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 Code[937] 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.
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.