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HEAVEN AND HELL
IN COMPARATIVE RELIGION
WITH SPECIAL REFERENCE TO
DANTE'S DIVINE COMEDY
BY
DR. KAUFMANN KOHLER
President Emeritus, Hebrew Union College, Cincinnati
AUTHOR OF “JEWISH THEOLOGY," ETC.
New York
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
1923
All rights reserved

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
BL
535
. K119
COPYRIGHT, 1923,
BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
Set up and printed. Published March, 1923,

Press of
J. J. Little & Ives Company
New York, U. S. A.

w'sht
TO THE
HON. ALFRED M. COHEN
PRESIDENT OF THE BOARD OF GOVERNORS
OF THE HEBREW UNION COLLEGE
IN FRIENDSHIP
AND HIGH ESTEEM




Hnthropology
hahir
3-21-24
10100
PREFACE
a
Ours is an age of historical research. As the various
layers of rock in the bowels of the earth have become
records of geological epochs extending over untold mil-
lions of years in the history of our planet, so have the
civilizations of Egypt and Babylonia, with their adjoin-
ing lands, risen out of the ruins of the past, to revolu-
tionize the history of man, and afford us a new insight
into the process of his mental and social development
and growth all over the whole civilized globe. Nor can
the medieval mind be viewed any longer as merely the
result of the intermingling of new races and nationali-
ties with the older ones, under the dominion of a ruling
political and hierarchical power. It rather resembles
a many-branched tree, whose roots and tendrils stretch
out in the hidden soil into a distant spot, though, to our
view, its growth appears stunted and more or less fos-
silized. Nor should the grandest literary product of
the Middle Ages, Dante's “Divine Comedy,” be judged
solely from a literary point of view, as is done by most
writers, particularly at present, with reference to the
sexcentenary celebration of the great Italian poet, but
rather as the last link in the chain of ideas and views
which held sway over all the preceding ages.
In tracing its sources, we must not stop at Vergil and
Homer, but take cognizance of the fact that, alongside

vii
viii
PREFACE
of and behind these, there were, on the one hand, Plato,
Pythagoras, and the Orphic mysteries, and on the other
hand, the extensive Egyptian, Babylonian, Hindu, and
Persian literature which furnished them the themes for
their compositions and their concepts of cosmic life.
A glance at the “Book of the Dead,” that strange Egyp-
tian Bible with its striking pictorial illustration of the
hall of judgment of the dead, which dates back to the
beginning of the second pre-Christian millennium, shows
an affinity to Dante's “Inferno and Paradiso” which, in
itself, is a subject of wonder. Neither, in fact, will the
views and doctrines voiced in Dante's unique master-
piece be fully understood and appreciated, unless the
reader becomes more familiarized than he, as a rule,
is, with the entire apocalyptic literature of the Old and
the New Testaments, from which the medieval visions
of monks and priests have emanated, and which served
the poet as models, if not as the source of inspiration.
For, after all, Dante was not merely a poet of extraordi-
nary versatility in all fields of knowledge of the time;
he was eminently a theological writer, ranking in depth
of thought with his famous teacher, Thomas Aquinas,
and far eclipsing him in breadth of view and spiritual
force, and it is in this aspect that he should be judged
by modern writers.
These considerations have induced me to undertake
this work, intended to present to a larger circle of
readers and admirers of Dante an approach to the
“Divine Comedy” from this novel point of view, show-
ing, in a brief historical survey of the various lands
and ages of the past, the development of the concepts

PREFACE
ix
of Hell and Heaven, which, together with the Christian
Purgatory, form the central idea of the grand poem
which has captivated the souls and elicited the admira-
tion of the greatest minds of modern civilization.
I am well aware that many of my readers will differ
with me in matters of religion when I come to give an
estimate of Dante from our modern standpoint, but,
nevertheless, I trust that the nine chapters of my book-
which, by a strange coincidence, correspond with Dante's
mysterious number nine!—will be read by them with
interest, if not with profit. It is, at any rate, a contribu-
tion to the study of Comparative Religion.
DR. K. KOHLER.
New York, October 8th, 1922.



INTRODUCTION
The sexcentenary celebration of Dante's death by
the entire Western world of culture has revived, as was
expected, general interest everywhere in the great Italian
poet, who was not merely the creator of the national lit-
erature of Italy, but who actually ushered in the modern
era of literature, the epoch of the Renaissance, by using
the language of his countrymen, instead of the Latin, for
his titanic masterpiece. A wonderful combination of
sublime poetry and profound philosophy, of theology
and history, of ethics and mysticism, as this unique work
represents, it has appealed, especially since the last cen-
tury, to the literary men of all classes and countries
as the production of one of the world's greatest geniuses,
so that the Dante literature has grown to such an extent
as to fill a whole library.
Yet the fact remains that it is a historical, rather than
a living, interest that we take in the composer of the
“Divine Comedy,” because, unlike a Shakespeare, a
Calderon, or a Goethe, he belongs to a world of belief
and of thought we have altogether outlived. While in
beauty of diction and grandeur of conception he may
excel all these, ranking, indeed, with Homer, not to
mention the authors of the Mahabharata, the Rama-
yana and the Shah Namah, we find his religious and
philosophical system altogether remote from ours, how-
a
xi
xii
INTRODUCTION
ever much we admire his wide grasp of history, the
stern sense of justice with which he castigates vice and
crime in high places and among all classes of men of
his own time as well as of the past, and his glowing
zeal for patriotism, for human dignity and lofty ideal-
ism, nurtured by faith. We love to quote striking lines
from the “Divine Comedy,” but lack the patience to
read its hundred cantos. We look upon the majestic
structure of this great creation of medieval poetry with
the same wonder and awe that we do upon the Strassburg
minster and the domes of Milan and St. Peter's of
Rome, but we cannot help feeling that we are out of all
sympathy with the austere medieval views championed
by the poet with such earnestness and consistency, and
we are lost in the labyrinth of mythological, theological,
and allegorical figures presented by him. We only
feel the touch of the Promethean fire which lent that
unique and classical expression to the rather abstruse,
scholastic system of Thomas Aquinas, in which the
entire thought, belief, and hope of medieval Christen-
dom culminated, finding it couched in the fascinating
form of human striving and aspiration, and of an all-
overawing, impartial divine judgment, instead of cold
and repugnant dogma. Moreover, we seem to be led
by the poet into a wonderland, where fact and fiction
strangely intermingle, where an intense realism maps
out for us every region of earth and heaven, giving us,
with mathematical accuracy, the measures for the space
of the world below and above, in connection with the
whole known geography, and based upon the Ptolemaic
system; and, at the same time, a supreme idealism

INTRODUCTION
xiii
allegorizes the figures of history and of religious belief,
to make them types of sin or virtue, or symbols of man's
fall or rise, or of abysmal wrong or heavenly perfec-
tion and love. The whole cosmos is represented as
working out the divine plan of lifting humanity from
the depth of moral filth and misery to the highest purity
and bliss, in accordance with the decree of supreme
wisdom, justice, and mercy, as conceived by the trini-
tarian church. Accordingly, the entire universe is
mapped out in consonance with the medieval view, so
as to have Earth placed in the center, with Jerusalem
and Golgotha in its midst (after Ezekiel xxxviii, 12 and
V, 5), and beneath it Hell, with its nine circles, the
nethermost depths of which, wbere Satan, the fallen
Lucifer, is frozen to his breast, to correspond with Gol-
gotha. Alongside of it, Purgatory rises out of the
Ocean, forming, with its nine terraces, a steep mountain,
on the summit of which the terrestrial Paradise, the Gar-
den of Eden, is located, on a level with Jerusalem, and
above this the heavenly Paradise, with its nine starry
circles, shines forth in radiating glory, overtopped by
the Empyrean, the realm of divine light emanating from
the Trinity (after Revelation xxii, 1), and having the
shape of a snow-white rose, in gazing at which the beati-
fied souls enjoy the highest bliss which divine grace and
love alone impart.
Grand and majestic beyond expression as this world-
aspect is, the impression of the modern reader is marred
by the sad church doctrine of the eternity of Hell's tor-
tures, which is vocalized at the very beginning in the
inscription on the portal of the “Inferno” in the third

xiv
INTRODUCTION
Canto: “Eternal I endure. All hope abandon, ye who
enter here.” The poet himself voices the “sore grief
which assailed his heart” at the realization of the harsh
doctrine: “No salvation outside of the church,” when
he learns that, however blameless and meritorious the
life of the worthiest of the heathen has been, “it profits
not, since baptism was not theirs.” So Plato and Aris-
Ptotle, and his beloved Homer are consigned to the
Limbo, while it was 'merely Christ, through his descent
into Hell, who saved the Old Testament worthies, Adam,
Moses, and David, and so forth, from the same fate by
carrying them with Him to the celestial paradise. Only
above the vale of doom do the gladdening strains of
hope resound, as the terraces of Purgatory turn the pain
of punishment into pacific means of repentance, whereas
triumphant joy reigns throughout the celestial spheres.
At the same time, at the close of each of the three parts
of the poem, the word Stelle = “Stars," is written, as
if to remind us of the Latin dictum, Per Aspera ad Astra,
“Through hardships and arduous roads up to the stars,
in which the story of Hercules was summed up. The
grandest figure of Greek mythology, half man and half
god, Hercules had by arduous strife and struggle, by
heroic combats with fierce and ferocious creatures, to
make his ascent from Earth and Hades to the heights
of Olympus, where he was to be ushered into the com-
pany of the gods, welcomed by Hebe with the cup of
nectar which imparted to him the gift of immortality.
Such is the destiny, also, of the human soul, for which
the outlook should ever open to the stars above. Who
knows but that some such thought was in the mind of
-
Rai in

INTRODUCTION
XV
the poet, who loved to draw his material from Greek
mythology, as well as from Christian theology.
We must bear in mind that, before he conceived his
glorious dream of a world beyond, Dante lived in the
dreamland of romance. A troubadour of youthful
ardor, he had, in impassionate sonnets, sung the praise
of his adored Beatrice, whose charm and nobility of
demeanor so impressed him that he applied to her the
Homeric verse, "She seems to be born, not of mortal
men, but of God.” And when, as he writes at the close
of the “Vita Nuova,” “the Lord of justice called her to
be glorified under the banner of that blessed Queen, the
Virgin Mary, whom she held in the highest reverence,”
he saw her in his vision translated to the highest seat in
heaven, close to the mother of the Saviour in the Em-
pyrean. For “were not all the nine heavens at perfect
unity with each other at her birth?” So was her death
on the ninth day of the month in the ninetieth year of
the century, as were other incidents in her brief life,
proof of her mystic relation to the triad of the holy trin-
ity—the number nine. “No longer would he hence-
forth speak of the blessed one, until the time should
come when he would say of her what has not yet been
spoken by any one”—such was his great resolve to pre-
pare, by profound study, for the monumental work to
be given to the world, for which the celestial Beatrice
had become his sustaining comfort in sore trials, his
inspiration, and his guide along the nine heavens up to
the Empyrean. The strange mixture of mystic idealism
and earthly reality that characterizes the “Divine Com-
edy” permeated, in fact, his own life, as, in his deep

xvi
INTRODUCTION
yearning for the supreme bliss amidst all perplexity
and woe, she becomes his guiding spirit, to usher him
into that superhuman state where contemplation of the
divine mystery is made possible to the ecstatic soul. As
reason and philosophy failed to appease his mind, trou-
bled alike by political and personal misfortune, faith
and scholastic theology seemed to offer him the ladder
to the highest goal of perfection, toward which she
beckoned him, who reflected for him the rays of "the
Sun of divine Love, flowering forth in the Rose of divine
Beauty.”
The Allegorists and Mystics, whose disciple he de-
clared himself to be, furnished him with the idea, as
we shall see further on, of finding the innermost palace
of heaven inlaid with love,” as the words of the “Song
of Songs,” iii, 10, were interpreted by the Jewish sages
of old. Here we have the leitmotif of the “Divine Com-
edy,” which significantly closes with the words, bor-
rowed alike from Plato's and Aristotle's philosophy and
from scholastic theology: “Love, which moves the sun
in heaven and all the stars.”
But, being also a classical scholar who, in common
with all medieval Christendom, looked upon Vergil as
the heathen sage and seer endowed with supernatural
gifts, Dante chose him, the poet of the “Æneid,” as
model for his composition of the “Inferno and Purga-
torio.” In the sixth book of the “Æneid,” Vergil de-
picted, in skillful and drastic form, the daring journey
of his hero, Æneas, through the horrors of Hades, and
then onward to the bright fields of Elysium, under the
guidance of the Cumæn Sibyl, in search of his father

INTRODUCTION
xvii
а
Anchises, whom he at last finds in the realms of bliss be-
yond the Acherusian lake, and the lugubrious river Styx,
over which Charon, the boatman of the nether world,
had ferried them. Here the Roman poet presents a far
nobler concept of the land of shades than does Book XI
of the “Odyssey,” which served him as model, inasmuch
as in the “Æneid” a real retribution of men's deeds in
life takes place, the Cretan god-king Minos, who sits in
judgment over all souls, assigning to each its destiny,
according to its merit or demerit, and meting out punish-
ments of various degrees, according to the crimes com-
mitted, whereas the blameless heroes are ushered to the
isles of the blessed, there to spend a life of ease and
joy. The Odyssean Hades, on the other hand, presents
only the well-known three great offenders of the gods,
Tityus, Tantalus, and Sisyphus, with their eternal tor-
tures, as a warning to mortal man, and portrays Hercules
as dwelling in the company of the gods, while his shade
is in Hades; the rest is gloomy and, except for the figure
of the seer Tiresias, primitive and uncanny. Only one
feature Vergil took over from the “Odyssey," and that
is the tragic fate of the unburied, who have to suffer, for
a thousand years, untold woe, roaming about, unless
merciful human hands on earth offer their body a rest-
ing place in the tomb with atoning funeral rites. Dante,
the Christian poet, assigns a similar fate to the unbap-
tized, who have to suffer for no sin of their own, a view
which baffles him, and which he finally accepts as faith
with surrender of reason. Aside, however, from the
many mythological figures of persons and monsters,
rivers and localities, taken over for his “Inferno and


xviii
INTRODUCTION
Purgatorio,” Dante's master mind has made his poem
a veritable Sittenspiegel, a truthful mirror of the moral
conduct of men throughout history, in holding up the
memorable events and personages of the various lands
and ages, and particularly of his own land and time, as
examples of vice and virtue, for relentless castigation or
fitting approbation, like the books before the throne of
God, recording, according to the Jewish view, the deeds
of mortals, good or bad, as if written down by their
own hands.
But what lends the “Divine Comedy” its chief value
among the world's literature is the fact that it was not
merely, as Carlyle said, "the voice of ten centuries,”
but the crowning work of millennia voicing in different
languages their views of Hell and Heaven, the con-
summation of the efforts of the ages to espy the mysteries
of the hereafter. These visions had become so popular
that there was scarcely any country in Western Europe
during the Middle Ages whose monasteries did not pro-
duce some saint who told, either orally or in writing, his
wondrous revelations of what he beheld of the nether
or the upper world in his ecstatic transports. While
Ireland, England, and France especially abounded in
such works, Italy, too, had its visionaries among its
monks shortly before Dante's time, in Alberico, the
monk of Monte Cassino; and the interest of the populace
in these miraculous tales was such that we are told by
the historians, Villari and Sismondi, of the fearful dis-
aster which followed a horrible representation of Hell
as shown at Florence in 1304, when, amidst the glare
of flames and the shrieks of men disguised as devils,


INTRODUCTION
xix
the scaffolding of the bridge on the Arno broke down,
and numerous spectators were burned or drowned.
It has been said of Goethe's “Faust” that he gave to
the Faust legend, which was deeply rooted in the popu- .
lar mind of medieval Europe, its classic form. In a
much higher degree may this be said of Dante's monu-
mental work, the subject of which had become a matter
of popular interest everywhere. For this very reason,
the great Italian poet wisely chose the language of the
people for his great composition, instead of Latin, the
language of the Church, and he succeeded, beyond all
expectation, in making it the vehicle of his high ethical
and religious views. But these medieval notions can
be traced to the most distant times and lands of antiquity,
and it is certainly of interest, in connection with Dante's
trilogy, to follow up the process of development of this
large subject, through the various sources, from a wider
range of view than was, for instance, undertaken by
Thomas Wright in his instructive book, “St. Patrick's
Purgatory,” or by W. R. Alger's voluminous and critical
“History of the Doctrine of a Future Life.” To present,
then, an extensive survey of those ideas which form the
framework of Dante's immortal poem, and thereby cast
some new light on its leading thought, is the object of
this study.
Before doing so, it seems quite appropriate to devote
a chapter to Dante's attitude toward the Old Testament,
and occasionally cast some new light on certain less un-
derstood points. As to the New Testament, it is to a
large extent based upon apocalyptic and rabbinic litera-
ture, which will be discussed in a later chapter.
a


CONTENTS
PREFACE
PAGE
vii
INTRODUCTION
xi
1
CHAPTER
XI DANTE AND THE OLD TESTAMENT .
II HELL AND HEAVEN IN BABYLONIAN AND EGYPTIAN
LITERATURE
III HELL AND HEAVEN IN HINDU AND PERSIAN LITERA-
10
TURE
25
40
59
81
IV HADES AND ELYSIUM IN GREEK AND ROMAN LIT-
ERATURE
V GEHENNA AND PARADISE IN THE APOCALYPTIC
LITERATURE OF THE OLD TESTAMENT
VI GEHENNA AND PARADISE IN THE APOCALYPTIC
LITERATURE OF THE NEW TESTAMENT
VII GEHENNA AND PARADISE IN RABBINIC AND Mo-
HAMMEDAN LITERATURE
XVIII HELL, HEAVEN, AND PURGATORY IN MEDIEVAL
LITERATURE
X IX THE DIVINE COMEDY IN THE Light OF MODERN
THOUGHT
112
.
134

149
.


HEAVEN AND HELL
IN COMPARATIVE RELIGION



HEAVEN AND HELL
IN COMPARATIVE RELIGION
CHAPTER I
DANTE AND THE OLD TESTAMENT
1
To begin with the scriptural authority for Dante's
faith and ethics, it is noteworthy that he repeatedly
emphasizes the equality of the Old and New Testaments
as the basis. So, when he takes both to have been the
outflow of the spirit of God, and, in his creed, declares
the truth to have come to him through Moses, the
Prophets, and Psalms, as well as through the Gospels
and the Apostolic writings; or when, in expounding the
so-called three theological virtues, Faith, Hope, and
Charity, before Peter, James, and John, at the heavenly
court, he first points to both Testaments in general, and
then to the Psalmist and Isaiah, as well as to God's
Revelation to Moses, before referring to the Epistle of
James, the Revelation, and the Gospel of John. Again,
in the vision of the mystic chariot of the Church drawn
by Christ, the God-Man, in the shape of a Gryphon, half
eagle and half lion, twenty-four elders representing the
twenty-four books of the Old Testament march in front,
while the four Evangelists, in the shape of Ezekiel's four
* Par. xxiv, 91; 96; 133-137.
Purg. xxiv, 88-95; xxvi, 38-42.
2
а


1

2.
HEAVEN AND HELL IN COMPARATIVE RELIGION
holy beasts, with six instead of four wings (after Reve-
lation), and the other New Testament writers, follow.3
Familiar as he was with the fourfold methods of in-
terpretation of the Hebrew Scriptures, even as was his
master, Thomas Aquinas,4 he was especially fond of
allegorizing. Thus, right in the opening canto, the three
beasts that come upon him, the lion, the wolf, and the
panther, are taken from Jeremiah v, 6, and are symbols
of the three destructive vices: False Pride, Avarice, and
Lust; and, when he reaches Purgatory, “the realm of
freedom,” he hears Psalm cxiv, “When Israel came
forth from Egypt,” chanted by the spirits after the same
allegorical method, as expressly stated by him in the
“Convito.”
In the midst of the circle of kings, “chief among the
greatest,” David is seen, “the singer of the Holy Spirits’
song,” and his hymns of praise and strains of supplica-
tion and repentance are echoed forth throughout the
poem. Most significantly is King Solomon placed
among the great masters of theological lore as “the sixth
light”
“Goodliest of all and by such love inspired
That all your world craves tidings of his fate.
Within there is the lofty light endowed
With wisdom so profound, if truth be truth,
That with a ken of such amplitude
No second hath arisen." 6
* Purg. xxix, 79-145. Comp. Ezek. I, 4-6 and Rev. iv, 4.
* Purg. ii, 44, Comp. Convito Ep. x, 7. Thomas Aquinas' “Summa
Theologica," on the Multiplicity of the Meanings of Scripture and
the Rabbinic Fourfold Meanings called Pa R De 8. See F. W.
Farrar, “History of Interpretation,” p. 95; 244 f; 269.
• Par. x, 105. As to King Solomon's possible doom: Comp. Sanhe-
drin 1046, Yer. Sanh. x, 296.
5 Par. xx, 33 f.
DANTE AND THE OLD TESTAMENT
3
Moreover, he voices, like one of the holy angels, the
deepest mystery of love's joy in Paradise.? The eminent
place here assigned to him is mainly due to the “Song of
Songs,” taken by the Synagogue to be the allegorical
representation of the mystic relation of God, "the King
of Peace,” to the Congregation of Israel, the Sulamit
("peace-lover”) among the nations; and, likewise, by the
Church, as expressive of the mystic union of Christ and
the Church. On behalf of the Synagogue, Akiba, the
great Jewish master of the Hadrianic time, said, “The
whole world was scarcely worthy of the day when the
“Song of Songs' was given to Israel, which among all
the holy Writings is the Holy of Holies”; 8 while Paul,
in the Epistle to the Ephesians v, 32, obviously follow-
,
ing the traditional allegorical interpretations of the
Jewish masters, speaks of the great mystery” of the
union of Christ and the Church implied in the nuptial
covenant. And this view has been adopted by the
Fathers and Saints of the Church to that extent that
there is a striking similarity found between the Midra-
shic commentary to the “Canticles” and the interpreta-
tion given it by Bernard of Clairvaux of the twelfth
century, Dante's most adored saint.—Thus the Mosaic
Law concerning the unclean beasts, Leviticus xi, 4, is
used allegorically in Purgatory xvi, 103 (Compare Let-
ter of Aristeas, 163f), and the story of Rebecca's twins
(Gen. xxv, 22), in Paradiso xxxii, 60, after Paul's
Epistle to the Romans ix, 10-12.
Leah and Rachel have become standing figures of

Par. xiv, 34.
* Yadayim iii, 4.


4
HEAVEN AND HELL IN COMPARATIVE RELIGION
9
active and contemplative life since Richard, the learned
monk of St. Victor, and Dante's chivalry accords to
“the Hebrew dames,” from Eve to Judith, the foremost
place in the Empyrean.10 Regarding Adam's brief
stay in the Garden of Eden 11 the Church Fathers share
the opinion of the Rabbis that it lasted only a few hours,
the day of his creation having also been that of his ex-
pulsion on account of his transgression.
Nimrod is placed among the high-towering giants, the
Titans of Greek mythology who defied the rule of the
Olympian god, Zeus, and were cast into Tartaros. These
were identified by the Hellenistic writers, whom Jose-
phus in his history followed, with the builders of the
Tower of Babel, who provoked the wrath of God, after
which ensued the confusion of their language. Accord-
ing to this legend, Nimrod was the leader and evil coun-
selor. This is most drastically described in our poem,
especially when 'some incomprehensible speech is put
into his mouth, which puzzled the commentators.
The most dramatic figure in the whole poem, far
superior even to Milton's Satan, is Lucifer.13 It is
derived from Isaiah xiv, 12, which according to the
authorized version reads: "How art thou fallen from
heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning!” The name,
Purg. xxvii, 101-105.
10 Par. xxxii, 4-15.
11 Par. xxvi, 136-141. This strange view is based upon Psalm xlix,
24, which verse was taken to mean: “Adam's abode not in honor over
night.” Aboth d. R. Nathan Li; Sanh. 384.- What Dante says in
Purg. xxvi, 133-136, concerning God's Name is certainly incorrect.
Dante was no Hebrew scholar, as is shown also in Par. vii, 3.
12 Inf. xxxi, 30-74. Compare Josephus Antiqu. I, 4, 2-3 and Sibyl-
lines I, 309-323, continued in III, 97 f. See also Geffken "Oracula
Sibyllina" and the notes.
18 Inf. xxxiv, 17-54; 81-121.
9
DANTE AND THE OLD TESTAMENT
5
en
ros,
Lucifer, is taken from the Latin version, the Vulgate,
which follows the Greek translation, the lxx: Phospho-
In comparing the fall of Nebuchadnezzar with
that of the morning star, the post-Exilic seer had evi-
dently before him a Babylonian myth, telling how this
most brilliant of the stars plotted, in presumptuous
pride, to rise above all the stellar deities and take his
seat as the highest on the Mount of Assembly of the
gods in the uttermost parts of the North, but was cast
down to the lowest pit of the nether world. This astral
myth had its counterpart in the Greek myth of Phos-
phoros, the son of Eos (the Dawn), and the twofold char-
acter of the star, as day and evening star, probably
gave rise to the strange myth. But the apocalyptic
writers transformed the rebellious star god into a rebel-
lious angel, and so he became either the dragon-shaped
Satan or the real Seducer of Adam and Eve who is cast
down from heaven. In the rabbinic “Haggada,” he ap-
pears under the name of Samael, described as the fore-
most in rank, size, and splendor among the angels, before
pride and envy caused him to plot evil against man in
defiance of God, whereupon he is cast down from heaven
as the archfiend. In the Gospels, Satan's lightninglike
fall from heaven is spoken of as having been seen or
announced by Jesus, and this story is commented on by
Origen, the leading Church Father, as having been fore-
told by Isaiah's words concerning Lucifer. Henceforth,
Lucifer has become a by-word for Satan in the Church
and in popular literature. Thus Dante depicts him as
"the creature eminent in beauty once,” but, having been
cast down into the nethermost part of the Inferno with
9



6
HEAVEN AND HELL IN COMPARATIVE RELIGION
his head downward, he offers the most hideous sight
“with his three faces and six eyes looking upon
the three continents of the earth, and with his bat-like
wings flapping in the air to issue forth winds which cause
the river Cocytus to freeze.” Frozen up to his breast
in ice, his colossal figure extending over the entire
vertical line of the Inferno, he presents an awful pic-
ture of the demoniacal power of evil in its impotence
against God.14
Aside, however, from all these incidental references
to the Old Testament books and characters, it is its
fundamental idea, the divine righteousness ruling all
life, which permeates the “Divine Comedy.” “The
great, mighty, and awful God who respecteth not persons
nor bribe," "the foundations of whose throne are
”
righteousness and justice,” sits in judgment over the
sinners of the Inferno, to mete out their punishment in
accordance with their evil doings, nor does He admit
any to the realm of bliss, unless he has cleansed himself
from the least impurity of action or thought by sincere
repentance, while the soul ascends the steep mountain
of Purgatory (after Psalm xxiv, 3 f, “Who shall ascend
into the mountain of the Lord ? He that hath clean
hands and a pure heart”), wherefore the constant repe-
tition of the words "the eternal," "the all-searching jus-
tice, the minister of the most mighty Lord,” occurs
.
14 See my article “Lucifer” in the Jewish Encyclopedia; Isaiah xiv,
12-15; Revelation ix, 1, and xii, 7-10; Pirké d., R. Eliezer, Ch. xiii,
xiv, and xxvii transl. by G. Friedlander, and see his instructive notes;
Koran Sure vii, 11, and comp. Louis Ginsberg in the Frankel-Graetz
Monatschrift, 1869, p. 150 f.; Luke xi, 8, and John xii, 31; Origen,
“De Principiis” v. 5; Eusebius, “Demonstratio Evangelica” iv, 9.

DANTE AND THE OLD TESTAMENT
7
throughout the poem.15 Free from partiality and preju-
dice, the poet weighs men and nations in the scale of
unerring justice, not even sparing himself when review-
ing his life in the light of his conscience voiced by
Beatrice. 16 “The power, not ourselves, that maketh for
righteousness," as Matthew Arnold so well sums up the
Old Testament teaching, constitutes the principle of
Dante's ethics, and he, therefore, insists so positively
on man's free will, without which there can be no moral.
ity or responsibility.17 Indeed, he is so fully imbued
with the idea of the everlasting, living Justice” as to
be perplexed by the doctrine of predestination and the
exclusive salvation of the Christian believer, and he
only submits resignedly to it, surrendering his reason
to the dictates of his faith.18 Of course, the Hebrew
prophets and lawgivers were concerned only with the
establishment of justice among men and nations on earth,
and they rather avoided dwelling on the state of the soul
after death, as this led the people to necromancy and
similar superstitious practices, which could only estrange
them from the true worship of God. The problem of
adjusting the relation of destiny and merit in the indi-
vidual, which vexed Jeremiah, Job, and the Psalmist,19
remained unsolved, until the belief in the world-to-come
was brought home to the Jew through contact with new
currents of thought, such as found expression in Daniel,
15 Inf. iii, 4; vii, 19; xi, 90; xxiv, 119; xxix, 55; Purg. xix, 115;
xi, 37: “Justice and Mercy,” xix, 75: "Justice and Hope,” ii, 120;
xxi, 6; xxi, 65; xxii, 4, after Matt. v, 6.
10 Purg. xxx, 70—xxxi, 66.
17 Purg. xviii, 49-73.
18 Purg. xix, 27; 54-80.
18 Jer. xii, 1; Psalm lxxiii, 3-15, and the whole of Job.


8
HEAVEN AND HELL IN COMPARATIVE RELIGION
-
and in a late passage in Isaiah.20 Up to that time satis-
faction was found in the simple, naïve assumption:
“Behold, the righteous shall be requited in the earth,
how much more the wicked and the sinner.” 21
Sheol, the Hebrew nether world, remained, accord-
ingly, like the Greek Hades, the dreary realm of the
shades, the gathering place of the departed, devoid of
light and life, without any moral relation to earthly life,
“the Land of Silence (Dumah),” from which there is no
coming up again (= Belial), and where only "the king
of terrors reigns. Only gradually the kingdom of
Yahweh was extended to Sheol.23 It was under Persian
influence that it became the realm of punishment for the
soul, especially after it had been identified with Ge-
henna, “the valley of Hinnom," and Tofeth, the place of
the Moloch fires. Also such passages as speak of “the
devouring fire and the everlasting burnings” awaiting
the sinners, or of “the worm which dies not, and the
fire which is not quenched” 24 were then referred to
after-life. Neither was the heaven, in which the stars
move along the paths assigned to them, and above which
God in His majesty is enthroned, surrounded by the
various classes of angelic beings forming His court,
viewed, în biblical time, as a realm of reward for the
righteous, though Enoch and Elijah are taken up there.
Nor was the Garden of Eden thought of as an abode of
“delight” for the righteous after death, until apocalyptic
20 Dan. xii, 2-3; Isai. xxvi, 19.
a Prov. xi, 31.
22 Job x, 21 f; xviii, 14; xxvi, 5; Ps. xviii, 5; cxv, 17; Isai. xxxviii, 9.
23 Ps. cxxxix, 8, comp. Jewish Encyclopedia, art. "Belial;" Job
xviii, 14.
24 Jer. xix, 6; Isai. xxxiii, 14, 1xvi, 24; see J. E. art. "Gehenna.”
DANTE AND THE OLD TESTAMENT
9
writers accepted the idea from Parseeism, whence the
very name of Paradise emanated.
The development of these views, owing to the different
historic influences, will be the subject of the following
chapters.



CHAPTER II
HELL AND HEAVEN IN BABYLONIAN AND EGYPTIAN
LITERATURE
A. Babylonia
No one can read the “Divine Comedy” but will be
struck by the wonderful astronomical knowledge which
enabled its author to mark the position of the various
stars and constellations in the heavens above, so as to
make his visionary journey up to, and along, the Purga-
tory terraces so real. For this, as well as for his entire
view of the cosmos, he was probably, without being
aware of it, indebted to ancient Babylonia, the mother-
land of our civilization which gave us our science of
the stars and our divisions of time and space, and also,
in the main, fixed the cosmic system which held sway
over the centuries down to the time of Copernicus.
With so many brilliant minds of the Middle Ages, in-
cluding even Melanchthon and Wallenstein, Dante
shared the belief in the influence of the stars upon human
life, which was likewise the heritage of Babylonia, where
astrology was the twin-sister of astronomy, although the
astrologers, in common with the soothsayers, are as-
signed by him to the torments of the Inferno. Again,
1 Inf. xx.
10
BABYLONIAN AND EGYPTIAN LITERATURE
11
as we follow the poet in his soaring up from one celestial
circle to the other, each of which he finds peopled with
souls of the blessed, we see the working out of the
Aristotelian lore, as adopted by all medieval thinkers,
which leads us back to the seven planetary spheres of
the Babylonian star worshipers, who divided the upper
world into seven regions, one on top of the other, as
they divided, by way of symmetry, also the nether world
into seven apartments, one below the other.
But, what is of peculiar interest to us here is the
remarkable fact, brought to light by the decipherment of
the cuneiform tablets, that Dante and his prototypes,
Vergil and Homer, had, thousands of years before, a
predecessor in the composer of the grand, national epic
of the hero Gilgames, the king and builder of the
ancient city of Erech, who, after his many bold deeds,
ventured out on a daring voyage across the Arabian
desert, the wide Western ocean, and finally, across the
dark "waters of death” in search of Parnapishtim, the
very wise (Chasisadra = Xisuthros), the Babylonian
Noah, enjoying a beatified life on a paradiselike island
at the confluence of the rivers Euphrates and Tigris on
the shore of the Persian gulf. In twelve chapters, cor-
responding to the twelve months of the year, his heroic
deeds, partly resembling those of Hercules, are told.
We need not dwell on the half historical, half mytho-
logical tales presented in the former fragmentary part
of the epic. Our interest lies in the latter half, describ-
ing his march along the difficult road never trod by
mortal man before,” first through a wilderness beset by
lions, then through the mountains of Mashu, “whose
-



12 HEAVEN AND HELL IN COMPARATIVE RELIGION
-
summit touches the dome of heaven, and whose breast
reaches down to Aralu (Hades), the entrance to which
is guarded by scorpionlike monsters. Dense dark-
ness envelops the wanderer, until he comes to a won-
drous park of the gods, where, as in Ezekiel's Eden
(xxviii, 13), precious stones hang down from the trees
like clusters of grapes. On reaching the sea which en-
circles the earth,” he encounters the goddess Siduri of
Sabu (= Sheba), enthroned in her palace on the shore.
She directs him to find the boatman of Parnapis and
to be ferried by him over the dangerous sea and the
waters of death, where the Babylonian Charon acts as
boatman. At last he comes within sight of his ancestor,
the hero of the flood, whose tale is given in almost the
same language as the biblical account. But he fails
to attain the real object of his great venture, for he
learns that the coveted boon of immortality is denied to
Neither gods nor men can help him to escape
the inexorable law of mortality. He is cured of the
dreadful disease inflicted on him by the angry goddess,
Ishtar, as he bathes in the miraculous “fountain of puri-
fication” at the advice of Parnapishtim. Moreover,
owing to the help of the latter's wife, he becomes pos-
sessor of the magic plant of life's rejuvenation that
grows near by, but fate decrees that a demon, in the
shape of a serpent, snatches it away, and he has to
return home sorely disappointed. Still he craves to
know what the lot of the dead is, and with the help of
Nergal,” the god of the dead, he conjures up the spirit
of his departed friend, Eabani. From him he learns
man.
II Kings xxiii.
BABYLONIAN AND EGYPTIAN LITERATURE
13
that "heroes slain in battle find rest on their couches
below, when provided with water and food, after having
been honored by proper funeral rites, whereas he whose
body lies forsaken in the field, and whose ghost has
none to care for him, is doomed to restlessness and
consumed by ever-gnawing hunger.” We thus meet
here with the same view concerning the misery
of the unburied as is experienced by the unfor-
tunate in Hades, according to the “Odyssey” and the
"Æneid.”
The dreary character of the nether world and the
cheerless outlook upon the hereafter, reflected also in
the ancient Hebrew literature, as we have seen above,
find expression, especially, in the descent of Ishtar into
Hades, made familiar to the laic world of to-day by the
work of the French composer, Vincent d'Indy, and
others. Obviously, an original nature myth, like that
of Demeter and Persephone, if not also of Orpheus and
Eurydice, depicting the vanishing of fertility on earth
at the turn of the summer season, the poem describes
Ishtar's going down to the nether world, "the land
whence there is no return.” At each of the seven gates
she is, at the command of the fierce goddess residing
in the interior, stripped of a part of her ornaments
and clothing, until she appears naked before the relent-
less queen of Hades, to be imprisoned there; whereupon
all productivity among beasts and men ceases, and the
gods above lament her disappearance. Only at the
interference of the powerful god, Ea, is she released;
and after she has been sprinkled with the "water of
life,” she is led out again through the seven gates, at


14 HEAVEN AND HELL IN COMPARATIVE RELIGION
each of which the one or the other part of her garments
is restored, as she goes up. In another myth the num-
ber of gates is twice the number seven, and as many
messengers of death are at the disposal of the ruler of
Hades, while a guardian announces all newcomers to
her, allowing none to pass beyond the bars and bolts
of the “house of darkness.” There they find: “Dust is
"
their nourishment, their food, clay; they are clothed,
like birds, in a garment of feathers, forever deprived
of light.”
Still gloomier is the aspect of the Babylonian Hades,
as we glance at its pictorial representation, presenting
the terrific dog-shaped monster, the original Cerberus,
surveying Hades, and the fierce lion-headed goddess,
Allatu, holding serpents in her hands, and terrific mon-
sters upon her breast, while she kneels on a horse in a
boat floating along the “river of death."
Nor is reference made anywhere to a paradisiacal
abode of bliss for the privileged souls of the good. The
thought of retribution, or of a judgment in the hereafter,
as far as we can see, did not occur to the Babylonian or
ancient Semitic mind. The fate of all those in Hades or
Aralu (compare Ezek. xxxii, 18-32) is the same. Look-
ing up to the stars as life's rulers, the Babylonians be-
held, in their sun god, the judge and lawgiver of man-
kind, from whom the king, Hammurabi, in Abraham's
time, received the laws he had codified, as did Moses
from the God, Yahweh. To the nether world the sun
god's dominion did not extend. Neither did Yahweh
originally reign over Sheol. Only at a very late pe-
riod was His omnipresence proclaimed by the Psalmist:
BABYLONIAN AND EGYPTIAN LITERATURE
15
“If I mount to heaven, Thou art there;
If I make Sheol my couch, Thou art there."
a
Especially was the hopelessness of man's yearning
and striving for a life of the gods brought out in two
characteristic legends. The one tells of Etana (possibly
identical with the biblical Ethan, one of the wise men
of the East in I Kings v, 11, as suggested by Jastrow),
who attempted to fly to the heavenly abodes at the insti-
gation of an eagle, his friend, on whose breast he was
lying. On rising higher and higher, he beheld the earth
beneath as if it were a mountain, and the sea as if it
were a mere gardener's ditch (compare a similar
Alexander legend in the Talmud Yer. Ab. Zara
iii, 42c)—but when he came as far as the dwelling of
Anu, the god of heaven, he, together with the eagle, was
hurled down to become a dweller of Hades. 4 The other
legend relates the story of Adapa, the favorite son of the
god, Ea, the father of mankind, who was endowed with
the wisdom and knowledge of the gods. But as he had
entered the interior of heaven and was about to partake
of the food of the gods, he was prevented by some de-
ceptive trick of the jealous god, Ea, from so doing, and
he had to forego the boon of immortality. Here we
have the parallel to the Hebrew legend of Adam, who,
after he had eaten of the tree of knowledge, was ex-
pelled from the Garden of Eden, lest he eat also of the
tree of life, and be like the deathless gods. Man's
5


*Ps. cxxxix, 8.
*Jastrow, “Religion of Assyria and Babylonia," p. 519; Sayce,
"The Religion of the Ancient Egypt and Babylonia," p. 425 f.
* Jastrow 1. c., 544 f; Sayce I. c., 383 f.
8

16 HEAVEN AND HELL IN COMPARATIVE RELIGION
destiny is to live on earth; beyond this--such was the
ancient Semitic view—the shadowy existence of the
ghosts—Rephaim-awaits him in the infernal regions,
to which only necromancy-the survival of primitive
animism-gave the semblance of life, to satisfy the
curiosity of the blind masses. The higher spiritual
view, which beholds man as a personality made in the
image of God, who with mind and soul craves to par-
take in His divine nature, was, of course, beyond the
reach of those remote ages.
B. Egypt
Of greater importance than the discoveries made by
modern research in the Euphrates valley are, for our
subject, the revelations that have come to us from the
land of the Nile. The mystery which formerly sur-
rounded this ancient center of civilization, with its
colossal pyramids and sphinxes and its strange hiero-
glyphics, is no longer hidden from us. Modern scholars
have lifted the veil from a past dating back to six or
seven thousand years ago, and we now see, in the dim
twilight of history, the process of development of a
people composed of Asiatic and African races, of fetish
and animal worshipers, and of worshipers of solar dei-
ties in the shape and of the character of human beings.
Different from the Babylonian Semites who, when in-
vading the land of Shinar (= Sumer?), found a non-
Semitic population already in possession of culture,
such as is indicated by the invention of the cuneiform
picture writing, the aborigines of Egypt belonged to
BABYLONIAN AND EGYPTIAN LITERATURE
17
the primitive African race who beheld in beast, bird,
or plant, according to their useful or fearful character,
divine or demoniacal beings. In merging with them,
the Asiatic invaders learned to worship these also, and
gradually, by way of symbolism, combined the animal
with the human shape of their deities, reserving the
pure human form for the solar gods. Thus the pre-
historic views and practices were tenaciously adhered
to by the people, while the kings, the deified Pharaohs,
fostered more and more the priestly cult of the solar
man-god, in whose honor they erected the obelisks,
pointing like fingers to the heaven above. For the pres-
ervation of their bodies they built the pyramidal sepul-
chers and had them guarded by majestic sphinxes, coun-
terparts of the cherubs that guarded the temples and
palaces of the Babylonian kings. It was the soul, the
“double,” which was to outlast life that became the
chief object of their solicitude. Henceforth, the daily.--
setting of the sun god, Ra, beneath the Western horizon,
and his rising anew in the East on the following morn-
ing, became, to king and people, the dramatic picture
of human life. As they beheld him sailing along the
heaven in his bark, until, on reaching the Western end,
he would sink into the Amenti, the realm of the dead
beneath, to rise again on the other end as a new god-
Tum or Horus, so man journeys along on earth, until
he goes down to the dark world below, a prey to the
hostile powers of the deep. Should he not, then, like-
See for all the following: Sayce I. c., p. 153-251; Tiele, “Egyptian
Religion” and art., “Egypt” by Flinders Petrie, in Encyclopedia of
Religion and Ethics; Wiedeman, “Religion der Aegypter"; Maspero,
"Dawn of Civilization,” p. 190 f.

18 HEAVEN AND HELL IN COMPARATIVE RELIGION
wise undergo a renewal, so that the nether world be-
comes to him “the house of life?” In this hope the
Egyptians buried their dead in the Western part of
their cities, and, believing in the continuance of the
soul, or "double,” for the protection of which they re-
sorted to all sorts of magical practices, they were the
first to develop the doctrine of the immortality of the
soul. But it was chiefly on the ancient god, Osiris, of
Asiatic origin, who, owing to his appealing human
qualities, became the most popular deity of the land,
that the idea of immortality was from the earliest time
centered. Son of the most ancient gods in the Egyptian
pantheon, the god of the earth and the queen of the
ocean, Osiris, with the surname, the beneficent being,”
was looked upon as the first king and benefactor of men,
the first to be mummified, and the first to rise from the
dead, a pattern to mortal man to strive for goodness
and beneficence like him and become Osiris himself.
Upon attaining this goal in afterlife, and escaping
thereby all the horrors and hostile attacks of the fiends
and monsters of the world beneath, the thought and
lifelong toil of the Egyptian were bent; yet, at the same
time, innumerable magic formulas and amulets were
resorted to, to ward off the threatening powers. To this
end, the coffins and pyramidal sepulchers were made the
depositaries of endless prayers and incantations and
similar writings, and to this practice we owe the pres-
ervation of the entire sacred literature of Egypt, fore-
most among which is the famous “Book of the Dead,"
with its one hundred and sixty-five chapters, collected
in different order and versions in the course of cen-

>

BABYLONIAN AND EGYPTIAN LITERATURE
19
a
turies, and supposed to have been recited, or used, as
the means of protection or salvation of the soul of the
dead. Under the mystic title, “The Going Forth by
Day,” the various chapters describe the conflict waged
by either Ra or Osiris with the infernal foes, until the
final triumph was attained, and by emulating the god,
the soul merged into Osiris was to obtain salvation and be
admitted into the fields of Alu (=the “Elysian Fields”),
where a life without pain or death, an abundant harvest,
with six-ells-high stalks of corn under an eternal sun-
shine and mild zephyr winds, await the blessed toiler.
In the older chapters of the book the mythical and magic
elements conditioning the triumph of the god and the res-
cue of the soul prevail, but later on, the ethical view of
life is more and more accentuated, until the climax is
reached in the one hundred and twenty-fifth chapter,
which forms the high mark of the whole literature, and
which, considering the time and environment, shows a
surprisingly high standard of ethics. It portrays in
impressive words and in a magnificent illustration in
colors the ushering in of the dead—that his, his “dou-
ble”—by Maat, the goddess of truth and justice, into
the Hall of Judgment, presided over by Osiris, the
judge of the nether world. He is surrounded by forty-
two assessors—corresponding to the forty-two districts
of the land—who are seated on the canopy above the
throne, each having an ostrich feather, symbol of
the twofold truth, on his head. Before Osiris' throne,
the four genii of the dead are seen emerging, amidst
lotus flowers, from “the waters of life." Near by,
Anubis, the conductor and guardian of the dead, and


20 HEAVEN AND HELL IN COMPARATIVE RELIGION
Horus, the younger sun god, both sons of Osiris, are
seen weighing the heart of the dead in the scales against
an ostrich feather, while a dog-headed figure, repre-
senting correct measurement, lies on top of the scales
watching. The ibis-headed god, Thoth, the heavenly
recorder, writes down the result on his papyrus. But,
first of all, the dead person, with one hand lifted up to
heaven and the other held against the seat of his heart,
makes his confession, kneeling before the forty-two as-
sistant judges, declaring that he did not commit any of
the forty-two sins over which each of these judges holds
specific and relentless jurisdiction. He then addresses
them saying:
“Homage to you, masters of truth. Homage to thee,
great god, the master of truth! I have come before thee.
I know thy name and the names of the forty-two gods
who are with thee in the Hall of the Two Truths (truth
and justice), who live on taking hold of sinners, and
feed upon their blood on the day of reckoning before
the beneficent being (= Osiris).
“Now, double soul, mistress of truth, I bring you
truth, and I keep from you the wrong (= false-
hood):
I have not done any harm or malice to any man.
I have not oppressed kinsmen (the poor, or the
widow).
I have not lied at court.
I have not robbed men.
I have not been a slayer of men.
I have not stinted the quantity of corn.
I have not seized the property of the gods.

BABYLONIAN AND EGYPTIAN LITERATURE
21
а
I have not monopolized food.
I have not been an extortioner.
I have not been unchaste with women or with men.
I have not exacted more work from the laborer than
was just.
I have not caused the slave to be illtreated by his
master.
I have not made any one to hunger.
I have made none to weep.
I have not been a teller of lies.
I have not caused any man to be treacherously
murdered.
I have not been a doer of violence.
I have not pillaged cultivated lands.
I have not been a slanderer.
I have not been quarrelsome.
I have not been a revoker of my word.
I have not been a reviler of the king.
I have not obstructed the water (of the Nile).
I have not cut off the arm of the river.
I have not reviled the gods.
I have not acted fraudulently.
I have not withheld the offerings of the temples.
I have not spoiled the shewbread of the gods.
I have not robbed the dead of their funeral cakes.
I have not taken the milk from the suckling.
I have not killed sacred animals.
I did not catch the sacred birds of the gods.
I did not drive off the sacred cattle from their
pasture.
I have not falsified the measures of corn.
I have not tampered with the scales.
'I have not blown out the sacred flame at its time.
a



22 HEAVEN AND HELL IN COMPARATIVE RELIGION
I did not impede the procession of the gods.
I am pure. I am pure. I am pure.”
This confession is followed by another, in which
the number of forty-two sins is more clearly brought
out, and in which the plea for justification is based upon
the assurance that the dead has not robbed nor envied
any, that he was no eavesdropper, nor a dissembler or
deceiver of the deaf, and that he used no incantations
against the king, or his own father, or the god.
Then follows the weighing of his heart as described
above. When the verdict is favorable and he has been
cleared of any impurity, his heart is restored, and, after
several other ordeals, he is ushered into the bright
Elysian Fields (the fields of Alu) beyond the water.
According to one version, the boatman of the nether
world, Nu-Urru (called in the Gilgames epos Ur nimu,
the prototype of Charon), ferries him over the deep lake
or canal. According to another, probably a later one,
he is carried across on the wings of the ibis-headed
Thoth. Henceforth, he enjoys the perennial life of
the blessed under the shadow of the tree of life, or the
sycamore of Nut, the goddess of the sky, a true Osiris.
But woe to him if he turns out guilty! There stood in
front of Osiris' throne, in the corner of the Hall of
Judgment, the dreadful figure of Amam, "the De-
vourer,” in the shape of a hippopotamus, eager, with
its widely opened fangs, to seize upon the dead. Like-
wise are the forty-two judges, in case of his condemna-
tion, ready to exhibit their vindictive justice in their

7

V

'Sayce, I. e., p. 191.
BABYLONIAN AND EGYPTIAN LITERATURE
23
former capacity of destroying demons. The “Book of
the Dead,” being chiefly used for the protection of the
dead, seemingly avoids bringing out the punishments
awaiting the guilty. It only implies the imminent
"second death,” as his heart is not restored to him,
and his dismemberment follows. But, elsewhere the
fiercest tortures awaiting him, such as burning by hot
coals, and plunging into deep waters, or cutting of the
body into pieces by sharp swords, are depicted.
We have here the very origin of the Inferno and
Paradiso.
Though the chapter in question is a comparatively
late production, its ethical spirit has found its expres-
sion in far older parts of the literature, showing that,
behind all the superstitious practices of the Egyptians,
there prevailed among the higher classes a morality
which can only be compared with that of the Bible.
However justified, then, the sneer and ridicule were,
which Greek and Jewish writers cast upon “the wor-
shipers of cats and oxen,” we cannot withhold our ad-
miration for their advanced state in morality as well
as in literature and art.
But there is another point worth mentioning with
reference to our subject: It was in Egypt that the
Christian doctrine of the Trinity arose, which is the
alpha and omega of the Divine Comedy,” and this was
due to the great influence that the Osiris myth exerted
upon the whole land. It is not necessary to dwell at
length on the tale, which was ever more embellished,
as it spread over wider areas, and according to which
Osiris, the goodly man-god, met a cruel death at the



24 HEAVEN AND HELL IN COMPARATIVE RELIGION
hand of Set, the Evil One (formerly his brother, the
consuming sun god), who cut his body into fourteen
pieces, and scattered them to the winds. He left in
Horus, the god of the morning sun, a son and avenger;
while Isis, his consort—the type of a loving wife and
mother-after having buried the fourteen parts of
Osiris in fourteen different tombs, mourned him in
common with her sister Nephthys, as did the women of
Babylon and Canaan lament over Tammuz, or Adonis,
in ever-repeated songs. It was the tragic end of the
god, with its pathetic appeal, that gave rise also to the
Christian Trinity, exactly as the picture of Isis and
the child, Horus, found imitation in the first artistic
representation of the Mother Goddess and her Divine
Babe. Even the sycamore tree, on whose branches the
phænix perched and in which the heart of Osiris was be-
lieved to dwell to cause his resurrection at the winter
solstice, is this very day spoken of in Christian folk-
lore as the tree under which the Holy Family found rest
during their flight into Egypt. On the other hand, the
resurrection of Osiris out of the sycamore tree, taken
to have been his spinal column, gave rise to the Jewish
and Mohammedan belief in the revival of the dead by
means of the spinal bone of resurrection, called Luz
(the hazelnut tree). 8
* See Sayce, l. c., p. 207; Brugsch, “Religion and Mythologic der
Alten Aegypter," p. 634, and Jewish Encyclopedia, art. “Luz."
CHAPTER III
HELL AND HEAVEN IN HINDU AND PERSIAN LITERATURE
A. India
That the Persian or Zoroastrian religion, with its sharp
contrast between the principles of good and evil, was
the main factor in shaping the eschatological views of
Judaism, Christianity, and Islamism is to-day generally
recognized. But the development of these views by
the Hindus, the Aryan kinsmen of the Persians, requires
our first consideration. For their well-nigh inexhausti-
ble literary treasures, their hundreds of books of poetry,
philosophy, and law, now rendered for us into the Eng.
lish tongue, give us an insight into their endeavors to
unravel the mystery of the soul from the time when
they still lived in their ancient Aryan home to the period
of their higher civilization, when, within sight of India's
gigantic mountains and dazzling splendor of life, they
indulged more and more in fantastic concepts of things,
producing visions and legends concerning modes of
retribution after life, which anticipated and soon
eclipsed the Inferno and Purgatorio of Dante, and his
many predecessors. In fact, they imparted to Pythag-
oras and Plato, and indirectly to Christianity, that other-


25

26 HEAVEN AND HELL IN COMPARATIVE RELIGION
worldly character, of which the “Divine Comedy” was
the last great exponent. By nature of a cheerful and
optimistic disposition, like the Greeks, they spoke of
the soul's future destiny simply as of “the path the
fathers walked.” They looked up to their gods in
heaven as ideal men, hoping to participate in their
feasting and drinking on departing hence, as the Teuton
warriors, when admitted to Valhalla, or the Greek
heroes on Olympus. Next to Varuna (= Uranus), the
mighty ruler of heaven, came Yama, the Persian Yima
or Djemshid, whose spacious hall in the third heaven,
brimful of light and joy, was the constant object of
their praise in the songs of the Vedas. There, under
a beautiful treę, surrounded by the gods and the
fathers, he sał, quaffing the heavenly Soma sap, while
streams of milk and honey were flowing in abundance
round about. Sensual pleasures, including those of
sex, prevailed. To the nether world they gave as yet
little thought, though they occasionally consigned the
liars, murderers, and wicked women to the dark abyss.
At an early period, however, Yama was looked upon as
the first man and, like the Persian Djemshid, as the
ruler of men in the golden paradisiacal era, but soon he
became also the first to enter the nether world, the
leader and the stern judge of the dead. His two four-
eyed dogs, one of whom bore the name of Çabala (=the
Greek Cerberus), functioned as messengers of death
and as guardians of the nether world, preventing the
evildoers from entering the realm of bliss, situated be-
yond the river of death. Also, a recorder with an open
book was placed at his side, and scales were there, as
-
HINDU AND PERSIAN LITERATURE
27

in Egypt, in which to weigh the sins of the dead. Soon
the Brahmin imagination reveled in creating ever so
many hells, with terrible forms of punishment for the
guilty, one more appalling than the other. The orig-
inal number of three-corresponding to the three
heavens-grew to seven, then to twenty-one (in the
Laws of Manu iv. 88), and further on to one hundred
and thirty-six hells, and more. As the idea of just
retribution demanded, in all ancient laws, exact retali-
ation, so was each crime, whether of a ritual or moral
character, to be punished in the same form in which,
and on the same part of the body with which, it was
perpetrated by the living. As in Dante's Inferno,
the eyes of the lustful or the envious are pulled out by
the sharp beaks of birds; the tongue of the slanderer,
blasphemer, and liar is hacked to pieces by pointed
swords; the ear that listened with grim delight to ma-
licious tales is plucked off by hot, iron spits; hands or
feet employed in wrongdoing are put in seething cal-
drons; and these penalties are to be continued for a
As to the heavenly reward for the
virtuous, the writers are less prolific in their description.
One feature we discern in these visions, which afterward
recurs in Persian, Greek and medieval descriptions,
and this is that the hero, a son or a favorite of the gods,
or the saint, lapses into a comatose state, an apparent
death, lasting for a number of days, during which the
soul, freed from the body, was believed to enter the
nether and upper worlds, to espy the secrets of the
thousand years.

1 Zimmer, “Altindisches Leben,” pp. 408-422; Oldenberg, “Die Re-
ligion der Veda," pp. 524-543.


28 HEAVEN AND HELL IN COMPARATIVE RELIGION
2
hereafter, so as to be able to communicate them to
those around. Among these there are some really beau-
tiful and touching legends. One tells of a virtuous
?
king who had attained the bliss of the seventh heaven,
but was, on account of some unkind act to one of his
domestic animals, consigned to a gruesome hell, filled
with mud, blood, and flames of fire, and with human
victims of vulturelike birds, and there, as the sight of
the numerous unfortunates who suffered the most ter-
rible agonies, he forgot his own pain and woe, so that
the very breath of his sympathetic soul brought relief
to all to bring cheer to the beatified in Heaven as well
as to himself. And this story of compassion and sym-
pathy on the part of a king doomed to suffer for a while
in hell, as atonement for some small shortcoming, was
spun out in another more touching tale, reminding one
of Christ's descent into Hell. Having been led by the
servant of Yama, the judge, through the various apart-
ments of hell, to learn of the relentless execution of
justice, he hears, while on the point of leaving, the cry
from all sides: “O stay with us, if but for a brief space
of time, since thy presence assuages our agony!”
Thereupon, thoroughly moved by this appeal, he re-
solves to renounce the heavenly bliss awaiting him for
his good deeds and, instead, to derive a more intense
happiness from redeeming those doomed to unbearable
suffering. Thus he prevails upon Yama and Indra,
the supreme god, to grant release to all the unfortu-
nate. The legend reappears in part in the last book of
a
See about all these Lucian Scherman's "Materialien zur Geschichte
Indischen Visionsliteratur.”
HINDU AND PERSIAN LITERATURE
29
a
the Mahabharata, in connection with the death of
its last hero, Yudhishithra, the son of Yama, who, on
seeing his fellow heroes in hell instead of in heaven,
is taught the lesson that, as no good deed even of the
worst of men remains unrewarded, so must the slightest
failing of the most virtuous be atoned for before their
entrance into the realm of supreme bliss.
But there loomed up, in the Hindu mind, a view of
the universe which proved fateful to its mode of think-
ing as well as to many thinkers in other lands—the
doctrine of transmigration. Beholding in the whole
of life a vast immensity, in which all diversity of beings,
of gods, men, beasts, and plants, is undergoing a con-
tinuous transformation, passing from one state of life
into the other in an endless cycle, a constantly revolving
“wheel of destiny,” they combined, by a strange theos-
ophy, this concept with the idea of retribution, making
the ascending and descending scale of beings dependent
on the conduct of the souls in the various states of life
-the Karma. Accordingly, those whose merit endows
them with goodness—so the Law of Manu xii, 4, tells
-reach the state of gods; those endowed with activity
reach the state of men; whereas those endowed with
darkness in their craving for sensual pleasures sink to
the condition of beasts. Hence the slayer of a Brahmin
enters the womb of a dog, a pig or a jackal; he who
steals ... becomes a wolf, a bear, or a bird; and other
violators enter the bodies of insects or the form of
shrubs.” Other writers picture the breaker of his word,
the thief, the adulterer, and so forth, as passing into
the forms of fish, worms, jackals, or ants. Reborn

.


30 HEAVEN AND HELL IN COMPARATIVE RELIGION
thus as men, they are tested anew, to determine whether
they may regain a higher state of existence. Thus the
whole of life appears to be a sort of purgatory, cleans-
ing the soul from former impurity. Inasmuch, how-
ever, as the Karma, the merit or demerit inherent in
the soul from a previous existence, threatens those who
have risen to a higher state to be cast down again into
a lower one, their lives are beset with fear and distress,
so as to mar their bliss. There seemed but one way of
escape from this endless woe of the cycle of existence
for the Brahmin philosophy to offer, and this was to be
thoroughly merged into the pantheistic All-soul, or All-
breath, called Brahma, or Atman, with the full surrender
of individuality.
Numerous saints resorted to hermit life, as did the
naked philosophers, the Gymnosophists, who may have
had influence on the Greek school of Cynics, or to sys-
tems of self-discipline culminating in self-torture, so as
to become insensible to all pain and to make even the
gods in heaven shudder at their superior miraculous
power. They all took flights of thought to heights as
bewildering and overawing, and also as isolating, as the
Himalaya Mountains.
At last Buddha came to offer the panacea for all ills
of life, in teaching the wise to surrender the will of
thought, action, and purpose and enter the state of per-
fect passivity, the peace of Nirvana. In a world of
universal suffering and disappointment, the royal beg-
gar monk, in his pessimism—which so greatly appealed
to Schopenhauer-demanded tender compassion and
sympathy with all fellow creatures as the prerequisite
HINDU AND PERSIAN LITERATURE
31
step for the real solution of life's problem-spiritual
self-extinction. Different from the Jewish and Chris-
tian systems of faith, hope, and love, embodied in
Dante's “Divine Comedy,” Buddha's world is a world
deprived of purpose and divine foresight, a world
without faith and hope. As the climate of India has
become oppressive and enervating for its inhabitants,
because it lacks the refreshing breezes of the sea, so
was, seemingly, their mind impelled to revert to its own
self, after having lost contact with the larger currents
of humanity and its aims and activities. But the reac-
tion came not only for the religion of Buddha, when
the people reclaimed all the old gods and all the in-
numerable hells and heavens of old, but also for
Buddha's life itself, which was made the object of end-
less transformations. The widely circulated stories
about these, made India the land of wonders and fables
for the Western world. Quite characteristic is the story
told of the Chinese goddess, Kwan Yin, who refused to
obey her father's command to marry and underwent a
cruel death at his hand, whereupon a white tiger ap-
peared and carried her body into a forest. There her
disembodied spirit wanders through Yama's various
hells, while she constantly invokes Buddha as “the Lord
of Paradise,” and behold, at her every step the hor-
rors of hell disappear, and Yama finds his hells trans-
formed into a paradise. “How shall men ever grow
better, if there be no longer hell to chastise them?”
cries forth the judge of the nether world, and he sends
her back to the forest. There she awakens from her
dream, finally, to learn that it was all Buddha's work, in



32 HEAVEN AND HELL IN COMPARATIVE RELIGION
whose service she now became a sister of mercy, helping
to rescue the lives of mariners, and restoring even her
cruel father from illness to health.
B. Persia
Ancient Persia cannot be compared with India as to
her literature, which is as rich and varied in form and
thought as is her luxuriant natural world. All the more
prominent is Persia's place as a political and religious
power in the history of nations. The founder of her
great empire, the world-conqueror, Cyrus, is hailed by
the great prophet of the Exile, the so-called Deutero-
Isaiah, as “the Lord's anointed, called from the East
to subdue the nations and loosen the loins of kings, to
make the crooked places straight, and cut asunder the
bars of iron, so as to make known from the rising of
the sun unto the West that there is none beside Him,
though he himself did not know Him who formed the
light and created darkness, who maketh peace and cre-
ateth evil, the Lord who doeth all these things.
deed, Cyrus inaugurated a reign of wisdom, tolerance,
and freedom for the Eastern world not known before.
In subjecting ancient Babylonia, and, afterward Egypt,
to their rule, the whole royal dynasty did away with
the cruel rites of idolatry, and led the people to a higher
civilization. While adopting the cultural elements of
the former kingdoms, they made the pursuit of virtue,
truth and right the aim of their reign. Yet it was as
worshipers of Ormazd, the supreme god, the god of
9 3 In-
• Is. xlv, 1-7.
HINDU AND PERSIAN LITERATURE
33
>
a
light and purity, the principle of good in the Zoroastrian
system, whom they identified with Israel's "God of
heaven,” that they achieved their victories. It is not
within our province here to expatiate on the Zoroastrian
religion as laid down in the sacred books of the
“Avesta,” the product of many generations of priests
who turned the simple faith or law of the reformer
into a bewildering code of ritualism and dogmatism.
Suffice it to say that, about a thousand years or more
before the Christian era, Zoroaster appeared among the
rugged toilers of the soil in Bactria, a land exposed to
all the adversities of a rough climate and the hostile
attacks of men and beasts, and as a prophet of Ormazd
preached the lessons of thrift, purity, and law, while
representing the whole of life as a constant combat
against forces of evil. He beheld in the entire physical
and moral world two diametrically opposed kingdoms,
the kingdom of light, purity, and goodness under the
dominion of Ormazd, the ruling intelligence, with his
six beneficent forces or archangels, and the kingdom of
darkness, impurity, and evil under the dominion of
Ahriman, the principal of evil and destruction, with his
six archfiends, and made battle on behalf of the
former the very essence of religion. He thus gave the
ancient Aryan religion a higher ethical character and
purpose. Moreover, in contrast to the Hindu beliefs
which ended in a philosophy of pessimism, he, or his
successors, proclaimed, in a truly optimistic spirit, the
final triumph of the principle of good, in announcing
the downfall of Ahriman and his hosts at the end of
the twelfth millennium of the world, the third millen-



34 HEAVEN AND HELL IN COMPARATIVE RELIGION
nium of the law of Zoroaster. Out of the seed of Zo-
roaster, miraculously preserved and conceived by a
pure virgin, the world's savior (Soshiosh) will be born
to make an end to the world of perdition, and amidst a
great cataclysm, or conflagration, in which Ahriman
and his serpent, the embodiment of falsehood and wrong-
doing, will be consumed, he is to bring about the world
of resurrection and of life eternal. Then the dead will
rise to a new life, but they will have to undergo the
great judgment at the bridge, Chinvad (“the bridge of
judgment”), guarded by dogs, beneath which lies the
deep abyss of hell, and beyond which is the road to
Ormazd’s heavenly “Abode of Song” (Garomana).
The judgment is conducted by Ormazd's chief angel,
Serosh, the personification of prayer, by Mithra, the
genius of truth, and Rashnu, that of justice, who has,
as in Egypt, charge of the scales wherein the soul is
weighed. Those who prove to be good are met by a
most beautiful maiden, who is the reflection of their
own good life, and then led to the celestial paradise on
top of Mount Alburz, whereas the wicked are met by
a most ugly maiden, the reflection of their own wicked
life, and then drop from the narrow bridge into hell to
encounter its bitter torments. During the first three
days after death, however, the demons and the angels
fight for the possession of the soul, just as Satan and
Michael, the archangel, fight for the Child of the Virgin
in Revelation xii, 7 f., and for Moses in the Jewish
Haggada; but the good souls also, during this time,
have to pass the fire of purgatory, though without the
pain which the bad ones suffer. Prayers and sacrifices
HINDU AND PERSIAN LITERATURE
35
for the dead, however, are of great benefit to all, we
are told.
The Zoroastrian religion insists upon the threefold
goodness of man, goodness in action, in thought, and in
speech. Accordingly, the three heavens leading up to
the topmost heaven, the abode of Ormazd and his six
archangels, were designated to be the heaven of good
action, the heaven of good thought, and the heaven of
good speech. Through these the good are to be suc-
cessively led up by Vohuman, the keeper of Paradise,
to the “Abode of Song,” the seat of the uncreated light!
There they are given the food of immortality, consisting
of the marrow of the primeval ox, slain by Soshiosh
(the savior) and his helpers in the work of resurrection,
fifteen men and women of the immortals, and likewise
the drink of immortality, prepared out of the heavenly
Soma from the tree of life. Obviously we have here
something similar to the Greek ambrosia and nectar of
the Olympian gods. Corresponding to the three heavens
leading up to the mansion of bliss, there are also three
hells, one of bad action, another one of bad thought,
and a third one of bad speech, leading down to the
abode of utter darkness and woe, the habitation of
Ahriman and his host of demons, where the wicked
are fed on poisonous filth. As to those whose good
and evil deeds are about equal, they are consigned to
a neutral place to remain “ever stationary,” until their
future destiny is decided.
It is easy to see that this artificial system is the work
of long growth and development, as the Parsee literature
plainly shows, and undoubtedly both Semitic and Hindu



36 HEAVEN AND HELL IN COMPARATIVE RELIGION
elements helped in shaping it. This is especially indi-
cated by the remarkable vision of heaven and hell de-
scribed by Arda Viraf, the Wise, frequently referred
to in Parsee writings, and apparently modeled after
Hindu legends, but, at the same time, following older
descriptions, which gave rise to similar apocalyptic
visions, both Jewish and Christian, if not also Grecian
ones. It is especially interesting to find here an exact
prototype of Dante's Inferno and Paradiso. Arda
Viraf—thus runs the story—was chosen by his fellow
priests as the best and wisest, to serve as medium for
the ascertaining of the mysteries of the hereafter, and
was given a sleeping potion to fall into a comatose state
for seven days, during which time his soul would leave
his body and wander through heaven and hell. There,
at the Chinvad bridge, he sees first, precisely as does
Dante in his Inferno, those "undecided,” who, from lack
of merit, are kept there, unable to pass, and exposed
to suffering from the constant interchange of heat and
cold. Then he mounts up to the three heavens, first to the
one inhabited by the men of good action, but devoid of
ceremonial observations, the sphere of the stars; after
this, to the second heaven, the sphere of the moon;
and hence, to the third heaven, the sphere of the
sun, where he recognizes those who had been beneficent
rulers on earth. But here the description deviates from
the old system, having seven instead of four heavens.
At the fourth, his guide, Serosh, offers him the bread
of immortality which, like the Greek Lethe, makes the
soul forget all bodily experience and, at the same time,
enables it to gaze without fear at all the splendor of
HINDU AND PERSIAN LITERATURE
37
heaven. Further up, he beholds the souls of tillers of
the soil and of shepherds who have been faithful fol-
lowers of the law, in the midst of beautiful gardens,
replete with rarest flowers, and clad in gold- and silver-
woven garments, with diadems on their heads, attended
by most attractive maidens, all earning their reward
for having been kind to the poor and, likewise, to their
domestic animals. Finally, on reaching the seventh
heaven, the abode of the eternal light, he is dazed by
the grandeur and splendor surrounding him, an in
the midst of this celestial Paradise he beholds Zoroaster
on a throne, surrounded by the heroes and kings of
the past, of the Golden Age. Strange to say, like Dante,
during his stay in Paradise, he is initiated into the
whole theological system which he is to promulgate.
All the more awful and overwhelmingly sad is the
sight he encounters upon entering hell, with its pesti-
lential vapors, and its putrid waters, in which the un-
fortunates are tossed about without rest, amidst cries
of woe to which the heavens seem deaf. One stream,
presenting a most terrible aspect by its all-overpower-
ing whirlpools, is—he is told—formed of the tears
of those who incessantly lament over the dead they
have lost, failing to submit to the decree of divine
justice.
The punishments meted out to the sinners are similar
to those described in the Hindu versions and in Dante's
Inferno, in accordance with the principle of “Measure
for Measure!” The former rich man who withheld
his goods from the poor suffers unbearable thirst, and
gnaws at his own flesh from hunger. The quarrelsome



38 HEAVEN AND HELL IN COMPARATIVE RELIGION
woman with the bad tongue is suspended with her head
downward and her tongue twisted, and, likewise, the
liar and blasphemer. Thus the whole catalogue of
sins and crimes is passed muster, showing how each
wrongdoer is repaid for his acts. One great sinner suf-
fered unending torments in his whole body, only one
foot remained untouched by the fire and the serpents.
On noticing this, Arda Viraf asked his guide for the
reason, and was told that once in his life the man
showed pity upon a starving animal, and pushed some
fodder toward it with this one foot of his, and this was
his compensation. At the bridge of judgment another
fearful sight struck the saint. One soul was fleeing full
of terror from a pursuing demon, whose ghastly appear-
ance made it shudder and cry in despair, but it was
all in vain. The demon took hold of it and said: “Wilt
thou not recognize me? I am thy own self. Thy own
crimes have made me the ugly creature thou seest before
thee. Instead of following the path of supporting the
needy and leading others to the path of virtue, thou didst
only evil things during thy life, and led others on the
path of vice.” And speaking thus, he seized the soul
and cast it from the narrow bridge down into the abys-
mal depth of hell.
Surely, it is the language of humanity that is spoken
here in these “Sacred Books of the East.” 4 The distant
“
lands and the distant ages, with all their diversity of
* Max Mueller's “Sacred Books of the East," iv Zend Avesta i,
pp. 212-218; Bundahis xxx, 120-144; xviii, p. 46 f; The Book of
Arda Viraf, transl. by Haug, London, 1872, Spiegel, “Eranische
Alterthamskunde,” ii, 158 ff; Tiele's "Persian Religion"; Wm. Geiger
"Ostiranische Cultur," pp. 272-286; Windischman, “Zoroastrische
Studien”; Rawlinson, “Ancient Monarchies” ii, p. 337 ff.
HINDU AND PERSIAN LITERATURE
39
form and of thought, seem to beckon us to listen to the
one great symphony of religious aspiration and ethical
idealism, and to say to us: “Introite, et hic dii sunt-
“Enter, for here, too, dwells the Deity that lives in all
those made in the image of God.”


CHAPTER IV
HADES AND ELYSIUM IN GREEK AND ROMAN LITERATURE
A. Greece
As in our survey we approach the classic land of
Hellas, with its azure sky, its genial atmosphere, and its
hospitable shore offering an extensive view of the
Asiatic coast opposite and the many islands studded
about like sparkling precious stones upon the Ægean
sea, we feel as if nature had here done its utmost to
prepare the soil for a race superior to the rest in body
and mind. Indeed, the Hellenic race, being of a finer
build and a brighter mind, richer in imaginative power,
enterprise, and skill than the average population else-
where, was, by its geographical and historical position,
destined to take over the best elements of a culture
attained by the process of thousands of years before,
and cast them into a new mold that was to bear the
stamp of a higher European civilization. Here was
to be cradled a new type of humanity. In their proud
self-consciousness the Greeks looked upon the rest of
mankind as barbarians, forgetful of the fact that it
was, in the main, owing to their rare power of assimi-
lation that they were enabled to achieve the great task
assigned to them in history. Only by following in the
40
GREEK AND ROMAN LITERATURE
41
van of the seafaring Phænicians who, centuries before,
had settled all along the Ægean coast and on the islands
around, they acquired the skill of navigation and com-
merce together with the art of writing, adopting from
them even the very names of the instruments and prod-
ucts they used. From the Persians and Assyrians they
learned, through the mediatorship of the Phrygians and
Lydians, how to create works of art, and recent dis-
coveries have put us on the trail of the culture of Crete
and other centers of a remote civilization, to which they
were indebted for their beginnings of cultural life. On
the formation of their religious concepts also, apart from
their Indo-European traditions, the ancient Semitic races
exerted a prominent influence, and their gods and heroes
found easy admission into the Greek pantheon. Who,
for instance, would recognize in Aphrodite, “the foam-
born” goddess of beauty and love, the vulgar Phænician
Asthoreth of Cyprus, the goddess of fertility, or in
Poseidon, the Sidonian god of the sea? Or in Hermes
the Egyptian Thoth, and in the Minotaur of Crete, the
blood-thirsty Moloch, and so many other foreign gods
and goddesses in their attractive Hellenic guise? Thus
the Greek “Elysian fields” (Elysium) are none other
than the Egyptian “fields of Alu,” just as Rhadaman-
thys, who dwells there, has been shown by Naville and
Zuendel, the Egyptologists, to be the Grecized Rha d
Amenti (=the ruler of the nether world). The fact is,
the Greek genius was endowed with the wondrous power
of recasting the figures and concepts borrowed from oth-
ers into forms and characters of its own. Like Midas'
hand, it turned all it touched into the gold of artistic



42 HEAVEN AND HELL IN COMPARATIVE RELIGION
W
beauty and lucid thought. Its aim and object was not,
like that of other nations and empires, either conquest or
exploitation of lands, but solely the unfolding of all
human faculties, to attain the highest standard of cul-
ture, of esthetic and intellectual valor and dignity.
Accordingly, poets, painters, sculptors, and writers vied
with each other in representing their Olympian gods and
goddesses as idealized men and women, whether in
power or stature, in symmetry or harmony of form,
beautiful and impressive reflections of their own indi-
viduality, but with all human frailty and passion, and
as anything but exemplars of morality. Different from
the Hebrews, who beheld in man the creature made in
the likeness of God, they made their gods in the likeness
of man, thus elevating them above the level of blind and
crude nature, but at the same time viewing humanity
as the end and acme of life. The Greeks thus became
the unequaled masters of art and literature for all
time, the teachers of philosophy and the pathfinders
of science, the fashioners of our whole civilization.
And yet, with all their surpassing gifts and aspira-
tions, which make us look up with admiration and
gratitude to the genius of a Homer and a Phidias, a
Plato and an Aristotle in whose footsteps we are still
walking, they themselves at last felt one great gap in:
their make-up. They lacked the upward look to “a
a
Power not ourselves that maketh for righteousness,"
for love and holiness. It has well been said that the
word holiness, in our sense, was not in their vocabulary.
They had no sacred books, nor prophets, to bring them
the message of hope and courage from a higher world,
GREEK AND ROMAN LITERATURE
43
and invest their ethics with the authority and power of
a divine imperative. Their wise men, their first
philosophers—whether materialists, like Heraclitus, or
idealists, like Xenophanes—turned away with haughty
disdain, as did their sophists and comic writers with
scorn and ridicule, from the gods worshiped by the
masses, slaves of their passions and whims like them-
selves. But having outgrown their Olympian deities,
they failed to lift the godhead within to the heights of
a sublime ethical ideal, as did the Hebrew prophets.
However grand were the efforts of their great tragic
poets, Æschylus and Sophocles, to represent the heroes
of the past as imposing types and mirrors of heaven-
aspiring humanity, their views of human destiny were,
after all, pathetic and melancholy, as they culminated
in a resigned submission to inexorable fate, to which
men and gods were alike subject. So does their lofty-
minded lyric poet, Pindar, endeavor in vain to remove
the stains of moral impurity from the old deities, and,
with his hero worship and belief in transmigration of
souls, he still remains on polytheistic ground. Socrates,
the preacher to the men on the street, with his high
ideals, surely awakened, to a certain degree, the God-
consciousness in his contemporaries, and his dissent
from the crowd brought the martyr's death upon him.
More positive and clear was his great pupil, Plato, the
poet philosopher, in pointing to a divine goodness hold-
ing sway over a world of ideas, or heavenly images,
in which the world below was mirrored, to emulate
which was to be man's highest aim; and yet his God,
having another subaltern god to do the work of creation


44 HEAVEN AND HELL IN COMPARATIVE RELIGION
for him, lacked the liberty and super-mundane power of
the absolute Being of monotheism. Consequently the
human soul, imprisoned in the body, had none to open
its prison door for true freedom and a larger outlook
of life. Neither he nor his great disciple, Aristotle, the
.
comprehensive master mind of knowledge, who beheld
above the ever-revolving world spheres an all-moving
Intelligence in continuous action yet devoid of self-
conscious purpose, gave the people what they essentially
craved for, a religion to offer them the bread of life for
their hungry soul. What followed these leaders of
thought in the various schools was merely a compro-
mise or an expression of despair on the part of some,
but no solution of life's problem. Hence the serious-
minded resorted to the mysteries of cults introduced
from without, under the name of the frantic Thracian
god, Dionysius, or of Orpheus, the mystic bard of ob-
scure origin. As a matter of fact, India and Egypt,
under these hidden names, had to unfathom for the
initiated the secrets of the hereafter, and tell them of
the souls' state and the readjustment in another world
of life's inadequacies here, exactly as, in our days,
those that have lost their moorings in the accepted forms
of religion seek refuge for their bewildered soul in
spiritualism and kindred systems. And this brings us
to our main theme, the eschatological literature of the
Greeks.1
The Homeric Hades (literally "the Unseen,” the
ruler and then the realm of the nether world) is, as

9
1 Tiele, "Outlines of the History of Religion,” p. 201ff; Hasting's
Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics, art. “The Greeks.”
GREEK AND ROMAN LITERATURE
45
has been stated above, like Sheol, the dark abode of
the shades in the depths of the earth, with its entrance
at the extreme Western ends, where the ocean flows. It
is guarded by the three-headed dog Cerberus, originally,
as in Babylonia, a devouring demon, but later on repre-
sented as friendly to the newcomers, but a fierce as-
sailant of those attempting to escape. Charon, the ferry-
man who received the obolus coin from each entering
the gloomy realm (as a peace offering from the sur-
vivors), was, likewise, originally, as he appeared in
old Etruscan pictures and in modern Greek folklore,
the demon of death. Hermes, the god of the winds,
became, like the Egyptian Thoth, the conductor of souls.
Now the eleventh book of the Odyssey, which was taken
by Vergil as his model for the “Æneid,” presents by
no means, as does the latter, the descent of the hero
into the infernal regions to meet the departed. Instead
of this, the hero, following the advice of Circe, desires
to learn from Tiresias, the famous seer transferred to
the nether world, the outcome of his trying voyage from
land
land. Standing on the shore of the Western
ocean at the entrance to Hades, he offers to the shade
of the seer and others sacrificial blood, to give them
the semblance of life, and he summons them to himself
rather than wander across the rivers of death in search
of them. From where he stands he sees his mother, his
friends, and his kinsmen, the heroes and heroines of
the Trojan War, and likewise the Cretan Minos, the
judge, Orion, the huntsman, and Hercules, with his bow,
in their former occupations, and finally the three noted
penitents, Tityus, Tantalus, and Sisyphus, as they suf-


46 HEAVEN AND HELL IN COMPARATIVE RELIGION
9
fered in the upper world for their offenses against the
gods. A retribution of the deeds of mortals in Hades
was not at all intended by the poet, who does not even
refer here to the Elysium spoken of elsewhere in the
Odyssey (iv. 560 ff.) as
“the blissful plains
Of the utmost earth where Rhadamanthys reigns,
Where joys ever young, mixed with pain or fear,
Fill the wide circle of the eternal year,
Where from the breezy deep the blessed inhale
The fragrant murmur of the Western gale. .
And these were “afforded them by the gods as a
peculiar grace,” but not as the place of reward for good
deeds.
The idea of retribution in after life was first brought
home to the people by the Eleusinian mysteries, in
which the descent into Hades of Demeter, the goddess
of the earth, in quest of Persephone, her daughter, dram-
atized in symbolic form the going down of the seed
into the soil to reappear in the new garb of grain in
spring, thereby to express the idea of man's entering
death in order to rise to a new life thereafter. While
at first offering the promise of bliss only to the initiated,
these mysteries afterward took a wider scope, and gave
rise to a division of the souls in Hades into the morally
pure and therefore blessed, and the morally impure
and therefore doomed to suffer. But it was chiefly due
to the Orphic mysteries, in which only a select aristo-
cratic class participated, that the idea of an after-life
retribution was developed and systematically elaborated.
It is difficult to say how far the ecstatic state called

GREEK AND ROMAN LITERATURE
47
2
forth by the wild Dionysian cult produced the vision
of the soul's defying all limitations of space and time
in its wanderings through hell and heaven, such as were
ascribed to the mythical Orpheus and his followers, and
worked out in numerous poems under his name. Al-
ready at an early period, we read of saints and heroes
as having left their bodies to wander about from land
to land. An unbiased study of the subject seems to
show that the train of ideas which influenced alike the
Orphic brotherhood and the half religious, half philo-
sophical order founded by Pythagoras in South Italy in
the middle of the sixth century came, not from the bar-
barous people of Thrace, but from India and surround-
ing lands. Only there the belief in the transmigration
or rebirth of the soul as a mode of purging it from
former sins in an endless “wheel of existence” had
taken deep root long before the Greeks knew of it, and
it is exceedingly improbable that this strange doctrine
should have risen in different countries independently
of each other.
As to Orpheus, there can be little doubt that before
he became the wondrous musician whose magic art
tamed the wild beasts into silence, he was, like Osiris
and Yama, a god of the nether world, as was his wife,
Eurydice, the corresponding earth or hell goddess. He
was even spoken of, like these, as the first man to die
and enter there. Henceforth, his descent into Hades
became the favorite theme of poetic and artistic repre-
sentations. Greek mythology and Egyptian concepts
helped in the working out of the system. The three

2
Rhode, “Psyche”; Albert Dieterich, “Nekyia.”
48 HEAVEN AND HELL IN COMPARATIVE RELIGION
Homeric penitents were made types of vices punished
in Hades, the one of unbridled lust, the other of over-
bearing pride, and the third of insatiable greed. To
these were added Ixion, as a type of deceit and treach-
ery, and the Danaides pouring water into a sieve, as
types of futile ambition. So were the Furies, as the
avengers of wrongdoing, transferred from earth to
Hades, while Elysium became the realm of bliss await-
ing the pure and good. It was thus a deepened religious
sense which made the better class look to the hereafter,
to compensate for the shortcomings of this life. In
other words, individualism, which had no real place
either in the religion or in the philosophy of the Greeks,
made itself felt more and more as a demand of the soul.
And this became the dominant motive power and an
almost religious force in the teaching of Pythagoras,
whose followers are called theologians by Aristotle.
We know too little of this extraordinary personality who
started new movements in philosophy and particularly
in science, whose studies comprised the spheres of the
stars and the harmonies of music, and who was deeply
concerned with the calculation of mathematics and the
mystic significance of numbers—a great teacher of
ethics and a devout seeker after God as "the One among
the many,” the center of the cosmic unity and harmony,
“Whom man is to follow, striving like Him after har-
mony. .” Herodotus tells us that he owed his knowledge
to Egypt; modern investigators, with far better reason,
find him to have been an adept of Hindu lore. His

3
* L. Schroeder, “Pythagoras u. d. Inder"; Encyclopedia of Re-
ligion and Ethics, art. “Pythagoras and the Pythagoreans.”
GREEK AND ROMAN LITERATURE
49
system was centered upon his belief in the transmigra-
tion of the soul, the constant undergoing of the process
of rebirth in human and animal form, while at the same
time meeting retribution of its deeds in Hades, exactly
as the various Hindu visions have it. But he connected
it all with the cult of the Greek gods of the nether world
and, especially, with that of Apollo of Delphi. He left
no written work of his own, though descriptions of a
descent to Hades were ascribed to him as well as to his
followers. It was even said of him, as of Buddha, that
he recalled the memory of his former existence; more-
over, that, once, when he passed a howling dog who had
been beaten, he stopped it, saying that he recognized
in him a former friend. Whatever such legends may
amount to, it is certain that he strove to make his life and
his outer appearance the embodiment of perfect purity
as he taught it, and his abstinence from meat seems to
have been based on his transmigration theory. Recent
discoveries of hundreds of little gold plates belonging to
the fourth and fifth pre-Christian centuries, which con-
tain extracts of the Pythagorean system of belief in
after-life retribution, and which have apparently been
deposited as charms for the dead in those tombs or
coffins of South Italy (and also of Crete), like the Osir-
ian formulas in Egypt, have shown the large extent of
the Pythagorean propaganda, and verified the claims of
the order.
It is interesting to notice that, instead of drinking
from the water of Lethe (= Oblivion), the soul was here
told to drink from the water of Mnemosyne (= Remem-
brance) on the right side of the road in order to rise


50 HEAVEN AND HELL IN COMPARATIVE RELIGION
to a higher state, whereas the Lethe water on the left
side was to be avoided—a distinction which we fre-
quently meet henceforth. Alongside of the two classes
of souls, the wicked and the faithful, we find mentioned
here, for the first time, a middle class, as in the Parsee
system, whose fate remains in suspense for a thousand
years (=one æon), or more, until they are allowed to
walk upward on the road to Zeus.” Pindar, in one
of his odes, speaks of a threefold purgation, and else-
where of nine (=3X3) years. Empedocles, regarded
like Pythagoras, his master, as a priest and prophet of
the order, declares that one guilty of murder or per-
jury has for thirty thousand seasons (that is for ten
thousand years) to pass through the various forms of
life until his crime is atoned for.
The best informed writer on these Orphic and Pythag-
orean mysteries is Plato. In the form of mystic al-
legory, he tells first in his “Phædrus” ($ 247 f.), of
the joyous life of the gods in heaven, whose divine in-
telligence feeds their souls—amidst the revolution of
the worlds-on truth, on absolute justice, temperance,
and knowledge which "give them ambrosia to eat and
nectar to drink.” The human souls, on the other hand,
are either carried by their charioteers or wings upward
to the realm of truth or downward to the earth, and by
the law of retribution, the one becomes a philosopher
or an artist, the other a righteous king, the third a poli-
tician, the fourth a physician, the fifth a prophet or
hierophant, the sixth a poet, the seventh a husbandman,
the eighth a demagogue, and the ninth a tyrant. These
remain in a state of probation for ten thousand years

а
GREEK AND ROMAN LITERATURE
51
a
(=ten æons). At the end of three æons the guileless
philosopher has passed this state and enters the divine
life; the others have to enter the House of Correction”
under the earth, before they choose their second life.
Then they, according to their merit, pass into the life
of a beast and then again to that of man, whereas some
will not pass into human forms any more. The phi-
losopher, who will cling to the recollection of the things
he saw when in company with God, will remain blessed,
having been initiated into the sacred mysteries.
Less mystical is Plato in his “Republic” ($ 614 ff).
There he at once tells of the vision of Er, a Pamphylian
warrior, who, exactly like the Persian saint, Arda Viraf,
left his body on the twelfth day of his death and beheld
two chasms in the earth corresponding to two others in
heaven. In the intermediate space there sat judges bid-
ding the just to ascend on the right side to heaven with
marks on their foreheads, and commanding the unjust,
with marks on their backs, to descend on the left to the
lower regions. The former ones went forth into the
meadow of bliss, while recalling their sufferings on
earth during a thousand years' journey; for they had
to suffer tenfold for every wrong done during their hun-
dred years of earthly life. So were also the rewards
of beneficence and justice tenfold. Mention is made
also of infants who died too early for judgment. We
have here, already, the Limbus Infantium. Especially
terrible were the punishments inflicted upon such as
committed sins of impiety against gods and parents,
or upon murderers, suicides, and tyrants, but always
commensurate with their crimes, as were also the


52 HEAVEN AND HELL IN COMPARATIVE RELIGION
rewards of the just. He then dwells at length on the
bright light, like the color of the rainbow, which he saw
in midheaven where the spindle of Necessity is revolv-
ing, moving amidst the music of hymning sirens, the
seven planetary spheres. In the sphere above, where
perfect harmony reigns, the three Fates, the daughters
of Necessity, hold forth the lots to the mortals for the
new life, saying: “Virtue is free, and as man honors
or dishonors her, he will have more or less of her. The
chooser is answerable; God is justified.” Owing, how-
ever, to former existences, too many choose the life of
animals instead of men. At the "river of Forgetful-
ness” they await the new life, into which they enter,
amidst thunderstorm and earthquake, like shooting
stars, accompanied by the genius they have chosen for
their guardian.
In “Gorgias” (§ 525 f.) Plato devotes a chapter to
the mode of judgment of the dead as arranged by Zeus,
who appointed his three sons, Minos and Rhadamanthys
from Asia, and Æakus from Europe, as judges to be
placed at the three roads, of which two lead to the
Isles of the Blessed and the third to Tartarus. In his
“Phædo” (§ 113a) Plato speaks of the four streams
of Hades, but differently from other writers, he men-
tions first the ocean flowing around the earth, then the
Acheron flowing into the Acherusian Lake, next the
“fiery” Periphlegeton, and finally the black river Styx,
which he somehow identifies with Cocytus, the "howling"
river. On the Acheron judgment is held, and those
who have passed “a middle kind of life” are under-
going purification, being punished for their evildoings

GREEK AND ROMAN LITERATURE
53
and rewarded for their good deeds. Then there are the
incurable ones. Such as have committed great sacrileges
or foul murders are hurled into Tartarus, never to come
forth again. Those who are guilty of great, yet not
unpardonable crimes—who, for instance, have in a
moment of anger done violence to a father or mother,
or taken the life of another, but have repented for the
remainder of their life-are to undergo sufferings for
a year, and then are cast forth, the homicides through
the Cocytus and the parenticides through the Periphlege-
ton, into the Acherusian Lake, where they must stay until
they have obtained pardon from those whom they have
wronged. But those that have led a holy life are re-
leased from their earthly prison and go forth to the
upper “mansions of bliss.” Concerning these Plato, in
the “Republic” (§ 363), says, with reference to Musæus
and his son Orpheus, that “the saints are feasting on
couches with crowns on their heads, passing their whole
time in drinking,” but somewhat satirically he adds
that "the immortality of drunkenness can not be the
highest meed of virtue.”
All these descriptions, however colored by his own
philosophy, evidence the prominence given by Plato to
these mysteries, and his quotation from the vision of
Er, the Pamphylian, leaves us in no doubt as to their
Oriental origin. At the same time, the comic allusions
to them by Aristophanes in his “Frogs,” and by Lucian,
the satirist, betray the unfavorable attitude of many
toward these so-called sacred mysteries. Still they con-
tinued to furnish ever new material for poetic or prose
compositions of such visions. To a number of these,
9



54 HEAVEN AND HELL IN COMPARATIVE RELIGION
Plutarch, the prolific and eclectic writer of the first
Christian century, refers, besides quoting Pindar and
Plato as his authority. So in his “Dream of Socrates”
Timarchos relates of his descent into the cave of Tro-
phonius from where, after a two nights' and a day's
stay, he wandered down to hell. There, amidst the
howling of beasts and the groaning of men and children
he walked through its four divisions to behold the stars,
the sun, and the moon above, influencing the rise or fall
of the souls. More similar to the descriptions given
above is one told in the chapter on the Delay of Divine
Punishment. There, the divine Aridæus tells how he,
three days after a fatal fall from a precipice, found
himself flung into mid-air between the high stars above
and the deep, dark hell beneath, where he recognized
some friends among the fluttering souls. The three
Furies, the daughters of Necessity, held judgment, as in
Plato, decreeing three kinds of punishment, according
to the manner of the crime committed, while each soul
showed by its color whether cruel murder, or lascivious-
ness or envy was the ruling passion of its life. Besides
notorious malefactors, hypocrites had to undergo severe
punishment. Slanderers were twisted together, gnaw-
ing at each other's flesh. Three kinds of lakes were
there, one of boiling gold, another of chilling lead, and
a third of rugged iron, while demons whetted their in-
struments for the punishment of these different classes
of sinners. Among the wailings of the unfortunate he
heard the voice of his own father calling him, and con-
fessing that he had poisoned his guests for the sake of
the gold they had, but he dared not interfere.

GREEK AND ROMAN LITERATURE
55
ter.
On the opposite side he came to a very spacious
palace, radiant with light and fragrant with the perfume
of all sorts of flowers. There the souls, flocking in like
birds, were banqueting amidst sounds of joy and laugh-
This was the abode of Bacchus (=Dionysius)
and called the place of Lethe (= oblivion). It had a
rarified air. Goblets of many colors were seen, and
the voice of Sibyl, the prophetess, was heard. But the
last scene he saw was the preparation of the souls for
the second life awaiting them, a kind of purgatory. He
was also shown the Crater where Orpheus found the
soul of his wife, Eurydice.
With many of these visions Vergil was undoubtedly
familiar. Not so Dante, who probably knew no Greek.
B. Rome
Of Roman literature little need be said here. Much
as was achieved by the Romans in the field of law and
statecraft, in literature in general they lacked original-
ity. They were simply imitators of the Greeks. What-
ever peculiarity their religion possessed, in which ab-
stract ideas, as in Parseeism, prevailed, they admitted
at a later period the Greek deities, one after the other,
into their Pantheon, borrowing the grace and grandeur
from Olympian deities with which they identified their
own.4
As they extended their empire over the East,
they accorded also to the Asiatic and Egyptian god-
desses a place in their Pantheon. What a prominent
place the Cumæn Sibyl played in their early history
is well known.
* See Tiele, I. c., p. 228 f.

56 HEAVEN AND HELL IN COMPARATIVE RELIGION
As to the visionary literature, it was Cicero, the skill-
ful popularizer of Hellenic thought, who offers in his
“Dream of Scipio” a fair reproduction of the Greek
vision of Hades. But Vergil's “Æneid” occupies a
place of its own alongside of Homer's “Odyssey.”
Æneas' visit to Hades is, in fact, a great improvement
upon that of Odysseus', owing to Vergil's acquaintance
with Plato and the Orphics. The poem is above all
prompted by a higher design, being permeated by a
certain moral purpose. The uncanny Homeric Circe is
replaced by the Cumæan Sibyl, who by her wisdom di-
rects the hero's wanderings through the gloomy “house
of Proserpina” where law and order hold sway, and
to which also Charon, the dreadful ferryman with his
boat ever freighted anew with souls, and grim Cerberus,
the hellhound lurking at the river Styx, own allegiance.
After having bestowed the much-coveted funeral rites
upon the wretched unburied, which was also Odysseus'
first act of piety, Æneas encounters, before crossing the
Acheron River, first, newborn babes torn from their
mothers, thus realizing not so much the horrors of hell
as the bitterness of death. Then his human pity is
roused by the sight of those whom judicial error has
sadly robbed of their young life. Next to these he finds
at “the mournful fields” a group of suicides lamenting
over their rash deed prompted by disappointed and un-
requited love. Finally, his woe is mixed with pride, as
he meets his heroic kinsmen who have fallen as victims
of the Trojan War. On reaching the interior of hell he
comes to the parting of the roads, where the path on the
right leads to “Pluto's golden palace,” while the left


GREEK AND ROMAN LITERATURE
57
leads down to the dismal depth of Tartarus. Overlook-
ing the wide realm on the left, he sees treble walls, sur-
rounded by the fiery Phlegeton River, enclosing the
towers of Tartarus, where the groans of the tormented
rent the air. There Rhadamanthys holds stern judgment,
inquiring into the manner, place, and time of each crime
committed during lifetime, before passing the rigid
sentence, while the Furies stand hard by, eager to exe-
cute the sentence with the aid of the horrible monsters
at their command. In the meanwhile the dire warning
is echoed forth by their fierce messenger, Phlegyas,
“Learn righteousness, and dread the avenging deities!”
The Titan race comes first to sight, terrific examples of
the unrelenting wrath of the offended gods; then follow
the tyrants, the traitors, those guilty of incest and mur-
der, all paying their penalty for the crimes perpetrated.
Turning to the right, Æneas, immersed with Lethe's
rejuvenating water, enters the verdant fields of bliss,
where the happy souls listen to Orpheus' harmonious
notes, themselves joining in the song, some exercising
their limbs in sport, others feasting. Finally meeting
his long-sought-for father, Anchises, he learns all about
the destiny of the human soul. He is told of the mys-
terious “wheel” of constant rebirth. For a thousand
years the souls have to undergo the punishments and
penances that are to cleanse them from stains clinging
to them from bygone existences. “Some are hung to
bleach in the wind, others are plunged in water, and
again others purged in fire. They all prepare for 'the
second life.' And yet, only the few will breathe the
soft Elysian air to enjoy happiness in the pure ether of


58 HEAVEN AND HELL IN COMPARATIVE RELIGION
the soul, after they have tasted of the Lethean flood to
sweep the memory of past labors and cares beyond
recall.”
It is the transmigration theory of Plato and the Or.
phics that Vergil embodied in his poem, which ends
with the hopeful outlook upon imperial Rome, founded
by the descendants of Æneas. Of course, Dante's Cath-
olic faith bade him discard the transmigration idea.
Instead, his regeneration of the soul is effected by the
stages of the purgatory. On the further development
of the concept of the Inferno and Purgatorio the follow-
ing chapters will cast new light.

CHAPTER V
GEHENNA AND PARADISE IN THE APOCALYPTIC LITERA-
TURE OF THE OLD TESTAMENT
The general impression is that the “Apocrypha,”
which belong to the period intervening between the Old
and the New Testaments, and are placed in our larger
Bible editions between these two, form the connecting
link between them. But this is erroneous. Though the
“Book of Wisdom” and the second “Book of the Mac-
cabees” contain views pointing to a new religious con-
cept of life, the "Apocrypha,” on the whole, did not
exert a decisive influence on either the Synagogue or
the Church. Quite different is the place occupied by
the apocalyptic literature. The writings which ap-
peared under the assumed name of older biblical sages
—therefore, also called the “Pseudepigrapha”-during
the two centuries preceding the Christian era and the
two following centuries,-having for their purpose the
revealing “of the hidden events of the future”; or of
the mysteries of “the things to happen at the end of
time,”—wrought a perceptible change of thought in the
minds of the people. They led to a new world view,
widely differing from the ancient Israelitish one, and

59
60 HEAVEN AND HELL IN COMPARATIVE RELIGION
they actually interlink the Old and the New Testaments.
Reinterpreting and thus reëchoing the old prophecies,
the apocalyptic writers and speakers claimed to be pos-
sessed of the Divine Spirit, like the prophets of yore,
while announcing the advent of the longed-for Mes-
sianic era with its preceding day of doom, the Day of
God's primitive wrath, for heathenism, and at the same
time offering new hope for the people chafing under the
yoke of Syrian or Roman oppression. Nor was theirs
a mere national hope or a message confined to Judea,
as was in the main that of the older prophecies, but it
bore a more universal character, voiced, as it was, as a
long-hidden “secret” of heaven. Since the great expec-
tations of Israel's rejuvenation, roused by the exilic and
post-exilic seers, were not realized, these apocalyptic
seers boldly declared that “the end of days” was nigh,
and a regeneration of the whole universe was to follow,
in which the heathen kingdoms, together with all the
God-defying hosts of heaven and earth, would be swept
away, and death itself be swallowed up forever. How-
ever much these Apocalyptists were indebted for such
radical world concepts to Parseeism, they gave their
message its specific Jewish character by their preaching
of righteousness, by their stern insistence on repentance,
by their revival of the prophetic appeal: “Wash you,
make you clean; put away the evil of your doings; cease
to do evil, learn to do well; seek justice, relieve the
oppressed, and so forth” (Is. i, 16-17). Then, they
promised, Israel would be compensated for all its suf-
ferings, and its dead would rise from the grave to par-
ticipate in the new life of the nation.

APOCALYPTIC LITERATURE OF OLD TESTAMENT
61
But what lent especial force and authority to these
predictions was that they did not present them as ema-
nating from their own minds, but as matters decreed
from the beginning of the world, as cosmic mysteries
that had come down from the wise men of the hoary
past and been transmitted only to the few elect. As
a matter of fact, these very ideas formed, as a closer
study of Babylonian literature has shown us, part of
the old Oriental wisdom, and offered mystic glimpses
of a larger cosmos to widen their mental horizon.
But the Synagogue at large with its Scribes, the Phari-
sean doctors of the Law, could not afford to recognize
these outpourings of the spirit as genuine prophecy,
since for them the prophetic period closed with Malachi
(Tos. Sota xiii, 2; I Macc. iv, 46; ix, 27 comp. Ps.
lxxiv, 9). The very claim of secret lore was discoun-
tenanced for them by the Deuteronomic declaration:
“The secret things belong unto the Lord our God”
(Deut. xxix, 28 comp. Ben Sira iii, 22; Hagigah
ii, 1). Only the saintly mystics, known by the name of
Essenes, "the men of silence,” or “the discreet ones,"
described by Philo and Josephus as living apart from
the crowds and leading a holier life than even the Phari-
sean schoolmen, were the real keepers of the secret lore
and the authors of the apocalyptic literature. The very
woe and distress of the time, which made the people in
their despondency cry out with the Psalmist (lxxiv,
9-10), “How long, how long, O God, shall the adversary
reproach?” became to them the evidence of the ap-
proaching end, of the nearing crisis, which is to bring
about the great Day of Judgment and the Messianic



62 HEAVEN AND HELL IN COMPARATIVE RELIGION
kingdom of God with its resurrection or regeneration
of the world. Moreover, claiming to be initiated into
the innermost plan of God's reign, they gave a survey
of the world's history, pointing out the very time when
the end was bound to come.
Now the “Book of Daniel” formed an exception
among the Apocalyptic books, in being admitted into
the collection of Holy Writings—though not, as was
later done by the Church, among the prophetic books.
The reason was that this Hasidean product had essen-
tially helped in bringing about the Maccabean victory
by the vision announcing the imminent overthrow of
the reign of Antiochus, the Syrian king, and his hosts,
by the miraculous intercession of God. Daniel, men-
tioned by Ezekiel, alongside of Noah and Job, as a
righteous man and also as eminent by his great wisdom
(Ezek. xiv, 14-20 and xxviii, 3), had apparently be-
come a popular hero in Jewish folklore—and was aptly
depicted by the Hasidean author as a typical saint
whose staunch loyalty to his faith, despite threatening
peril, served as an inspiring example to the people, and
whose miraculous powers, which forced even the cruel
tyrant to pay homage to God, could only render his
wondrous visions all the more impressive.
Being the first work of its kind, it naturally became
the model for the entire subsequent apocalyptic litera-
ture. There is, first of all, the artificial construction of
Israel's history, based on Jeremiah's seventy years and
rendered into seventy year-weeks (Dan. ix, 29 f.; comp.
Jer. xxv, 11; xxix, 10), and likewise of the world's his-
tory, taking the four great world kingdoms, Babylonia,


APOCALYPTIC LITERATURE OF OLD TESTAMENT
63
а
Media, Persia, and Syria, symbolized by the four
metals (ii, 35 f.) and the four beasts (vii, 4 ff.), as
destined, by their successive downfall, to lead to the
final appearance of the kingdom of God's holy ones,
of Israel symbolized by the Son of Man in the clouds,
which would last forever. The very “time of trouble
such as never was, since there was any nation even to
that same time,” is declared as marking the great catas-
trophe when the final defeat will be brought upon the
Adversary in heaven by the archangel, Michael. In the
meantime the altar of God was to be polluted for three
and a half years by the Syrian idol, Baal Shamem, called
"the Abomination of Desolation.” Then the people in-
scribed in God's book for life would be delivered.
After this, “Many that sleep in the dust shall awake,
some—the righteous or martyrs—to life everlasting, the
others—the wicked—to everlasting shame and abhor-
rence” (xii, 1-4).
Alongside of Daniel, Enoch, the grandfather of Noah,
was selected as a typical saint by the apocalyptic writers.
He seemed to be best fitted to be represented as the orig-
inal recipient of the secret lore concerning the heavenly
realm, the world to come and the various angels and
demons in possession of the Essenes, as, according to
Scripture (Gen. v, 24), he was taken alive to heaven
after his three hundred and sixty-five years of godly
life. Traditions pointing to Babylonian origin singled
him out as the possessor of all the hoary wisdom and
1 See Marti, “Comm. to Daniel”; “D. Bibel u. d. Keilschriften,"
Schrader 3d Ed.; Hilgenfeld, “Die Juedische Apocalyptik”; Kohler,
"The Essenes and Apocalyptic Literature” in the Jewish Quarterly
Review xi, 145 f; Jewish Encyclopedia, art. “Apocalyptic Literature.”


64 HEAVEN AND HELL IN COMPARATIVE RELIGION
knowledge concerning heaven and earth. Besides, an-
cient folklore clustering around Mount Hermon and
the sources of the Jordan picture him as an associate
of the angels who interceded in favor of the fallen
angels mentioned in Genesis vi, 1-4. Accordingly, nu-
merous visions and fervent appeals to repentance, with
incessant cries of woe for the sinners and promises of
beatitude for the righteous, were ascribed to him in
writings bearing his name. It is a large literature, ex-
tending over more than a hundred years, from the time
of the Maccabean War to the middle of the first Chris-
tian century, but the Hebrew original, and almost the
whole Greek translation has been lost, and only an in-
coherent collection of fragments has been preserved in
the Ethiopic language. Being introduced as “the right-
eous man who saw a vision of the Holy One in heaven
and heard from the angels what he was to disclose to
remote generations to come, concerning the great Judg.
ment at the end of days,” he is first represented as pre-
dicting the Flood and admonishing the sinners to repent
in time, after he had, as the prophet of God, brought
the message of woe and gloom to the fallen angels, de-
claring that there is no salvation for the wicked and the
seducers.
Then speaking in the first person, he describes in
Chapters xiv-xix—"the Jewish prototype of Dante”-his
journeyings over heaven and earth under the guidance
of the archangels. Lifted above the clouds, he beholds
the paths of the stars and the lightnings, and the fiery
cherubim; then amidst tremors of awe he is admitted
into the lofty palace where, in impenetrable flames of

APOCALYPTIC LITERATURE OF OLD TESTAMENT
65
fire, the majesty of God is seen on His throne of Glory
with the myriads of angels around Him. Beneath a
high mountain the place of the whirlwind and of the
luminaries comes to sight, and then the ocean and the
river of fire, the rivers of Sheol (=Ps. xviii, 5), and
the dark abysmal depth whence all the waters of the
earth issue forth. There he sees also the corner stone
of the earth and the pillars of heaven, and seven moun-
tains of precious stones, of which the middle one eclipses
all in brilliancy (Ezek. xxviii, 14). After this he is
shown the place of horror in which the seven rebellious
star spirits are imprisoned for a thousand years, until
the Judgment Day. Farther on he beheld, beneath high
mountain rocks, four hollow places, and was told that
these were the four apartments of the nether world.
Two of these are the temporary abodes of the righteous,
one for saintly martyrs like Abel, the other for the
simple righteous; they have a spring of water and light.
The other two are for the two classes of sinners. The
wicked who remained unpunished in life and had an
ordinary burial are to remain in this dark realm of
pain until the time of the Resurrection, when they will
be cast into Gehenna; the others, who suffered a violent
death and are now complaining, being neither righteous
nor complete sinners, remain in this intermediate state.
On hearing this, Enoch cried out, “Blessed be the Lord
of righteousness forever!” Turning to the center of the
earth, he saw (Chapters xxvi, 1 ff.) the blessed land
filled with trees (Palestine), where out of the dismem-
bered tree (exiled Israel) branches had taken new root;
and there was Mount Zion with the brook of Siloah
a


66 HEAVEN AND HELL IN COMPARATIVE RELIGION
beneath, and another mountain with the deep ravine be-
tween the two. There he beheld the accursed valley,
the gathering place of the ungodly who blasphemed God.
Gehinnom, the former place of Moloch sacrifices (Jer.
vii, 31), is here designated for the first time in litera-
ture as the place of punishment for the wicked, while
Sheol is not yet identified with it, as was done after-
ward in the rabbinical and New Testament writings.
Other visions contained in cosmological and astro-
nomical portions we omit, as being of less concern to us,
nor need we dwell on those which present the world's
history after certain epochs leading up to the Judgment
Day, the advent of the Messiah, and the Resurrection,
however interesting for the historian the so-called Beast
vision is, in which the seventy nations of the world are
pictured as world beasts, and Israel as the flock of God,
“the Lord of the Sheep,” who first rescues it through
Judas Maccabee and finally through the Messiah, "the
white bull,” to whom all nations will pay homage (Chap-
ters lxxxv-xc). Of greater interest to us is the apocalyp-
tic portion of Chapters xxxvii to lxxi. There the Mes-
siah is announced in Chapters xlv-xlviii, in terms taken
from Daniel vii, as the Son of Man coming in the clouds,
but not as denoting Israel symbolically, but the words
are taken literally to mean that he, God's elect, will
come forth from his concealment where he has been
kept ever since the world's beginning, “the staff of the
righteous and a light to the nations,” to be placed by the
Ancient of Days, the Lord of the Spirits, upon His
throne to judge all the living, angels, men, and nations.
He shall consign the wicked, especially the God-defying

APOCALYPTIC LITERATURE OF OLD TESTAMENT
67
kings of Israel, such as was the murderous tyrant, king
Jannaeus, to eternal punishment in Gehenna, and accord
eternal life to the righteous, for whom inexhaustible
fountains of wisdom will be opened, to make them shine
as the angels in heaven. The names of these, Enoch saw
written in the books of life; those of the evildoers, in
the books of death. Otherwise he repeatedly claims to
have read all the great secrets of the hereafter in the
heavenly tablets, showing every event to be predeter-
mined, as was the belief of the Essenes, and he com-
mitted them all to his son Methusalah.
Intermingled with Enoch’s books are fragments of a
Noah Apocalypse, in which, in connection with the pre-
diction of the Flood, is also announced the day of
visitation of sinners and of a covenant banquet for the
righteous, for the latter of which the flesh of the two
great monsters, Behemoth and Leviathan (Job xl-xli)
will furnish the food, like the primeval ox of the Parsees
(Chapters xx, 6-8; 24 comp. iv Ezra. vi, 49; Apoc.
Baruch xxix, 4).
The last of the series of Enoch writings is the “Book
of the Secrets of Enoch,” written originally in Greek,
possibly after a Hebrew model, about the middle of the
first pre-Christian century, and preserved only in the
Slavonic language. Here, too, Enoch tells how he was
taken up in his sleep by two angels to the first heaven,
where he saw a great sea larger than the earthly sea, and
then “the Elders,” the two hundred rulers of the stars,
9
a


2 "The Book of Enoch,” R. H. Charles; Kautsch, “D. Apocryphen
u. Pseudepigraphen d. Alt
. Test”; Beers' transl. of Enoch; also
the books mentioned above in Note 1, and Jewish Encyclopedia s. v.
"Enoch."
68 HEAVEN AND HELL IN COMPARATIVE RELIGION
a
the treasuries of the snow, the ice, the hoarfrost and the
dew under the guardianship of angels, thence to the
second heaven, where the fallen angels were imprisoned
for whom he had pleaded in vain; and then to the third
heaven, where he beheld the celestial Paradise with its
tree of life from whose root four streams flowing with
honey, milk, wine, and oil issue forth, and its olive tree
ever distilling wondrous oil. This, he is told, is the
place prepared for the righteous as eternal inheritance.
Toward the North he saw the place of torture with its
fiery river, its ice and cold, to burn and freeze, and also
its pitiless angels, to scourge the various classes of sin-
ners. The sins specified offer a mirror of the vices prev-
alent then: sodomy, witchcraft, and magic; stealing,
lying, slander, envy, lustful thoughts, fornication, and
murder; kidnapping, oppression of the poor and cheat-
ing them of their possessions; instead of feeding the
hungry, allowing them to starve, and instead of cloth-
ing them, stripping them naked, and finally the worship
of idols, instead of recognizing God as the Creator.
Taken up to the fourth heaven, he saw the sun, the
moon, and the four great stars, each moving in their
chariots, the sun with its myriads of angels before it,
and wondrous phenixes and flying serpents, seraphlike,
accompanying it with songs on its drive Westward to
the six great gates, and again, on its coming out of the
six gates of the East. The moon also, in its movements
through the twelve lunar months of the year, and its
equation with the solar months in nineteen years, is
described. Of course, we observe here the influence of
Greek astronomy.
m

APOCALYPTIC LITERATURE OF OLD TESTAMENT
69
men, tak-
In the fifth heaven he found the Watchers, the for-
mer companions of the fallen angels, in sore distress
over the fate of their brethren, but he succeeded in hav-
ing them resume their song in worship of God. In the
sixth heaven he saw the seven orders of angels, fore-
most the archangels who are appointed over the rest
of the angels who direct the movements of the stars
and the seasons, the rivers and the seas, fruits and
herbs, and finally, those set over the souls of men,
ing account of their doings and their lives. They all
sing with one voice, accompanied by seven phonixes,
seven cherubim, and seven seraphim, rejoicing before
the Lord. Finally, taken up to the seventh heaven, he
beheld amidst the radiance of a great light ten classes
of angels worshiping the Lord seated on His lofty
throne, and singing their “Thrice Holy.” But, while
his angelic guides dared go no further, nor any of the
angels, the archangel Michael took, at God's bidding,
his earthly robe from him, and anointed him, and clothed
him with the raiment of the Divine Glory, so that he
became like one of the glorious angels himself. For
thirty days and thirty nights he was here instructed by
one of the highest angels 'in all the secrets of heaven
and earth, and he wrote them down in three hundred
and sixty-six (three hundred and sixty-five?) days.
Nay, more. God himself initiated him, as He had not
done to any one even among the angels, into the mys-
teries of His creation from the beginnings of the uni-
verse to those of man, and also regarding the end of
the days, so as to comprise the seven millennia of the
world. The eight thousand years in Chapter xxiii, 2


70 HEAVEN AND HELL IN COMPARATIVE RELIGION
4
seems to be due to Christian interpolation. He also
told him that these books of mysteries shall remain
under angelic guardianship until the time has come for
their disclosure. Being a Hellenistic product, the
Slavonic Enoch omits the Messiah and the Resurrection,
and instead accentuates the immortality, and also the
preëxistence, of the soul (xxxiii, 5).
In place of the antediluvian Enoch, the Alexandrian
Essenes, more versed in Greek literature, took the Sibyl,
the ancient heathen prophetess, known for her gloomy
foretellings to many lands, as a type of an apocalyptic
seer and preacher. Interspersing numerous oracles
which circulated under the name of the Chaldean and
Etrurian Sibyl in their writings, they represented her as
Noah's daughter-in-law announcing the imminent Flood
and at the same time warning the people to repent, as
did also Noah, according to the Talmudic tradition (San-
hedrin 90a f), in order that they escape their impending
doom. In the main, however, this was, as in the case
of Enoch, merely the prelude to the appeal to all coming
generations, that is, the heathen nations, to repent of
their sins, particularly of the three capital sins, idolatry,
murder, specifically infanticide, adultery or sodomy,
and to become true worshipers of the Only One and
holy God, lest perdition would overtake them. With
great emphasis, she dwells on the great Judgment Day
which would consign the wicked to the fire of hell (the
* The seven heavens recur also in the vision of Levi in the Testa-
ments of the Twelve Patriarchs (Levi ii, 3), and the cosmology is
nearly the same. So also in the Talmud Hagigah 12b f.
* See "The Book of the Secrets of Enoch,” Morfill and Charles
(1896).

APOCALYPTIC LITERATURE OF OLD TESTAMENT
71
Tartarus), to the fire of the world conflagration which
would consume the entire present world, to make way
for the new, which is to offer salvation and bliss to the
righteous under the reign of God's anointed King (=the
Messiah).
These Sibylline Books, however, were lost sight of
by the Jews and left in the hands of Christian writers,
who not only appropriated them and gave them, by in-
terpolations and alterations, a Christian character, but
also added new books to the original Jewish ones, and
disarranged their order, so as to make the reconstruc-
tion of the whole literature most difficult to the student.
Strange to say, the Sibyl became a prominent figure in
Church history down to the Middle Ages, but was alto-
gether forgotten by the Jews. It is sufficient for our
purpose to summarize a few of the books.
The oldest one, belonging to the Maccabean time, con-
sisted originally of Book i, 1-323 and Book iii, 97-828.
It presents, like one of the visions of Enoch, the his-
tory of the world from creation to the end of times
in ten periods, the last of which was to be ushered in by
the fall of Rome, as the fourth world kingdom doomed,
as is Syria in Daniel's vision, to perdition at the advent
of the Messiah. The biblical story of Genesis down to
the building of the Tower of Babel is here strangely
combined with Greek mythology, particularly with
Hesiod's theogony, and so are the builders of the Babel
Tower identified with the Greek Titans, and the three
sons of Noah paralleled with Saturn, Titan, and Japetus.
Adam's name is oddly connected with Hades, as the
death of the first man implied his entrance there, whereas

72 HEAVEN AND HELL IN COMPARATIVE RELIGION
Paradise is to be the future land of immortality.
We furthermore come across a number of Greek con-
cepts, such as the river Acheron and the Acherusian
Lake, which influenced the medieval visions of the In-
ferno down to Dante. It pictures the Messianic future in
glowing colors, and its prophetic tone probably inspired
Vergil in his portraiture of the Augustan age in his
Eclogues iv.
The other Sibylline Books identify the Elysian Fields
with Paradise, and tell of the three rivers of wine, milk,
and honey flowing there, also mentioned in the Slavonic
Enoch book, as well as of the biblical Manna awaiting
the righteous. The Essenic origin of these books,
despite the current opinion to the contrary, cannot be
doubted, as such passages as iii 591 f and iv, 26, 64,
referring to the rites of bathing in living waters for
worship and for conversion, and also those in iii, 235 ff.
and ii, 322 ff., extolling the virtue of justice, poverty,
and disinterested, helpful love, amply show. Worth
mentioning is at least the strange episode concerning
the anti-Christ in the person of Nero, who was expected
to reappear as the very embodiment of hostile Rome,
to come back from the far-off East, the alter-Ego of
Satan or Belial, to antagonize the Messiah, but only to
meet final defeat at his hand (Book iv, 119-138;
v, 28 f., 155 f., 215 f., 363 f.; viii, 151 f., 337 f.; xii,
78 f.). The fourth book is a strong appeal to the
heathen world to forsake idolatry and by a renewal of
their whole being by bathing in living streams, to enter
the fold of Judaism.
More important for us here is the remarkable passage

APOCALYPTIC LITERATURE OF OLD TESTAMENT
73
in ii, 253-313, in which the various classes of sinners
and their punishments are far more elaborately de-
scribed than in the Slavonic Enoch, x, 4-6. They be-
came henceforth the standing theme in the Christian
Apocalypses down to Dante's Inferno. The writer had
probably the Orphic visions as models before him, but
the Jewish character is evident. The passage reads
in full: “All have to pass the fiery stream, the un-
quenchable flame. The righteous will all be saved, but
the wicked will perish forever, whosoever have perpe-
trated evil before: The murderers and their abettors, the
liars and thieves, the fraudulent and the spendthrifts,
the adulterers and the tricksters, the backbiters, and
the arrogant, the lawless, the idolators, and those
who apostatized from the great, undying God, the blas-
phemers, and the oppressors of the pious; the enemies
of the faith and the slayers of the saints; the deceitful
and double-faced, the elders who seem venerable before
men's eyes, but act unjustly from fear of men, allow-
ing themselves to be guided by false rumors, more dan-
gerous than panthers and wolves, the worst of men,
however greatly they elate themselves above others!
Likewise the usurers who accumulate interest upon
interest in their houses, and those who afflict orphans
and widows, whether sharing their ill-gotten gain with
them or vexing them when giving them of their own;
those also who forsake their parents in old age, failing
to compensate them for what they received from them,
even for their education, and showing disobedience and
contradicting them in unseeming words; they also who
deny the goods they received in trust; the servants who

74 HEAVEN AND HELL IN COMPARATIVE RELIGION
rose against their masters; they who have polluted their
own body in lustful sin as well as those who violated pure
virgins or commingled with women in secret; those who
committed abortion and they who exposed their infants
to death, and the poisoners among men or women. All
these will the wrath of the heavenly God lead to the
stream of fire, and His angels will scourge them with
fiery chains, and cast them before the fierce monsters
of hell, and fiery wheels will turn them round about.
Lamenting over their terrible lot, the fathers over their
young children, the mothers over their sucklings, they
will fill these ghastly spaces with howling cries. Suf-
fering thrice for their evildoings, they shall be con-
sumed by fearful thirst and bitter woe, gnashing their
teeth and longing for death which will never come, and
it will be too late for repentance which is given only
for the seven decades (ages) of life.” Obviously we
have here a portraiture of the vices and crimes preva-
lent at the time, and the writer pours out his wrath of
indignation against his contemporaries, especially
against the hypocrites, sparing his own kinsmen as little
as did Dante in his Inferno.
It is easy to see how the Roman oppression and par-
ticularly the Romanizers on the Jewish throne, King
Herod and his sons, brought about a reaction in Judea
which opposed the apotheosis of Enoch—though in the
later Cabala Henoch-Metatron became God's charioteer,
like the Persian Mithra. So Abraham, the Jewish an-
cestor, became the typical seer and possessor of all wis-
dom in Enoch’s place. Accordingly, the Apocalypse of
Abraham describes his ascent to heaven with reference

APOCALYPTIC LITERATURE OF OLD TESTAMENT
75
a
to Genesis, Chapter xv, where the words, “He brought
him forth outside” (Verse 5) were interpreted: “He
lifted him above the firmament to look down upon the
stars and the world beneath.” Speaking in the first per-
son, the patriarch relates first all about his conversion
from idolatry to pure monotheism, and then how, after
having offered the fourfold sacrifice, which was to sym-
bolize the downfall of the four world kingdoms pre-
paratory to the Messianic era, he was carried by the
highest of the angels, named Yahoel, upon the wing
of the untouched bird to the uppermost heaven. There
he beheld amidst a radiant light the four holy creatures
of Ezekiel carrying the throne chariot of God. Looking
down from here, he saw the seventh heaven with its
multitude of angels, its light, and its dew (of resurrec-
tion), and then the sixth and the fifth heaven, where all
the stars are located. And there lay beneath him the
earth with its inhabitants, the men with their righteous
and ungodly deeds, and the sea with its great monsters,
and then hell with its torments for the wicked, and the
Garden of Eden with its blessed trees and its food for
the righteous. Mankind was divided into two opposite
parts, the people of God on the right and the idolaters
on the left; the former to be saved after the great judg.
ment, the latter to enter the realm of doom together
with the archfiend, Azazel. In the Garden of Eden he
beheld Adam and Eve, and, besides them, Cain in
league with the Adversary, round about whom were the
different vices such as impurity, jealousy, evil desire,
and idolatry with its Moloch sacrifices, while pure
worship of God and Prayer were on the other side.

76 HEAVEN AND HELL IN COMPARATIVE RELIGION
After this the patriarch was shown the destruction of
the Temple by the Romans, and he received the in-
formation that the age of ungodliness would last twelve
hours—that is twelve hundred years, from David to
Titus—and the age of righteousness would be ushered
in only after the divine judgment upon the heathen na-
tions shall have been executed through his (Abraham's)
seed. Ten plagues, as at Israel's deliverance from
Egypt, shall be visited upon the godless world, forming
the so-called birthpangs of the Messiah, and then blasts
of the heavenly trumpet will herald forth the advent
of God's elect, who, endowed with divine powers, will
summon the scattered and despised people of God to
the Holy City for their eternal possession, the number
of the righteous to be saved having been predetermined
in heaven. Their oppressors and foes shall be con-
sumed in the fire of Hades.
This apocalyptic book, discovered only in recent
times in its Slavonic garb, was originally written in
Hebrew and translated into Greek, and its contents are
reflected in the rabbinical literature as well as in the
Baruch Apocalypse, iv, 4, and iv Ezra, iii, 14.
We omit discussing these two Apocalypses, written
amidst the uttermost woe and despair of the people
after the destruction of the Temple, with the view of
offering them solace and hope by the announcement
that this world is fast approaching its end and that the
world of resurrection and eternal life is at hand. The
large eschatological material contained therein is rather
beyond our scope. Neither shall we expatiate on the
somewhat older apocalyptic book entitled “Assumptio

APOCALYPTIC LITERATURE OF OLD TESTAMENT
77
5
Moses” (= "the Taking up of Moses”), in which Moses
as “the mediator between God and Israel” announces
"the Day of Visitation” for the latter end of the fifth
millennium, which would place the Messianic era in
the sixth millennium. The main portion of the book,
which must have contained the visionary journey of
Moses along the heavens, and which is alluded to in
the Midrash (Sifre Deuteronomy xxxiv, 1 f.) and in
the Baruch Apocalypse lxxvi, has evidently been lost.
So we close this chapter with the highly instructive
Testament of Abraham, an Alexandrian product of the
first Christian century. In poetic form, the aged patri-
arch, the friend of God and benefactor of men, is por-
trayed here as rebelling at first against the fate of mor-
tality and submitting to it only after having received
the promise of being permitted to survey the entire
universe before his death. Thus, he is taken by the arch-
angel, Michael, in his heavenly chariot to the heights of
the firmament, where he looks down upon the earth with
its inhabitants. But then, as he observes the doings of
people, the murder, the adultery, and the burglary they
commit, he is horrified, and in his rage he asks the
archangel to smite the malefactors with instant death,
and the archangel is bound to obey. But there a voice
of heaven is heard saying: “O archangel, Michael, stop
thy chariot and turn Abraham away, lest, seeing all
living in wickedness, he destroy all creation. For, sin-
less as he is, he has no pity for sinners, whereas I who
am the Maker of the world do not wish to destroy a
single creature of Mine, but defer death until he repent
5 Jewish Encyclopedia, art. “Abraham, Testament of.”


5
78 HEAVEN AND HELL IN COMPARATIVE RELIGION
and live. Go, therefore, and show Abraham the judg-
ments and the retribution behind the Eastern (Western?)
gate of heaven that he may have compassion on the
souls of the sinners whom he killed in his wrath.” With
these words of incomparable beauty and grandeur, the
like of which have never been spoken by any prophet
since the days of Ezekiel, God sends Abraham with the
archangel to view Hell and Paradise. A grand scene
opens here before the gaze of the patriarch. Two
roads, one wide and one narrow, stretch on either side,
ending at two gates correspondingly large and small.
A large procession of souls is led by angels along the
former, and a few walk along the other. In front of
the two gates Adam, of majestic appearance, sits on a
golden throne watching, now weeping and tearing his
hair in distress at the sight of the multitude going
through the wide gate, and then smiling and exulting at
the sight of the few entering the narrow gate. For,
while the one leads to destruction and the other to eternal
bliss, against seven thousands walking on the road of
doom there is hardly one soul walking on the path of
righteousness without blemish. Following the proceed-
ing of the judgment of the souls, Abraham sees the
scourging angels driving thousands through the wide
gate to perdition with their tongs of fire, while he be-
holds a single soul being led by one angel to the middle
space. Farther on he sees Abel, the martyr son of
Adam, seated on a throne of crystal, and before him a
crystal table with an immense scroll in which the actions
of men are recorded by two angels holding pen and
ink in their hands. In another version of the book,

APOCALYPTIC LITERATURE OF OLD TESTAMENT
79
Enoch is named as the heavenly recorder, like Thoth,
the Egyptian scribe of the gods.—On the other side
one angel holds a pair of scales to weigh actions, and
another fierce-looking angel holds a vessel of fire to
probe the souls. Much puzzled as Abraham is by the
sight of Abel in this high position, he is told: “ Man
‘
shall be judged by man,' says the law (Gen. ix, 6); only
at the final judgment, which is everlasting and unchange-
able, God himself shall preside, and the twelve tribes of
Israel will be judged first (Comp. Yalkut to Dan. §
1064), and then all creation will be judged by the Ruler
of all at the end of time.”
The culmination of this wondrous vision is reached
by the following striking episode. One single soul is
being brought before Abel, and as the scroll is opened,
there, behold, the number and weight of the evil and
the good deeds of the soul are found to be exactly alike.
So the soul is neither handed over to chastisement, nor
to salvation, but placed in the middle state. Then Abra-
ham, on learning that the soul was to remain there until
God at the end of time decides its fate, says to the arch-
angel: “Let us offer a prayer on its behalf,” and as
both pray, there appears a light-encircled angel who
brings the soul to Paradise amidst the praise and thanks-
giving of the patriarch. After having thus been made
aware of the power of prayerful intercession on behalf
of this one soul, Abraham proceeds, amidst pangs of
remorse and tears, to invoke God's forgiveness for all
the souls of the sinners whom he had so rashly con-
signed to perdition, and God grants his request and re-
stores the dead to life. It is unnecessary to give here


80 HEAVEN AND HELL IN COMPARATIVE RELIGION
the rest of the story of the Apocalypse. Suffice it to
say that, after further arguments and information con-
cerning death, Abraham's soul is carried by the angels
into Paradise, where the various saints have their man-
şions of bliss assigned to them.
It must be noted here that there is nowhere in the
book any trace of the belief in Adam's fall and the orig-
inal sin, nor any allusion to Christ and his atoning power.
In other words, the assumption of the Christian character
of the Apocalypse is contradicted by its contents. On
the contrary, the passage in Matthew vii, 13-14, speak-
ing of the wide and narrow gate has its source right
here. Evidently Egyptian and Persian ideas have in-
fluenced the author, but he invested them with the spirit
of the ancient prophets and created a work which de-
serves to be read by all who wish to obtain the right
knowledge of Judaism in its eschatological aspect."
# James, “Testament of Abraham"; Kohler, “The Pre-Talmudic
Haggada” in the Jewish Quarterly Review, vii, 581-606; Jewish Ency-
clopedia, art. “Abraham, Testament of.”

CHAPTER VI
GEHENNA AND PARADISE IN THE APOCALYPTIC LITERA-
TURE OF THE NEW TESTAMENT
This is not the place for a critical estimate of the
New Testament as a historical source, and still less of
the personality of Jesus, concerning whom the opinions
of scholars differ as widely as do the conflicting records
in the gospels. Still, we cannot avoid considering sev-
eral important questions in dealing with the great sub-
ject. There is, first of all, the authorship of the gos-
pels and their sources, which demand consideration,
since neither Jesus nor any of his apostles, except Paul,
who never saw him alive, wrote a word of what we
have in the New Testament. Like his disciples, Jesus
spoke Aramaic, whereas the New Testament presents
his sayings and all the traditions about him in the
Greek language. Only three words of his have been
preserved in the Aramaic, two in Mark v, 41 and vii, 34,
spoken by him at the healing of a sick child and of a
deaf and dumb person, and probably regarded by the
writer as a magic formula, and a third one in Mark
xv, 35 and Matthew xxvii, 46, the famous outburst of
despair at the agony of death on the cross: “Eli, Eli,
lama shabachtani” (=“My God, my God, why hast
Thou forsaken me”), the Aramaic translation of Psalm


81
82 HEAVEN AND HELL IN COMPARATIVE RELIGION
92
as if
xxii, 2, which ill accords with the foretelling of his
tragic end and ascribed to him in numerous passages
throughout the gospels. Quite significantly Luke xxiii,
46 (comp. Acts vii, 59), has instead the Psalm
(xxxi, 6): “Father, in Thy hand I commend my spirit,"
while the late Gospel of Peter translates the former one:
“My power, my power, thou hast forsaken me,
the divine Christ thus addressed his human, or fleshly,
self, he himself having suffered no pain, as the heretic
sect called Docetæ, “the Semblancer,” assumed. It
stands to reason that during the two generations when
the original sayings of, and the traditions about, Jesus
were translated into Greek, many legends sprang up to
color and obscure the historical character of his per-
sonality whose very greatness consisted in his simple
and tender humanity.
But there is another point which concerns us here
most. It is to-day generally recognized by the scholarly
world that the religious movement which was started
by John the Baptist's call to the people to wash them-
selves clean of their sins in the waters of the Jordan
and repent in preparation for the kingdom of God
that was nigh," and which culminated in the proclama-
tion of Jesus as the Messiah by his Galilean followers
at Jerusalem, originated and centered in the Jewish
eschatology as developed and shaped by the Apoca-
lyptists since Daniel and Enoch. Only in these circles
the end of this world and the beginning of a new one
were looked for, with a view to the advent of the Messiah
as the “Son of Man” and the judge of the souls after
* See Jewish Encyclopedia, art. “John the Baptist.”
1
a

APOCALYPTIC LITERATURE OF NEW TESTAMENT 83
or before the Resurrection. And here the question
necessarily occurs to thinking readers, whether the sim-
ple fishermen and herdsmen of Galilee, among whom
Peter and John, the most prominent disciples of Jesus,
are characterized in Acts iv, 13, as “unlearned and
ignorant men,” could ever have understood those
eschatological terms such as is the Messianic "Son of
Man” of Enoch used by Jesus in addressing them?
True to his declaration, “I was not sent but unto the
lost sheep of the house of Israel” (Matt. xv, 24 comp.
xviii, 12 and Luke xv, 4 f,), he made it his life task
to bring home the good tidings of salvation by righteous-
ness to the outcast and despised, neglected by the Phari-
sean schoolmen, while they in turn lifted him in their
grateful homage at first to the station of a prophet, and
at last to that of a Messiah. None of the dozen and
more passages representing him as having spoken of
himself as the Son of Man in the sense of the Messiah,
is, accordingly, to be taken as genuine. They merely
betray the hand of such Essenic writers as had joined
the early Christian movement, eager to identify Jesus
with their Messianic concepts.?
Especially illuminating, therefore, are the twenty-
fourth and twenty-fifth chapters of Matthew. Leaving
aside the introduction in Matthew xxiv, 1-5, and paral-
lels in Mark and Luke and a few slight alterations or
additions, the original Jewish character of the Apoca-
lypse—in which even the Sabbath rest is accentuated
in v. 20—is self-evident. It plainly refers, not to the
apostles, but to the Jewish nation preparing the same
* Jewish Encyclopedia, art. “Jesus.”
2

84 HEAVEN AND HELL IN COMPARATIVE RELIGION
for the great crisis, the so-called “birth-throes” or “trav-
ail” of the Messianic time in which Daniel's "Abomina-
tion of Desolation,” the symbol of heathenism, and the
attack of the heathen nations upon Jerusalem, as well
as the false Messiahs, were to play a conspicuous rôle
before the final triumph to be brought about by the Son
of Man. Likewise is the parable of the wise and foolish
virgins, and that of the faithful and slothful servants
(xxv, 1-20, comp. Luke xii, 35-40, where the Son of Man
is especially mentioned) of Jewish, or, more particu-
larly, of Essenic origin, as can be learned from the al-
most identical and contemporary one in the Talmud
(Shabbath 153a). Even the idea of a marriage or
covenant feast in the hereafter is originally Jewish,
referring to the reunion of God and Israel as based on
Isaiah xlv, 1 and xlviii, 12 (comp. Pesik R. xli; Aboth
iii, 16 and Rev. xix, 9).
Still more significant is the second Apocalypse xxv,
31-46, in which the Messiah as the Son of Man and
the judge of the nations is portrayed as sitting as King
on God's throne of glory with all the angels around him.
Placing the sheep-that is, as in Enoch, the righteous
ones—on his right hand, and the goats, the unrighteous,
on the left, he shall say to those on his right: "Come,
ye blessed of my father, inherit the kingdom prepared
for you from the foundation of the world. For I was
hungered and ye gave me meat; I was thirsty, and ye
gave me drink. I was a stranger, and ye took me in;
,
naked, and ye clothed me; I was in prison, and
unto me” (probably to be corrected into "ye ransomed
me”). And then in answer to their questioning he

ye came
APOCALYPTIC LITERATURE OF NEW TESTAMENT
85
a
shall say: “Verily inasmuch as ye did it unto one of
these my brethren, even the least, ye did it unto me.”
Turning then to those on the left, he shall say: “Depart
from me, ye cursed, into the eternal fire which is pre-
pared for the devil and his angels!” while reproaching
them for having failed to practice charity in the way
the
righteous did. Now this whole address of Jesus to his
brethren in the name of his Father is but a substitute
for the original Judgment of God and His Anointed,
Enoch’s “Son of Man.” Moreover, the Midrash to
Psalm cxviii, 17, has preserved for us the reference to
the biblical source on which the whole Apocalypse was
based: "Open unto me the gates of righteousness that
I may enter.” This refers to the world to come, when
man, on being asked for his meritorious acts, will say:
“I gave the hungry to eat, I gave the thirsty to drink, I
clothed the naked, brought up the fatherless, aided the
poor, and practiced this or that charity,” and he will be
admitted among the righteous. Likewise, does God, ac-
cording to the Midrash (Aggadath Shir ha Shirim to
Song of Songs IV, 1), say to Israel: “In practicing char-
ity you do it unto Me, for I am in no need of bread,
but as you give it to the poor, you give it unto Me.”
Of particular importance, however, is the Apocalypse
contained in the “Book of Revelation" of John the Di-
vine, the last book of the New Testament, which, while
being connected and interwoven with the Letters ad-
dressed to the Seven Churches of Asia by John the
Presbyter on the isle of Patmos, underwent such radical
changes that its original Jewish character has not been
* See Jewish Encyclopedia, art. “Revelation, Book of.”
99
3


86 HEAVEN AND HELL IN COMPARATIVE RELIGION
recognized by the commentators, with the exception of
Vischer and Harnack, notwithstanding its utter incon-
gruity with the New Testament concept of Jesus and its
decided nationalism and Hebraism. Beginning with
Chapter iv, 1, and ending with xxii, 7, it has obviously
been written by one of the Essenic zealots during the
last days of the siege of Jerusalem by the Romans, be-
traying the very same Messianic views voiced soon after-
ward by the authors of the Baruch and Ezra Apoca-
lypses. The seer starts with a theophany similar to
that of Isaiah vi, Ezekiel, and Daniel, only adding to
Ezekiel's four living creatures twenty-four Elders-
probably taken from some Babylonian source- - the
heavenly court surrounding God's throne of glory.
There he sees in God's right hand a scroll with seven
seals to be opened only by the Lion of Judah, the root
of David. The opening of the first four seals by the
Jewish Messiah—for whom the Christian editor sub-
stituted the Slain Lamb announces the four horsemen:
War, symbolized by the victorious Parthian bowman,
Strife, Famine, and Pestilence, and the fifth, Persecu-
tions. At the sight of these the seer beholds the souls of
the Jewish martyrs under God's altar (Comp. Aboth d.
R. N. xxvi) and hears their cry: “How long, O Ruler,
dost Thou leave our blood unavenged?” but they are
told to have patience yet, for more numerous will be the
victims. The opening of the sixth seal announces earth-
quakes, eclipses of sun and moon, falling stars, and
other disturbances of heaven—exactly as in the above-
mentioned Apocalypse of Matthew and parallels—and
finally the seventh announces, as specially heralded by

APOCALYPTIC LITERATURE OF NEW TESTAMENT
87
seven trumpets, numerous plagues similar to the Egyp-
tian ones, then a star sending forth poisonous Worm-
wood, so as to smite the third part of the land, the sea
and rivers, and also sun, moon and stars.
These were
to be followed by three great woes, the one coming in
the shape of ferocious beasts, more so than in those of
Joel ii and iii, sent forth from the very depth of the
abyss, called Abaddon, to torment the inhabitants of
the earth. In protection against the plague twelve
thousand saints of each of the twelve tribes of Israel
were to have their foreheads marked by the seal of God,
and they were afterward to form the nucleus of the Mes-
sianic Kingdom at the Millennium. The second woe
was to come from the river Euphrates, whence the in-
vincible Parthian armies would invade the land and
slay a third part of mankind, but the rest would by no
means repent of their sins of idolatry, murder, fornica-
tion, and theft. Finally “the great secret of God,” the
world's end, with its good tidings for God's faithful
servants, will reach its fulfillment. As in Daniel's
vision, the seer now beholds the siege of the Holy City
and its Temple lasting three and a half years. During
this time two prophets, like Elijah and Moses, display-
ing miraculous powers, would preach repentance in sack-
cloth, but in the end succumb to the heathen foe, then
to be taken up to heaven amidst a mighty earthquake in
which seven thousand men would perish, and finally
the Holy City would fall into the hands of the heathen.
The great judgment to come upon Rome, however, is
preceded by two grand scenes in heaven (Ch. xii to xiii)
borrowed from a Babylonian myth. The seer beholds

88 HEAVEN AND HELL IN COMPARATIVE RELIGION
first Zion, the mother of the Messiah, pursued by Satan,
the primeval dragon, and forced to flee before giving
birth to her son, who is to rule all the nations with a rod
of iron” (= the Messiah of Psalm ii, 9), and who will
remain in concealment until the time arrives for his ap-
pearance on earth. Then again Satan is seen in battle
array against Michael, the guardian angel of Israel,
who finally hurls him down to the earth, thereby decid-
ing the fate of Satanic Rome. To this must be referred
the saying of Jesus in Luke x, 18: “I beheld Satan fall-
ing as lightning from heaven.”
Rome herself is now seen coming forth out of the
sea in the shape of a beast with seven heads and ten
horns, as depicted in Daniel vii, 4 f., uttering blas-
phemies against God and His temple and making war
against His saints, while all dwellers on earth worship it.
And this is followed by another beast coming up out of
the earth, exercising the authority of the first beast,
deceiving all men by having them bear the mark or the
name of that first beast on their right hand and fore-
head, while at the same time it displays miraculous pow-
ers. Of course, the first beast is Rome situated on seven
hills, having had seven kings from Augustus to Titus,
but identified with the demonic emperor, Nero Redi-
vivus, the incarnation of Belial or Satan, the name
given in Hebrew ciphers as 666 (= corresponding to
Neron Cæsar); the other beast represents the imperial
priesthood which deified the emperors of Rome whose
very image on the coins was regarded as a matter of
horror and abomination by the rigorous Essenes.
While the doom of both Rome and the worshipers
-

APOCALYPTIC LITERATURE OF NEW TESTAMENT
89
of the emperors is announced in heaven, there the Son
of Man in the clouds comes to sight, having a golden
crown on his head and a sharp sickle in his hand, with
which he is to gather the vintage of the earth for the
great wine press of the wrath of God (comp. Joel iv, 13)
and, in place of God in Isaiah lxiii, 2-6, he is arrayed in
a garment sprinkled with blood (Ch. xiv, 14; xix, 11).
Seven bowls of the divine wrath are then poured out
upon the worshipers of the beast and its throne, upon
the sea and rivers and the sun above, and also upon the
Parthian armies allied with the mythical Nero coming
from the East. But the last bowl of the divine wrath
brings about the final judgment, signaled by an earth-
quake such as was not since there were men on earth.”
As over Babylon of old in Isaiah xxi, 9, the voice re-
sounding through the heavens is heard crying forth:
“Fallen, fallen is Babylon the great, and is to become
the habitation of demons.” Rome, drunken with the
blood of the saintly martyrs, “the harlot that sitteth upon
many waters” who had made the kings of the earth
drunken with the wine of her fornication, is now to drain
the cup of the wine of the fierceness of God's wrath.
The merchant princes of the world shall wail over the
fall of the great city whose ships were upon all the seas,
laden with the treasures of the earth (xvii-xix). But
above it the heavenly powers will shout forth their Halle-
lujah! Salvation and glory to God who in His judg.
ment has avenged the blood of His servants! And the
birds that fly in midheaven shall be bidden to gather to-
gether for the great feast of God to eat the flesh of the
kings and the mighty men and their horses and the men.


90 HEAVEN AND HELL IN COMPARATIVE RELIGION
The beast and the false prophet and their armies that
made war against the Messiah and his army will be cast
into the lake of fire, while the victors in heaven and on
earth sing a new song of triumph besides the song of
Moses (xy and xix).
Then Satan will also be cast down into the
abyss and be chained there (like Azazel in the
book of Enoch) for a thousand years (xx). This is
the Messianic millennium, for which the Ezra Apoca-
lypse (vii, 28) has four hundred years, whereas the
Talmud Sanhedrin, 99a, offers reasons for figuring both
four hundred and one thousand years. During this time
the one hundred and forty-four thousand saints who
formed the kernel of the army of the Messiah will reign
as priests with him. In place of the ruined city a new
Jerusalem will be rebuilt of sapphires, rubies, and em-
eralds, as pictured in Isaiah liv, 11 f., and Tobit xii, 6;
xiv, 5, with its streets of pure gold, its twelve gates of
pearl, in accordance with the twelve tribes of Israel, and
its foundations of precious stones like those twelve
precious stones of the high priest's breast shield of yore
(xxi). The ark of old will again be brought to sight
(xi, 19). God will have His Shekinah there, and His
glory will be there for a light. His servants will see
Him face to face like Moses of yore, and the heathen
nations that will have escaped the universal doom will
walk in His light, and bring their wealth into it.
But, after the end of the millennium, Satan will be
released again out of his prison–exactly as was the
Parsee belief—and he will induce the armies of Gog
and Magog (of Ezekiel xxxviii-xxxix), numberless as

APOCALYPTIC LITERATURE OF NEW TESTAMENT
91
a
the sands of the sea, to encamp around the Holy City
and wage the final war against Israel. The battle is to
take place in Har Magedon (xvii, 16), (probably the
Hamon-Gog of Ezekiel xxxix, 11-17), but they will be
consumed by the fire of heaven (Ezek. 5, 6 ff.). Then
Satan, the great deceiver, will be cast into the lake of
fire to be tormented there forever. With him Hades
and Death will be cast down, and the earth and the sea
will give up their dead; for the last Judgment is
to be held by God himself after the general resurrec-
tion. In place of the first heaven and the first earth
and sea, a new heaven and a new earth will then arise
(=Is. lxv, 17; lxvi, 22), and a new Jerusalem will
come down from heaven like a bride adorned for God
as His spouse (Is. lxi, 5). A river of the water of life
proceeding from the throne of God will be in the midst
of the streets to feed the tree of life, which will have
twelve kinds of fruit for the twelve months of the year,
and whose leaves will be for the healing of the na-
tions (Ezk. lxvii, 12). No unclean one, nor any sinner
will enter the city, whose name shall be “The Lord is
there” (Ezek. Ixviii, 35).
Such are in the main the contents of this remarkable
Apocalypse, obviously written at the very height of
the great tragedy of the Jewish nation. It evidences, as
Mommsen in his History of Rome (v 521 f., Germ.
Ed.) has well stated, the author's intense hatred of
Rome, and likewise the abhorrence of the deification of
her emperors, whose images were as loathsome to the
zealot, as was the idol of Antiochus Epiphanes to the
Maccabean saints. Never could the Neronic persecu-

92 HEAVEN AND HELL IN COMPARATIVE RELIGION
a
tions of the Christians in Rome have provoked such ve-
hement ire and fury against heathenism as is voiced
here at the very time when the Church endeavored to
win over the heathen world. But aside from this, the
outlook of the Apocalypse upon a future which is cen-
tered upon Jerusalem as the capital of the twelve
tribes of Israel, while the worshipers of God from among
the heathens play only a secondary rôle, strongly con-
trasts with the view expressed in those passages which
speak of a world conquest by Christianity under the Mes-
siahship of the slain Lamb (after Is. lxi, 7; comp. Acts
viii, 32.) The Christian editor not only substituted
the Lamb for the Lion of Judah, and the Christian
saints and martyrs for those of the Jewish people, but
went so far as to accord to Jesus titles such as "the
first and the last,” “the alpha and omega,” and the
praises befitting God alone. He also made so many
alterations and interpolations in the original as to dis-
arrange the entire order and dislocate numerous pas-
sages. This editor, probably John the Presbyter himself,
a declared antagonist of Paulinian Christianity which
he places on a level with the idolatrous practices of
Balaam and Jezebel (Ch. ii, 5; 14; 20), apparently
felt called upon to adapt the Jewish Apocalypse—which,
written in Hebrew or Aramaic, seemingly had a large
circulation among the Essenes and Judeo-Christians—to
the views and doctrines of the Church, notwithstanding
its nationalistic character. Henceforth the “Book of
Revelation” became the common property of the
Church. By Dante, however, as by the medieval writers
in general, the book was ascribed to John the Apostle,

APOCALYPTIC LITERATURE OF NEW TESTAMENT
93
to whom, as the type of divine love, the highest place in
heaven is assigned in the Paradiso xxv, 94, where the
very words of the Apocalypse vii, 9, are quoted. But
the whole aspect of the heavenly Jerusalem is based
upon this Apocalypse.
Before discussing the Apocalypses of Peter and Paul,
which exerted a determining influence on the Inferno
and Paradiso of Dante and on his medieval predeces-
sors, it may not be amiss to dwell briefly on the doctrine
of Christ's descent to Hades, which formed part of the
apostolic symbol or creed, and has found a conspicuous
place at the very beginning of the Inferno iv, 50-59.
To the believer in the divinity of Jesus, the story of his
death and his bodily resurrection on the third day was
naturally more or less offensive. Thus, at an early pe-
riod, the belief arose that his going down to the realm
of the departed was not an ordinary death, but was a
voluntary act of his, done with a view to release the
spirits imprisoned there, to make them partake, by his
preaching, of his salvation (I Petri iii, 19; iv, 6). The
same idea is expressed in the Ephesians iv, 8-10, where
the Psalm (Verse lxviii, 19): Thou hast ascended on
high and hast led captivity captive and received gifts
among men—applied by R. Akiba to Moses (Shabbath
892)-refers to Jesus as having descended unto the
lower parts of the earth, and from there ascended above
all the heavens “to take the captives and give gifts
unto men.” Accordingly, the apocryphal Gospel of
Peter (v, 10) tells that Jesus, when rising out of the
tomb and reaching to the uppermost heaven, is addressed
by the heavenly voice: “Hast thou preached to them that


94 HEAVEN AND HELL IN COMPARATIVE RELIGION
sleep?” and his answer is given from the cross: “Yea.”
A full description of the descent is given in the apoc-
ryphal Gospel of Nicodemus ii, 10, according to which
Jesus, as the Lord of Glory of Psalm xxiv, 7-10, enters
Hades in human shape to seize Satan and hand him over
chained to Hades, to keep him secure until his second
coming. He, then, delivers Adam and all his descend-
ants, with the help of the cross suspended in Hades, and
takes them with him to Paradise, giving them in charge
of the archangel, Michael, while they are met by Enoch
and Elijah. Likewise has the Christian portion of the
apocalyptic Ascensio Isaiac Chapters vi to xi, a “Vision
of Isaiah” belonging to the second century, in which
the prophet is represented as having ascended up to
the seven heavens, where he first beheld Adam, Abel,
Seth, Enoch, and the rest of the righteous. Above this
he sees a light more radiant than anywhere in the other
heavens, encircling the Trinity, the unnamable God
of Glory in the center, Jesus, glorious like Him, at His
right, and the angel of the spirit (=the Holy Ghost) at
His left. There he heard the voice of the Most High
telling Jesus to go down, descending through all the
heavens beneath, until he reaches the firmament, where
the ruler of this world, that is Satan, resides, and then
enter unknown the forecourt of Hades, which is the
Limbo of the medieval writers, but not Gehenna. There
he should remain for three days. The real object of
this descent, however, is not stated in the apocalyptic
fragment. While the Church Fathers differ as to the
souls that were redeemed by the descent of Jesus, Dante
follows the generally accepted doctrine that the Old

APOCALYPTIC LITERATURE OF NEW TESTAMENT
95
Testament worthies were released by Jesus from the
Limbo and taken up with him to Paradise.
The so-called Apocalypse of Peter, known at the close
of the second century as such, was found in the year
1886 in fragmentary form together with a part of the
apocryphal Gospel of Peter and a portion of the “Book
of Enoch” on a little parchment scroll deposited in a
tomb at Achmin in Upper Egypt, and the discovery of
those two unknown writings created a great stir through-
out the scholarly world. As Albert Dieterich, in his
work, “Nekyiah,” well suggests, the scroll containing
these eschatological portions was, like the ancient Egyp-
tian tomb deposits, placed there as a talisman for the
dead. Among the many writers who discussed these
“relics of the earliest Christian Apocalypses,” Mon-
tague Rhodes James of Cambridge, England, says that
“the Apocalypse of Peter had a share in the moulding
of the greatest poem of the Middle Ages, the ‘Divina
Commedia,”” taking it to be the source, not merely of
the Apocalypse of Paul, but also of the second book of
the Sibyllines, which we have shown in the former chap-
ter to be mainly a Jewish work. On closer examination
the Apocalypse proves to be, as maintained by Dieterich,
a compilation of older material rather than an original
unit. It apparently consists of three parts artificially
connected. The beginning is taken over, though not
literally, from the eschatological address ascribed to
Jesus in Matthew xxiv-xxv and parallels discussed be-
fore. It must be noted, however, that the words "the
sons of perdition” and the “sons of lawlessness,” corre-
sponding with the Hebrew of Sons of Belial, are used

96 HEAVEN AND HELL IN COMPARATIVE RELIGION
in the Epistles and not in the Synoptic Gospels. The
following vision of the two men, “shining with the radi-
ant beauty of angels” and standing before Jesus on the
mount, and also of the place of the righteous in heaven,
“luminous like the sun and fragrant with the perfume
of wondrous plants and spices,” shown the apostles by
Jesus at their request, appears to be a comment on, or
another version of, the story of the transfiguration
(Matt. xvii, 2, Mark ix, 2); particularly so of Luke ix,
28. There Moses and Elijah appeared to the three
apostles as communing with Jesus. Their aspect was so
dazzling that Peter asked whether they should not have
a screen or tabernacle to be able to bear the overawing
sight. At any rate, the Christian Apocalyptist found in
the story an opportunity of describing briefly the place
of the former righteous men and their glory in Paradise.
Far larger is the description of the place of chastisement
and of those that were being chastised by the dark
appareled angels, seen by the writer directly opposite
to the paradise. There is nothing in this whole portion
to indicate a Christian origin. First there are those
that “blaspheme the way of righteousness," and these
are seen hanging by their tongues, while the flaming fire
torments them from beneath. Then there are those who
pervert righteousness, seen in a great lake of burning
mire tormented by angels. A third class are women
hung by their hair over the bubbling mire, because they
adorned themselves for adultery, whereas the adulterers
were hanging by their feet with their heads in the mire.
A fourth class consisted of murderers and those who had
conspired with them; they were cast into a pit full of

APOCALYPTIC LITERATURE OF NEW TESTAMENT
97
-
evil reptiles by which they were smitten and tormented,
while their victims stood by them and, seeing their pun-
ishment, cried forth: “O God, righteous is Thy Judg-
ment!” A fifth class was formed by mothers who de-
stroyed their children and caused abortion; they were
seen in a pit filled with the gore and filth that ran down
from them and rose up to their throats, while the chil.
dren who thus died, born before their due time, cried
out against them. A sixth class were those that had
persecuted the righteous and delivered them up; they
had fire up to the middle of their body, while they were
scourged by evil spirits and had their entrails devoured
by worms that rested not (=Is. Ixvi, 24). A seventh
class who had blasphemed and spoken evil of the way
of righteousness” were seen gnawing their lips and re-
ceiving red-hot iron upon their eyes. An eighth class
was made up of false witnesses, who were seen gnaw-
ing their tongues and having flaming fire in their
mouths. A ninth class were the wealthy who had no
pity upon the orphans and widows, thus neglecting the
commandment of God”; they were seen, clad in filthy
rags, rolling upon pebbles sharper than swords and
spits. A tenth class was formed by usurers who stood in
a lake of pitch and blood and boiling mire up to their
knees. An eleventh class was hurled down from a
great cliff and carried up again to be hurled down anew
in ceaseless turns. These were those who had polluted
their bodies, the men by sodomy, the women by a similar
perversion of nature. A twelfth class consisted of
worshipers of idols in place of God. A thirteenth class
smote each other incessantly with iron rods. . . . Here
a

.
98 HEAVEN AND HELL IN COMPARATIVE RELIGION
is a lacuna, but it has been well suggested that the
missing words stated that these were the quarrelsome
and pugnacious ones, bent upon hurting their fellow-
men. The fourteenth and last class were seen burning
and being roasted, while turning about in the great
flame; these were those who had forsaken "the way of
God."
We have here, then, the punishments to be the exact
retribution of the various sins on the principle of meas-
ure for measure as found in all ancient systems of
legislation and applied to the hereafter, as we have seen,
in the Orphic and Pythagorean eschatology, in Plato
and Vergil; but the list of sins in our Apocalypse, among
which that against the way of righteousness” or “the
way of God” stands out conspicuously, has its parallel
only in the second book of the Sibyllines, and is de-
cidedly Jewish in character. This is confirmed by the
Apocalypse ascribed to Joshua ben Levi of the third
century, as we shall see in our next chapter.
Quite different is the Apocalypse of Paul, which
first appeared at the close of the fourth century, with
the claim of having been found, owing to an especial
revelation, in the apostle's house in Tarsus. It made
such an impression upon the following centuries that
for some time it was read in the Church like any New
Testament book and was circulated in many translations
in the Syriac and Latin, as well as modern languages,
so as to become a popular book. It is probably re-
ferred to by Dante in his Inferno ii, 31, when he speaks
* See Tischendorf, “Apocalypses Apocrypha”; James' “Visio
Pauli"; Brandes' “Visio Pauli," Halle, 1885; and Robinson, "Texts
and Studies,” II, Cambridge, 1893.
4

APOCALYPTIC LITERATURE OF NEW TESTAMENT
99
of Paul as "the chosen vessel who travelled to those
regions beyond.” The compilatory character of the
Apocalypse has been generally recognized by the critics,
but the state of disorder and confusion in which the
more favored second part is found, dealing with the
description of hell and its punishments, shows the many
alterations, interpolations, and dislocations which por-
tions of it have undergone in the course of centuries
at the hands of medieval monks and ecclesiastics.
As the beginning shows, it is based upon Paul's say-
ing in II Corinthians xii, 9, that "he was caught up to
the third heaven where he heard unspeakable words
which it is not lawful for man to utter.” Still it is note-
worthy that no trace of Paul's doctrines concerning sal-
vation by grace and original sin caused by the first
Adam and to be atoned by the voluntary death of Christ
as the new Adam, is found throughout the Apocalypse,
though later ecclesiastical views have been inserted.
The main part of the Apocalypse lays all stress on re-
pentance, for the preaching of which the apostle is, like
Enoch and Abraham in the Jewish Apocalypses, sent
forth by God through the vision he receives. So are the
modes of reward of the righteous and of punishment
of the wicked originally conceived in the spirit of pure
ethics, while only the narrow ecclesiasticism of the
Middle Ages confounded the system by its interpola-
tions. Omitting the introductory paragraphs which re-
late to the finding of the Apocalypse, we notice a two-
fold address of the apostle at the bidding of the Lord,
one to "the children of Abraham who are doing Satan's
work” and another to “the sons of men whose sinful

100 HEAVEN AND HELL IN COMPARATIVE RELIGION
2
nature provokes the wrath of God.” This is followed
by a dramatic appeal of sun, moon, stars, and the earth
to God to bid them destroy the iniquitous race which
commits adultery, fornication, murder, theft, violence,
and sorcery, but to each God replies: “My eyes behold
and My ears hear it all; and nothing is hidden from Me,
but My goodness and long-suffering bear with them; per-
adventure they may turn and repent, and their sins be
forgiven. If they do not repent and turn to Me, I shall
judge them with a righteous judgment, and shall reward
every man according to his deeds.” Also when the an-
gelic spirits of men, who give God account of their
doings each day, complain of their wickedness and their
neglect to pray for the divine forgiveness, God says to
them: “Cease not to serve them as their guardian angels;
peradventure they may repent and turn to Me before I
judge them with a righteous judgment.” The absence
even of the name of Christ in this highly poetic portion
is certainly most significant.
The real vision begins with paragraph eleven, de-
scribing the place of the righteous and their departure
from earth, and then the place of the wicked and their
departure. The latter are seen surrounded by the
powers of this world, the spirits of deception, of ac-
cusation, of lewdness, and of avarice, and “angels in
whom there is no mercy are sent for the souls of those
sinners who do not repent, nor believe in God and wait
for His salvation.” The former were led by angels of
righteousness, with faces bright as the sun and girdles
of gold and pearls, holding in their hands crowns, and
having the name of the living God inscribed on them.

APOCALYPTIC LITERATURE OF NEW TESTAMENT 101
(Here the Latin version has the Son of God instead.)
They were to carry these righteous souls in meekness
before the throne of God. On looking down upon the
tiny earth beneath, the apostle saw first a fiery cloud
spread over the whole world, being told that this was
the iniquity coupled with the perdition of the sinners.
He then beheld a righteous man at the point of death
when all his good deeds stood by him as his angels,
promising him a place among the saints at the Resur-
rection, whereas the bad angels, with all the wicked pow-
ers under heaven, the spirits of deception, of tempta-
tion, and of lust, fought in vain for the possession of
his soul. Amidst the praises of all the angels and the
prayers of his guardian angel, his soul is, then, at the
bidding of the heavenly voice, committed to the arch-
angel, Michael, the doorkeeper of Paradise, there to be
kept until the day of Resurrection. At this sight the
myriads of adoring angels and archangels, the cherubim
and seraphim, and also the twenty-four Elders we know
from the Book of Revelation shout forth: “Just art
Thou, O Lord, and righteous are Thy judgments” (Ps.
cxix, 1, 37). Seeing on the other hand the wicked man
depart from life, which was nothing to him but eating
and drinking-(Here a sentence is inserted which refers
to the descent of Christ to Hades and which had no
place in the original)—the apostle finds him in the last
hour embittered by the aspect of all the wickedness he
had committed, so that he cries out: “It would have
been better for me if I had not been born!” and all the
good angels flee away from him, and even his own
guardian spirit turns away in distress at his lifelong


102 HEAVEN AND HELL IN COMPARATIVE RELIGION
refusal to repent. And in answer to all the appeals made
to God for his forgiveness, the Heavenly Voice is heard,
saying: “Whosoever hath shown mercy, mercy will be
shown to him, but he who hath shown none, will not
be dealt with mercifully, either. So let this soul be
delivered to the relentless Temeluchos, the keeper of the
place of torment, and be cast into outer darkness where
there is but wailing and gnashing of teeth.” At these
words the voices of the myriads of angels are echoed
forth: “Thou, O Lord, are just, and righteous is Thy
Judgment!”
But then one soul was heard in its dire suffering say-
ing: “I have not sinned, O Lord!” when the great Judge
of heaven summoned the angel who kept account of
men's doings to come forth with his writing, and he
said: “Behold, such are the sins committed by this soul
from his fourteenth year until this day!” whereupon
the Heavenly Voice was heard saying: “If thou hadst
repented but three days before now, not one of thy sins
would have been remembered. And now I swear by My
angels and the strength of My arm, if thou hadst re-
pented but one hour before thy death, I would have re-
ceived thee.” Then all the souls against whom this
person had sinned stood up as witnesses against him;
one person whom he had killed, another with whom he
had committed adultery, and likewise the children that
had become victims of abortion, and forthwith the lying
soul was handed over to Tartaruchos, the keeper of the
lowest hell, while the myriads of angels uttered, as be-
fore, their praise of God's justice.
After this the apostle was carried to the third heaven

APOCALYPTIC LITERATURE OF NEW TESTAMENT 103
(Ch. xix ff.) and shown the golden gate of the city of
God, through which only the simple-minded and pure
of heart are permitted to enter (Ps. cxviii, 20). There
he saw two golden tables covered with writings contain-
ing the names of the righteous. At the opening of the
gate a man of angelic appearance saluted him with a
kiss, yet his sad countenance told of his deep sorrow
at men’s ingratitude toward their Maker, whose com-
mandments they failed to obey. This was Enoch, "the
scribe of righteousness.” Then Elijah came and saluted
him, also complaining that so few of mankind are ad-
mitted to these places there. As he proceeded, the apos-
tle was told by his angelic guide not to reveal the mys-
teries of the place to any living man.
From the top-
most heaven, where the throne of God's glory was as-
sumed to be, the apostle goes down to the second heaven,
and there he beholds the heavenly river, with myriads
of gigantic trees on both sides, bringing forth every
month fruits of many kinds (= Ezek. xlvii, 12), and the
tree of life in the midst of this luminous and most de-
sirable creation of the living God. At the same time
he is told, that "seven times more delightful places are
prepared for the righteous,” “things which eye hath not
seen, nor ear heard” (Is. lxiv, 3). Thus a land brighter
than silver and gold with wondrous produce is prom-
ised to the meek and chaste; and here in the Christian
spirit are added “those that preserve their virginity,”
being celibates. A golden ship upon the wondrous
oceanic river-called after the Sibylline Books the
Acherusian Lake, for which the Syrian version has the
Sea of Eucharist-brings him to the city of God, the
9

104 HEAVEN AND HELL IN COMPARATIVE RELIGION
celestial Jerusalem-named here the city of Christ-
with its twelve gates and twelve walls, illumined by a
light seven times as bright as the sun. Like the biblical
Garden of Eden, it has at its four sides four rivers, one
flowing with honey and called Phishon, the other with
milk and called Euphrates, the third with oil, Gihon,
and the fourth with wine, Tigris. Upon the river of
honey was the city of the prophets, and there the apostle
was greeted by each of the prophets from Moses to
Zachariah and the rest. At the river of milk at the
South he beheld the guileless infants (the insertion,
“Whom Herod slew," only betrays the hand of a
naïve New Testament reader), and he was told that here
was the dwelling place of the pure and childlike. On
the river of wine in the North he saw the residences of
the venerable fathers of yore, the patriarchs, and Job,
and was told that those who love the stranger and show
kindness to their fellow-men are to be in this company.
On the river of oil in the East there were those who had
consecrated their lives to God. (Here follows a para-
graph assigning a special place of honor to such as are
ignorant and without books, and in their simplicity,
while lowly and despised, continually commune with
God. It needs little argument to show that this is an
insertion of some Christian recluse.) In the midst of
the celestial city, King David, with a face shining like
the firmament, was seen standing near a high altar, play-
ing the harp and the cither and singing Hallelujah, in
which the whole city chimes with reverberating shouts
of Hallelujah. (Here an interpolator makes reference
to Christ, and this is followed by an odd interpretation

APOCALYPTIC LITERATURE OF NEW TESTAMENT 105
of the term Hallelujah with some corrupt Aramaic words,
and an admonition to Church-goers not to neglect to
respond to the songs and prayers of the service.) Be-
fore entering the city, the apostle tells that he saw in
front of the gate great and very high trees, having only
leaves, but no fruits, and under these trees there were
a few men weeping whenever some righteous man en-
tered the city, and he was told, “The root of all evil is
false pride,” and like these trees barren of fruit, were
these men, haughty while fasting and praying, but lack-
ing the fruit of righteousness, humility, and regard for
others. Only when they have put aside their conceit
will they be admitted at the coming of the Lord of
Glory. (Christ is an addition.)
From there (Ch. 31) he was led to the Western end
of heaven where the great ocean surrounds the earth,
to see the place of torment of the sinners, where there.
prevailed only darkness, mourning and groaning.
There he beheld a river of fire-the Periphlegeton of
the Greeks in which men and women stood sunk to
their knees, others to the navel or belly, and again others
to their lips and eyelids—some versions read also, “to
the arms and ears”—to suffer for the sins committed
by the one or the other member of their body. But the
real order of these sins, as it was undoubtedly given
in the original, has not been preserved in the various
versions. Mentioned are only the blasphemers and
slanderers who sin with their lips, the murderers, in-
fanticides, and abortionists whose sins point to the belly,
the thieves who sin with their arms, and the usurers and
betrayers of the poor, the orphans and widows, and nig-

106 HEAVEN AND HELL IN COMPARATIVE RELIGION
gards whose evil eye is the source of their sins. The
medieval ecclesiastics and monks, however, were appar-
ently not satisfied with the chastisement of sins against
morality or against God and religion in general, but
wanted to have whisperers during the service, faithless
priests, bishops, deacons, and readers of the Church,
and especially disbelievers in the dogmas of the Church,
singled out for severe and gruesome punishment, and
their narrow-mindedness appealed most to the readers or
hearers. Hence the diversity and disorder throughout
the entire portion.
Especially significant is the fact that there is men-
tioned a class of men who were not on a level with the
righteous nor with the wicked, but filled up their life
in error, serving their body and indulging in evil imagi-
nations, failing to repent,” in other words, the inter-
mediate class of the Parsee and the Jewish Eschatology,
but what was their fate is no longer stated, because the
copyists no longer understood the meaning of the text.
Brought to another river of fire of immense depth
the bottom of which could not be reached within a hun-
dred years, the apostle saw it filled with numerous souls
whose torment was such as to cause him to weep; but
his angelic guide reproached him saying: “Wherefore
dost thou weep? Art thou more merciful than God?”
Whereupon he humbly acknowledged his weakness, as-
serting his belief in God's goodness and long-suffering
unto the sons of men. (Again it is to be noted that not
a word is mentioned concerning Christ's mediatorship.)
A third river of fire showed men and women tor-
tured by “the worm that dies not” (Is. lxvi, 24) and

APOCALYPTIC LITERATURE OF NEW TESTAMENT 107
dragons—some versions have here Behemoth (and
Leviathan)—who opened their mouths ever anew to
devour them. There were seen usurers and despisers
of the word of God gnawing at their tongues. A pit
filled with blood held sorcerers, adulterers, oppressors
of widows and orphans, unchaste women clad in black
garments, and mothers against whom their slain children
cried out for revenge. But when their ghastly torments
moved the apostle to more tears of compassion, the
angel told him that he has not seen real pain as yet,
and he led him to a pit closed with seven seals, at the
opening of which there came out an unbearable stench.
It contained seven plagues for seven types of sin. There
were those that were continually cast from coals of fire
to piles of snow and ice and back again, and they cried
forth, “Oh, that we would never have been born!” The
sin they were guilty of was that they said there is no
Resurrection; but the present text has all kinds of dis-
belief in the Christian dogma instead!
Here follows a touching scene. The unfortunate sin-
ners, on seeing the apostle and his angelic guide weep,
cried forth: “O Lord God, have mercy upon us!” And
there behold, the archangel Gabriel with the whole host
of angels came down from heaven, all joining in their
supplications, saying: “O Lord God, have mercy on
the work of Thine hand. Have mercy on Thine image!”
Then the very heavens shook like trees before the wind,
and the twenty-four Elders cast themselves down before
God, making supplication in the sight of the altar, the
veil, and the throne of glory. And there, amidst the
,
sound of the trumpet, the Son of God came down in all
a

108 HEAVEN AND HELL IN COMPARATIVE RELIGION
his glory and said, “What do My glorious angels de-
sire?” and they answered and said, “Plenitude of Thy
mercy for the sons of men!” And all the tormented
souls cried aloud, “Son of God, have mercy upon us!”
Whereupon a voice was heard saying: “What good
have you done that you should deserve respite? You
have but followed your own desire, and did not repent,
spending your life in licentiousness. Still for the sake
of Gabriel, the angel of righteousness, and of Paul my
beloved, I grant you the night and the day of Sunday,
the day of my resurrection, for respite.” And forth-
with all the tormented broke forth into a cry of thanks-
giving and said, “This very respite is better than the
whole life we passed in the world above.” This beauti-
ful episode casts a flood of light upon the whole Apoc-
alypse. While it became the favorite thought of the
Middle Ages—inasmuch as it was a welcome antidote
to the belief in the eternity of the torments of hell, and
lent a certain cheerfulness to Sunday as the day of the
resurrection of Christ—its origin is to be found in the
older Jewish belief, as found in the Talmudic and
Midrashic sources. It says there: “Every Friday, at
nightfall, Dumah, the angel set over the dead in the
land of Silence,' calls out to the dwellers in hell, “Let
the wicked here have their Sabbath rest!' and when the
Sabbath closes with nightfall the following day, he again
calls out, “Return to your torment in Gehenna,' as the
people of Israel have finished their Sabbath service!”
The underlying idea is that the Sabbath rest, being im-
planted in creation by God, is observed in hell and
heaven as well as on earth. But a critical examination

APOCALYPTIC LITERATURE OF NEW TESTAMENT 109
5
of the whole Apocalypse shows that just as the idea of
a Sabbath rest for the unfortunate in hell has been taken
over by the Christian Apocalyptist and given its Chris-
tian character, so some of the principal ideas of the
whole Apocalypse, such as the vindication and glorifica-
tion of God's justice in the sight of affliction even in hell,
and the joyous salutation or wailing of the angels at
their meeting the souls of either the righteous or the
sinners on their departure from life, have been simply
taken over from the Jewish, or Essenic sources, and only
superficially transformed for the Christian reader.
As a matter of fact, however, these eschatological ideas
can all be traced back to Parseeism.
Here the original Apocalypse apparently ended.
The following seven paragraphs are a repetition of the
former portion of Paradise taken from another version
in which the order of succession of Paradise and Hell is
reversed, and which shows a strong anti-Jewish bias,
while the whole ends abruptly. Its pronounced Chris-
tian character is shown in the more elaborate descrip-
tion of the tree of life where the Holy Ghost rested, and
the tree of knowledge of good and evil through which
Adam and Eve sinned, bringing thereby death into the
world. Near the tree of life guarded by the cherubim
and the fiery sword, Mary, the mother of Jesus, appears
• See Sanh. 65b; Gen. R. xi, 6; Jellinek. B. H. I. 74; 184 and for the
rest see Isr. Levi in Revue des Etudes Juives xxv, 1-13; also in re-
gard to the other views of the Apocalypse expressed in far older
Jewish sources see especially Sifre to Deut. xxxii, 4; Ab. Zara 18a
and Joshua ben Levi in Erubin 19a; Keth. 104a; Eccl. R. to i, 15;
Sota 3b; also Testament Asser. 6; Test. Naphtali 8 and Revelation
xiv, 13. As to the Parsee views see Boecklen, “D. Verwandschaft d.
jŭdishen, christlichen und parsischen Eschatologie,” pp. 40-50.

110 HEAVEN AND HELL IN COMPARATIVE RELIGION
to the apostle, praising him for his work of salvation
for the world through his Church. Then the three pa-
triarchs and afterward the twelve sons of Jacob appear,
all lauding him for his preaching and his great labor for
the faith in Christ, especially Joseph, referring to his
own trial, brought on him by his own brethren. They
are followed by Moses, the lawgiver, who, oddly enough,
weeps, accusing his own people not merely of idol wor-
ship, but also of having committed the cruelty of cruci-
fying the Son of God, and in this condemnation of the
crucifiers the patriarchs, as well as all the angels, join,
asking for their immediate destruction, while God alone
restrains them. The prophets, twelve in number, also
appear: Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel, each charging
his own people with the crime of having slain them,
and blessing Paul and those who have been taught by
him to believe in Jesus Christ. Lot follows, who is
lauded for his hospitality to strangers; then Job, who
bravely stood the great ordeal of suffering and also
Satan's (not his wife’s) tempting words: “Curse thy
God and die!” and afterward Noah, who had preached
repentance to his generation and ceased not praying for
them, but in vain. Finally, Enoch and Elias stepped
forth as preachers of repentance, but Enoch's address
to the apostle is not given in this fragment, with which
the Apocalypse closes.
It is difficult to say whether Dante made any direct
use of this Apocalypse of Paul, which was utilized by
so many visionary monks of the Middle Ages in their de-
scriptions of hell and heaven. This, however, must be
stated, that the genius of the great medieval poet would

APOCALYPTIC LITERATURE OF NEW TESTAMENT 111
not allow him to indulge in the hatred of the Jews that
inspired the writer of the Apocalypse. He voiced the
pure sentiments of justice and human ethics, making
his Inferno the dispenser and instrument of rigid and
impartial justice, and assigning to his Purgatorio the
function of administering mercy.

CHAPTER VII
GEHENNA AND PARADISE
IN RABBINIC AND MOHAMMEDAN LITERATURE
A. Rabbinic Literature
Familiarity with the Bible and the classics is generally
regarded as an indispensable factor of intellectual cul-
ture, but even among the learned there prevail the
quaintest notions about the character and contents of
rabbinic literature. Few are aware of its close relation
to the New Testament. The Jewish sages and scribes
of old held the key to the faith preached by the apostles
and their followers throughout the West, and to the one
spread, with the aid of the sword, over the other half
of the world by the followers of Mohammed, a faith en-
riched by the philosophy of Greece as well as by the
wisdom of Babylonia and Persia. Scattered over the
lands without possessing a land of their own, the Jews,
during the Middle Ages, carried with one hand the mer-
chandise of the world, and with the other the torch of
knowledge to enlighten the Church Fathers, the priests
and monks, and at the same time to furnish the people
of the Occident with most of the fables and folklore of
the Orient. Thus socially and intellectually the Jews
were factors of our modern civilization. And yet you
can almost count on your fingers the non-Jews who feel

112
RABBINIC AND MOHAMMEDAN LITERATURE
113
a
the desire even to glance at the power house of the
medieval intellect and the storehouse of multifarious
wisdom, such as is presented in the Talmudic and rab-
binic lore. It was, indeed, the armory which furnished
the Jews with ammunition for the defense of their truth
and, at the same time, the battleground for their mental
athletics in the decision of the Law; now a granary
replete with the precious products of many soils, and
then a garden fragrant with the perfume of exotic plants,
and again a deep sea waiting for the skilled diver to
bring forth rare pearls of wisdom and ethical maxims.
Here are treasured up ideas and concepts, transmitted
from of old by way of mouth or pen, which have found
their echo in Christian and Islamic writings and still
cast a flood of light on the meaning and origin of many
sayings contained in these.
This is especially the case with the eschatological ma-
terial with which we are here concerned.1 Under the
name of the Mysteries of Creation, and of the heavenly
Throne Chariot of Ezekiel, as well as of the hereafter,
the saintly mystics known as Essenes communicated to
the few initiated in their esoteric circle what they saw
in their ecstatic visions, and what was first the secret
lore of the Apocalyptists became, at the decline of their
order the property of a larger class of Rabbis. Only
occasionally we get glimpses of these ecstatic visions in
stories told in the Talmud, after the destruction of the
Temple, about the two famous disciples of Hillel, the
head of the Jerusalem academy, Jonathan ben Uzziel,

See art. “Eschatology” in the Jewish Encyclopedia and in the
Dict. of Religion and Ethics; also Bousset, "Die Religion des Juden-
thums," 2d ed.
114 HEAVEN AND HELL IN COMPARATIVE RELIGION
the Targumic translator of the Prophets, and Johanan
ben Zakkai, the head of the school of Jamnia, and his
pupils. As legend would have it, flames issued forth
from their mouths, enveloping their bodies as with the
fire of Sinai when they revealed the heavenly mysteries
to their elect hearers (Sukkah 28°; Hagigah 14"). So
we are told of the high priest, Jishmael ben Elisha of
the same period that, when offering incense in the Holy
of Holies, he beheld the majesty of God with the crown-
bearing angel, Akathriel, behind Him, and he heard the
prayer, “May the attribute of My mercy prevail over
that of My justice in favor of My children!” Likewise,
we read of four sages of the second century, Ben Zoma,
Ben Azzai, Elisha ben Abuyah, and Akiba that, by
power of vision, they entered Paradise," but the first
three were dazed and distracted by what they saw, and
only Akiba emerged sane and strong in mind and body.
(Hag. eodem.) Then there was the famous mystic,
Simon ben Yohai, a pupil of Akiba, who is reported as
having said, “I looked, and behold, I found but few of
the mortals privileged to rise to the upper spheres”
(Succ. 44", Yer. Ber. 134). In the next generation the
outstanding figure in mystic lore was Joshua ben Levi,
who, while still associated with the Essenes, made
eschatology a specialty of his, and whose visions took, as
we shall see farther on, an apocalyptic form. A son of
his had fallen in his illness into a trance, and on his
recovery he said to his father in reply to his question, “I
saw a world reversed; those on high were here below,
and those below here were on high there”; whereupon
Joshua ben Levi remarked, “Thou hast seen the better

RABBINIC AND MOHAMMEDAN LITERATURE
115
world” (Pesah. 505). A similar saying is ascribed to
Jesus, when speaking of the time of the regeneration
when the Son of Man shall sit on the throne of His glory
with the twelve judges for the twelve tribes of Israel,
“Then many shall be the last that are the first, and first
that are last” (Matt. xix, 30).
Already in the first century we find the schools of
Hillel and Shammai discussing the subject of punish-
ment in the hereafter, and to Daniel's (xii, 2) two
classes of men, the righteous to enter everlasting life
and the wicked to go to everlasting doom, were added,
as the third, those whose merits and demerits are found
to be even, when weighed in the balance. The more
rigid Shammaites, referring to Zechariah xiii, 9, say
that for twelve months they shall have to undergo a
purgatory process in the fire of Gehenna, until they are
sufficiently cleansed from sin to be admitted into Para-
dise, whereas the Hillelites reject the idea of a purga-
tory and, referring to Psalm cxvi, maintain that “He
who is abundant in mercy will turn the scales toward
mercy” (Tos. Sanh. xiii, 3; R. H. 16"). This diversity
of views of the two schools may be traced through the
various Talmudic and apocalyptic sources. So is man's
life in general viewed by the former from a more pessi-
mistic standpoint to make them declare that it were
better for sinful man not to have been born, whereas
the more optimistic Hillelites say, “It is well for man
with his mastery over himself to have been born” (Eru-
bin 136). A comparison of the Ezra and the Baruch
Apocalypse, or of the Book of Jubilees, with the Testa-
ments of the Twelve Patriarchs, shows exactly the same

116 HEAVEN AND HELL IN COMPARATIVE RELIGION
divergence of views, not to mention the New Testament
writings. The same difference of principles induced, on
the one hand, the rigorous Shammaite, Eliezer ben
Hyrcanos, to consign the heathen nations to Gehenna,
and the liberal Hillelite, Joshua ben Hananiah, on the
other hand, to declare that the righteous among the
heathen have a share in the world to come, both basing
their views on Psalm ix, 18: “The wicked shall return
to Sheol, all the nations that forget God.” Eliezer b.
H. finds in these words the condemnation of all the
heathen nations; Joshua b. H., whose opinion became
the generally adopted one, finds in the latter part of
the verse the exemption of such as have not forgotten
God (Tos. Sanh. xiii, 2). And this very difference of
view may be discerned in the apocalyptic, the Tal-
mudic, and the New Testament literature. Moreover,
it influenced also the views concerning the relation of the
Messiah and the Messianic kingdom to the heathen
world, and hence we see the sources vary between
nationalism and universalism. As long as the expected
resurrection was confined, as in Daniel xii, 2, to the
righteous of Israel and then extended to all Israel (Sanh.
x, 1, after Is. lx. 21, “Thy people shall all be righteous
and inherit the land forever”), it was connected with
the Holy Land, called “the land of the living," that is
“where the dead will come to life anew,” the very name
ascribed to the Messiah Yinnon (Ps. lxxii, 17) being
taken as “the Awakener” (Sanh. 98"; Pirk. d. R. E.
xxxiv, comp. I Thess. iv, 14 f). Later on the resurrec-
tion was believed to be universal and to be brought
about by the regeneration of the world following the

RABBINIC AND MOHAMMEDAN LITERATURE
117
Messianic era, the last judgment presided over by God
himself being the one which would decide the fate of
all, as to whether they should enter life eternal or be
doomed forever (Sanh. 91"). Accordingly, Gehenna
and Paradise were believed from the very beginning
of creation to be the destination of either the God-
defying heathen as the wicked ones or of Israel as the
righteous, God-worshiping people. The ordinary sin-
ners of Israel, for whom Gehenna would be but a purga-
tory, were to be taken up by Abraham and received into
his bosom, that is for admission into Paradise (comp.
Erubin 19a with Luke xvi, 22, and Matt. iii, 9), exactly
as Jesus was believed to have descended into Hades to
redeem the souls imprisoned there. Suggested by Isaiah
lxvi, 23, was the assumption that the torments of hell
lasted twelve months, after which the souls of the un-
redeemed wicked were to be consumed in the fire of
Gehenna to become “ashes under the soles of the feet
of the righteous” (Mal. iii, 21). As to extraordinary
sinners, such as traitors, heretics, and seducers of many,
“their worm shall not die, neither shall their fire be
quenched” (Is. lxvi, 24; Eduyoth ii, 10; Tos. Sanh. xiii,
4-5). There is, however, throughout the rabbinical
literature, echoed forth also by the Apocalyptists, the
principle voiced that, inasmuch as man would not en-
dure, if measured by the standard of stern justice, God
combined mercy with justice when he created man (Gen.
R. viii, 4-8; xii, 15; Midr. Ps. lxxxix, 3). He, there-
fore, provided from the very beginning, alongside of
Gehenna and Paradise, the power of repentance to
enable man to escape the former and inherit the latter

118 HEAVEN AND HELL IN COMPARATIVE RELIGION
(Pesah. 54”; Midr. Ps. xc, 3; Pirk. d. R. El. iii and
xliii). Thus it will be the chief function of Elijah to
lead Israel to repentance before the coming of the great
Day of Judgment (Mal. iii, 24).
As the main feature of rabbinical literature, it is well
to observe that the eschatological views, whether taken
over from Parseeism or developed independently by
the Apocalyptists, were as a rule based, like other doc-
trines, upon Scripture interpretation rather than upon
mere vision or inspiration. Thus the fundamental
Pharisean doctrine of resurrection is based both in the
Talmud (Sanh. 905) and in the Gospel (Matt. xxii, 92)
on the Pentateuchal words “the God of the fathers,"
only applied differently by the one and the other. Not
to mention the argument taken from the grain of wheat
rising in a new garb from the soil, found alike in the
Talmud there and in the Epistle to the Corinthians xv,
37, it is interesting to find the exquisite parable of the
lame and the blind both in the Talmud (Sanh. 91a) and
in the apocryphical book of Ezekiel referred to in early
Christian writings. In the former the Psalm (Verse 1,
4), “He calleth to the heaven above, and to the earth
that He may judge His people,” is applied to the heav-
enly soul and the earthly body in a dialogue of Judah,
the prince and the Emperor Antoninus (Severus), the
former telling the story of a king who had set up two
guardians for his garden, one of whom was lame and
the other blind, yet on returning found the garden
robbed of its fruits. When called to account, the one, ,
to exonerate himself, said, “How could I have taken the
fruit, being unable to walk?” and the other said, “I
a
a

RABBINIC AND MOHAMMEDAN LITERATURE
119
am blind; how could I see the fruit on the trees?”, but
the king placed the lame on the blind man's back,
saying, “You both committed the wrong, acting as I
showed you.” In like manner God will bring the soul
and the body together at the resurrection as they were
joined in life, and punish them on the great Judgment
Day. Similarly were the seven hells and heavens of the
Apocalyptists based by the Rabbis on scriptural texts.
For Gehenna, Joshua ben Levi found seven biblical
names: Sheol, Abaddon, Pit of Corruption, Pit of
Horror, Mire of Clay, Shadow of Death, and the Nether
Parts of the Earth; according to another version: “The
Land of Forgetting” or “of Silence,” instead of the one
or the other of these. For the seven heavenly mansions
of Paradise, Simeon ben Yohai finds “Sevenfold Joy is
before Thy face" instead of “abundance of joy” pred-
icated in Psalm xvi, 11, and accordingly seven classes
of righteous are pointed out: Such as shine like the sun
(Judg. v, 31; Matt. xiii, 43), or, like the moon (Song
of Songs vi, 10), or like the stars; others, like the firma-
ment (Dan. xii, 3), like the lightnings, or the torches
(Nahum ii, 5), like the lilies (Ps. xli, 1), and like the
golden candlestick (Zach. iv, 3). Similarly Paul,
speaking of the celestial bodies of men, says (Corinth.
xv, 41): “There is one glory of the sun, and another
of the moon, and another of the stars. So is the
Resurrection of the dead.” A more popular eudemon-
istic view of bliss was based on Isaiah lxv, 13, and
Psalm xxiii, 5, where the “eating and drinking of the
servants of God” and “the table prepared” for the be-
loved of God are spoken of. This led to the belief in

120 HEAVEN AND HELL IN COMPARATIVE RELIGION
a Messianic banquet (Aboth iii, 16; iv, 21, comp. Enoch
lxii, 14), alluded to by Jesus (Matt. viii, 11; xxvi, 29;
Luke xiii, 28 f; xxii, 30), and referred to in Revela-
tion xix, 9, as the Messianic wedding feast, which is
based on Isaiah lxii, 5, and xlviii, 12 (Comp. Cant. R.
to Song of Songs iii, 21; Pes. R. xli with Matt. ix, 15;
xxv, 1 f.). In rabbinic literature it is called the banquet
of Leviathan, based on Job xl, 30, which is interpreted,
“The companies of the saints shall hold their meal upon
it” (B. B. 74"). Like the Parsee food of immortality
furnished by the primeval ox, the leviathan, together
with the behemoth of Job, the one a sea monster, the
other a land monster, to which was added a gigantic bird
found in Psalms 1, 11, were believed to supply the menu
for the Messianic feast. (See Enoch lx, 7; Baruch
Apoc. xxix, 4; Ezra Apoc. vi, 52; Tanh. Beshallah at
the close; Midr. to Ps. xviii, 25; xx, 5.) Nor was the
wine missing at the table (Matt. xxvi, 29; Ber. 34"
comp. Eccl. ix, 7, which verse was also referred to the
hereafter). Against this sensual view Rab, the Baby-
lonian sage of the third century, declared that there is
neither eating and drinking nor marrying in the world
to come, but the righteous are to be in spiritual com-
munion with God, as were the chosen ones of Israel in
Exodus xxiv, 11, who "saw God's glory, and this was
their eating and drinking” (Ber. 175). R. Johanan, his
Palestinean contemporary, differentiates the Messianic
age, which is earthly, from the world to come, about
which it is said, “Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, but
God alone knows what He hath prepared for him that
waits for Him” (Is. lxiv, 3; Ber. 34").

RABBINIC AND MOHAMMEDAN LITERATURE
121
About the length of the Messianic age the opinions
differ; some make it a millennium, after Psalm xc, 4,
or seven thousand years; others four hundred years,
after Genesis xv, 13, and Psalm xc, 15, as the Ezra
Apocalypse vii, 28, has it; others again only forty years
or three generations after Psalm lxxii, 5. (See Sanh.
99a and the Midr. to the various Psalm passages.)
The beautiful idea, expressed also in the Apocalypses
of Peter and Paul, that the sinners in hell are released
from pain when they acknowledge the righteousness of
the Divine Judgment while joining in the praise of God
by the righteous, Joshua ben Levi finds in Psalm lxxxiv,
7, which is interpreted, “They that, having trespassed
the will of God dwell in the valley of weeping, which
is Gehenna, make it a well of tears to quench its fire,
and their praises rise to Him who decideth the judg-
ment” (Erub. 198, Targum and Midr. ad Locum; Exod.
R. vii, 4). So is the striking description in Parsee writ-
ings of the beautiful maiden who meets the righteous at
his departure from earth as the personification of his
virtue to fill him with delight, and of the ugly maiden
who meets the sinner as the personification of his guilt
to horrify him, paralleled by the rabbinical saying that
the righteous will be hailed by groups of good angels,
calling out, “He entereth in peace!” “They rest in their
place of repose;" "He walketh forward to his goal”
(Is. Ivii, 2); and the sinners will be met by three groups
of chastising angels who call out, “There is no peace
to the wicked” (Is. xlvii, 27, and so forth). Others
refer to Isaiah lviii, 8, “Thy righteousness shall go
before thee”; and vice versa to Job vi, 18, “They are


122 HEAVEN AND HELL IN COMPARATIVE RELIGION
entangled by the paths of their ways, and go into deso-
lation and perish” (Sota 10a).
All these instances illustrate the rabbinical method of
applying scriptural passages to the accepted eschato-
logical views, and this was followed also by the gospel
writers, especially Matthew, in the endeavor to find sup-
port for the claim of the Messiahship of Jesus. Even
in the story of the Temptation of Jesus by Satan, Scrip-
ture passages are quoted by both, as if it had been a
dispute between two schoolmen. Still there is an essen-
tial difference between the rabbinic eschatology and that
of the New Testament, in that the latter has been fas-
tened into a firm, dogmatic creed, allowing no dissension,
whereas the former was regarded simply as the free
expression of individuals allowing for a wide diversity
of opinion. Boldly, therefore, could a Talmudic teacher
of the third century declare, “There will be no Gehenna
in the world to come, but God shall bring forth the sun
from its sheath and cause it to shed forth its burning
rays, which will serve as means of chastisement for the
sinners and offer healing and delight to the righteous
in accordance with Malachi iii, 18 ff” (Ab. Zara 3';
Ned. 8b). Rabbi Hillel, a descendant of the great Hillel
of the fourth century, had the audacity to say, “Israel
needs not look for the advent of the Messiah, since
Isaiah's prophecy about him was already fulfilled in
King Hezekiah” (Sanh. 98). And was ever a more
daring remark made by a stanch believer in Scripture
than was that of R. Jose, the pupil of Akiba: “Never
did God's majesty come down to earth, nor did any
mortal, even Moses and Elijah, actually rise up to
a

RABBINIC AND MOHAMMEDAN LITERATURE
123
heaven, for it says, “The heavens are the heavens of
the Lord, and the earth hath He given to the children
of men.'” (Ps. cxv, 16—Sukkah 5.) He obviously
deprecated all mystic speculation.
Still mysticism had its way and was fostered more
and more, as the sober reasoning of the schools declined.
Eschatology became again a matter of apocalyptic
vision. The leading minds at the close of the Talmudic
period down to the rise of Islam indulged in unbridled
imagination; and apparitions of Elijah, the prophet,
became a matter of frequent experience. It was es-
pecially Joshua ben Levi who was made the legendary
hero of visions, and frequent intercourse with the
prophet, Elijah, was ascribed to him. Nay more. A
Talmudic legend (Ketuboth 776) tells of his encounter
with the angel of death on the walls of Paradise, where
he snatched the angel's sword from him, while leaping
over the wall in order to find the place destined for him
there. Subsequently arose a large literature ascribing
to him a visit to Paradise and Gehenna, and an account
of what he saw there. He thus became the Jewish
Dante.?
Speaking in the first person in an Apocalypse as-
cribed to him, he describes first the two gates of Para-
dise, made of carbuncle, where sixty million angels
keep watch. When a righteous person arrives, they
clothe him with eight garments of glory, and place two
crowns, one of gold and another of precious stones,
upon his head and eight myrtles into his hand; and with
2
* See Bacher, Agada d. Palest. Amoraer 188-194 and Jellinek's
Beth ha Midrash, ü, 48-53; iii, 131 f.; 194 f.; v. 43.

124 HEAVEN AND HELL IN COMPARATIVE RELIGION
a
the words “Go and eat thy bread in joy!” (Eccl. ix, 7)
lead him to a stream surrounded by all kinds of fra-
grant plants, from which flow rivers, one of oil, another
of balsam, a third of wine, and a fourth of honey. Over
each of the righteous a canopy is spread according to
his merit, and a table of precious stones, while eternal
light is everywhere. There are three compartments, one
for childhood, the other for youthful manhood, and
the third for old age, and, going through the same each
day during the three watches, the righteous enjoy the
pleasures of each. There are myriads of trees, one
more fragrant than the other, and in their midst the
tree of life overshadows the whole of Paradise, while
seven clouds of glory overhang it.
There are seven compartments for the seven classes
of the righteous, the first for martyrs like Akiba; the
second for those who died by the accident of drowning
(?); the third for the great masters of the law, such as
Johanan ben Zakkai and his disciples; the fourth for
those covered by the cloud of glory (?); the fifth for
the penitent; the sixth for the childlike who proved
chaste throughout life; and the seventh for the poor
who amidst privation and suffering attended to the
Law.
Another version has seven compartments, in the first
of which dwell the proselytes, who joined the faith from
mere love, and over them is set Obadiah (probably mis-
spelled for Ebed Melek, the Ethiopian); in the second
dwell the penitents, with Manasseh, the son of Hezekiah,
at their head; in the third the patriarchs and all Israel,
including David and Solomon, but not Absalom, Moses

RABBINIC AND MOHAMMEDAN LITERATURE
125
and Aaron presiding over them; in the fourth are all
the blameless righteous of later times whose life was
bitter like the olive tree; in the fifth, through which the
river Gihon flows, Joshua ben Levi saw the palatial
dwelling of the Messiah in the company of Elijah, and
there was weeping all around, as all Israel was anxiously
waiting for his coming, and he himself joined in the
weeping; in the sixth dwelt those who met an accidental
death, not having had the solemn funeral; and in the
seventh those who suffer diseases thereby to atone for
Israel's sins.
In the corresponding seven compartments of Gehenna
Joshua ben Levi saw pits replete with fiery lions and
rivers of fire, and each compartment inhabited by ten
of the seventy nations of heathendom and presided over
by one of seven Jewish rebels such as Absalom, Doeg
the Edomite, Korah, Jeroboam, Ahab, Micah, the idol-
atrous priest of Judges xviii, and Elisha ben Abuyah,
the apostate. These, having been included in the cove-
nant of Sinai, were not doomed to suffer with the heathen
nations.
Altogether different in character and spirit and of
the same universal or human character as the original
Apocalypses of Peter and Paul is another description of
Hell by Joshua ben Levi, an undoubtedly older one
than the one just given here. Therein he tells how the
prophet Elijah brought him to the gate of Hell and
showed him men hanging by their hair. These were
those who let their hair grow to adorn themselves for
sin. Others were hanging by their eyelids; they had
followed their eyes lustingly; others by their noses;


126 HEAVEN AND HELL IN COMPARATIVE RELIGION
they had perfumed themselves to sin. Others again by
their tongues; they were slanderers. Others by their
hands; they had stolen or robbed. Others by their
genitals; they had committed adultery. Again others by
their feet; they had run to sin. Women who had bared
their breasts before men for sin were hung by their
breasts. Blasphemers were fed on fiery coal. Such
as ate on fast days were forced to eat bitter gall. Sin-
ners with their mouths had to eat fine sand, until their
teeth were broken (after Ps. iii, 8). Men who had
abused the needy who had asked them for assistance
were thrown from fire to snow and from snow to fire.
Others were driven from hill to hill like the sheep by
the shepherd (Ps. xlv, 15).
À vision ascribed to Moses in a Midrash to Song of
Songs ii, 33, describes his voyage under the guidance
of the angel (Enoch) Metatron, through the seven com-
partments of Gehenna, in which the unfortunate ones
are likewise hung by their eyes, ears, tongues, feet, or
hands for having sinned with the corresponding member
of their body, whether against the moral or the ritual
laws. Greatly affected by the sight of these horrors,
Moses, knowing that the time for repentance had passed
for them in entering the sad place, prayed to God for
the release of Israel, his people, from the terrible tor-
ment, but God said to him, “Moses, My servant, there
is no respect of person, nor taking of bribes with Me;
whosoever performs good deeds finds his place in Para-
dise, and whosoever doeth evil, his place is Gehenna,” as
3 Wertheimer, "Bathe Midrashoth," iv, 22.
RABBINIC AND MOHAMMEDAN LITERATURE
127
it says, “I, the Lord, search the heart; I try the reins to
give every man according to his ways, according to the
fruit of his doings” (Jer. xvii, 10).
From Gehenna Moses entered Paradise, brought there
by the archangel, Gabriel, and, under the guidance of
the angel, Sampsiel, came first to behold seventy thrones
of gold and silver, pearls, and precious stones, among
which the one excelling all the rest was that of Abraham;
the next, that of Isaac, and the third, that of Jacob.
The rest were assigned to the various classes of the
saints according to their rank: the first were those who
amidst affliction and privation studied the Law; the
second, to the blameless; the third, to the penitents; the
fourth, to the proselytes of righteousness; the fifth and
sixth class consisting of righteous sons of unrighteous
men, such as was Abraham, and of unrighteous sons of
righteous men who are saved by the merit of their
fathers.
Many of these visions belong to the post-Talmudic
period, in which the apocalyptic Essenism of the Enoch
writings was revived, and the martyrs of the Hadrianic
persecution were made legendary heroes, described as
ascending the heavens by means of an ethereal shiplike
chariot, to behold all the wonders of the heavenly halls
and of creation. Thus eschatology became a popular
study, so as to exert a great influence even on the Syna-
gogal liturgy, the poets and philosophers of the Middle
Ages. Only the Aristotelian school of philosophers
such as Crescas and Maimonides had the courage to
oppose it, looking upon heaven and hell as symbols,
rather than as localities of God's judgment.

128 HEAVEN AND HELL IN COMPARATIVE RELIGION
B. Mohammedan Literature
Mohammed, the founder of the Islamic faith, whose
fervent religious zeal won the millions of the Arabic
race for Allah, the God of Abraham, was consigned by
Dante to the ninth gulf of the Inferno (xxviii, 28 f.),
where he is seen with limbs mangled and ripped in two
for having split the Christian world by his schism. We
have learned to judge him better than could the Middle
Ages. However distorted and confused his hearsay
acquaintance with the Old and New Testament stories
was in his receptive, yet undisciplined mind, however
inferior in every respect he was to Moses and Jesus as
a prophet claiming to be the last and the seal of the three
great prophets, we cannot deny him a place among the
foremost movers and molders of the human race. There
is a wondrous spiritual power and poetic grandeur in
his impassionate appeal to his idolatrous and vicious
countrymen to turn to Allah, the omnipotent Ruler of
heaven and earth, the sublime and merciful one, and
fear His great judgment in the day of reckoning that is
sure and quick to come in the hereafter. True, he was
not the first among the Arabs to believe in Allah or in
resurrection, but, being of a high-strung, nervous tem-
perament and given to hallucinations and visions, he
made his “Koran,” the book handed him by the angel,
Gabriel, as he saw it in his ecstatic state, the mirror of
a revelation that still stirs two or three hundred millions
of men to the very core by its profound earnestness. In
*R. Bosworth Smith, "Mohammed and Mohammedanism"; Palmer's
Koran in S. B. E.; George Sales, "The Koran”; Pautz, “Mohammeds
Lehre von d. Offenbarung"); Wolf, "Mohammedanische Eschatologie."

RABBINIC AND MOHAMMEDAN LITERATURE
129
spite of his sensuality, which became more pronounced
as he grew older, his vivid description of the terrors
of Gehenna and the delights of Paradise impresses the
readers of the Koran as much as does any other eschatol-
ogy, if not more so. In fact, it may be called the Leit-
,
motif of his theology, and its main source is rabbinic,
with only a few Parsee elements interwoven. But, as
the whole Mohammedan religion remained national, so
also was its eschatology, whether in the Koran or in its
later development.
As in rabbinic and older sources, Hell has in the
Koran (xv, 44) seven gates for the seven compartments,
one below the other, and each gloomier than the other.
The one on top is for the disobedient among the Mus-
lims, the second for the Jews, the third for the Christians,
the fourth for the Sabeans (who also had some book of
Revelation), the fifth for the Parsees or Magians, the
sixth for the idolaters, and the seventh—and this is
quite characteristic!—for the hypocrites (iv, 44). It
is unnecessary to give the names of each compartment.
Suffice it to say that Malik (a derivate of Moloch?),
the keeper of hell, has his subordinates to carry out the
ordinances of the various punishments for the various
sinners (xliv, 18). “For the infidels we have chains
and collars and burning fire,” says the Koran (lxxvi,
4). “He who believed not in God and failed to give
the poor their bread, shall feed on corruption and sores”
(lxix, 36 f.). The inmates of the Fire will in their
burning thirst cry out to the inmates of Paradise, “Pour
upon us some water” (vii, 48), exactly as does the rich
man in Luke xvi.


130 HEAVEN AND HELL IN COMPARATIVE RELIGION
Paradise, with Ridwan as its keeper, has likewise
seven compartments, each with a different name, all
built up of gold and silver and precious stones. There
are also the four rivers, one of pure water, instead of
the balsam of the Rabbis, the other of milk, the third
of wine, and the fourth of honey. To these were later
on added streams of various spices to be mixed with
the water. Black-eyed maidens of perennial virginity,
whether patterned after Persian custom or Parsee writ-
ings, play a prominent rôle in the sensuous system of
Mohammedan eschatology, alongside of the wives and
beautiful youths who serve the faithful sitting under
shady trees or reclining on their costly couches in Para-
dise. Nor should they miss, according to later tradi-
tion, the meat of the Jewish Behemoth and the big earth-
encircling fish, Leviathan (Sale, p. 78). Between Hell
and Paradise there is a partisan wall (vii, 44 f., comp.
Eccl. R. vii, 14 and Phædo, 62). Upon it are placed
those who, while worshiping God, have not done good
works sufficiently to outbalance their evil deeds, the so-
called intermediates of the Talmud. They look with
envy upon the inmates of Paradise, and seeing the
inmates of Hell, they pray that they themselves may be
spared the same pain, but at last by divine grace they
will be admitted into Paradise. A later doctrine states
that the Mohammedan creed, “There is no Allah but
Allah, and Mohammed is His prophet,” pronounced
by the unfortunate in Gehenna, will at the intercession
of the prophet release them, and after having bathed in
a Lethelike stream, they will be rejuvenated and then
admitted into Paradise. Instead of seven there are in

RABBINIC AND MOHAMMEDAN LITERATURE
131
later writings eleven classes of sinners pointed out, such
as scandal-mongers, liars, unrighteous judges, the proud
and insolent, hypocrites, false witnesses, the unchaste,
misers, slanderers, usurers, the fraudulent, also those
who neglect their prayers or disturb the public worship,
while the twelfth class comprises the good and righteous.
The resurrection is said to take place from Jerusalem
at the sound of successive trumpet blasts by the angel,
Israfil (=Sarafel). A monster called the Spy will
then come out of the earth (xxvii, 84) and mark the
foreheads of the faithful with the staff of Moses as the
white sign of life, and the noses of the evildoers with
the signet ring of Solomon, as the black sign for per-
dition. Then all will be summoned to the temple hill
of Jerusalem, as the highest spot of the earth, for judg-
ment, which will take place at the narrow bridge leading
from Hell to Paradise. There no intercession shall
avail, except that of Jesus and Ezra (xx, 107, and else-
where). The deeds of men shall be weighed in the
scales, and the books containing the records of the faith-
ful, kept in the seventh heaven, and those of the sinners,
kept in the lowest part of hell, will be read, the former
to be held in the right hand of the faithful, the latter
placed in the left hand of the sinners and tied to their
neck. Then “shall Paradise and Gehenna be brought
down,” and the faithful be welcomed by God and His
angels with the greeting, “Peace be on you!” while the
unbelievers will be ushered into the wretched abode of
Hell, there to dwell forever.
Following rabbinical sayings, the Mohammedan
sources assign to each person two angels accompanying

132 HEAVEN AND HELL IN COMPARATIVE RELIGION
him through life, the one at his right recording his
good deeds, the one at his left his evildoings. At his
departure the virtuous sees his good deeds before him
in the shape of a beautiful man to fill him with great
joy, and the wicked sees his evil doings in the shape of
an ugly man to fill him with horror and dismay. This
view is, of course, taken over from the Parsees.
Concerning the visions Mohammed speaks of in the
Koran as frequent, if not constant, experiences at the
beginning of his career as prophet (liii, 2-8, and lxxxi,
19-23), we find them to be, of course, of an ecstatic state
such as Paul and Swedenborg must have had. But his
followers saw in them actual ascents of the soul to
heaven, and they describe his journey through the seven
heavens under the guidance of the angel, Gabriel, and
through Gehenna as shown to him by Malik, its keeper.
In the first heaven he sees Adam who in his survey of
all his descendants lauds the righteous and blames the
evildoers. In the second he sees Jesus and John the
Baptist, in the third, Joseph, in the fourth, Idris—that
is, Enoch-in the fifth, Aaron, in the sixth, Moses, and
in the seventh, Abraham. But it is especially Moham-
med's reference to this night journey from Mecca, “the
Sacred Mosque,” to the Temple at Jerusalem called by
him, “the remote Mosque” (xvii, 1), which was, of
course, only a vision or a dream, that gave rise to the
belief of the Muslims in the actual voyage of the prophet
to heaven on the miraculous Burak—a sort of lightning-
like mule.
As a matter of course the history of Islam tells
of many visionaries who journeyed like Mohammed

RABBINIC AND MOHAMMEDAN LITERATURE
133
through hell and heaven to see the torments of the sin-
ners and the delights of the faithful, as shown by Ham-
mer-Purgstall in his “Geisterlehre der Moslimen.”
But while the great mass of Moslems believed as
staunchly in these crude notions of Gehenna and Para-
dise as did medieval Christendom, there arose many
classes of free-thinkers in opposition to the same, either
rejecting them altogether or allegorizing them. (See
von Kremer “Gesch. d. herrschenden Ideen des Islam,"
pp. 278, 305.)


CHAPTER VIII
HELL, HEAVEN, AND PURGATORY IN
MEDIEVAL LITERATURE
The Middle Ages are called the ages of faith, but it
would be more correct to call them the ages of credulity,
or of blind belief unenlightened by reason and knowl-
edge and lacking altogether originality of thought. Of
course, this does not include the Islamic and Jewish
world from which the Scholastics received a new im-
petus to mental endeavor. The masses of Christendom,
constituting many races and nationalities, most of them
converted to Christianity either by the power of speech
or of the sword, were held together by despotism,
whether political or hierarchical, and ruled by fear
either for the body or for the soul. The Church, in her
ascendancy over the State, demanded unreserved sub-
mission to her authority upon the condition of future
salvation. Education and knowledge, which make men
self-reliant, were shunned and suspected, and instead,
ignorance and superstition fostered. Tertullian's fa-
mous dictum, Credo quia absurdum, or more exactly,
Certum est, quia impossible est, had given the death-
blow to reason and independent inquiry. Hence the
belief in miracles and ghosts grew like mushrooms in
marshy soil. The fear of hell and the devil by far

134
HELL, HEAVEN, AND PURGATORY
135
eclipsed the fear of God, and the old pagan deities and
demons only helped to increase the hosts of the Evil
One, unless they were turned into saints. Yet in the
same proportion grew the power of the clergy, the
priests, or the monks who invented ever new means of
mediation between man and the Deity in the shape of
relics or of sacraments. Though learning found here
and there shelter in some cloister, the people at large
were not affected by it, as they knew no Latin and could
not even read the Scripture in the Vulgate. Only art
was cultivated, not for art's sake as an expression of
beauty, but as reflecting the emotional element, and par-
ticularly the passion typified in the crucified Savior and
the Mater Dolorosa. It was an appeal to the senses in
hallucinations and visions which were believed to in-
dicate the presence of the Divine in opposition to the
devil. In like manner did poetry and music culminate
in the thrill of awe expressed in “Dies Irae” and “Stabat
Mater.” As has well been said, “there was no re-
liance on sin-crushed self. There was a constant con-
flict between the heavenly joy of the divine world, sym-
bolized in the Church dome and the fleshly joy of the
devil's lures, between the lust and vainglory of the
earth and the salvation in the beyond, between life's
terror and its pitifulness, and its eternal hope over which
flamed the terror of darkness and the Judgment Day.”
To this corresponded the contrast between the asceticism
of monk or nun, of hermit, flagellant or saint, and the
unbounded licentiousness of the semi-barbarian mob,
or the idealized illicit love of romantic knighthood; like-
1 See H. 0. Taylor, “The Medieval Mind,” for the whole chapter.
1

136 HEAVEN AND HELL IN COMPARATIVE RELIGION
wise between the all-powerful Church with her penances
and penitences offering expiation for every sin or crime,
however revolting, and an unredeemed heathen world
whose very virtues were declared by Augustine, the
Church Father, to be only shining vices (Civitas Dei
xix, 25). It is, indeed, worth noting that Dante, the
greatest genius of the Middle Ages, not merely felt
in his soul, but actually experienced in his own life,
this raging conflict between the carnal and the spiritual,
between the secular and the eternal, seeking its reconcil-
iation in his immortal poem both for his own satisfac-
tion and for that of the Christian believer. Whether he
satisfies the modern thinker is a question we shall con-
sider in our next and last chapter. Our purpose here is
to follow up the views and visions presented in the
medieval literature preceding him.
And here we are struck by the significant fact that
the apocalyptic vision of Paul we discussed in Chapter
vi, which circulated in ever so many versions through-
out the Middle Ages, dwelt more and more upon the
description of the terrors of Hell, and of the Purgatory
which was inserted later with the emphasis laid on the
Sunday respite for the unfortunate, whereas the delights
of Paradise were more and more omitted. The reason
is obvious. Paradise was regarded as attainable only
by the elect few, the real saints whose blameless life was
considered as having been angelic. In its place Purga-
tory loomed up as the realm of hope for those whose
overwhelming burden of sins was to be lightened and
ultimately removed by the cleansing process of fire,
since those "cursed” by the Son of Man, are according to

HELL, HEAVEN, AND PURGATORY
137
a
Matthew xxv, 41, doomed to go “into everlasting fire
prepared for the devil and his angels.”
Now the idea of the purgatorial function of a middle
or temporary state of the sin-laden soul goes back to
India and Persia, to Plato and Vergil, and is main-
tained, as we have seen in the previous chapter, by the
Shammaite school as well as in the New Testament.
(See Luke xvi, 23, where Hades is not identical with
Gehenna.) To secure release for those suffering in this
temporary state, prayers and almsgiving were resorted
to in Hindu and Persian, as well as in Jewish circles.
For the latter II Maccabees xii, 42-45, has become the
classic passage, as it has also for early Christian prac-
tice. (See also Sifre Deut. 210.) It was, however,
only the last of the Church fathers, Gregory the Great
of the sixth century, who invested the doctrine of the
purgatory with the character of a dogma for the Roman
Church, and for which he instituted the mass. Hence-
forth it became the chief instrument of ecclesiastical
power and profit. But strange to say, it was mostly
Ireland and England that became its main propagators,
foremost among whom was the Venerable Bede of the
eighth century, the then acknowledged master of me-
dieval lore. He illustrated the doctrine by the visions
of two famous monks, Furseus and Dhrithelm, which,
next to the Vision of St. Paul, became very popular and
were made the pattern of many others.?
Furseus, an Irish monk who built monasteries in Ire-

2
2
See for all this Th. Wright, “St. Patrick's Purgatory”: “Essay
on the Legends of Purgatory"; "Hell and Paradise current during
the Middle Ages"; also Baring-Gould, “Curious Myths of the Middle
Ages": "St. Patrick's Purgatory,” p. 230 ff.
138 HEAVEN AND HELL IN COMPARATIVE RELIGION
land, England, and France, describes in his vision how
in his deathlike sleep he was carried to heaven by angels
who sang the Psalm verse, “They go from strength to
strength” (Ps. Ixxxiii, 8); and then he saw, far beneath,
a deep valley full of fierce demons, having four fires at
different places, one to burn the lovers of falsehood, the
other the avaricious, the third those who stirred up strife
and discord, and the fourth the fraudulent and impious.
Owing to some slight sin of his, he was scorched by a
demon, as he passed, but was lifted up again to heaven,
there to behold the saints enjoying the fellowship of the
angels.
Dhrithelm beheld the deep and broad valley one
half filled with roaring flames, and the other half with
storms of hail and snow, between which the unfortunate
were tossed to and fro as globes of fire amidst terrible
wailing. Yet this was only the Purgatory; the real Hell
far below was far more horrible with its darts of fire,
the very nearness of which scorched him, too. On the
other side, behind a great wall, he beheld numerous
people in shining garments enjoying the delights of the
place replete with light brighter than sun and moon and
fragrant with flowers, and yet this was only the fore-
court of Paradise, the dwelling place of such as had done
good works on earth, but had not yet attained the per-
fection of the saints. These lived in a still brighter
realm, resounding with music and song, enjoying the
fellowship of Christ and his angels, the real Paradise.
This he could only look at from the distance, not being
permitted to enter.
A vision ascribed to Charles the Fat of France, of the

HELL, HEAVEN, AND PURGATORY
139
ninth or tenth century, indicating the influence of St.
Paul's Vision, is interesting only in so far as it consigns
to the Purgatory, with its great torments, bishops, barons,
and kings for the mischief and wrong caused by them,
for which they are punished by having to stand up to
their hair or chin or navel in pits of sulphur and burn-
ing oil, or water, or in streams of melting metal.
A vision of Tundale of the twelfth century has the
parricides, the fratricides, and the homicides melted in
a great iron boiler, the deceitful and treacherous tossed
about alternately in fire and ice; the proud cast down
from a narrow bridge into a deep, stinking valley; the
avaricious devoured by a terrible monster called
Acheron (probably originally Leviathan). Thieves are
forced to carry their stolen goods over a bridge, with
sharp spikes that pierce their feet as they go across-
Tundale himself was thus slightly punished for having
once stolen a calf.—Monks, nuns, and ecclesiastics who
had led an unholy life were devoured by another fright-
ful winged beast and, when ejected, tormented again by
serpents. The last he saw there was the Vale of the
Smithies in charge of Vulcanus, the Greek god. There
the great criminals were beaten to formless mass. But
the chief sufferer was—and here we have Dante's proto-
type-Lucifer, the prince of hell who was tormented by
fires kept up by gigantic fiends blowing the bellows with
thousands of hands to fan the flames. On passing a
great wall he came first to a place where such souls as
were neither very good nor very bad suffered from
hunger and thirst, waiting to be admitted after a certain
time to Paradise. But he was admitted only to the fore.
140 HEAVEN AND HELL IN COMPARATIVE RELIGION
a
court where those whose sins were expiated lived. Into
the glorious dwelling place of the saints behind the
other great wall he could not enter.
Matthew of Paris tells of two famous visions at the
close of the twelfth century. The one by the monk of
Evesham contains nothing new, except that he describes
three compartments of hell and correspondingly three
compartments of heaven. More interesting is the vision
of Thurcill, a hospitable farmer of a village in Essex at
the beginning of the thirteenth century, who was taken
by St. Julian, his grateful guest, into "the center of the
world” and led to a hall whither the souls went on their
departure from earth. Near by was the forecourt of
Purgatory where slight sins were punished, and the Pur-
gatory in charge of St. Nicholas. From there a great
bridge covered with nails and spikes led to the Mountain
of Joy. In the reception hall St. Michael, St. Peter,
and St. Paul were in attendance. St. Michael led the
spotless and perfectly white souls through the flames up
to the Mount of Joy, St. Peter led the spotted souls to
the Purgatory, and St. Paul had opposite him the Devil,
while watching the scales in which the souls were
weighed, to have those inclined toward the apostle sent
to the Purgatory, the others to the fiery pit, right under
the feet of the grinning devil. There proud churchmen,
faithless priests, frivolous knights, and bribe-taking
lawyers underwent scrutiny in the presence of Thur-
cill, who was led hence to the earthly Paradise. There he
saw Adam-similarly to the Testament of Abraham-
laughing with one eye and weeping with the other at
the sight of the few who were admitted into Paradise,

HELL, HEAVEN, AND PURGATORY
141
and the many who had to meet their fate in hell, while
Adam himself was stripped of his robe and splendor
of immortality, which he recovered in part through
Abel, and the other elect ones, but which in their en-
tirety he will recover only at the end of the world, when
the virtuous will all gather around him.
The famous St. Patrick's Purgatory, which seems to
have originally been one of the many supposed entrances
to hell in ancient folklore, had as one of its legendary
heroes, Owain, an Irish knight who, according to Mat-
thew of Paris, went there to do penance for his sins.
He is said to have gone through four fields of punish-
ments, in the last of which the unfortunate were hung
up by the various members of their body with which
they had sinned. From an icy lake called the Devil's
Mouth, he was led across a beautiful gate to the earthly
Paradise, where Adam and Eve had transgressed, to be
cast into hell together with Lucifer, until they and their
worthy descendants were rescued by Christ's Descent.
It would lead us too far afield, if we would continue
taking notice of all these medieval visions, some of
which had also Norse and Icelandish sagas interwoven,
while French Troubadours of the thirteenth century
offered, instead of visions, dreams of hell and Paradise.
Of direct influence upon Dante was the Vision of Al-
beric, monk of Monte Casino at the beginning of the
twelfth century, who described what he saw as a child
of ten years in a trance after a nine days' and nights'
deathlike sleep. Carried up by a white dovelike bird,
he meets St. Peter with two angels, and is led first to
the Limbus Infantum where little children in propor-
a

142 HEAVEN AND HELL IN COMPARATIVE RELIGION
tion to their age are purged; then to the real Purgatory,
at which adulterers and other impure souls have to
undergo the fire and ice punishment. Elsewhere mothers
who refused nurture to their children were seen hung
up by their breasts; faithless women by their hair.
Severer punishments were inflicted upon tyrants, upon
mothers guilty of infanticide, upon persons guilty of
sacrilege, simony, slander, false testimony, and theft.
On the borders of hell two malignant spirits, in the
shape of a dog and a lion, spat fire out of their mouths
to prevent escape, and over the fiery river an iron
bridge was spanned which appeared broad and easy to
pass for the virtuous, but grew narrow as a thread under
the feet of the sinners who attempted to pass, to cause
them to fall into the boiling pitch beneath. From there
a road, covered with thorns and brambles, and watched
by a cruel demon, led the souls, after they had passed
the test of purification, to a very pleasant fragrant plain
filled with joy by the good people, martyrs, and monks.
In the midst of this there rose the Mountain of Paradise,
with its tree of life. From there he was conducted
through the seven heavens, the circles of the Moon, the
Mars, the Mercurius, the Sun, Jupiter, Venus, and
Saturn, where the cherubim surrounded the Throne of
Glory. In the sixth heaven he beheld the archangels,
the patriarchs, prophets, and apostles, the Virgin, St.
Peter, and also St. Benedict, but what he saw behind
the wall there of the Empyrean with the Trinity, he was
forbidden to tell. Obviously much of the material con-
tained in the rather wearisome forty-five chapters of
this Vision of Alberic served Dante as model.

HELL, HEAVEN, AND PURGATORY
143
While the substance of these visionary voyages to
the other world as developed through the centuries was
thus used by our great poet, he took the spirit from the
great mystics of the Middle Ages. To understand this
spirit, we have to go back to the Church Father, Origen,
who beheld in the Song of Songs an allegorical bridal
duet between the soul and her bridegroom, Christ, the
God-man, as it was originally taken by the Rabbis to
be a nuptial song of Israel and God. The very sensuous-
ness of the biblical dialogue of love appealed to the
imagination of the Christian mystic, since celibacy was
regarded as a higher state than married life, and monk,
nun, and priest were to consider themselves as wedded
to Christ, the Bridegroom. It is easy to understand how
this psychological sex motive worked all the stronger
upon the ascetic women in their ecstatic visions. And,
strange to say, this love motive, not having justice as
corrective and basic principle, led to injustice, to such
partiality as to put hatred at the opposite end. Heaven
as the realm of love and bliss for the saints had its
cal counterpart in Hell as the realm of eternal doom
for the wicked and infidels, to be hated like the devil
himself. Of Beruria, the gentle-souled wife of Rabbi
Meir of the second century, the Talmud relates that, on
hearing her famous husband in his indignation at some
wicked neighbors pronounce a curse upon them, she
said: “Pray, do not curse! Instead of reading in
!
the Psalm verse civ, 35, ‘Let the sinners perish from the
earth, you had better read, “Let the sins cease from
the earth,' and the wicked will be no more!” Not so the
saints and saintly women of the Middle Ages. With all

144 HEAVEN AND HELL IN COMPARATIVE RELIGION
their love for God and Christ, they turned their hatred
of sin to the sinners, and their wrath against the devil
to the unbelievers. Thus St. Bernard of Clairvaux, the
greatest saint of the Middle Ages—whom Dante places
in his Paradiso next to the holy Virgin, his adored
Queen of Heaven, and whose speeches and writings,
especially his sermons on the Song of Songs, are aglow
with the most fervent love for Christ, the ever-yearned-
for and ever-yearning Bridegroom of the soul-has but
the fiercest utterances of wrath and condemnation for
heretics and schismatics, “the enemies of God,” to per-
secute whom was deemed by him the holiest task, as he,
indeed, started the second Crusade. This is not the
place to point out the striking contrast between those
vehement outpourings of mystic love in his exposition
of the Song of Songs and those harrowing execrations
hurled against dissenters. Nor did the saintly women
of the same century remain behind the famous saint in
either their mysticism or their fanaticism. More re-
ceptive than creative among these was Elizabeth of
Shoenau on the Rhine, as she describes her vision of the
heaven with the Lamb of God, and “the Queen of Kings
and Angels,” the radiant Cross at the left of the Trinity,
and the twenty-four Elders, all taken from the Apoc-
alypse of John, and likewise her vision of the last days
of the Saviour. But she also preached vigorous sermons
from scriptural texts, assigning backsliding prelates,
monks, and nuns to hell, while the blessed martyrs were
seen by her in celestial beatitude. Of greater original-
ity and influence was Hildegard of Bingen on the Rhine,
who, in her letters addressed to all the great men of her

HELL, HEAVEN, AND PURGATORY
145
time as well as in all her writings, spoke as a seeress in-
spired by the living light” of God, and exerted like St.
Bernard a certain influence, even if only indirectly, on
Dante. In her “Book of the Rewards of Life,” in which
the heavenly love is contrasted with the love of the
world, she describes the punishments of the sinners in
hell and the delights of the blessed in Paradise. But,
as Dante's Inferno is far more dramatic in presenting
the passion and strife of the sinner, whereas Paradiso
is all mysticism in lyric form, so also are the former
given with all the pathos of life and the latter rather in
dull and lifeless imagery.
Among the numerous visionary women of this class,
all of whom revelled in love for their heavenly Bride-
groom or Spouse, using frequently the most sensuous
expressions of Sulamit and King Solomon in the Song
of Songs, such as “the Couch,” Mechthild of Magdeburg
and Mechthild of Hageborn must be specially men-
tioned as being referred to three times in the Purgatorio
xxviii, 41; xxxii, 82, and xxxiii, 119, as Mathilda. The
former's dithyrambic love for her Lord took its color
from the secular love poetry of the time. She is ever
ready to die, yearning for a kiss from Him who died
on the Cross, and only tears can cool off her fiery pas-
sion. The latter hears Jesus address her in words of
the Song of Songs; she speaks of the seven steps of
ascent to heaven, two thrones, one for Jesus, the other
for his Virgin Mother, also of the celestial Rose and
other sights presented in the Empyrean.
Reading such outbursts of passionate love, with which
Troubadour or minstrel adores the woman of his choice,
>

146 HEAVEN AND HELL IN COMPARATIVE RELIGION
applied to the ecstasies of mystic love often called forth
by the cult of the Madonna, we realize how Dante, who
tasted enough of each as Troubadour and as spiritual
lover, came to idealize his Beatrice, to be lifted up by
her to heaven's sublimest love as the crowning goal of
life, while saintly women from Rachel, the beloved wife
of Jacob, to Lucia, Italy's martyr saint, led the way.
Nor must we omit to mention Hughes and Richard of
St. Victor at Paris, who preceded these saints in the
apotheosis of love. As a matter of fact, the former also
found in women such as Rachel and Leah types of vir-
tue and vessels of the holy spirit, the one as presenting
contemplative, the other practical, life. So does the
Song of Songs appeal to him to seek rest from the world's
unrest in the Bridegroom's arms, and he, too, longs for
a kiss from the mouth of the Incarnate Son of God.
Still more extravagant in his mystic effusions is his pupil
Richard.
It was Dante's good fortune to be drawn out of this
torpid atmosphere of emotionalism into the intellectual
sphere of stern philosophy by the great master of scho-
lasticism, Thomas Aquinas. Through him the poet was
transformed into a theologian and a philosopher fa-
miliar with Aristotelian thought as interwoven with
Christian doctrine, and thus his love expanded into love
for pure truth, for philosophy typified by Vergil, and
for theology, the divine science typified by Beatrice.
As the new knowledge of the classics and especially of
Aristotle streamed into Western Europe, and the works
of Mohammedan and Jewish thinkers circulated in Latin
translations, the mental horizon of Aquinas and his

HELL, HEAVEN, AND PURGATORY
147
teacher, Albertus Magnus, expanded, to enable espe-
cially the former to concentrate the whole medieval
theology and systematize it in his "Summa Theologiæ.”
So was Dante, the artist, induced to sum up the whole
of Christian thought and aspiration in a grand poem
which, while presenting the plan of Christian salvation,
would mirror all the conflicts and convictions, the experi-
ences and hopes of the medieval world. It is, moreover,
an allegorical drama of man, beginning with the tragedy
of the damned with all its human pathos, and following
with tender sympathy the arduous efforts toward free-
dom and purification, ending in the triumphant joy of
the blessed, which the poet calls the “Divine Comedy."
Thus he created out of the depths of his own life with
its strifes and struggles the masterpiece of art to be ac-
corded a prominent place among the great teachers
of the Church, as was done by the other great Italian
artist Raffael in his Disputa.
The question, however, whether man after life’s toils
and struggles is really satisfied with that quietude of
rest which is offered in the contemplation of the divine
glory by Dante's Paradiso, can be better discussed in
our last chapter. The Psalmist's verse, “They go from
strength to strength, until God is seen on Zion” (Ps.
lxxxiv, 8) has led the Rabbis of old to remark, “The
righteous find no real rest either in this world, nor in
the world to come, but go from stage to stage onward,
until the highest perfection is reached in an ever closer
communion with the Deity.” In other words, there is no
standstill either in earthly life nor in the hereafter.
God as the all-encompassing energy of life must of

148 HEAVEN AND HELL IN COMPARATIVE RELIGION
necessity impart His own energizing power throughout
time and eternity to man, whose soul will ever thirst
after Him as the living God.

CHAPTER IX
Hohlen
Py
THE DIVINE COMEDY IN THE LIGHT OF MODERN THOUGHT
It has well been said that Dante represents the sun-
set of the Middle Ages. Indeed, as the sun in its set-
ting gilds the Western horizon with all the splendor of
its rays to glorify the receding day, so does Dante's
masterwork cast its wondrous luster upon the entire
medieval world to cover it, together with all its faults
and shortcomings, with a mantle of glory. But after all,
the new day which was dawning, foreshadowed by the
classic Italian vernacular of his swan song, was to part
forever with the beliefs and views voiced therein. Con-
trasted with our cosmic system, our ethical and social
concepts of life, and our anthropological and psycho-
logical science, and still more with our historical and
religious outlook upon life, we look upon the whole of
medievalism as a curiosity, as if presented to us in a
museum of antiquity. Unless we purposely shut our
eyes and ears to the revelations of the modern era since
Copernicus and Newton, Kant and Darwin—and there
is none so blind as he who will not see, and none so
deaf as he who will not hear-Dante's world view is
as remote from ours as is the child age from that of
mature manhood. It is difficult for us to realize the
entire structure of the universe as conceived by the an-


149
150 HEAVEN AND HELL IN COMPARATIVE RELIGION
cosmos.
cient and medieval times, when the vault of heaven with
its three or seven stories served as the dwelling place
of the Deity with its court of angels or inferior gods
around and beneath, and when the corresponding nether
world beneath the earth, the abode of men and beasts,
with its three or seven chambers was inhabited by the
shades of men and the infernal demons. How easily
could then a fertile imagination work out a plan for a
continuance of the shadowy life of these, either in the
dark region below or in the brighter realm in the heavens
above, to make it a question of damnation or salvation
to be decided by the ruling Church! Surely our en-
lightened world has outgrown this conception of the
Our universe with its infinitude of space and
time, in which orbs of light without number swing in
endless æons through distances far beyond the grasp of
the human mind around some unknown center, has no
upper nor lower sphere, no celestial or infernal region to
localize either the Deity or its counterpart, the devil, with
their hosts. In order to find God, while upward looking
in our prayer and aspiration, we must needs look within,
as neither space nor time can encompass Him. And as
God has thus become for us both transcendent and imma-
nent, the hosts of angels as well as the demons have
ceased to be material entities. Heaven and hell have at
best merely symbolic significance, lacking all reality.
Geography and history alike compel us to see in the
story of Paradise a beautiful parable rather than an
actual occurrence, as, in fact, the medieval Jewish
philosophers felt it to be.
As we trace life to-day through its various stages,

THE DIVINE COMEDY
151
go
from the lowest to the highest form, we see man's life
to be a constant ascent, and not a fall from grace, unless
we ourselves make it thus by our relapse into the state
of the brute through passion and guilt. It is man’s free-
dom of will and action which renders him self-conscious
and self-determining in contradistinction to the animal
below him. Though body and soul are in constant in-
teraction and interrelation with him, as with all living
creatures beneath him, he mirrors the Divinity in mind
and soul. Scripture, therefore, represents him as made
in God's image. At the same time physiology and an-
thropology forbid us to so separate the soul from the
body as to believe that the disembodied spirit of man
is after this life to take on again the shape of the body,
and, when found guilty on the Judgment Day, to undergo
corporal punishments, such as the culprit on earth is
liable to, or in case of guiltlessness to enjoy sensuous
delights like any mortal man. Hence, while we admire
Dante's Inferno as the portraiture of a grand tribunal of
justice for the ages of the past, and follow him with
reverential awe through his Purgatorio and up to the
serene realms of his Paradiso, we must always bear in
mind that they have for us only the value of a poetical
allegory.
Above all, however, does our ethical view militate
against the doctrine of eternal damnation which Dante
as a loyal son of the Church accepted, though not with-
out reluctance. The very principle of justice, which he
so often accentuates, is violated by the assumption that
the sins committed by man during his brief stay on earth
should condemn him to endless suffering throughout all

152 HEAVEN AND HELL IN COMPARATIVE RELIGION
eternity. However strongly our sense of justice urges
us, as it did all the ages past, to punish wrongdoing,
we have learned more and more to realize that the pen-
alty should not be inflicted for the sake of retaliation
or revenge, but that it must have the betterment of the
individual or the welfare of society in view, and be
corrective rather than destructive. Still more must the
punitive justice of God have the improvement of man
for its purpose, or else it would be cruel and unworthy
of God. Yet such would be an endless punishment. It
makes God, the Father of mankind, the most cruel tyrant.
Endless joy, too, as a reward for the good is unbear-
able, unless it has an ennobling and salutary effect.
But after all, threats and bribes are at best pedagogic
methods for children, not for men. True morality
must do away with all selfish motives. The good ought
to be done for its own sake, and evil be shunned because
it is evil. Says Antigonos of Soko, a Jewish sage of the
second pre-Christian century, “Be not as slaves that serve
their master with a view to recompense, but be as slaves
that serve their master without a view to recompense,
and let the fear of God be upon you” (Sayings of the
Fathers i, 3). That is to say, serve God from pure mo-
tives, in disinterested love of duty. Another teacher in
the same treatise (iv, 5) says, “The reward of welldoing
is welldoing, and the compensation of evildoing is evil.
doing.” That is, virtue is its own reward, and vice is
its own punishment; the one enriches, the other hardens
and impoverishes the soul. To both St. Louis and St.
Theresa a vision is ascribed, found also in rabbinical
writings, of a stately woman striding along the earth

THE DIVINE COMEDY
153
with a pitcher of water in one hand and a torch or a
bundle of brushwood in the other. "With this one,” she
said, “I shall quench the fire of hell, and with the other
I shall set fire to Paradise,” so as to banish self-interest
from the hearts of those that do good and avoid evil.
Genuine religion fears not hell, but wrongdoing and
falsehood, and longs not for heaven, but for goodness
and righteousness.
But, then, this is no longer the religion of a single
creed or sect, but that of humanity. Such broadness
of view could not be expected of Dante, who looked out
upon the world with the eyes of a Roman Catholic, and
tenaciously clung to the traditions of the Holy Roman
Empire. He was broad-minded enough not to share the
medieval hatred of the Jew. As he entertained a warm
personal friendship for his Jewish contemporary, Im-
manuel of Rome, the Hebrew poet who became his en-
thusiastic admirer and skillful imitator in a Hebrew
poem on Hell and Paradise, so he obviously had a high
regard for the Jewish people. Writing at a time when
the great martyr race was made the target of contumely
and scorn, the victim of persecution over all the lands,
the lofty-minded poet refrained from consigning any of
the same to his Inferno, whether among the heretics
and schismatics or among the criminals, and hé rather
spares or pities the Jewish people when referring to the
Crucifixion (Inf. xxiii, 126; Par. vi, 45). Nay, he ad-
monishes his Christian fellow citizens not to give cause
by brutish behavior to "the mockery of the Jew who
dwelleth in their streets” (Par. v, 81). Still he did
not learn from his Jewish friend, Immanuel, the tradi-



154 HEAVEN AND HELL IN COMPARATIVE RELIGION
tional rabbinical maxim that “the righteous of all nations
have a share in the world to come.” The words of the
Hebrew poet of “Hell and Paradise” are worth repro-
ducing. Having Daniel—some find here a literal allu-
sion to the name of Dante!-as his guide, he says:
“As we were coming through the avenues of Paradise,
looking at the group of wise men adorned with beauty,
majesty, and dignity in the company of the angels, I
asked my guide who they were, and he told me that they
were heathen men of wisdom and piety who had rejected
the beliefs and ways of their fathers, and risen to the
recognition of God as the Fountain of all life and light.
And they said, “By whatever name the Supreme Being
may be called by the various nations, we believe in Him
who was, is, and shall ever be, who created and rules
the world, Himself hidden from sight and beyond all
ken, and whose compassionate love encompasses all His
creatures, watching them, as the shepherd does his flock,
to gather them at the end, and receive them in glory.'
Neither, apparently, did Dante become acquainted
with the parable of the three rings taken from an older
Jewish work and based upon an authentic fact, with
which a Jewish sage answered the delicate question, put
to him by the ruler, as to which of the three religions,
the Christian, the Mohammedan, and the Jewish, was
the best. It implied the simple truth that the best re-
ligion is the one which induces men best to promote
the welfare of their fellow-men. In using this parable,
borrowed from Boccaccio, Lessing made his Nathan the
Wise preach to Sultan Saladdin the grand lesson of re-
ligious toleration. Lessing himself, however, was not
a

THE DIVINE COMEDY
155
a
aware of the fact that, when placed in a similar precari-
ous situation as was his Nathan the Wise, by Don Pedro
the Elder of Aragon, at the beginning of the twelfth cen-
tury-through the question as to which religion was the
better one, the Christian or the Jewish—the Jewish sage,
Sancho, told him the story of two precious stones given
by a father to his two sons, each of whom claimed to
possess the more precious one, the jeweler alone being
able to decide, and then he closed with the pointed re-
mark that God as the Jeweler must be the final judge.
As a matter of fact, it was in the East where the
various religions contested for supremacy, that wise
rulers were led to a kind of Deism which advocated
toleration, if not equality for each. As early as the
ninth or tenth century the Mohammedan rulers at Bag.
dad held religious disputations of the representatives
of the various sects, Christian, Mohammedan, and Jew-
ish as well as Persians, Hindus, and freethinkers, which
resulted in the recognition of a common religion of hu-
manity, based on reason and ethics. If not Dante, then
at least his authority, Thomas Aquinas, might have
caught something of that broader spirit from the Jewish
philosophers, such as Ibn Gabirol, whom he knew
through a Latin translation. But the Church, dogma
once for all shut the gate of salvation to those doomed
by their “unbelief.” Neither Job and Enoch, nor Mala-
chi's verse, “For from the rising of the sun even unto
the going down of the same My name is great among
the nations” (i, 11), would teach the Churchmen the
1

1 See Alfred v. Kremer, “Die herrschenden Ideen des Islams,” p.
241 ff, and Kohler, “Jewish Theology,” p. 430 f.
156 HEAVEN AND HELL IN COMPARATIVE RELIGION
a
contrary. Yea, the very words of Jesus (John xiv, 3),
“In my father's house there are many mansions,” could
not plead for a broader conception of religion. It re-
quired the enlightenment of a new era to take the band-
age from the eyes of the people, to make them see God
enthroned in every human heart that strives for right-
eousness, be it in larger or smaller circles, and to realize
that there is no hell but wickedness, and no heaven but
goodness and love. As Huxley, the great scientist, de-
spite his agnosticism, well said, “Religion has for all
time been best defined by the prophet Micah (vi, 8) in
the words, 'It hath been told to thee, O Man, what is good
and what the Lord requires of thee but to do justly, to
love mercy, and walk humbly with thy God.''
What especially appeals to us in this and similar
utterances of the prophets is the accent laid on social
ethics. Religion to these foremost leaders of men is
not individualistic in the sense of making the salvation
of the soul its sole aim and purpose. Its main object
must be the salvation of humanity, the welfare and hap-
piness of the entire social life of men. In the pursuit
of social justice and redeeming love we emulate God,
the loving Father of men, and by a life of disinterested,
self-sacrificing service we approach Him more and more
who is the supreme Source and Ideal of love and holi-
This optimistic, prophetic view of life which
makes us all coworkers of God is in full consonance
with our modern world view, and strongly contrasts with
that other-worldliness which found its climax in the
medievalism of the “Divine Comedy.”
Nevertheless, there is much for us to learn from
a
ness.

THE DIVINE COMEDY
157
Dante's immortal poem. It is the profound and genuine
religious spirit which pervades it, the spirit of faith,
the yearning for the living God, which made him the
prophet of his time. For is not man, as was the Italian
bard, again lost in a dark and dense forest, beset with
savage beasts of prey, such as are lust and greed, passion
and pride, to infest his road of life? Excessive recourse
to reason has robbed many of their faith, and daring
trust in our mental powers alone has too often cast aside
reverence and awe. We are passing amidst severe tests
and trials from the former religion of servility and blind
authority-worship to one of independent thinking and
free manhood, yet while the rod of infernal chastise-
ment and the enticement of paradisiacal bliss have lost
their power and influence upon us, the fear of God has
likewise been dropped from the heart, and with it also
heedfulness to the call of duty. We are in the birth-
throes of a new era of humanity, spoken of in the New
Testament as well as in the Talmud. The fear of old is
gone, and the love of God has not taken its place as yet.
Doubt and denial have sapped the very pillars of society
and undermined the conscience, the sense of responsi-
bility and dignity which were safeguarded by the old
faith. Hence the great crisis we are undergoing in
these days. It is our purgatory. We must be reborn
to a new faith in God and man. We need a new inspira-
tion, a new interpretation of the ancient truths, a power-
ful vision which points not to a realm beyond the grave,
but beckons us, as did the prophets of yore, forward to
a life of duty and service, and makes us all, be it
through the Church or the Mosque, the Pagoda or the



158 HEAVEN AND HELL IN COMPARATIVE RELIGION
Synagogue, partakers of the Kingdom of God, the king-
dom of divine justice and love. We must become con-
scious of our Godlikeness, of the immortality of our
spirit which makes us realize that the eternity for which
we long in our higher moods is not to begin in another
world, but right here and now. Will then our age,
strangely divided as it is, between undreamed-of powers
of wisdom and humiliating folly, between unheard-of
world-embracing philanthropy and fratricidal hatred, see
a God-intoxicated seer or singer arise, who will, with
Dantelike force and fervor, portray for us the woe and
wretchedness of hell in the human breast, to terrify the
most abject sinner, and with tears wipe away the stains
of guilt from his soul, and also visualize the sublime
peace and bliss of heavenly love and righteousness, to
fascinate the soul of the most indifferent egoist and fill
him with the deepest yearning for God and goodness;
one who will say to each and all: Choose between sin
and saintliness, between Satan and God?"It is not in
the heavens above nor in the far beyond; it is within
you, for hand and heart to achieve it!” Somewhere,
somehow, his voice will be heard, like Dante's, with its
prophetic message of "love, wisdom, and virtue.”
a Inferno i, 100f (see von Doellinger: "Dante the Prophet” in his
Academische Vortraege i, p. 93ff).
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