gos, his Word, which is the expression
of his thought. In the Christian creed it is the Logos, the Word of God,
by whom all things are made (John i. 1-3). The very name, as well as the
thought, is the same, whether we turn over the pages of Plato or those
of John. Philo, the great Jewish Platonist, living in Alexandria at the
close of the last century B.C. and in the first half of the first
century after Christ, speaks of the Logos in terms that, to our ears,
seem purely Christian. Philo was a man of high position among the Jews
in Alexandria, being "a man eminent on all accounts, brother to
Alexander the alabarch [governor of the Jews], and one not unskilful in
philosophy" (Josephus' "Antiquities of the Jews," bk. xviii., ch. 8,
sec. 1). This "Alexander was a principal person among all his
contemporaries both for his family and wealth" (Ibid, bk. xx, ch. 5,
sec. 2). He was the principal man in the Jewish embassage to Caius
(Caligula) A.D. 39-40, and was then a grey-headed old man. Keim speaks
of him as about sixty or seventy years old at that time, and puts his
birth at about B.C. 20. He writes: "The Theology of Philo is in great
measure founded on his peculiar combination of the Jewish, the Platonic,
and the Neo-Platonic conception of God. The God of the Old Testament,
the exalted God, as he is called by the modern Hegelian philosophy,
stood in close relations to the Greek Philosophers' conception of God,
which believed that the Supreme Being could be accurately defined by the
negative of all that was finite. In accordance with this, Philo also
described God as the simple Entity; he disclaimed for him every name,
every quality, even that of the Good, the Beautiful, the Blessed, the
One. Since he is still better than the good, higher than the Unity, he
can never be known _as_, but only _that_, he is: his perfect name is
only the four mysterious letters (Jhvh)--that is, pure Being. By such
means, indeed, neither a fuller theology nor God's influence on the
world was to be obtained. And yet it was the problem of philosophy, as
well as of religion, to shed the light of God upon the world, and to
lead it again to God. But how could this Being which was veiled from the
world be brought to bear upon it? By Philo, as well as by all the
philosophy of the time, the problem could only be solved illogically.
Yet, by modifying his exalted nature, it might be done. If not by his
being, yet by his work he influences the world; his pow