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which is magnified. Philo, and the rabbis, too, believed that faith
was the goal of virtue, and the culmination of the moral life; but
faith to them implied the sanctification of the whole of life, the
love of God "shown in obedience to a law of conduct." Paul, however,
hating the law, set up a new faith in the saving power of Jesus and in
certain beliefs about him, which afterwards were crystallized, or
petrified, into merciless dogmas, contrary alike to the Jewish ideas
of God and of life. The new religion, when it was denationalized,
inevitably became ecclesiastical: for as the national regulation of
life was rejected, in order to ensure some kind of uniformity, it had
to bind its members together by definite articles of belief imposed by
a central authority. The true alternative was not between a legal and
a spiritual religion--for every religion must have some external
rule--but between a law of conduct and a law of belief. Philo and the
rabbis chose the former way; Paul and the Church, the latter.
Christian theology, no less than the Christian conception of religion,
exhibits also a complete breach with the Jewish spirit of Philo. In
the Epistles there are, indeed, in many places doctrines of the Logos
in the same images and the same Hebraic metaphors as Philo had worked
into his system; but their purport is entirely changed by association
with new un-Jewish dogmas. Philo, allegorizing,[362] had seen the holy
Word typified in the high priest, and in Melchizedek, the priest of
the Most High; he had called it the son of God and His first-born.
Paul, dogmatizing, exalts Jesus Christ, the incarnate Word, above
Melchizedek and the high priest, and calls on the Hebrews to gain
salvation by faith in the son of God, who died on behalf of the sinful
human race. Philo, in his poetic fancy, speaks of God associating with
the virgin soul and generating therein the Divine offspring of holy
wisdom;[363] the Christian creed-makers enunciated the irrational
dogma of the immaculate conception of Jesus. So, too, the earliest
philosophical exponents of Christianity, Clement of Alexandria, and
Origen, may have derived many of their detailed ideas from Philo, but
they converted--one might rather say perverted--his monotheistic
theology into a dogmatic trinitarianism. They exalted the Logos, to
Philo the "God of the imperfect," and a second-best Deity, to an equal
place with the perfect God. For man, indeed, he was nearer and the
tru