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Indiana University Studies 



fundamentally Greek, colored of course by Hebraism. One can no 

 more understand and appreciate Philo than Plato without being 

 somewhat of a mystic and in sympathy with the allegorizing method. 



Philo believed implicitly in the Law as handed down by Moses 

 in the Pentateuch, and wherever similar ideas are found in Greek 

 philosophy, he with other Jews believed they had been borrowed 

 from the Hebrews. They adopted Plato as their own, calling him the 

 Moses who spoke Attic Greek {McjvGvjg drrLxl^idv). Philo is 

 always trying to harmonize Moses and Plato. Religion is Philo's 

 first concern, and here he combats especially the anthropomorphism 

 so common in most Greek writers and in many rabbinical commen- 

 tators on the Old Testament. Like Xenophanes in an earlier age, 

 Philo insists that God is a spirit and must be worshipped as such. 

 Compare John 4, 24, ''God is a Spirit; and they that worship him 

 must worship him in spirit and in truth." Philo even hesitates to 

 give God a name, for he says: ''Names are symbols of created things; 

 do not look for a name for Him who is uncreated." But Philo stops 

 before he pushes his argument to pure negation of all qualities and 

 attributes, and thus he remains more human if less logical. 



God, according to his idea, did not create the world himself, but 

 delegated his creative energy to certain ministers called Powers, 

 which in a way are identical with Angels, or with the Logoi of the 

 Stoics, or even with the Platonic Ideas. They are the Thoughts of 

 God. These Angels are governed by both the Goodness and the 

 Justice of God. The backbone of all of Philo's philosophy is the doctrine 

 of the Logos. This was not his invention, for it is found in the Stoics, 

 and even as early as Heraclitus. The reason why Philo preferred it to 

 the Platonic Idea is because of the frequent use of the expression 

 "The Word of God" in the Hebrew Scriptures. Besides, its vagueness 

 could be interpreted as "word" merely, or "reason", "plan", "system'', 

 "idea", etc. Faust had the same difficulty in finding just the appro- 

 priate translation for Xoyog.'^ 



^The significance of the /o}oc in the world's thought is admirably 

 expressed in the following quotation from W. P. Montague ("The Antinomy 

 and Logical Theory", in the Columbia Universittj Studies in the History of 

 Ideas, p. 236): "Many who failed to see the concrete flux of Heraclitus have 

 seen in one form or another his fluxless Logos. Parmenides saw only its shadow, 

 the mere generic character of abstract being and permanence, projected into 

 the abyss as a dark and homogeneous sphere. For the gorgeous mind of Plato 

 the Logos was reflected above the sky as a rainbow of moral beauties and 

 creative mystic powers. To Aquinas and Leibnitz it seemed as the omni- 

 present intellect of an eternal God. By the transcendental Germans, it was 

 taken for the presupposition of the sensible world, which it was, and then 

 mistaken for the grandiose structure of their egos, which it certainly was not. 



