nor paradise. Instead, God
sends out the sun in its full strength from its encasement, and the wicked
are consumed by its heat, while the pious find delight and healing in its
beams."(972)

However, the popular imagination demanded more perceptible pictures of
heaven and hell, if fear of punishment was to deter men from sin, and hope
of reward to lead them to virtue. The description of the modes of reward
and punishment for the future in the Koran is the outcome of mingled
Persian and Jewish popular conceptions, and its crass sensuousness exerted
in turn a decisive influence upon the entire Gaonic period,(973) leaving
its mark upon even so clear a thinker as Saadia. Not only does he admit
into his philosophic work all the crude and conflicting descriptions of
the future world, but he also argues for the eternity of the punishments
of hell and of the delights of heaven as logical necessities, because only
such could sufficiently deter or allure mankind, and a righteous God must
certainly carry out His threats and promises.(974)

9. The entire Jewish philosophy or theology of the Middle Ages remained
under the influence of the traditional belief in resurrection. Even
Maimonides, whose purely spiritual conception of the soul and of salvation
is utterly irreconcilable with the belief in bodily resurrection, and who
accordingly dwells instead, in both his Moreh and his Code, on the future
world of spirits, with explicit emphasis on their incorporeality, did not
have the courage to break altogether with the traditional belief in
resurrection. In his apologetic treatise on resurrection he even attempts
to present it as a miraculous act of God beyond the grasp of the
intellect. He omits, however, to specify what purpose this miracle may
serve, since in the Maimonidean system reward and punishment would be
administered in the world of spirits in a much purer and more satisfactory
manner.(975) The same standpoint is taken also by Jehuda ha Levi as well
as by Crescas and Albo.(976) If then resurrection be a miracle, it falls
outside the scope of philosophic speculation and becomes a matter of
faith; accordingly the mystics from Nahmanides down to Manasseh ben Israel
associated with it the grossest conceptions.(977)

10. The actual view of Maimonides concerning future retribution is
expressed clearly and unambiguously in both his early product, the
commentary on the Mishna, and in the ripest fruit of his life work, the
Mishneh To