different attributes of God [Hebrew: mdot], which were different
manifestations of His activity, to the human mind separable and
distinguishable from each other, though absolutely they were
inseparable aspects of the Godhead. Chief among these were the
attribute of mercy and the attribute of justice, [Hebrew: mdt hrhmim]
and [Hebrew: mdt hdin],[195] by which, according to a Midrash, Adam
was driven from Eden. And these conceptions, though distrusted by the
Synagogue, entered into later parts of the Prayer Book. "Attribute of
Mercy, reveal thyself for us; make our supplication to fall at the feet of
Thy Creator; and on behalf of Thy people beseech for mercy"; thus runs
a fine prayer in the Ne'ilah service of the Day of Atonement, and many
of the other Selihot prove the persistence of this development of
Jewish belief. The theory of Divine attributes was common to Palestine
and Alexandria, and plays, as we shall see, an important part in
Philo's[196] thought; but the distinctive Hellenistic theology is the
hypostasis of the Wisdom and the Word of God. In the Bible itself, and
notably in Proverbs, we find Wisdom personified--the first vague,
poetical suggestion of a Jewish theology. As the Jews came into
contact with Hellenic influence, the tendency to develop the
personification into a power increased, and may be traced through the
first flower of Græco-Jewish culture, the Wisdom literature. The Greek
philosophers had conceived the First Cause as a ruling Mind, or
universal Reason, and influenced by this conception, yet loyal to
their monotheistic faith, the Jewish writers of the Hellenistic age
spoke of the Wisdom as the minister of God, the power by which He
ruled creation. The apocryphal books of Ecclesiasticus and the Wisdom
of Solomon exhibit Wisdom passing from the poetical personification of
the Bible to the separate hypostasis of theology. In the verse of the
Bible sage, "Wisdom hath builded her house, she hath hewn out her
seven pillars" (Prov. ix. 1), she is the creation of the purely
poetical fancy, but in the Wisdom of Solomon she has become a link
between Heaven and earth, the creation of the theologian's reflection.
"She reacheth from one end of the world to the other with strength,
and ordereth all things graciously. She is settled by God on His
throne, and by her He made the world, by her the righteous were saved.
She watched over the father of the human race, and she delivered
Israel from Egypt." In Ecclesiasticus it is written, "All Wisdom is
from the Lord and is with Him forever. She cometh forth from the mouth
of the Most High, and was created before all things. God having
fashioned her from the beginning placed her over all His works. Then
she covered the earth as a mist, she pitched her tent in high places
and her palace was in a pillar of cloud. She ministered in the
tabernacle, and was established in Zion, in Jerusalem, the beloved
city." In similar strain, in the apocalyptic book of Enoch (xxx), God
says, "On the sixth day I ordered My Wisdom to make man"; and in the
Sibylline Oracles and Aristobulus she appears as the assessor of God
who ruleth over men.
Parallel with Wisdom, the Word of God was developed into something
between a poetical image and a separate power. Again the development
starts from a Biblical metaphor. "By the word of the Lord were the
heavens created, and all their host by the breath of His mouth" (Ps.
xxxiii). "God of our Fathers and Lord of Mercy, who didst make all
things by Thy word," says the writer of the Wisdom of Solomon.
Inspired again by the phrase of the Psalmist, "He sent His word, and
healed them" (Ps. cvi. 20), he hymns the Divine Logos as the
all-powerful emissary doing God's bidding among men. "It was neither
herb nor emollient that cured Israel in the wilderness (when bitten by
the fiery scorpions), but Thy Logos, O Lord, which heals all things."
Later, when he describes the destruction of the first-born in Egypt,
he rises in a pæan to a finer poetical flight: "When tranquil silence
folded all things, and night in her own swiftness was in the midst of
her course, Thy all-powerful Logos leaped from heaven, from his royal
throne, a stern warrior into the midst of the doomed land, bearing as
a sharp sword Thy Divine commandment, and having taken his stand
filled all things with death: and he touched heaven and walked upon
earth." The Jewish poet, rejecting the idea that the perfect God could
descend to earth and slay men, brushes away the anthropomorphism of
the Bible, and summons from his mind this creation mixed of Hebrew
imagination and Greek reason. So, too, Onkelos, wherever activity upon
earth was ascribed to God, wrote, in his translation (Targum) of
Scripture, "the word of the Lord," and for the material hand he
substituted the more abstract might. The same development,[197] under
the names of Memra and (less frequently) of [Hebrew: dbor], shows that
the word-agent of God appealed to certain of the rabbis in their
desire to explain away, on the one hand, expressions in the Bible
which seemed to invest the Deity with corporeal qualities, and, on the
other, so to divide His infinite perfection as to make His presence
immanent upon earth.
The teachers at Alexandria were above all others induced to develop
the Word into the active power, since they seemed thereby to find in
the Bible a remarkable anticipation of Greek philosophy. The Greek
Logos, by which "the Word" was translated in the Septuagint, meant
also thought and reason, and during the Hellenistic age was the
regular term by which the philosophical schools expressed the
impersonal world-force which governed all things. The Logos idea among
the Jews was a modification of intuitive and naïve monotheism; among
the Greeks it was a step upwards, demanded by reason, from polytheism
to a monistic view of the universe. By the first century its
recognition as the ruling power in both the physical and moral
universe had become a point of union in all philosophical schools--the
common stamp of philosophical theology. Between the Semitic
ministerial word uttered by a personal Being and the Greek pantheistic
governing reason, there was probably an early connection, due to
Eastern influences which operated upon the founders of Greek
philosophy, which later schools lost sight of. When the Hebrew
Scriptures were translated, the two coalesced more fruitfully in the
Greek term Logos, and a point of union was provided between the
philosophical and the Jewish theology. Moreover the local Egyptian
influence aided the union, for the god Thoth was also identified with
the Logos, which thus appeared as a religious conception common to all
races, the basis of a universal creed. And besides the world-reason of
the philosophers, another Greek influence no doubt tended to further
the development of the Logos in Jewish thought. One of the most marked
characteristics of the Hellenistic age is the renascence of wonder at
the institutions of human life, and more especially at numbers and
speech.
Numbers were held to contain the essence of things, and the marvellous
powers of four, seven, and ten received honor from all sects and
schools. Words, too, were regarded almost as a mystic power, distinct
from thought, incorporeal things which made thought real and gave it
expression. The mystical susceptibility of Philo to the power of
numbers has been noticed by every critic and exaggerated by not a few;
his mystical valuation of words and speech, though far more important
in his thought, has been commonly passed over. The analysis which
Greek writers made of the relation between the mental thought, the
sound which utters it, and the mind which thinks it, was invested with
special importance for the Jewish thinker, who transferred it from the
human to the Divine sphere. He applied it to interpret the constant
Biblical phrases "and God said" or "and God spoke," according to
notions in which philosophy and theology are mixed; and propounded a
mystic idealism and a mystic cosmology, in which God's thought or
comprehensive Word becomes the archetype of the visible universe, His
single words the substantive universe and the laws of nature. A
century before Philo, Aristobulus--assuming the genuineness of his
Fragments--wrote:[198] "We must understand the Word of God, not as a
spoken word, but as the establishment of actual things, seeing that we
find throughout the Torah that Moses has declared the whole creation
to be words of God." Philo, following his predecessor, says, "God
speaks not words but things,"[199] and, again, commenting on the first
chapter of Genesis, "God, even as He spake, at the same moment
created."[200] And of human speech he has this pretty conceit a little
before: "Into the mouth there enter food and drink, the perishable
food of a perishable body; out of it issue words, immortal laws of an
immortal soul, by which rational life is guided."[201] If human speech
is "immortal law," much more is the speech of God. His words are ideas
seen by the eye of the soul, not heard by the ear.[202] The ten
commandments given at Sinai were "ideas" of this incorporeal nature,
and the voice that Israel heard was no voice such as men possess, but
the [Hebrew: shkina], the Divine Presence itself, which exalted the
multitude.[203] Philo is here expanding and developing Jewish
tradition. In the "Ethics of the Fathers" (v) we read: "By ten words
was the world created"; and in the pages of the Midrash the [Hebrew:
bt-kol], i.e._, the mystic emanation of the Deity, which revealed itself
after the spirit of prophecy had ceased to be vouchsafed, is credited
with wondrous and varied powers, now revealing the Decalogue, now
performing some miracle, now appearing in a vision to the blessed, now
prophesying the future fate of the race to a pious rabbi. The
fertilizing stream of Greek philosophical idealism nourished the
growth of the Jewish pious imagination, and in the Logos of Philo the
fruit matured. It is idle to try to formulate a single definite notion
of Philo's Logos. For it is the expression of God in all His multiple
and manifold activity, the instrument of creation, the seat of ideas,
the world of thought which God first established as the model of the
visible universe, the guiding providence, the sower of virtue, the
fount of wisdom, described sometimes in religious ecstasy, sometimes
in philosophical metaphysics, sometimes in the spirit of the mystical
poet. Of his last manner let us take a specimen singled out by a
Christian and a Jewish theologian as of surprising beauty. Commenting
on the verse of the Psalmist, "The river of God is filled with water,"
Philo declares that it is absurd to call any earthly stream the river
of God.
"The poet clearly refers to the Divine Logos that is full of
the fountain of wisdom, and is in no part itself empty. Nay,
it is diffused through the universe, and is raised up on
high. In another verse the Psalmist says, 'The course of the
river gladdens the city of God.' And in truth the continuous
rush of the Divine Logos is borne along with eager but
regular onset, and overflows and gladdens all things. In one
sense he calls the world the city of God, for it has
received the 'full cup' of the Divine draught, and has
quaffed a perpetual, eternal joy. But in another sense he
gave this name to the soul of the wise, wherein God is said
to walk as in a city. And who can pour out the sacred
measures of their joy to the blissful soul which holds out
the holy cup, that is its own reason, save the Logos, the
cupbearer of God, the master of the feast? Nor is the Logos
cupbearer only, but it is itself the pure draught, itself
the joy and exultation, itself the pouring forth and the
delight, itself the ambrosial philtre and potion of
bliss."[204]
Through the luxury of metaphor and imagination one may discern the
underlying thought of the mystic writer, that the Logos is the
effluence of God, either in the whole universe or the individual man,
filling the one as the other with the Divine Shekinah. It is the link
which joins God and man, the ladder of Jacob's dream, which stretches
from Heaven to earth.[205] That man can attain the Divine state by the
help of God's effluence was a cardinal thought of Philo's; this,
indeed, is the form in which he conceives the Messianic hope. God does
not come down to earth incarnate in man's form, but God's active
influence possesses the soul of man, and makes it live with God, and
if man be peculiarly blessed, carries it up to the ineffable Spirit.
Similarly his idea of the Messiah is more spiritual than that of the
popular belief. The ascent of man to God's height, not the descent of
God to man's level, will produce the age of universal peace.
There are various degrees of the Divine influence, stretching from
complete possession by the Deity Himself to the advent of single
Divine thoughts. These Philo regards as [Greek: logoi], words or
thoughts--for he does not clearly distinguish between the two--and he
resolves the realistic angels of the Bible into this spiritual
conception.[206] Thus he says, "the place" where Jacob alighted and
had the vision (Gen. xxvii. 11) is the symbol of the perfect
contemplation of God; the angels which he saw ascending and descending
are the inferior light of Divine precepts. These thoughts are
continually vouchsafed to all of us, prompting us to noble actions,
comforting us in times of sadness, inspiring lofty ideas.
"Up and down through the whole soul the Logoi of God move
without end; when they ascend, drawing it up with them, and
severing it from the mortal part, and showing only the
vision of ideal things; but when they descend, not casting
it down, but descending with it from humanity or compassion
towards our race, so as to give assistance and help, in
order that, inspiring what is noble, they may revive the
soul which is borne along on the stream of the body."[207]
Conversely, the rabbis taught that from each word that proceeded from
the mouth of God an angel was created, as it is said: "By the word of
the Lord the Heavens were made, and all the host of them by the breath
of His mouth."[208]
Apart from these sudden and occasional emanations of the Divine
Spirit, the individual man has within him a permanent Divine Logos by
which he may direct his conduct aright. Viewed in this aspect, the
Logos, _i.e._, the activity of God, is conscience, the Judge in the
soul, which is the true man dwelling within,[209] ruler and king,
judge and arbiter, witness and accuser, correcting and restraining.
Rising to bolder personification, Philo, who loves to present a
spiritual thought in a concrete image, calls it the undefiled high
priest in us.[210] In this power he finds a sure refutation of
skepticism; for in virtue of the Divine voice man may secure moral
certitude: and he finds also a philosophical value for popular
superstition. It was a common notion of the pagans as well as
the Jews of the time that an intermediate order of beings passed
between heaven and earth and brought supernatural aid to men; and also
that a familiar spirit, or Dæmon, dwelt within the soul of each man.
The finer spirit of Philo resolves the attendant Dæmon and the
messenger-dæmons or angels into the spiritual effluences of the one
Deity; save for a few places where he makes a pose of agreement with
popular notions and speaks of winged denizens of Heaven[211] who
descend to earth, he habitually expounds angels as inward revelations
of God.
As the revelation of God to the individual is a Logos, so, too, is his
revelation to the whole of mankind. It was pointed out in the last
chapter that Philo identified the Torah with the law of nature, and he
did this by regarding it as the Divine Logos. The more perfect
emanation of God is in one view the power by which He directs the
physical creation, in another the perfect law which He set up as the
model of conduct for His highest creatures. The rabbis, indeed, were
prone to glorify the law as the primal creation of God, and the
instrument of all the later creations, [Hebrew: kli hmra shbu gbrao
shmim].[212] They speak of it as the light, the pillar, and the bond
of the universe, the model whereon the architect looked;[213] and Philo
amplifies this simple poetical concept and develops it afresh in the
light of Greek idealistic and cosmical notions,[214] so that the Torah,
as the Logos of God, is equated with the source of all being, wisdom, and
knowledge, with the ideal world which is the archetype of the
material, and with all the law and order of nature. And as the Torah
is the Logos, so also its particular precepts are Logoi.
It seems difficult to trace the unity among all these different
aspects of the "Word," but in fact they are only different expressions
of the Divine activity in the universe. All these are comprehended in
the Logos, and then again divided out of it, so that it is, as it
were, a crystal prism reflecting the light of the Godhead in a myriad
different ways. One curious illustration of the universal sense in
which Philo understood the Logos is his interpretation of the manna;
it is typical also of his manner of exegesis and his habit of
spiritualizing the material. It is related in Exodus (xvi. 15) that
when the Israelites saw the heavenly food they exclaimed [Hebrew: mn
hu'], "What is it?" and hence the food obtained its name of manna. Now the
Greek Septuagint word for [Hebrew: mn] is [Greek: ti], which means not
only "what" but "anything." Philo sees in the gift of the heavenly
food a symbol of the inspiration of the chosen people by the Divine
Logos, and says that the Logos is rightly called manna, _i.e._,
anything, because it is the "most generic of all things, and that by
which man may be nourished."[215]
The central thought of Philo's system is that God is immanent in all
His work; but it would seem to him sacrilegious to apply to the
Godhead itself this universal, unceasing activity, and so he develops
the Logos as the most ideal attribute of the Deity, and the sum of all
His immanence and effluence. He preferred the Logos to the older
Wisdom, probably because he could by this conception bring his idea of
God into closer relation with Greek philosophical notions, for already
the Hellenistic world had come spontaneously to revere the cosmical
Logos. Only Philo gave to the expression of their physical and
metaphysical speculation a religious warmth new to it, when he
associated it with the word uttered by the personal God. Philosophy,
theology, and religion were all joined and harmonized in his
conception.
If we have followed thus far the spirit of Philo aright, the Logos is
only the immanent manifestation of the One God, who is both
transcendental and immanent, metaphorically, not metaphysically,
separate. In other words, it is the complete aspect of God as He
reveals Himself to the world. Above it and including it is the being
or essence of God, seen in Himself, and not in relation to His outward
activity. But it is often suggested that the Logos appears to Philo as
a second God, subordinate, indeed, to the Supreme Being, but yet a
separate personality. It is said, with truth, that he speaks of it as
a person, now calling it king, priest, primal man, the first-born son
of God, even the second God, and identifying it at other times with
some personal being, Melchizedek or Moses, and apostrophizing it as
man's helper, guide, and advocate.[216] Now we have reason to think
that Gnostic sects of Jews, both in Alexandria and in Palestine, were
at this time tending towards the division of the Godhead into separate
powers. The heresy of "Minut," frequently mentioned in the Talmud,
consisted originally, in the opinion of modern scholars, of a Gnostic
ditheism;[217] and during the latter part of the first century and
thereafter we hear of sects in Egypt and Syria which supported similar
theories. Theology here produced its fantastic offspring theosophy,
and the followers of the esoteric wisdom let their speculations carry
them away from the cardinal principle of Judaism. Influenced by
Egyptian speculation, they imagined an incarnation of the Divine
Spirit, and in the mystical thought of the day they adumbrated
theories of virgin birth.
Now these prototypes of Christian belief had undoubtedly manifested
themselves at Alexandria in Philo's day. His treatises show traces of
them,[218] and the question is whether he countenanced them or tried
to summon the theosophists of his generation back to the true Jewish
conception of God. Certain Christian and philosophical critics of
Philo, for whom the wish was perhaps father to the thought, have found
in Philo's Logos a conception which is at times impersonal, at times
personal, at times an aspect of the One God, and at times a second
independent God. If we take Philo literally, this certainly is the
case. But let it be clearly understood, this interpretation not only
involves Philo in inconsistency, but it utterly ruins and destroys his
religious and philosophical system. It means that the champion of
Jewish monotheism wanders into a vague ditheism. And in view of this,
the modern commentators of Philo, notably Professor Drummond,[219]
have examined his words more carefully and studied them in relation to
their context; and they have shown how, judged in this critical
fashion, the personality of the Logos is only figurative. It is,
indeed, probable that certain extreme passages, where the Logos is
presented most explicitly as a separate Deity, are due to
Christological interpolation. The Church Fathers found in the popular
belief in the Divine Word a remarkable support of the Trinity, and
regarding, as they did, Philo's writings as valuable testimony to the
truth of Christianity, they had every temptation to bring his passages
about the Logos still closer to their ideas. And between the first and
the fifth century, when we first hear from Eusebius of manuscripts of
Philo at the Christian monastery of Cæsarea--from which we can trace
our texts in direct line--there was no high standard in dealing with
ancient authorities. It is the Christian teachers who preserved Philo,
and they preserved him not as scholars but as missioners. The best
editors have recognized that our text has been interfered with by
evidenced-making scribes, as where a passage about the new Jerusalem
appears, agreeing almost word for word with the picture of
Revelations. Similarly, not a few passages about the Logos are
probably spurious.[220]
Yet, even when we have expurgated our text of Philo, there remain, it
will be said, numerous passages where the Logos is spoken of and
apostrophized as a person. This is so, but the conclusion which is
drawn, that the Logos is regarded as a second deity, is unjustifiable.
The Jewish mind from the time of the prophets unto this day has
thought in images and metaphors, and the personification of the Logos
is only the most striking instance of Philo's regular habit of
personifying all abstract ideas. The allegorical habit particularly
conduces to this, for as persons are constantly resolved into ideas,
so ideas come to be naturally represented as persons. There are thus
two steps in Philo's theology, which seem to some extent to counteract
each other; in the first place, he resolves the concrete physical
expressions of the Bible into spiritual ideas, in the second he
portrays those ideas in pictorial language and clothes them in
personifications. The allegorizer requires an allegorist to interpret
him aright.
Nor must it be forgotten that Philo was preaching spiritual monotheism
not only to Jews, but also to the Hellenic world, for whom it was a
vast bound from their naturalistic polytheism. Zealous as he was for
the pure faith, he realized that mankind could not attain it directly,
but must approach it by conceptions of the One God gradually
increasing in profundity and truth. The Greek thinkers had
approximated closest to the Hebraic God-idea when they conceived one
supreme, immanent reason in the universe; and Philo, in carrying his
audiences beyond this to the transcendent-immanent Being, transformed
the Greek cosmical concept into a Divine power of the One Being. For
the true believer this is the stepping-stone to the perfect idea. "The
Logos," he says, "is the God of us imperfect people, but the true
sages worship the One Being."[221] And, again, "The imperfect have as
their law the holy Logos."[222] And in this sense, it is "intermediate
([Greek: methorios]) between God and man."[223] What such passages
mean is that the separation of the Logos is a stage in man's progress
up to the true idea of God. It is a second-best Deity, so to say,
rather than a second Deity; for those who regard the Logos as God have
no conception at all of the perfect Being of which it is only the
principal attribute.
The theology of Philo is characterized throughout by a tolerant and
philosophical grasp of the difficulty of pure monotheism, and of the
necessity of a long intellectual searching before the goal can be
attained. To declare the Unity of God is simple enough; to have a real
conception of it is a very different and a very difficult thing. And
Philo's theology has a two-fold aim, in which either part complements
the other. It explains, on the one hand, how God is revealed to the
world through His powers or attributes or modes of activity, and, on
the other, how man can ascend to an ecstatic union with the Real Being
through comprehension of those powers. By the ideal ladder which
brings down God to earth, man can climb again to Heaven. The three
chief rungs of the ladder are the attributes of creation, and of
ruling power, and the Logos. The perfect unity of the Godhead is not,
of course, properly the subject of attributes, but the limited mind of
man so conceives it for its own understanding, and speaks of God's
justice, God's goodness, God's wisdom. These are, to use philosophical
terminology, categories of the religious understanding, which are
finally resolved by the perfect sage in "the synthetic apperception of
Unity."