If all this were expressed in modern terms, and by the help of later conceptions, it would probably be most suitably gathered into the proposition that the world is the self-evolution of God. Into such a conception the idea of a beginning does not necessarily enter: it is consistent with the idea of an eternal process of differentiation: that which is, always has been, under changed and changing forms: the theory is cosmological rather than cosmogonical: it rather explains the world as it is than gives an account of its origin.
2. The chief philosophical expression of Dualism was Platonism. Plato followed Anaxagoras in believing that mind is separate from matter and acts upon it: he went beyond him in founding upon this separation a universal distinction between the real and the phenomenal, and between God and the world. God was regarded as being outside the world. The world was in its origin only potential being (τὸ μὴ ὄν). The action of God upon it was that of a craftsman upon his material, shaping it as a carpenter shapes wood, or moulding it as a statuary moulds clay. In so acting, He acted with reason, following out thoughts in His mind. Sometimes His reason, or His mind, is spoken of as being itself the fashioner of the world.[317] Each thought shows itself in a group of material objects. Such objects, so far as they admit of being grouped, may be viewed as imitations or embodiments of a form or pattern, existing either as a thought in the mind of the Divine Workman, or as a force proceeding from His mind and acting outside it. As the conception of these forms was developed more and more, they tended to be regarded in the latter light rather than in the former. They were cosmic forces which had the power of impressing themselves upon matter. They were less types than causes. They came midway between God and the rude material of the universe, so that its changing phenomena were united with an unchanging element. They were themselves grouped in a vast gradation, reaching its highest point in the Form of Perfection, which was higher than the Form of Being. The highest and most perfect of types is conceived as the most powerful and most active of forces. In the elaborate cosmology of the Timæus, it is further conceived as a person. The creative energy of God is spoken of as the Demiurgus, who himself made an ideal world, and employed subordinate agents in the construction of the actual world. The matter upon which the Demiurgus or his agents work is sometimes conceived as potential being,[318] the bare capacity of receiving qualities and forms, and sometimes as chaotic substance which was reduced to order.[319] The agents were gods who, having been themselves created, were bidden to create living beings, capable of growth and decay.[320] The distinction between the two spheres of creation, that of a world in which nothing was imperfect since it was the work of a Perfect Being, and that of a world which was full of imperfections as being the work of created beings, came, as we shall see, to be of importance in some phases of Christian thought.
It was inevitable, in the syncretism which results when an age of philosophical reflection succeeds an age of philosophical origination, that these two great drifts of thought should tend in some points to approach each other. The elements in them which were most readily fused together were the theories of the processes by which the actual world came into being, and of the nature of the forces which lay behind those processes. In Stoicism, there was the theory of the one Law or Logos expressing itself in an infinite variety of material forms: in Platonism, there was the theory of the one God, shaping matter according to an infinite variety of patterns. In the one, the processes of nature were the operations of active forces, containing in themselves the law of the forms in which they exhibit themselves, self-developing seeds, each of them a portion of the one Logos which runs through the whole.[321] In the other, they were the operations of the infinitely various and eternally active energy of God, moving always in the direction of His thoughts, so that those thoughts might themselves be conceived as the causes of the operations.[322] In both the one theory and the other, the processes were sometimes regarded in their apparent multiplicity, and sometimes in their underlying unity: and in both also the unity was expressed sometimes by the impersonal term Logos, and sometimes by the personal term God.
But while the monism of the Stoics, by laying stress upon the antithesis between the two phases of the one substance, was tending to dualism, the dualism of the Platonists, by laying stress upon the distinction between the creative energy of God and the form in the mind of God which His energy embodied in the material universe, was tending to introduce a third factor into the conception of creation. It became common to speak, not of two principles, but of three—God, Matter, and the Form, or Pattern.[323] Hence came a new fusion of conceptions. The Platonic Forms in the mind of God, conceived, as they sometimes were, as causes operating outside Him, were more or less identified with the Stoical Logoi, and, being viewed as the manifold expressions of a single Logos, were expressed by a singular rather than a plural term, the Logos rather than the Logoi of God.
It is at this point that the writings of Philo become of special importance. They gather together, without fusing into a symmetrical system, the two dominant theories of the past, and they contain the seeds of nearly all that afterwards grew up on Christian soil. It is possible that those writings cover a much larger period of time than is commonly supposed, and that if we could find a key to their chronological arrangement, we should find in them a perfect bridge from philosophical Judaism to Christian theology. And even without such a key we are able to see in them a large representation of the processes of thought that were going on, and can better understand by the analogies which they offer both the tentative theories and those that ultimately became dominant in the sphere of Christianity. It is consequently desirable to give a brief account of the view which they present.
The ultimate cause of the world is to be found in the nature of God. As in Plato, though perhaps in a different sense, God is regarded as good. By His goodness He was impelled to make the world: He was able to make it by virtue of His power. “If any one wished to search out the reason why the universe was made, I think that he would not be far from the mark if he were to say, what, in fact, one of the ancients said, that the Father and Maker is good, and that being good He did not grudge the best kind of nature to matter (οὔσίᾳ) which of itself had nothing excellent, though it was capable of becoming all things.”[324] And again: “My soul once told me a more serious story (than that of the Greek mythology), when seized, as it often was, with a divine ecstasy.... It told me that in the one really existing God there are two chief and primary faculties, Goodness and Power, and that by Goodness He begat the universe, and by Power He governs it.”[325] God is thus the Creator, the Fashioner and Maker of the world, its Builder and Artificer.[326] But when the conception of His relation to the world is more precisely examined, it is found to be based upon a recognition of a sharp distinction between the world of thought and that of sense; and to be monistic in regard to the one, dualistic in regard to the other. God is mind. From Him, as from a fountain, proceed all forms of mind and reason. Reason, whether unconscious in the form of natural law, or conscious in the form of human thought, is like a river that flows forth from Him and fills the universe.[327] In man the two worlds meet. The body is fashioned by the Artificer from the dust of the earth: “The soul came from nothing that is created, but from the Father and Leader of all things. For what He breathed into Adam was nothing else than a divine breath, a colony from that blissful and happy nature, placed here below for the benefit of our race; so that granting man to be mortal in respect of his visible part, yet in respect of that which is invisible he is the heir of immortality.”[328] And again: “The mind is an offshoot from the divine and happy soul (of God), an offshoot not separated from Him, for nothing divine is cut off and disjoined, but only extended.”[329] And again, in expounding the words, “They have forsaken me, the fountain of life” (Jeremiah ii. 13), he says: “Only God is the cause of soul and life, especially of rational soul and reasonable life; but He Himself is more than life, being the ever-flowing fountain of life.”[330]
This is monistic. But the theory of the origin of the sensible world is dualistic. The matter upon which He acted was outside Him. “It was in itself without order, without quality, without soul, full of difference, disproportion, and discord: it received a change and transformation into what was opposite and best, order, quality, animation, identity, proportion, harmony, all that is characteristic of a better form.”[331] He himself did not touch it. “Out of it God begat all things, Himself not touching it: for it was not right that the all-knowing and blessed One should touch unlimited and confused matter: but He used the unbodied Forces whose true name is the Forms (ἰδέαι), that each class of things should receive its fitting shape.”[332] These unbodied Forces, which are here called by the Platonic name of Forms, are elsewhere spoken of in Stoical language as Reasons (λόγοι), sometimes in Pythagorean language as Numbers or Limits, sometimes in the language of the Old Testament as Angels, and sometimes in the language of popular mythology as Dæmons.[333] The use of the two names Force and Form, with the synonyms which are interchanged with each of them, expresses the two sides of the conception of them. They are at once the agents or instruments by means of which God fashioned the world, and also the types or patterns after which He fashioned it.[334]
In both respects they are frequently viewed, not in the plurality of their manifestations, but in the unity of their essence. On the one hand, they collectively form the world which the Divine Architect of the great City of the Universe fashioned in His mind before His thought went outside Him to stamp with its impress the chaotic and unformed mass. The place of this world is the Logos, the Reason or Will or Word of God: more precisely, it constitutes that Logos in a special form of its activity:[335] for in the building of an ordinary city the ideal which precedes it “is no other than the mind of the architect, planning to realize in a visible city the city of his thought.... The archetypal seal, which we call the ideal world, is itself the archetypal pattern, the Form of Forms, the Reason of God.”[336] On the other hand, the Reason of God is sometimes viewed not as a Form but as a Force. It is His creative energy.[337] It is the instrument by which He made all things.[338] It is the “river of God” that is “full of waters,” and that flows forth to “make glad the city of God,” the universe.[339] From it, as from a fountain, all lower Forms and Forces flow. By another and even sublimer figure, it, the eldest born of the “I am,” robes itself with the world as with a vesture, the high-priest’s robe, embroidered by all the Forces of the seen and unseen worlds.[340]
But in all this, Philo never loses sight of the primary truth that the world was made not by inferior or opposing beings, but by God. It is the expression of His Thought. His Thought went forth from Him, impressing itself in infinite Forms and by means of infinite Forces: but though His Thought was the charioteer, it is God Himself who gives the orders.[341] By a different conception of the genesis of the world, and one that is of singular interest in view of the similar conceptions which we shall find in some Gnostic schools, God is the Father of the world:[342] and the metaphor of Fatherhood is expanded into that of a marriage: God is conceived as the Father, His Wisdom as the Mother: “and she, receiving the seed of God, with fruitful birth-pangs brought forth this world, His visible son, only and well-beloved.”[343]