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V

PHILO’S THEOLOGY

“The most remarkable feature about Judaism,” says Darmesteter, “is that without a philosophical system it had reached a philosophical conclusion about the government of the world and the nature of God."[171] The same idea underlies the statement of the Peripatetic writer Theophrastus (who lived in the latter part of the fourth century B.C.E.) that the Jews are a people of philosophers,[172] and the epigram of Heine, that they pray in metaphysics.  Intuitively, the lawgiver and prophets of the Hebrew race had attained a conception of monotheism to which the greatest of the Greek philosophers had hardly struggled by reason.  The Greeks had started with separate nature-powers, which they had finally resolved into a supreme nature-force; the Hebrews had started with the historical God of their fathers, whom they had universalized into the Creator of the world and Father of all the human race.  Wellhausen has suggested that the intellectual development of Judaism with its tendency to become a purified monotheism moved in the same direction towards which Greek thought tended in its philosophical speculation of the universe.  The difference between the two conceptions of God, however, remained even in their universalized aspect; the one was an impersonal world-force, the other a personal God in direct relation with individual man.  Elsewhere than in Judaea, it has been well said, religious development reaches unity only by sacrificing personality.  But the prophets, whose conception of God was imaginative rather than rational, preserved His nearness while expanding His sway.  Israel, to use Philo’s etymology, is the man who sees God,[173] and his religious genius gave to the world a personal incorporeal Deity, who is both transcendent and immanent, personal and yet above human conception.  It is unnecessary to quote evidence of this view of the Godhead in the Bible, and it would be superfluous to adduce passages from the rabbis, did they not bear a striking similarity to the words of Philo.  God to them is not only the Creator of the world, but also the Father of the world, the Governor of the world, the Only One of the world, the Space of the world, filling it as the soul fills the body.[174] Now, this Jewish conception of God is dominant in Philo.  To him also God is not only the Creator but the Father of the universe.[175] He is the One and the All.[176] He is ever at rest, yet he outstrippeth everything, nearest to everyone, yet far removed, everywhere and nowhere, above and outside the universe, yet filling creation with Himself.[177] Philo loves to attach to the Deity these opposite predicates, for in this way alone can we form for ourselves some conception, however inadequate, of His Being.  Strictly, God is unconditioned, and cannot be the subject of predication, for all determination involves negation, and hence in one aspect He is not