But if even the body holds such a high position as to make all its instincts and functions, if properly regulated, a service of God, and to destine it for a glorious future of eternal bliss and rejoicing in God, we can easily imagine what a high place the soul must occupy in the system of Nachmanides. To be sure it is a much higher one than that to which philosophy would fain admit her. A beautiful parable of the Persian poet Yellaladeen (quoted by the late Mr. Lowell) narrates that “One knocked at the beloved's door, and a voice asked from within, ‘Who is there?’ and he answered, ‘It is I.’ Then the voice said, ‘This house will not hold me and thee,’ and the door was not opened. Then went the lover into the desert and fasted and prayed in solitude, and after a year he returned and knocked again at the door, and again the voice asked ‘Who is there?’ and he said ‘It is thyself’; and the door [pg 117] was opened to him.” This is also the difference between the two schools—the mystical and the philosophical—with regard to the soul. With the rationalist the soul is indeed a superior abstract intelligence created by God, but, like all His creations, has an existence of its own, and is thus separated from God. With the mystic, however, the soul is God, or a direct emanation from God. “For he who breathes into another thing (Gen. ii. 7) gives unto it something of his own breath (or soul),” and as it is said in Job xxxii. 8, “And the soul of the Almighty giveth them understanding.” This emanation, or rather immanence—for Nachmanides insists in another place that the Hebrew term employed for it, Aziluth,[84] means a permanent dwelling with the thing emanating—which became manifest with the creation of man, must not be confounded with the moving soul (or the Nephesh Chayah),[85] which is common to man with all creatures.
It may be remarked here that Nachmanides endows all animals with a soul which is derived from the “Superior Powers,” and its presence is proved by certain marks of intelligence which they show. By this fact he tries to account for the law prohibiting cruelty to animals, “all souls belonging to God.” Their original disposition was, it would seem, according to Nachmanides, peaceful and harmless.
About them frisking played
All beasts of earth, since wild, and of all chase
In wood or wilderness, forest or den.
It was only after man had sinned that war entered into creation, but with the coming of the Messiah, when sin will disappear, all the living beings will regain their [pg 118] primæval gentleness, and be reinstituted in their first rights.
The special soul of man, however, or rather the “over-soul,” was pre-existent to the creation of the world, treasured up as a wave in the sea or fountain of souls—dwelling in the eternal light and holiness of God. There, in God, the soul abides in its ideal existence before it enters into its material life through the medium of man; though it must be noted that, according to Nachmanides' belief in the Transmigration of souls, it is not necessary to perceive in the soul of every new-born child, “a fresh message from heaven” coming directly from the fountain-head. Nachmanides finds this belief indicated in the commandment of levirate marriage, where the child born of the deceased brother's wife inherits not only the name of the brother of his actual father, but also his soul, and thus perpetuates his existence on earth. The fourth verse of Ecclesiastes ii. Nachmanides seems to interpret to mean that the very generation which passes away comes up again, by which he tries to explain the difficulty of God's visiting the iniquity of the fathers on their children; the latter being the very fathers who committed the sins. However, whatever trials and changes the soul may have to pass through during its bodily existence, its origin is in God and thither it will return in the end, “just as the waters rise always to the same high level from which their source sprang forth.”
It is for this man, with a body so superior, and a soul so sublime—more sublime than the angels—that the world was created. I emphasise the last word, for the belief in the creation of the world by God from nothing forms, according to Nachmanides, the first of the three fundamental [pg 119] dogmas of Judaism. The other two also refer to God's relation to the world and man. They are the belief in God's Providence and his Yediah.[86] Creation from nothing is for Nachmanides the keynote to his whole religion, since it is only by this fact, as he points out in many places, that God gains real dominion over nature. For, as he says, as soon as we admit the eternity of matter, we must (logically) deny God even “the power of enlarging the wing of a fly, or shortening the leg of an ant.” But the whole Torah is nothing if not a record of God's mastery in and over the world, and of His miraculous deeds. One of the first proclamations of Abraham to his generation was that God is the Lord (or Master) of the world (Gen. xviii. 33). The injunction given to Abraham, and repeated afterwards to the whole of Israel (Gen. xvii. 2, and Deut. xviii. 13), to be perfect with God, Nachmanides numbers as one of the 613 commandments, and explains it to mean that man must have a whole belief in God without blemish or reservation, and acknowledge Him possessed of power over nature and the world, man and beast, devil and angel, power being attributable to Him alone. Indeed, when the angel said to Jacob, “Why dost thou ask after my name” (Gen. xxxii. 29), he meant to indicate by his question the impotence of the heavenly host, so that there is no use in knowing their name, the power and might belonging only to God.
We may venture even a step further, and maintain that in Nachmanides' system there is hardly room left for such a thing as nature or “the order of the world.” There are only two categories of miracles by which the world is governed, or in which God's Providence is seen. The one is the category of the manifest miracles, as the ten [pg 120] plagues in Egypt, or the crossing of the Red Sea; the other is that of the hidden miracles, which we do not perceive as such, because of their frequency and continuity. “No man,” he declares, “can share in the Torah of our Teacher, Moses (that is, can be considered a follower of the Jewish religion), unless he believes that all our affairs and events, whether they concern the masses or the individual, are all miracles (worked by the direct will of God), attributing nothing to nature or to the order of the world.” Under this second order he classes all the promises the Torah makes to the righteous, and the punishments with which evil-doers are threatened. For, as he points out in many places, there is nothing in the nature of the commandments themselves that would make their fulfilment necessarily prolong the life of man, and cause the skies to pour down rain, or, on the other hand, would associate disobedience to them with famine and death. All these results can, therefore, only be accomplished in a supernatural way by the direct workings of God.
Thus miracles are raised to a place in the regular scheme of things, and the difficulty regarding the possibility of God's interferences with nature disappears by their very multiplication. But a still more important point is, that, by this unbroken chain of miracles, which unconditionally implies God's presence to perform them, Nachmanides arrives at a theory establishing a closer contact between the Deity and the world than that set forth by other thinkers. Thus, he insists that the term Shechinah, or Cabod[87] (Glory of God), must not be understood, with some Jewish philosophers, as something separate from God, or as glory created by God. “Were this the case,” he proceeds to say, “we could not possibly [pg 121] say, ‘Blessed be the glory of the Lord from his place,’ since every mark of worship to anything created involves the sin of idolatry.” Such terms as Shechinah, or Cabod, can therefore only mean the immediate divine presence. This proves, as may be noted in passing, how unphilosophical the idea of those writers is who maintain that the rigid monotheism of the Jews makes God so transcendental that He is banished from the world. As we see, it is just this assertion of His absolute Unity which not only suffers no substitute for God, but also removes every separation between Him and the world. Hence also Nachmanides insists that the prophecy even of the successors of Moses was a direct communion of God with the prophet, and not, as others maintained, furnished through the medium of an angel.