] God breathed His spirit into the body of man, to make him also god-like.[604] The prophet likewise is inspired by the spirit of God to see visions and to hear the divine message.[605] Thus the spirit of God has two aspects; it is the cosmic principle which imbues primal matter with life; it is a link between the soul of man and God on high. The view of Ezekiel was but one step from this, to conceive the spirit as a personal being, and place him beside God as an angel.