If we have understood correctly Philo’s theology, neither Logos, nor subordinate powers, nor angels, nor demons have an objective existence; they are mere imaginings of varying incompleteness which the limited minds of men, “moving in worlds not realized,” make for themselves of the one and only true God.  Philo’s theology is the philosophical treatment of Jewish tradition, just as Philo’s legal exegesis is the philosophical treatment of the Torah.  While maintaining and striving to deepen the conception of God’s unity, he aims at expounding to the reason how, on the one hand, that unity is revealed in the world about us, and how, on the other, we may advance to its true comprehension.  It was, however, unfortunate that Philo expressed his theology in the current language, which was vague and inexact, and adapted certain foreign theosophical ideas to Judaism; hence succeeding generations, paying regard to the pictorial representation rather than to the principles of his thought, sought and found in him evidence of theories of Divine government to which Judaism was pre-eminently opposed.  The first chapter of the Fourth Gospel shows that gradual process of thought which finally made the Logos doctrine the antithesis of Judaism.  In the first verse we have a thought which might well have been written by Philo himself:  “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”  But in the fourteenth verse there is manifest the sharp cleavage:  “And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth.”  There may be a fine spiritual thought beneath the letter here, but the notion of the Incarnation is not Jewish, nor philosophical, nor Philonic.  Philo’s work was made to serve as the guide of that Christian Gnosticism which, within the next hundred years, proclaimed that Judaism was the work of an evil God, and that the essential mission of Jesus—­the good Logos—­was to dethrone Jehovah!  But though the Logos conception was turned to non-Jewish and anti-Jewish purposes, it was in Philo the offspring of a pure and philosophical monotheism.  Whatever the later abuse of his teaching, Philo constructed a theology which, though affected by foreign influences, was essentially true to Judaism; and more than that, he was the first to weave the Jewish idea of God into the world’s philosophy.

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VI

PHILO AS A PHILOSOPHER

Save for a few monographs of no great importance, because of the absence of original thought, Philo’s works form avowedly an exegesis of the Bible and not a series of philosophical writings.  Nor must the reader expect to find an ordered system of philosophy in his separate works, much more than in the writings of the rabbis.  As Professor Caird says,[234] “The Hebrew mind is intuitive, imaginative, incapable