Tilden: Philo Judaeus 



5 



youthful indiscretion which men dare impiously to attribute to the 

 blessed and divine powers, declaring that they were madly in love 

 with mortal women and had intercourse with them, when in reality 

 they are free from all lusts and are thrice-blessed beings.^ 



But shall we compare them with people who worship rude idols 

 and images? The substances of these are stone and wood which a 

 short time before were utterly shapeless until the stone-cutters 

 and wood-carvers cut them out of their natural materials, while 

 their cognate and related portions are made into water-pails and 

 foot-tubs, and into other vessels of even more ignoble uses which 

 serve for purposes that are dark rather than for those that will 

 bear the light. 



It is right not even to call to mind the practices of the Egyptians, 

 who have wrongly introduced into divine honors unreasoning beasts, 

 not only domesticated animals, but even the fiercest of wild beasts, 

 from every species under the moon; from land animals, the lion; 

 from those that live in the water, the native crocodile; from creatures 

 of the air, the kite and the Egyptian ibis. And altho they recognize 

 that these animals are born and have need of food, and that they 

 are in fact insatiate of food, and full of excretions, and are venomous 

 and man-eating, and susceptible to all kinds of diseases, and that 

 they are often killed not only by a natural death, but also by violence, 

 still these ci\dlized people worship these wild and untamable beasts, 

 these rational beings revere irrational brutes, and tho they have 

 (M. 473) kinship with the divine they w^orship creatures not to be 

 compared even to Thersites-like apes; and altho they are rulers and 

 lords of creation the}' worship those who are by nature their subjects 

 and slaves.'^ 



II 



But inasmuch as these infect with the poison of folly not only 

 those of their own race but also those who associate with them, let 

 them remain uncured, being incapacitated in sight, that most 



^ In Leg. ad Gaium 2, 557-8, Philo reproaches Caligula for not imitating 

 the virtues of Dion3'sus, Heracles, and the Dioscuri whose titles he assumed 

 (Conybeare). 



" Plutarch in his essay on Isis (379 E) speaks of this animal worship^ 

 but he tries to defend the Egj^Dtians by supposing that the various animals 

 represent in symbolic fashion various attributes of the divine nature. Philo 

 regards the worship of animals as more degraded than that of idols. He is 

 followed by Justin Martyr and the Christian Apologists generally, but Clement 

 of Alexandria rather defends the Egyptians as against the ancient Greeks 

 {Cohort, ad Gentes, 325). (Condensed from Conybeare.) 



2—21026 



