Christianity sprang, as we have said, from two great spiritual streams—­the Judaic and the Hellenic—­each one of which had arrived on its account, if not at a precise definition of, at any rate at a definite yearning for, another life.  Among the Jews faith in another life was neither general nor clear; but they were led to it by faith in a personal and living God, the formation of which faith comprises all their spiritual history.

Jahwe, the Judaic God, began by being one god among many others—­the God of the people of Israel, revealed among the thunders of the tempest on Mount Sinai.  But he was so jealous that he demanded that worship should be paid to him alone, and it was by way of monocultism that the Jews arrived at monotheism.  He was adored as a living force, not as a metaphysical entity, and he was the god of battles.  But this God of social and martial origin, to whose genesis we shall have to return later, became more inward and personal in the prophets, and in becoming more inward and personal he thereby became more individual and more universal.  He is the Jahwe who, instead of loving Israel because Israel is his son, takes Israel for a son because he loves him (Hosea xi. 1).  And faith in the personal God, in the Father of men, carries with it faith in the eternalization of the individual man—­a faith which had already dawned in Pharisaism even before Christ.

Hellenic culture, on its side, ended by discovering death; and to discover death is to discover the hunger of immortality.  This longing does not appear in the Homeric poems, which are not initial, but final, in their character, marking not the start but the close of a civilization.  They indicate the transition from the old religion of Nature, of Zeus, to the more spiritual religion of Apollo—­of redemption.  But the popular and inward religion of the Eleusinian mysteries, the worship of souls and ancestors, always persisted underneath.  “In so far as it is possible to speak of a Delphic theology, among its more important elements must be counted the belief in the continuation of the life of souls after death in its popular forms, and in the worship of the souls of the dead."[13] There were the Titanic and the Dionysiac elements, and it was the duty of man, according to the Orphic doctrine, to free himself from the fetters of the body, in which the soul was like a captive in a prison (see Rohde, Psyche, “Die Orphiker,” 4).  The Nietzschean idea of eternal recurrence is an Orphic idea.  But the idea of the immortality of the soul was not a philosophical principle.  The attempt of Empedocles to harmonize a hylozoistic system with spiritualism proved that a philosophical natural science cannot by itself lead to a corroboration of the axiom of the perpetuity of the individual soul; it could only serve as a support to a theological speculation.  It was by a contradiction that the first Greek philosophers affirmed immortality, by abandoning natural philosophy and intruding into theology, by formulating not an Apollonian but a Dionysiac and Orphic dogma.  But “an immortality of the soul as such, in virtue of its own nature and condition as an imperishable divine force in the mortal body, was never an object of popular Hellenic belief” (Rohde, op. cit.).