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sions of the book, though not of the character of the argument. The views advanced and those refuted will be stated, as far as possible, by quotation, and without criticism.

1. Philo adopted the Platonic conception of matter, as an eternal, formless existence, the passive but necessary condition of creation, the substance out of which God fashioned the world. The dualism thus implied is never reconciled with the monotheistic faith which Philo, as a Jew, affirmed. The difficulty is increased by the apparent attribution of evil to matter, and the consequent disparagement of the bodily life. It has been commonly held that he was hopelessly inconsistent at this point, representing matter sometimes as necessary, and sometimes as harmful, now as passive, and now as limiting the divine power. Dr. Drummond defends Philo, in part, from this charge. Matter was, indeed, conceived by him as eternal, but not as actively evil. "The source of imperfection was not in the material as opposed to the spiritual, but in the phenomenal as opposed to the eternal." "Incurable disabilities " belong to all material things, not because they are made of matter, but because they are made (I. 310 ff; II. 297). Philo says that the body was made by God, but "he could hardly depart so widely from his general doctrine as to make God the creator of what was absolutely evil; and therefore we must be dealing, not with an intrinsically malignant matter, but with that which is relatively inferior, in the preference of which moral evil consists" (II. 300).

2. Philo has been charged with holding a materialistic conception of the human mind. "Our philosopher," says Zeller, "cannot hold himself entirely free from materialistic ideas of the nature of the soul" (III. ii. p. 396). This Dr. Drummond confidently denies. The essence of the mind is nothing less than the Divine Being, of whom it is an "impression, or fragment, or ray" (I. 328). These words would seem to justify rather than to refute Zeller's statement, but in Dr. Drummond's judgment they were meant to be taken figuratively.

3. In his doctrine of God, Philo has often been accused of vacillating between a negative and a positive description. This is due to the attempt to unite the abstract deity of philosophy with the personal God of Israel, to escape all anthropomorph

isms, and yet affirm all perfections. "He wavers continually in his utterances concerning the deity between the negative description in which all predicates must be denied of God, and the positive in which all perfection must be ascribed to him. We cannot hope to resolve this contradiction; it is enough that we recognize it and point out its grounds" (Zeller, p. 354). Dr. Drummond acknowledges a certain verbal contradiction, but thinks that Philo was aware of it and attempted its solution (II. 23 ff.). God is, indeed, described as without qualities (aлоos), but the word is used in its logical meaning, and denotes "that which does not belong to a class, but is sui generis.” God is beyond classification because he is alone and dependent on nothing but himself. Philo could consistently deny qualities of God and yet affirm properties, or attributes of him, such as eternity, self-existence, omnipotence, perfection, because these do not place him in a class with others. Even attributes which belong in some measure to man, such as freedom, mercy, goodness, can consistently be ascribed to a God without qualities, because man possesses these attributes only so far as he shares in the divine nature, while God contains them and is their source. God is not like man because he is just and good, but man, so far as he is just and good, participates in God's being. It would be 66 more correct to say that the good is divine than to say that God is good" (II. 27, 30). It is not the logical emptiness but the real fullness of God that Philo is concerned to maintain. "God, instead of being an empty abstraction, contains in his infinite fullness the eternal essence of all perfect things" (II. 34). By this peculiar (realistic) conception of the attributes, Philo saves himself, in Dr. Drummond's view, from inconsistency, and makes "the strictest speculative thought minister to religious aspiration."

4. Dr. Drummond's most important deviation from the prevailing view of Philo's interpreters relates to the divine Powers and the Logos. Philo's Powers are the mediators by which he attempts to bring God into connection with the world. As mediators they must, it would seem, share in the nature of each of the contrasted beings, though identical with neither; and they are, in fact, spoken of as divine, and yet as distinct from God, as impersonal attributes of God, and again as his

personal agents. Zeller says that the contradiction was inevitable, and that it could not, in the nature of the case, have been perceived by Philo (p. 365). Dr. Drummond's discussion of the matter is elaborate and most instructive. He maintains that the Powers are impersonal; not independent entities, but attributes of God, or, more exactly, modes of the divine activity. They are in essence ideas of God, and they appear as the forms and forces of finite things. They make up collectively the nature, or essence of God, so far as it can be impressed upon matter and comprehended by finite minds. They are not ontologically distinct from God. They "are not substitutes for God. It is he that is everywhere, and the Powers are introduced simply to explain the mode of his omnipresence" (II. 108). Their function "was not to keep God out of the world, but to bring him into it" (p. 107). They are like the plans in the mind of the architect, if these be conceived as also the forces that hold the finished structure together. Apart from God they would be nothing, and the world apart from them would be nothing. They are fitted to mediate between the universe and God, not because they waver between the two and are different from both, but because strictly separable from neither (p. 116). This view, Dr. Drummond insists, can be fairly derived from Philo's language, and is "something better than sheer nonsense." On the other hand he could not have meant "to represent God as physically outside the universe, and therefore requiring separate persons inferior to himself to act upon matter for him." Language that seems to imply this is to be understood as rhetorical personification, of which Philo was certainly fond (p. 123 ff.), or as due to the exigencies of his allegorical interpretation.

5. The Logos presents the same problem, for it is simply the sum and unity of the Powers, the most general mediator between God and the universe. According to Zeller (whom Schürer and others follow), the Logos appears in Philo, on the one hand, as a power or property of God, and on the other, as a separate being beside God. "The peculiarity of his representation consists precisely in this, that he does not notice the contradiction, that the conception of Logos vacillates uncertainly between personal and impersonal being." This peculi

arity is mistaken if one regards the Philonic Logos as simply a person outside of God, or as only God in a definite relation. In Philo's view he is both, and on that very account neither of the two exclusively (p. 378). Dr. Drummond, however, will not admit the alternative, and thinks Zeller's solution violent and unwarrantable. The Thought of God permanently impressed upon the universe is not God under a definite relation, nor is it a person outside of God, nor is it an illogical mixture of the two conceptions (II. 223). It is, then, the thought of God that Dr. Drummond understands by the Logos; the "one Thought expressive of the Divine" (p. 160); "the expressed Thought of God, which takes up into itself all inferior ideas, and combines into one force all the forces of nature" (p. 171); "the Mind or Reason of the universe," which is not the divine essence itself, but a mode of that essence (p. 183). God is before and above the Logos, for he does not participate in Reason, but exhausts and transcends it. We depend upon it for our reason, but it depends upon God for its existence (p. 184). Man is the image of the Logos, and the Logos is the image of God (p. 187). "All other things are an expression of Thought, but Thought is an expression of God alone" (p. 189). The Logos therefore stands between God and the world, inseparable from either; the thought of God and the force that gives reality to things (p. 190 f.). "It is as though the artist's thought were not only visible in the form of the statue, but were the enduring power which held its particles together." The thought would then "mediate between the mind and the marble block, and seem to border on both the ontological and the phenomenal realms" (p. 191). "The Logos. . . is not a demiurge who acts for or instead of God, but is God's own rational energy acting upon matter" (p. 192 f.). It follows that "the separate personality of the Logos would be a purely disturbing element, and introduce a quite needless perplexity into an otherwise coherent system" (p. 223), and Philo cannot have meant to assert it. Where he seems to do so, we are to make allowance for his "florid and rhetorical style," his "fondness for personification," his "mingling of the literal and the allegorical." Passages that appear to imply the personality of the Logos are quoted and discussed in great detail. The reader has

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the material fully before him even for an unfavorable judgment. Dr. Drummond admits the "looseness and uncertainty" of Philo's exposition, but maintains that the contradiction usually ascribed to him is unfounded. "From first to last," he concludes," the Logos is the Thought of God, dwelling subjectively in the Infinite Mind, planted out and made objective in the universe. The cosmos is a tissue of rational force, which images the beauty, the power, the goodness of its primeval fountain. The reason of man is this same rational force entering into consciousness, and held by each in proportion to the truth and variety of his thoughts; and to follow it is the law of righteous living. Each form which we can differentiate as a distinct species, each rule of conduct which we can treat as an injunction of reason, is itself a Logos, one of those innumerable thoughts or laws into which the universal thought may, though self-reflection, be resolved." And finally these Words, which are also Works, of God, tell us of the BEING from whom they came (p. 273). This description may profitably be compared with such an estimate as that of Siegfried (Philo, p. 223). "The Logos of Philo appears, then, as a mixture of most various elements, and one cannot tell in a word what it is. It is the type of things, productive power of God, immanent reason of the world, Jewish archangel, high priest, sum of the divine world of emanations, simple being, multiplicity, God himself, distinct from God, attribute of God, independent being. The Logos of Philo is a thesaurus of all philosophizings on "face," "name," "word," "wisdom," "angel," etc., in the Old Testament and Palestinian Judaism, on oogia in Alexandrianism, and on the kóros among the Greeks." Was Philo a serious philosopher or a lawless eclectic?

The two hundred pages, or more, which Dr. Drummond devotes to the Divine Powers and the Logos, certainly deserve careful study. There will be differences of opinion as to the success of the argument. It will doubtless seem to some that the discussion has too much the tone of defense and apology. Some will think that the writer has idealized Philo's thought, and made him say what he should have said. Yet the friendly interpreter is more likely than the critic to do justice to his author, and it is safe to say that the thought of Philo has not

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