vin THE EVOLUTION OF THEOLOGY 365 



is infinitely perfect and infinitely good, worked 

 itself out into its logical consequence agnostic 

 theism. Philo will allow of no point of contact 

 between God and a world in which evil exists. 

 For him God has no relation to space or to time, 

 and, as infinite, suffers no predicate beyond that 

 of existence. It is therefore absurd to ascribe to 

 Him mental faculties and affections comparable in 

 the remotest degree to those of men ; He is in no 

 way an object of cognition; He is CLTTOLOS and 

 afcaTaXrj/cTos l without quality and incomprehen- 

 sible. That is to say the Alexandrian Jew of the 

 first century had anticipated the reasonings of 

 Hamilton and Mansell in the nineteenth, and, for 

 him, God is the Unknowable in the sense in which 

 that term is used by Mr. Herbert Spencer. More- 

 over, Philo's definition of the Supreme Being 

 would not be inconsistent with that "substantia 

 const-ails infinitis attributis, quorum unumquodque 

 seternam et infinitam essentiam exprimit," given by 

 another great Israelite, were it not that Spinoza's 

 doctrine of the immanence of the Deity in the 

 world puts him, at any rate formally, at the 

 antipodes of theological speculation. But the 

 conception of the essential incognoscibility of the 

 Deity is the same in each case. However, Philo 



1 See the careful analsyis of the work of the Alexandrian 

 philosopher and theologian (who, it should be remembered, was 

 a most devout Jew, held in the highest esteem by his country- 

 men) in Siegfried's Philo von Alexandricn, 1875. [Also Dr. J. 

 Drunimoiid's Philo Judccus, 1888.] 



