Soul, or, the Hebrew word nephesh, and the Greek word psuche [?] [x]

Soul, or, the Hebrew word nephesh, and the Greek word psuche [?] [x]

Moncrieff, Rev. William Glen

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George Eliot to George Combe, 22 January 1853. “I read yesterday the little pamphlet on ‘Soul’ which you mentioned to me some time ago. I think it is quite valuable, at least as a piece of criticism, though it may perhaps be regarded as one among the many signs of the hopeful fact, that even narrow orthodoxy is beginning to shrink from the doctrine of eternal punishments. For my own part, I was never fond of the plan of availing oneself of the elasticity of the biblical text to make the scriptural writers teach philosophy and to force truth on the believers in inspiration by an argumentum ad hominem. I like thoroughly honest critical investigation and could never encourage such a reasoner as our Mr. Moncrieff simply because he wants to make the Bible less mischievous. He appears to be ignorant both of the philosophy of language and the true principles of biblical criticism – he thinks that a theory as to a doctrine can be founded on the merely etymological meaning of a word which has half a dozen derivative meanings, and that there is a homogeneity of thought in all the different parts of the Bible in spite of the varieties in their chronology and the other circumstances of their production. As to his argument about the Old Testament, even B[isho]p Warburton long ago proved that the [unknown] Mosaic [unknown]; idea of a future life was not included in the Mosaic system, which was one of purely temporal rewards and punishments. (By the bye, I wonder if you have read a clever work on "Jesus-Christ et sa doctrine" by Salvador, a free-thinking Jew, in which the writer attempts to shew that the Mosaic system presented the quintessence of political and social wisdom, and that, morally, it was an adumbration of the doctrines contained in "The Constitution of Man.") As to the New Testament, there are many contradictory texts which have given rise to the vexata questio of "the middle state" between death and the resurrection. But surely nothing can be built on the mere word psychê which is equally used for the simply animal life and, interchangeably with pneyma for the spiritual existence -- the soul. I think Mr. M. has quite failed to explain away the difficulty in Matthew 10.28: "Fear not them that kill the body etc. – a passage utterly meaningless without the antithesis between the life of the body and the life of the soul, which antithesis he has been previously maintaining not to have existed in the minds of the biblical writers. His ultimate argument to which all the rest tends -- that the Scriptures teach not the eternal punishment but the annihilation of the wicked -- is I think rather difficult of proof to those who are not afraid of any conclusions as to the meaning of the biblical text to which thorough inquiry may lead them. That idea of Plato, of Spinoza, of Goethe, and of many others -- that immortality is the destiny of the worthy only, -- of those who have sublimated themselves by the pursuit of truth and beauty, is a very fascinating [one], but it seems to me, at least in this stage of my development, which is imperfect enough, to be rather the hallucination of an intense personality than to have any foundation in reason. But it would be far easier to talk of these things to you than to write of them, for they are endless.” GEL 8: 69-70

Moncrieff, Rev. William Glen, Soul, or, the Hebrew word nephesh, and the Greek word psuche [?] [x], George Eliot's Reading, George Eliot Archive, edited by Beverley Park Rilett. https://GeorgeEliotArchive.org, Accessed September 7, 2026. https://www.georgeeliotarchive.org/items/show/57823