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Maamar VI: On the Essence of the Soul, Death, and Everything Appended to These.
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Section 1. The Sixth Maamar: On the Substance of the Soul, Death, and What Follows From These.
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Our Lord, blessed and exalted, has informed us that He originates the human soul in the heart together with the completion of the body's form — as He said: 'The burden of the word of the Lord concerning Israel — the word of the Lord who stretched out the heavens and laid the foundations of the earth and formed the spirit of man within him' (Zech 12:1).
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And He has set a term for their dwelling together; when it expires He separates them — until the number of souls whose creation His wisdom has deemed necessary is complete.
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When He has completed them, He will reunite the souls with their bodies and reward them.
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Our prophets have provided us signs and proofs for these matters, which we accepted readily; then we proceeded to derive these matters also by way of rational inquiry, following the method we pursued in the preceding maamarim.
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The first thing I had to investigate was the essential nature of the soul — for I found people hold remarkably divergent opinions about it, opinions that preoccupy minds.
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I chose to set aside most of them and focus on seven positions, beyond the four mentioned earlier — bringing the total to eleven.
For those four positions —
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— I tested and examined them and all four were found invalid and refuted: the doctrine of spiritual beings, the doctrine that things derive from the Creator's own essence, the doctrine that they derive from Him and from something else, and the doctrine of the dualists.
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Since the soul is one of the known existing things, insofar as it was included among those things, it too is included in the refutation of those views — so we need not repeat it. We will instead discuss these seven.
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I say first: I found some people who consider the soul to be an accident among accidents. It seems to me that what led them to this is that they did not see the soul itself — they saw only its actions.
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Because it is too subtle to be perceived by the senses, they concluded it was an accident, like the subtlety and fineness of accidents. Yet even among themselves they disagreed along five lines:
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Some considered it a self-moving accident; some considered it the perfection of the natural body; some imagined it to be the composition of the four natures; some conceived of it as the interconnection of the senses; and some estimated it to be an accident generated from blood.
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Having examined these views — all united by the claim that the soul is an accident — I found them all invalid from multiple angles. One: an accident cannot produce the immense wisdom and noble understanding that sustain the world, as I mentioned in the preceding maamar.
And also —
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— an accident cannot be qualified by another accident, for that is contradictory; yet we find the soul qualified by many accidents: we say 'an ignorant soul' and 'a learned soul,' 'a pure soul' and 'an evil soul,'
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— and we say that it has love and aversion, satisfaction and anger, and all the well-known moral traits. Given these conditions, it cannot be an accident; on the contrary, its accepting these contradictory qualities makes it more fitting to be a substance.
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The second: I found some who imagine the soul is air. The third: I found some who imagine it is fire. Both of these I found to be invalid — for if it were air its nature would be hot and moist, and if it were fire its nature would be hot and dry; yet we do not find it thus.
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The fourth: one who says it is two parts — one rational and articulate, which does not perish and dwells in the heart; and one animal, which spreads throughout the body and perishes.
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I established that this too is wrong — for if the rational part were other than the part spread through the body they could not blend, since one is eternal and the other created, one perishes and the other does not.
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And furthermore, the rational part by itself cannot hear, see, or sense through the other senses. The objection I anticipated — that the senses yield to one another and the articulate faculty speaks for all of them, as I explained in the maamar —
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— in the First Maamar: what that position actually entails is that there are two souls, since each part stands independently.
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The fifth: one who says it consists of two airs — one from within and one from without. What led to this view was that he found the soul only sustains itself through inhalation of air from outside.
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He thought that constituted half of it — but in reality the purpose of breathing is to cool the natural heat that the soul generates in the heart, just as air is fanned over a fire to dispel the bad vapors from it.
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The sixth: one who supposed the soul to be pure blood — and he alone said this explicitly in his book.
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What misled him was the Torah's statement 'for the blood is in the soul' (Lev 17:14), and he did not attend to what precedes it: 'for the soul of the flesh is in the blood' (Lev 17:11).
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Rather, the observable truth is that blood is the soul's dwelling and seat — through its strength the soul's strength manifests, through its weakness the soul's weakness manifests.
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When the soul rejoices and begins to manifest in gladness at its good fortune, it sends blood outward; when it flees inward from fear of something threatening, it draws blood inward with it.
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The Torah's statement 'the blood is in the soul' follows linguistic convention — language names a thing by its location: just as wisdom is called 'heart' ('a youth lacking heart,' Prov 7:7) because the heart is its seat, and language is called 'lip' ('the whole earth was of one lip,' Gen 11:1) because language comes through the lip.
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Section 2. The seventh position — the correct position — I will now explain with God's help. I presented the foregoing positions first —