argument and many proofs to show that when a man is dead his soul yet
exists, and has any force or intelligence.”^48 Some ancients dreaded the
very thought of a perpetual existence in what they conceived to be an
interminable Hades. To the ancient Jews, Greeks, and Romans, and to
the Hindus the prospect of an afterlife or resurrection was often terrify-
ing.^49 The Book of Ecclesiastes comments dourly that “in the days to
come shall all be forgotten.... For the living know that they shall die:
but the dead know not any thing, neither have they any more a reward,
for the memory of them is forgotten.” And the Psalmist declares that “the
dead praise not the Lord, neither any that go down in silence.” But in®u-
enced by their Greek and Near Eastern neighbors, the Hebrews made
life after death a key tenet in their belief system; and in the eighth cen-
tury b.c., when they faced massive threats, Isaiah advanced the doctrine
of personal and national resurrection. Two centuries later, Ezekiel prophe-
sied the resurrection of the Hebrew dead, both the individuals and the
nation.^50 And although some early Christians cloaked the idea of immor-
tality in a pall of terror, Platonic Christianity became a major source of
the belief that mortal life could indeed be transcended, maintaining that
because death represents a bene¤cial change from earthly existence, grief
over the loss of a mortal life should be curbed. In the New Testament
(where Heaven is mentioned some 140 times) the promise of immortality
forms the heart of Paul’s message. He tells the Corinthians that “if the
dead rise not, then is not Christ raised: And if Christ be not raised, your
faith is vain.” And he interprets Christ’s resurrection as the emblem of
universal resurrection. Yet, Paul’s words (like those of Whitman) chal-
lenge the reader to pin down an unambiguous explanation of physical or
personal immortality.^51
Like both Emerson and Elias Hicks, the radical Quaker whose person
and beliefs Whitman esteemed, the poet rejected established theological
creeds. Hicks praised Christ chie®y as an inspirer of the human spirit.
Whitman quoted with admiration Hicks’s dictum that God had breathed
life into “the immortal and invisible soul... and it became alive to God.”
And in view of Whitman’s frequent reference to the “law” that prevails
throughout the universe and is generally manifested in the human spirit
as feeling or intuition, it is illuminating to note Hicks’s contention that
“the cross of Christ... is the perfect law of God, written on the tablet of
the heart, and in the heart of every rational creature,” a law that humans
cannot “erase or obliterate.” Anticipating both Whitman and Emerson,
Introduction / 27