The opposition of Talmudism against the neo-mysticism
was thus on the whole just and salutary. This
opposition, no doubt, was bitter chiefly when mysticism
became revolutionary in practice, when it invaded the
established customs of legalistic orthodoxy. But
it was also felt that mysticism went dangerously near
to a denial of the absolute Unity of God. It
was more difficult to attack it on its theoretical
than on its practical side, however. The Jewish
mystic did sometimes adopt a most irritating policy
of deliberately altering customs as though for the
very pleasure of change. Now in most religious
controversies discipline counts for more than belief.
As Salimbene asserts of his own day: ’It
was far less dangerous to debate in the schools whether
God really existed, than to wear publicly and pertinaciously
a frock and cowl of any but the orthodox cut.’
But the Talmudists’ antagonism to mysticism
was not exclusively of this kind in the eighteenth
century. Mysticism is often mere delusion.
In the last resort man has no other guide than his
reason. It is his own reason that convinces him
of the limitations of his reason. But those limitations
are not to be overpassed by a visionary self-introspection,
unless this, too, is subjected to rational criticism.
Mysticism does its true part when it applies this criticism
also to the current forms, conventions, and institutions.
Conventions, forms, and institutions, after all, represent
the corporate wisdom, the accumulated experiences
of men throughout the ages. Mysticism is the
experience of one. Each does right to test the
corporate experience by his own experience. But
he must not elevate himself into a law even for himself.
That, in a sentence, would summarise the attitude of
Judaism towards mysticism. It is medicine, not
a food.
CHAPTER VII
ESCHATOLOGY
That the soul has a life of its own after death was
a firmly fixed idea in Judaism, though, except in
the works of philosophers and in the liberal theology
of modern Judaism, the grosser conception of a bodily
Resurrection was predominant over the purely spiritual
idea of Immortality. Curiously enough, Maimonides,
who formulated the belief in Resurrection as a dogma
of the Synagogue, himself held that the world to come
is altogether free from material factors. At a
much earlier period (in the third century) Rab had
said (Ber. 17 a): ’Not as this world is
the world to come. In the world to come there
is no eating or drinking, no sexual intercourse, no
barter, no envy, hatred, or contention. But the
righteous sit with their crowns on their heads, enjoying
the splendour of the Shechinah (the Divine Presence).’
Commenting on this in various places, Maimonides emphatically
asserts the spirituality of the future life.
In his Siraj he says, with reference to the
utterance of Rab just quoted: ’By the remark
of the Sages “with their crowns on their heads”
