Note 61 — Chapter XIII · THE GREAT TOL­ER­A­TION EX­ER­CISED A­MONG THE JEWS.

Those who have thought to discover the doctrine of hell and heaven, such as it is now believed by us, in the Mosaic books, have been strangely mistaken; their error is owing entirely to an idle dispute about words: the Vulgate having translated the Hebrew word Sheol, the pit, by the Latin word infernum, and this latter having been rendered in French by enfer, hell, they have taken occasion from this equivocal translation to establish a belief that the ancient Hebrews had a notion of the Hades and Tartarus of the Greeks, known to other nations before them by different appellations. We are told in the sixteenth chapter of Numbers, that the earth opened her mouth and swallowed up Korah, Dathan, and Abiron, and they and all that appertained to them went down alive into the pit, or grave; now certainly there is nothing said in this passage concerning the souls of these three persons, nor yet of the torments of hell, nor of eternal punishments. It is very extraordinary that the authors of the “Dictionnaire Encyclopédique” under the word hell (enfer) should say that the ancient Hebrews believed in its existence. If this be true, there would be an insurmountable contradiction in the Pentateuch; for why should Moses have spoken of the punishment after death in one single passage only, of all his works. On this occasion they quote the thirty-second chapter of Deuteronomy; but after a mutilated manner. The whole passage is as follows: “They have moved me to jealousy with that which is not God, they have provoked me to anger with their vanities, and I will move them to jealousy with those that are not a people, I will provoke them to anger with a foolish nation. For a fire is kindled in my anger, and shall burn unto the lowest hell; and shall consume the earth with her increase, and set on fire the foundations of the mountains. I will heap mischiefs upon them; I will spend mine arrows upon them. They shall be burnt with hunger, and devoured with burning heat and with bitter destruction; I will also send the teeth of beasts upon them, with the poison of serpents of the dust.” But have any or all of these expressions the least relation to the idea of hell-torments? On the contrary, it seems as if these words were purposely inserted to prove that our hell was unknown to the ancient Jews. The author of this article quotes also the following passage from the twenty-fourth chapter of Job: “The eye of the adulterer waiteth for the twilight, saying, no eye shall see me, and disguiseth his face. In the dark they dig through houses which they had marked for themselves in the daytime. They know not the light, for the morning is to them as the shadow of death; if one know them, they are in the terrors of the shadow of death. He is swift as the waters, their portion is cursed in the earth, he beholdeth not the way of the vineyards. Drought and heat consume the snow-waters, so doth the grave those who have sinned.” I quote these passages entire, otherwise it will be impossible to form a true idea of them. But let me ask if there is the least expression here from which one may conclude that Moses ever taught the Jews the clear and simple doctrine of eternal rewards and punishments? Not to mention that the Book of Job has nothing to do with the Mosaic law, there is great reason to believe that Job himself was not a Jew; this is the opinion of St. Jerome in his “Hebrew Questions upon Genesis.” The word Satan, which occurs in Job, was not known to the Jews, nor is it anywhere to be found in the five books of Moses. This name, as well as those of Gabriel and Raphael, were entirely unknown to the Jews before their captivity in Babylon. It would appear, then, that Job is very improperly quoted in this place. But the last chapter of Isaiah is likewise brought in, where it is said: “And it shall come to pass that from one new moon to another, and from one Sabbath to another, shall all flesh come to worship before me, saith the Lord. And they shall go forth and look upon the carcasses of the men that have transgressed against me; for their worm shall not die, neither shall their fire be quenched, and they shall be an abhorring unto all flesh.” Certainly, the casting out of these bodies to the view of all passengers, even to abhorring, and their being eaten by worms, can never mean that Moses taught the Jews the doctrine of the immortality of the soul; and the words “the fire shall not be quenched” can as little signify that the bodies so exposed to public view were to suffer eternal torments in hell. How can any one quote a passage in Isaiah to prove that the Jews in the time of Moses had adopted the doctrine of the immortality of the soul? According to the Hebrew computation, Isaiah prophesied about the year of the world 3380. Moses lived about the year 2500; therefore there was a distance of eight centuries between the one and the other. Now it is an insult to common sense, a downright mockery, thus to abuse the licence of quoting, by pretending to prove that a writer was of this or that opinion from a passage in another writer who lived eight hundred years after him, and who has not even made any mention of such opinion. It is beyond contradiction that the immortality of the soul, and rewards and punishments after death, are clearly and positively expressed and declared in the New Testament, and it is equally certain, that nothing concerning them is to be found in any one part of the five books of Moses. Notwithstanding that the Jews did afterwards embrace this doctrine, they were far from having a proper idea of the spirituality of the soul; they thought, in common with most other nations, that the soul was an uncompounded aerial light substance that retained the appearance of the body it had formerly animated; and hence came the term apparition, manes of the dead. Several fathers of the Church were of the same opinion. Tertullian, in his twenty-second chapter “De Anima,” expresses himself thus: “Definimus animam Dei flatu natam, immortalem, corporalem, effigiatam, substantia simplicem”; that is, “We define the soul a substance, formed by the breath of God; of an immortal, corporeal, figurative, and simple nature.” St. Irenæus, in the thirty-fourth chapter of his second book, says: “Incorporales sunt animæ quantum ad comparationem mortalium corporum.” “Souls are incorporeal in comparison of mortal bodies.” Adding, “Christ has taught us that the soul retains the image of the body”; “Caracterem corporum in quo adoptantur,” etc. Christ does not appear ever to have taught such a doctrine, and it is difficult to understand what St. Irenæus means in this passage. St. Hilarius, in his commentary on St. Matthew, is still more express and positive; he roundly asserts the soul to have a corporeal substance, “Corpoream naturæ suæ substantiam sortiuntur.” St. Ambrose on Abraham, book ii. chap. viii., will have it that there is nothing free from matter, unless it be the substance of the Blessed Trinity. These reverend fathers seem to have been very indifferent philosophers; but there is the greatest reason to believe that their divinity was in the main very sound, inasmuch as, notwithstanding their ignorance of the incomprehensible nature of the soul, they asserted it to be immortal, and endeavored to make it Christian. We know that the soul is of a spiritual nature, but we do not at all know what spirit is. We are very imperfectly acquainted with matter; nor is it possible for us to have a distinct idea of what is not matter. Hardly capable of understanding what effects our senses have, we cannot of ourselves know anything of what surpasses the bound of those senses. We carry some few words of our common language into the inexplorable depths of metaphysics and divinity, in order to acquire some slight idea of those things, which we could never conceive or express; and we use those words as props to support the steps of our feeble understandings in travelling through those unknown regions. Thus we make use of the word spirit, which is the same as breath or air, to express something which is not matter; and this word breath, air, spirit, inspiring us insensibly with an idea of an uncompounded and light substance, we still refine upon this as much as possible, in order to obtain a proper conception of pure and simple spirituality; but we shall never be able to obtain a distinct notion of this, we do not even know what we say, when we pronounce the word substance; in its literal signification, it signifies something beneath, and thereby shows us that it is incomprehensible; for what is meant by that which is beneath? The knowledge of the secrets of God is not to be acquired in this life. Plunged as we are in mortal obscurity, we fight against one another, and strike at random in the darkness with which we are surrounded, without precisely knowing for what we are fighting. If mankind would consider all this with attention, every reasonable person will be ready to conclude that we ought to have the greatest indulgence for the opinions of others, and by our conduct endeavor to merit the same from them. The above remarks are not at all foreign to the principal point in question, which is to know whether men are bound to tolerate one another; inasmuch as by proving that in all times those of different opinions have been alike mistaken, it appears to have been the duty of all mankind in every age to treat each other with kindness and forbearance.