Philosophy, from the moment of its first existence, has always by an irresistible pressure been driven towards monotheism. The consciousness in the thinker of his own unity, and the inevitable conditions of thought, alike force him to imagine one power as the cause of all the phenomena of life. Philosophy, when it arises in the midst of polytheism, at first allows the orthodox gods to be the subordinate instruments of this power, but it soon develops a tendency to sweep them utterly away. Then, having shaken itself free of popular religion, it builds up a new religion of its own, in which it asserts the existence of one supreme intelligence, the creator and governor of the world.
When philosophy has got thus far, and has constructed its eternal God, certain difficulties confront it. God, as the great first cause, has to be made perfect, for if he were imperfect thought would have to ascend higher to find a cause of his imperfection. But as the creator of all things, God at one time must have existed alone, an absolute being simply self-contemplative. When he began to create, he ceased to be absolute, and became a relative being contemplative of his own creation. If as an absolute being he was perfect, how did he remain perfect when he became a relative being? The study of this problem has generally driven philosophy into pantheism, but where it has maintained its hold on theism, it has been forced to suppose that a change occurred in God at the time of creation, by which he remained absolute in regard to himself, though he became relative in regard to that which he created.
Two Gods had thus to be imagined, one absolute and eternal, the other relative and existing from the beginning of created things. But these two had to be one, or else the first or absolute God would have been relative to the second, and so the old difficulty would have been revived. Hence there was need of a mystery; God was one and yet two, two persons and one substance. The first was God as he was through all eternity, the second was God as he was manifested in creation, his representative with everything but himself. Thus the second was a mediator between the first and the world.
While for purely philosophical reasons philosophy was thus compelled to dualise God, other reasons also impelled it to this conclusion. Holding him to be pure mind, it had to explain his action on matter. Here, too, it was necessary to suppose, a mediator between the material world and God. And in proportion as philosophy advanced in its theism, it extended the attributes of God and raised him to a loftier height above created things; and hence, to connect him with what was so far inferior, a mediator again was needed. But in all cases this mediator had to be a part of God himself, or no difficulty was met; and thus in every way philosophy tended towards a divine dualism in mystery.
All Greek philosophy, except where it drifted into pantheism or pure materialism, was more or less influenced by this tendency. In Platonism especially it is clearly marked. The ideal world of Plato fills the place of the second or relative God, and acts as a mediator between God the absolute and the material world. God, according to Plato, is not the creator of matter, which, so far as it is recognized in his system, is given an eternal existence. The action of God is confined to the ideal world, of which material phenomena are a distorted reflection. At the time of the beginning of Christianity these features of Platonism were strongly developed in the theology of an Alexandrian Jew.
Outside Palestine the most important centre of Jewish thought was Alexandria. There from the time of the captivity a large colony of Jews had been established. This colony became in many respects almost independent of Jerusalem in religion; it formed and translated its own canon of sacred writings, and even set up a temple of its own. Speaking the Greek language and living in the most cosmopolitan city of the world, the meeting-ground of eastern and western thought, the Jews of Alexandria were naturally affected by the speculative activity of Greek philosophy. The high development of Judaism encouraged speculation in its adherents. The Jewish philosopher had not, like the Pagan, to cast his religion aside when he began to seek out the causes of things; on the contrary, his religion seemed to cover a great part of the philosophical path. Under these circumstances, it is not strange that a philosophy should have arisen among the Alexandrian Jews.
For us this philosophy is represented by Philo, who was born about twenty years before Christ. A Jew by birth, and nominally always one in religion, Philo was so steeped in Pagan thought that he really ranks as a Greek philosopher. The chief object of his life was to reconcile Judaism and Hellenism, to give a philosophical reason for every feature of the Jewish religion. In fulfilment of this purpose, he handled Judaism with considerable freedom, and bent its simple theology into a mystical Platonism.
The tendency which inevitably characterized philosophy to push God back from contact with creation, and to preserve his shadowy glory as an absolute being, of course influenced Philo, who simply as a philosopher was bound to be a pure theist. But as a Jew also, Philo was bound to be a pure theist, with the most reverent conception of God. Thus two forces acted on him, as a Jew and as a Greek philosopher, driving him to the most refined theism, and this double pressure produced what Professor Huxley calls Philo’s agnosticism. He was compelled to form a conception of God utterly inconsistent with his character as creator of the world. Philo could not imagine that God had any relations with matter, or that he contemplated anything except the world of his own ideas. So philosophy, helped by his monotheistic religion, forced Philo to pursue the path of theological development which I have described above, to leave God in his pure essence absolute and unknown, and to attribute all the phenomena of creation to a mediator between this pure essence and created things.
In Judaism, language had already been used which, taken literally, almost described such a mediator. Wisdom had been spoken of as God’s companion before creation and his assistant or agent in all that he had done.[89] In a passage of the Psalms the word of God had been called the maker of the heavens.[90] Language of this kind probably was merely the result of the inveterate tendency of the Jewish mind to express itself by means of personification and symbolism, and had no mystical significance. But the passage last referred to, derived of course from the formula of creation in the first chapter of Genesis, seems to have guided Philo in his difficulty. He made the “Word” of God the required mediator, God’s agent and representative in all his actions.[91]