h the
creative mind looks up. Soon, however, they are conceived as thoughts of
this mind, as something secondary, created, sometimes also as something
independent, as much so as is the Son in relation to his Father. The whole
Logos, with all ideas, became in this manner the first-born Son of the
Creator, yet so that the Father could not be Father without the Son, or
the Son without the Father, Son. All these distinctions, insignificant as
they may appear from a purely philosophical point of view, demand
attention because of the influence that they afterward exerted on
Christian dogma, especially on that of the Trinity--a dogma which, however
specifically Christian it may appear to be, must still in all its
essential features be traced back to Greek elements.

It is certainly remarkable that Jewish philosophy also developed on very
similar lines, of course not with the purity and exactness of the Greek
mind, but still with the same object in view,--to bring the reason and
wisdom recognised in nature into renewed connexion with their supernatural
Jehovah. Through the Proverbs of Solomon and similar works the Jews were
well acquainted with Wisdom, who says of herself (viii. 22 ff.): "The Lord
possessed me in the beginning of his way, before his works of old. I was
set up from everlasting, from the beginning, or ever the earth was.{~HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS~}
Before the mountains were settled, before the hills was I brought forth.{~HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS~}
When he prepared the heavens, I was there: when he set a compass upon the
face of the depth.{~HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS~} Then I was by him, as a master workman: and I was
daily his delight, rejoicing always before him." These and similar
thoughts were familiar to Jewish thinkers (see Proverbs viii. and ix., Job
xxviii. 12, Ecclesiasticus i. 4), and it was natural that, in coming in
contact with Greek philosophy, especially in Alexandria, they should seek
to recognise again this traditional conception of divine Wisdom in the
Logos of Greek philosophers. We see this most clearly in Philo, a
contemporary of Christ, of whom it is often difficult to say whether he
reasons more as a Greek or as a Jew. While the Greeks had almost lost
sight of the bridge between the world and God by abstraction, the Jews,
through mistaken reverence, had so far removed the Creator above his
creation that on both sides the need of mediation or a mediator was deeply
felt. The Jewish God was little better than the