Tags:
metempsychosis (soul transmigration) in
Græco-Jewish religious thought
St. John ix, 2 in context
(according to Alfred Bertholet, 1909)
As a pointer for anybody
interested in metempsychosis (the belief in soul transmigration) in the
Ancient World (see
a previous entry of mine on this subject) below is an excerpt from The
transmigration of souls (1909), the translation in English of Seelenwanderung
(1906), by the Swiss Old Testament scholar Alfred Bertholet (1868-1951). I
might quote lengthier excerpts from this book from 1st January
2022 onwards as 2022 is the year when the works of this scholar enter the
public domain.
The excerpt I am making available on this blog is taken from pages 88 to 94
of the aforementioned study of metempsychosis and explores in particular
[...] St. John ix, 2, the question of the young men, is also quoted : “
Master, who sinned, this man or his parents that he was born blind ? ”[...]
(p.86) against the religious background prevalent at the time of
Jesus.
Please note that this excerpt follows the typographical conventions used for
the original [for instance, I have kept the spaces before quotation marks
and colons – ‘:’] with the exception of the occasional word breaks – which I
have removed.
As concerns the passage in St. John ix, 2, it has been urged that the
supposition of the disciples, who considered that a man might be born blind
on account of his own sins, is only intelligible upon the assumption that
the person concerned had passed through a previous state of existence in
which he had committed the sins in question. This conclusion can hardly be
avoided, and we must therefore assume that the full force of these words and
their general implication were not realised by the disciples at the moment
when they put their question to Jesus, or by the writer who puts it in their
mouths. In any case, it may readily be conceded that the Judaism of that
age, notwithstanding its exclusiveness, had not entirely escaped the
overwhelming influence of Greek intellectualism, and was therefore by no
means entirely ignorant of the theory that souls existed before their
incarnation in bodies, though this would not of itself justify the
supposition that any universal belief in metempsychosis existed. For
instance, the so-called “ wisdom of Solomon ” represents King Solomon as
saying : “ For I was a witty child and had a good spirit ; yea, rather,
being good, I came into a body undefiled ” (Ch. viii, 19 f.). During the
early days of Christianity similar ideas may be found in Rabbinical
literature. The Rabbis, for instance, occasionally state that all human
souls which were to enter human bodies up to the time of the Messiah had
existed even before the Creation. In the infinite past they had remained in
a kind of store-house, in the seventh heaven, or in the garden of Eden, from
which they were brought forth to become incarnate in the human bodies which
they were to inhabit. When God requires a soul he gives an order to the
angel in charge of this locality, and says to him : “ Bring me such and such
a soul, called So-and-So, and of such and such an appearance. ” The angel
immediately goes forth and brings the soul before God. The soul then bows
and prostrates itself before the King of kings, but is unwilling to leave
the world in which it has hitherto lived for another. Then God says to it: “
The world into which I send thee shall be fairer for thee than that in which
thou hast lived hitherto.” Then the soul enters the body of a mother and
receives a promise from the angel that conducts it, that it shall enter
Paradise if it keeps God s commandments. The Rabbis certainly and constantly
insisted upon the fact that the soul enters the body in a state of purity,
but this assertion is in fundamental contradiction to the continual
reluctance of the soul before God to exchange the world in which it has
lived for another. If this theory concerning the objection of the soul in an
earlier state of existence to undergo a change be carried a little further,
we shall reach the idea expressed in St. John ix, 2, that actual sin can be
committed in a previous state of existence. Nor is it, perhaps, surprising
that no further instances can be adduced from contemporary Jewish
literature. The fact, however, remains, as may be seen at the first glance,
that the theory of a soul in an earlier state of existence is very far
removed from the theory of metempsychosis proper.
Equally impossible is it to
regard as inspired by this belief the familiar statements that John the
Baptist or Elias or Jeremiah had returned to earth in the person of Jesus
(Matt, xvi, 14). Such passages as Matthew xiv, 2, Luke ix, 7 f.,
demonstrate beyond cavil the fact that this opinion was merely the outcome
of that belief in a resurrection which all pious Jews held at the
beginning of the Christian era. This belief has been placed in a false
perspective by the Jewish historian Josephus, who represented it as
peculiar to the Pharisees, in a manner that might seem to show them as
accepting a migration of the soul : this, however, is due to his habit,
which almost amounts to mania, of representing the Jewish parties as
schools of philosophic thought. He personally, at least, declares his
belief that the souls of the righteous, after a sojourn in the holiest
part of heaven, may return in undefiled bodies after a certain lapse of
time (Jewish War III, viii, 5).
Traces of the Greek doctrine
of metempsychosis are also apparent in the works of Philo, a writer
representative of Greek Judaism, and an early contemporary of Jesus. He
considers that a fall from God is the only reason why the soul is bound to
this earthly life, i.e. to the body. The ideal of the soul is to aspire to
direct contemplation of the Deity : only the wise and virtuous can attain
this object during the earthly life, and success is not complete until
after death, when the soul returns to its original incorporeal state. He
who cannot avoid the sins of sense is compelled to enter another body
after death.
In its entirety, the belief
in metempsychosis proper was not adopted before the rise of the Jewish
philosophy of the so-called Cabbalists, a much later growth : its doctrine
of the “ rolling onward of the soul ” expresses this belief. “ Souls enter
the bodies of wild animals, birds, and worms, for ” – such is the text
quoted to support the assertion –“ Jahwe (Jehovah) is the God of the
spirits of all flesh ” (Num. xxvii, 16), and the man who has committed but
one sin shall be transformed into an animal, whatever his good deeds. He
who gives a Jew unclean flesh to eat, his soul shall enter a leaf, to be
tossed hither and thither by the wind ; for it is said : “ We all do fade
as a leaf, and our iniquities, like the wind, have taken us away ” (Isa.
Ixiv, 6). He who speaks evil, his soul shall enter a stone, like the soul
of Nabal ; for it is said : “ His heart died within him and he became as a
stone ” (I Sam. xxv, 37). Thus it is clear that in these cases a belief in
metempsychosis is extorted from extravagant interpretations of Biblical
texts. These pedantic hair-splitting methods of exegesis are found to
produce an even more brilliant result, in the supposed discovery that the
soul of Cain must have passed into the body of Jethro, and the soul of
Abel into the body of Moses, because Jethro gave Moses his daughter to
wife. A similar idea, that a bond of sympathy between two men pointed to
their relationship in a former life, was not alien even to such a writer
as Goethe, as we shall afterwards see.
Lausanne, 7th December 2020
