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Timestamp: 2019-04-25 17:51:31+00:00

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In the last lecture I said that Philo occupies a peculiar position in the history of theology, because he, more than any other writer, exhibits to us the process by which the two great streams of thought, from Greece and from Judaea, came to unite in one. Just at the time when Christ was teaching in Galilee, Philo in Alexandria was using the lessons of Greek philosophy to guide him in his interpretation of the Old Testament. And in one sense he was quite justified in doing so; for the development of Jewish religion had brought it to a point of view closely analogous to that which had been reached by the independent movement of Greek thought; and in the later books of the Old Testament we can discern the elements of that spiritual and universal conception of religion, which is found in Philo. Philo, therefore, it might be said, was only reading backwards into the earliest expressions of the religious ideas of Israel what was implicitly contained or involved therein. He was only looking for the oak in the acorn, for the man in the child, when in the books of the Law and the Prophets he sought for the source of his own conceptions of God and of his relations to the world.
But, even allowing that there is a measure of truth in this view of the case, we have to observe that what Philo tries to prove is not that his own doctrine is contained potentially, or in germ, in the Hebrew Scriptures. He has no conception of a historical process of evolution, nor does he make any distinction between what is implicitly contained in the Old Testament and what is explicitly expressed there. To him the Old Testament as it stands, especially the teaching of the books of the Law, is the absolute revelation of divine truth, the verbally inspired word of God, which contains once for all thé declaration of God's nature and will. And as there is much in Philo's view of that nature which is not found in the letter of the Scriptures, nay even much that seems to contradict it, he is forced to maintain that that letter was intended to convey a higher truth than its immediate and obvious meaning, and that the facts narrated and the expressions used tee te be understood as an allegory. So far does Philo carry this view that he contends that somê things, which in their direct sense are irrational and even immoral, have been put into the text to warn the reader to look deeper for the real meaning. By a process which is sometimes called f spiritualising/—a process similar to that which St. Paul applies to the story of Hagar and Ishmael,— Philo gets out of the Old Testament all the conclusions to which he is led by the philosophical and religious consciousness of his own time; and he never seems to be aware that he brings with him the greater part of what he seems to find. We cannot discover in his writings any attempt to gather up the general meaning of the books of the Old Testament, or to view the parts in relation to the whole, or the earlier in relation to the later revelation of divine truth. He simply takes each chapter, verse by verse, and interprets it by certain arbitrary rules of symbolism—taking, for instance, the earth in the narrative of the creation to mean sensibility and the heavens to mean intelligence., and arguing that, when it is said that the heavens were created before the earth, it means that intelligence is prior to sense. On such a method it is not difficult for him to find, even in the first chapters of Genesis, all the main principles of his own theology.
Now this method of allegorical interpretation, which was afterwards extensively used by the Christian Fathers, and which is not altogether disused in the present day, had one recommendation. It enabled those who employed it to find a basis for their religious life in the sacred boots, without being limited by the immediate meaning of those parts of the Bible which expressed the moral and religious ideas of an earlier time. It served, in fact, the same purpose, which in more modem times has been served by the theory of evolution, enabling men to connect the present with the past without allowing that connexion to become a hindrance to progress. We may realise how great a service this was, if we remember how in modern times, as among our own Puritans and Covenanters, the acceptance of the Old Testament as equally inspired with the New produced a reactionary tendency to confuse Christianity with Judaism. Such misconceptions were to a great degree precluded by the allegorical method of interpretation. Still we must acknowledge that it was, after all, an arbitrary and unscientific method, and that it altogether precluded a true view of the religious history of man, which must neither deny the fundamental identity of man with himself in all ages, nor the difference of the phases through which he has had to pass in his development.
In considering Philo's theology we have to remember the characteristics of the two terms between which he is seeking to mediate. His task is to translate Hebrew conceptions into their Greek equivalents, and to bring Greek conceptions into a form suited to the Hebrew mind. But, in every formal respect, the Greek and the Hebrew ways of thinking are antagonistic, even where the matter or content of their thought is most similar. The Hebrew mind is intuitive, imaginative, almost incapable of analysis or of systematic connexion of ideas. It does not hold its object clearly and steadily before it, or endeavour exactly to measure it; rather it may be said to give itself up to the influence of that which it contemplates, to identify itself with it and to become possessed by it. Its perceptions of truth come to it in a series of vivid flashes of insight, which it is unable to co-ordinate. Eor the most part it expresses its thought symbolically, and it constantly confuses the symbol with the thing signified, or only corrects the deficiencies of one symbol by setting up another. In his native language, the Hebrew has only the scantiest means of expressing the dependence of one thought upon another or of building up a connected argument. If a complex object be portrayed by him, it is only in large and indefinite outlines and never as an ordered system of related parts. Hence he is almost incapable either of grasping prosaic fact in its bare simplicity, or of rising to a scientific consciousness of general laws; he lives rather in' a consciousness of the unanalysed whole, which presents itself now in one aspect and now in another, as when one stands before a scene which is illuminated from moment to moment by gleams of lightning.
The Greek mind, on the other hand, is essentially discursive, analytical, and systematic, governing itself even in its highest flights by the ideas of measure and symmetry, of logical sequence and connexion. Even in poetry it seeks for definite pictures, in which the object represented stands out clearly from other objects and displays distinctly all the relations of its parts. Its epics and dramas have order and organisation, so that their plots work forward logically from, the first presentment, of the situation to the final catastrophe; and even its lyrics have plan and sequence in the evolution of the idea that inspires them. The Muse of Greece, to use an expression of Goethe, is the companion of the poet and not his guide. The same mental characteristics are shown in the political life of the Greeks, in their historical literature, and above all in their philosophy. They are never satisfied to leave anything obscure or undefined, or to let any element stand by itself without being carefully distinguished from and related to the rest. The Homeric hero who cried for light, even if it were but light to die in, was a genuine representative of the Greek spirit. Hence, in spite of their great aesthetic capacity, their love of the beautiful and their power of creating it, there never was a nation that was less disposed to rest in the contemplation of a beautiful symbol, without trying to analyse it into its elements and discover its exact meaning. The Greek, again, was essentially reflective ; he was never content to wield the weapons of thought without examining them; rather he sought to realise the precise value of every category or general term which he found himself using. And it was this that made him the creator of most of the abstract language of thought which philosophy has ever since been employing.
Now in Philo, as I have said, we find the first comprehensive attempt at a synthesis of these- two modes of thought; and we need not be surprised that, in spite of the common tendencies to which I have referred in the last lecture, the amalgamation is somewhat external and incomplete. Thus, for instance, in his treatise on the creation of the world, we find him reading almost all the leading ideas of the Timaeus into' the simple narrative of Genesis. The double account of the creation in the first and second chapters, and the phrase " every herb of the field before it grew," are supposed to express the idea that God first by the pure action of his intelligence created an ideal or intelligible world, and then, using this as his pattern, constructed the visible world out of chaotic matter. Again, the phrase: "Let us make man in our image" is interpreted as meaning that God, as in the Timaeus, has to call in the aid of angels or subordinate powers, in order to create a being who is not altogether good.1 Philo, indeed, thinks that in so using Plato's conceptions, he is simply restoring them to their original owner: for, in his view, Plato and the other Greek philosophers had stolen all their good ideas from Moses. But tiiis only means that Philo had become unable to read Moses except in the light of Plato. No doubt, in this process Plato also is forced to make considerable concessions. In accommodation to Jewish notions, God must be supposed to create the matter in "which his ideas are realised; and the "created gods" of the Timaeus have to be conceived either as angels or as powers like angels, which issue from the divine nature, but which have a certain relative independence bestowed upon them. The result, therefore, is neither distinctively Greek nor distinctively Jewish ; nor can we even say that it is any tertium quid in which the peculiar characteristics of Greece and Judaea are united. What we have in Philo is rather the imperfect product of a process of fermentation which has not yet been completed, and in which the elements combined still retain a great « of their original form.
Passing.from these general considerations, it will he /s^dersiriot our purpose to examine how Philo deals, &s% witih the idea of God: secondly, with the *I>4 Confusidne Ling., §33.
mediation whereby God is connected with the world: and, finally, with man's relation to God.
I have already shown how the later development of Jewish religion tended to universalise the idea of God, and to remove those special characteristics which had been at first attributed to him as the national God of the Hebrews. Also I have shown how this process found a parallel in the movement of Greek thought, by which the Stoic conception of immanent reason was set aside and the Neo-Platonic idea of a transcendent unity took its place. Both these movements have great influence on the mind of Philo. He is continually anxious to explain away the anthropomorphic traits with which in the Old Testament God is invested. When the Bible speaks of God's hands or his feet, his eyes or his face, no one supposes that it is speaking literally. As little, argues Philo, can we take it as prosaic truth, when it speaks of God as ' angry' or being ' appeased,' as being ' jealous of other gods,' or ' repenting that he had made man.' All such expressions, we are to regard as used in condescension to.the needs of those who could not understand or would not be rightly impressed by any other language. The two most important statements of the law, says Philo,1 are, first that " God is not as a man " (Numb, xxiii. 19) and second, that "he is as a man" (Deut. i. 31): but the second is introduced for the instruction 1 Philo, Quod Deus Immut., § 11; De Somniis, I., §40.
Gods true nature is not expressible by any name.
We know him only negatively, and not positively: for alT the predicates we can possibly attach to Him are predicates which express the contrast of his pure being with the limited and determined nature of finite creatures. Thus He is represented as one in opposition to their division, as simple in opposition to thefr compfexity^ as immutable in opposition to their variableness, as eterncd and immeasurable in opposition to their conditioned existence in time and space. But these attributes are all to be taken as simply repelling from him every qualification by which He might be VOL. iL ' «r reduced to the level of his creatures, and not as expressing the infinite fulness and completeness of his own Being, which is incomprehensible to the mind of man. To determine what He is in his essential being would be impossible; for to define is to relate, and He is above relation. Even the words, " I am thy God," are, Philo declares, employed in an inexact and figurative way, and not in their primary sense; for the self-existent Being, regarded simply as self-existent, does not come under the category of relation. " He is full of himself, and sufficient to himself, equally before and after the creation of the universe; for He is unchangeable, requiring nothing else at all, so that all things belong to him, but He, strictly speaking, belongs to nothing."1 These last words show the true movement of Philo's thought, which carries everything back to the absolute Being, but will not allow us to invert the process, or to see in the nature of that Being any necessity for the existence of any being other than himself; seeing that this would make him dependent on his creatures or responsible for their imperfections. In other words, they are regarded as related and essentially related to him, but not He to them.
1 "De Mufcatione liom.," §4: quoted by Dr. Drummond, Philo Judaeus, II, 48.
God ?" But to take this course was to cut the knot instead of untying it; and Philo was too much imbued with the spirit of Greece to rest in the bare idea of will without reason.
The sacred books, however, when interpreted in the light of the conception of the Logos supplied him with a better solution of the difficulty. Originally, indeed, the expression e Word of God' had not carried with it any notion of mediation, or of a mediating being. On the contrary, in such passages as: "By the word of God were the heavens made and all the host of them by the breath of his mouth," what the writer sought to convey was rather the idea of a direct divine action which needed no mediation or instrument whatever. But gradually, as the idea of God became universalised, the same feeling which caused the name of ' Jahveh' or ' Jehovah' to be avoided, and the word 4 Lord' substituted for it, gave rise to an inclination to attribute divine acts not to God but to some personification of one of his attributes, generally of his wisdom. This tendency is shown in Ecclesiastes and also in a still more decided form in one of the apocryphal books, The Wisdom of Solomon. And for Philo, who wrote in Greek and under the influence of Greek philosophical ideas, the Stoic use of the word Logos to express the rational principle which is immanent in man and in the universe, seemed to throw a new light on those numerous passages in the Old Testament in which the phrase 'Word of God' is used in a half-personal way. We may thus explain how Philo arrives at the notion of the Word, as a second divine principle, which connects the absolute divine power with the world—a God who reveals, as contrasted with the God who hides himself: a principle through which God creates and governs the universe, through which he binds all the parts of the finite world to each other and unites it as a whole to himself. In fact, we find concentrated in the idea of the Logos all that Philo has to say of God's revelation in the world as opposed to his absolute essence; and he is very fertile in forms of expression to convey the relation of this principle of revelation to God and to man respectively. In the former aspect, the Word is declared to be the Son of God, the first-born, the highest archangel, the oldest of the angels: in the latter aspect* he is said to be the man who is the immediate image of God, the ideal or prototype in whose image all other men are created.
This passage seems certainly to suggest personal agency; yet in other places Philo seems rather to speak as if the Word were only a general name for all the attributes of God. I think, however, that two things may be made out clearly: first, that the idea of the Logos gains importance for Philo iust because his primary conception of God is such as to make it impossible to connect Him directly with the finite: and secondly, that the Logos is viewed as the principle of all the activities that are involved in that connexion. In particular, Philo speaks of 1 QuaesL et Solut. in Genesin //., § 62.
In some passages it seems as if this duality of powers, and jeven the Logos in whom they are united, were regarded merely as an appearance which is due * Be Cherub, % 9.
to the imperfect apprehension of truth by the finite mind: as where it is declared that "God appears in his unity when the soul, being perfectly purified and having transcended all multiplicity, not only the multiplicity of numbers but even the dyad which is nearest to unity, passes on to the idea which is un-mingled, simple and complete in itself."1 But if this way of thinking were followed out to its utmost consequences, the world Itself must disappear in the highest Being, who is above all relation. Hence it was a logical necessity for one who would not reduce the world to an illusive appearance to regard the primal unity as going out of itself and producing a manifestation which was relatively independent of it. And from this point of view the idea of the Word, through whom this manifestation takes place, could not be treated as merely an accommodation to an imperfect mode of human "thought.
The truth is that Philo brings the dualism, which, as we have seen, was latent both in Hebrew and in Greek thought, to a more definite expression than it had hitherto reached. He holds, on the one hand,... to the idea of an absolute God, pure, simple and self-subsistent; yet, on the other hand, he cannot avoid conceiving God as a principle of being and well-being in the universe, who binds all things to each other in binding them to himself. And he 1De Abrahamo, § 24.
puts these two aspects together as 'two Gods,' who yet must in some way be reduced to unity.1 But it was impossible for Philo to explain the nature of this unity without either giving up the conception of what God is in himself, or reducing the relative independence of the principle that manifests itself in the universe to an illusion. Sometimes, as in the passage just quoted, he approaches the former solution of the difficulty: sometimes, as when he is speaking of the goodness of God as the cause of the existence and preservation of his creatures, he approaches the latter solution of it. But he never definitely brings the two conceptions together, nor does he realise fully the consequences of either alternative.
We are, therefore, left with the idea of an absolute substance which, strictly taken, would exclude all difference and relation, even the difference and relation of subject and object in self-conscious-ness; and, on the other hand, with the idea of a self-revealing Word, who manifests himself in and to his creatures. And Philo employs all the resources of symbolism, allegorical interpretation, and logical distinction, to conceal from others, and even from hniiiSix Ifee lact that he is following out two separate -lte^ M thought which cannot be reconciled. All that he ca n say is that one of these Gods is subordinate to the other. The Logos, he declares, 1 Cf. Vol. I, p. 252.
that underlay. Greek thought from the time of Anaxagoras, and which the Stoics vainly endeavoured to escape. And this step had a higher significance because it was partly the result of a similar movement in Jewish religion, and showed that the Eastern was involved in similar difficulties with the Western mind. For the first time in the history of the world, these two great streams of thought had run together, and a beginning was made in that process of fusion of which the whole development of Christian theology was the outcome.
Philo, however, could not rest satisfied with this view; he could not, like a Stoic, fall back on the inner life, and seek to emancipate it as far as possible from entanglement with the world; for he had learnt that man can as little find his good within himself as he can find it without him. Hence he argues that the great source of evil lies not directly in our sensuous nature itself, but rather in the fact that it . leads us to rest in ourselves and not in God. Thus, speaking of the passage in Genesis that tells how Adam sought to hide himself from God among the trees of the garden, Philo tells us that the garden means the mind of man as an individual; and that "he who is escaping from God flees to himself." For there are only two principles which can exercise power over our life, the mind of the universe which is God, and the separate mind of the individual. He, .therefore, " who escapes from his own mind flies to the mind of the universe, confessing that all the things of the human mind are vain and unreal, and attributing everything to God; while he who seeks to escape from God declares by so doing that God is not the cause of anything, and looks upon himself as the cause of all that exists."1 Hence the soul that would attain to the heritage of God must not only despise the flesh and regard all the objects of outward sense as things which have no real existence, it must not only free itself from all the illusions of speech and opinion, but it must also flee from itself and empty itself of all self-love and all trust in anything which is its own.2 If, "there-1 Leg. AllegIll, § 9. 2 Quis rerum, § 14-16.
"Only he who dies to himself can live to God." There is a sense in which this is the highest of all truths, the truth which constitutes the essence of Christianity. But, as it appears in Philo, in connexion with a dualistic view of human nature, it seems to mean, not that we find God in so far as our individual nature becomes the organ of a higher spirit, but only that we find God in so far as all individual life is expelled from us or reduced to inactivity. And this appears to be the ultimate thought of Philo, which is expressed in his doctrine of ecstasy. For, according to this doctrine, the highest perfection of man is not the realisation of his nature as man, not the development of all his powers of mind and will, but an absorption of them in the divine vision, which annihilates all consciousness of himself and of the world. Philo is too much of a Jew to accept the ultimate consequences of this view; but it is obviously the conclusion to which his philosophy points, and it is only imperfectly warded off by his doctrine of the Logw. For, if God is not in his own essential nature a self-manifesting being, but is withdrawn from all relation to his creatures, it is clear that man can 1Drummond, II, p. 288.
become united to God only as he rises above his own existence as a creature.

References: §33
 § 11
 §40
 §4
 § 62
 § 24
 § 9
 § 14