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Updated: June 23, 2025
For though there may be degrees of happiness in Heaven to reward the varying degrees of virtue on earth, all these are dwarfed to nothing by the unimaginable abyss of difference which yawns between Heaven and Hell; and the practical upshot of the current eschatology is that all men the self-sacrificing equally with the self-indulgent, the kind and compassionate equally with the hard-hearted, the spiritually-minded equally with the worldly, the aspiring equally with the indifferent are to reap the same reward.
On such a mysterious subject, definiteness is neither to be expected nor desired. The original Gospel does not encourage the natural curiosity of man to know his future fate; and the three types of eschatology which we have described have all their value as representing different aspects of religious faith and hope. We must after all confess the truth of St.
Both the philosophical and the popular beliefs about the other world are far more Greek than Jewish; but the attempt to hold these very discrepant beliefs together has reduced Christian eschatology to extreme confusion, and many Christians have given up the attempt to formulate any theories about what are called the four last things.
In theology we have many curious subdivisions; among the rest eschatology, that is to say, the geography, geology, etc., of the "undiscovered country;" in medicine, if the surgeon who deals with dislocations of the right shoulder declines to meddle with a displacement on the other side, we are not surprised, but ring the bell of the practitioner who devotes himself to injuries of the left shoulder.
Their power, however, is limited. They are subject to the orders of the gods whose dominion is the lower world, more particularly to Nergal and his consort Allatu. In the advanced eschatology of the Babylonians the demons play a minor part. It is with the gods that the dead man must make his peace.
We can, with logical propriety, accept the Graeco-Jewish eschatology or the Graeco-Oriental sacramental regeneration if we reject modern thought. But we cannot, except in intellectual chaos, combine the two, or appropriately express modern thought in language belonging to the ancient systems. The modern man does not believe in any form of salvation known to ancient Christianity.
The reader who would finish this Essay, which I suspect to belong to an early period of Emerson's development, must be prepared to plunge into mysticism and lose himself at last in an Oriental apologue. The eschatology which rests upon an English poem and an Indian fable belongs to the realm of reverie and of imagination rather than the domain of reason.
When the soul is separated from the body, those powers which functioned with the aid of the body perish; the others remain. In the matter of eschatology Aaron ben Elijah gives a number of views without declaring himself definitely for any of them. Aaron ben Elijah seems to incline to the first, in favor of resurrection. We must endeavor, he says, to get some notion of final reward and punishment.
The doctrine of the Divinity of Christ, Christian eschatology, and Christian views of prophecy will also have found their place in a sound historical scheme! 'It is discreditable now for the man of intelligence to refuse to read his Livy in the light of his Mommsen.
But in fact it is disastrous, for it obscures thought and confuses language. Thus there is no doubt as to the general resemblance of the Christian offer of salvation to that of other cults, and the obvious point of difference the presence of the Jewish eschatology has no claim to superior truth.
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