Derech Hashem - 001 Four Kinds of Souls

Generally speaking, there are four kinds of souls.

1) There are souls who mainly enjoy action. If they merit, they reach holy kinds of actions; if they don’t merit it, their actions remain mundane, or worse, they commit evil acts.

2) Then there are souls who derive their main vitality from emotions. Their enjoyment in life is drawn from their emotional experiences.

3) Then there are souls who yearn for intellectual achievements.

4) Finally, there are souls who yearn mainly to reach reach G-dliness (elokus) – to reach attachment with the Creator (d’veykus).

[The four kinds of souls are rooted in each of the four realms; the action-rooted souls come from the lowest realm, Asiyah; the emotion-rooted souls are from Yetzirah. The intellect-rooted souls are from Beriah, and the spiritually oriented souls are rooted in Atzilus].

The Ramchal, in the beginning of sefer Derech Hashem, uses expressions that reflect the kind of soul that is mainly drawn after intellect. He is describing the kind of person who yearns for more intellectual understanding of things.

If a person is mainly drawn after action or emotion, he’s not that drawn after intellectual understanding, and therefore, he doesn’t yearn for more knowledge. Of course, everyone in Creation possesses some wisdom -“All of them, You created with wisdom” – we all use our intellect, or else we wouldn’t all to be perform anything; but only someone who is rooted in intellect is someone who will yearn for more intellectual understanding.

The Ramchal is writing this sefer from his soul’s perspective, in which he viewed intellectual understanding as his vitality in life. He writes as well in another sefer, Derech Eitz Chaim, that “The way of the wise ones is to walk with constant thought.” To the Ramchal, the intellectual understanding of things was his life.

Just like when it comes to physicality, we get hungry when we don’t eat, so does an intellectual person feel hunger when he doesn’t understand things. Intellect is his life, and he gets his main vitality in life from understanding things. A person whose soul is rooted in intellect is someone who constantly yearns for the intellectual, someone who really seeks to know things.

For this reason, the Ramchal writes here that when someone yearns for intellectual understanding, it pains him when he doesn’t understand things, just as much as a hungry person needs to eat food.

Therefore, in order to sense the matters written in this sefer, the reader must be the kind of person who considers intellectual understanding to be the main source of vitality in his life. In order to gain from this sefer, one has to be the kind of person who actually has pain when he doesn’t understand something, no less than when he’s physically hungry.