Atherton. He overtook me on my walk this morning, and I alluded to the subject. He said he had been dipping into Philo last week, and that suggested his topic. I told him I had paid that respectable old gentleman a visit or two lately, and we amused ourselves with some of his fancies. Think of the seven branches of the candlestick being the seven planets—the four colours employed, the four elements—the forecourt symbolizing the visible, the two sanctuaries the ideal world—and so on.
Gower. At this rate the furniture in one of Hoffmann’s tales cannot be more alive with spirit than Philo’s temple apparatus. An ingenious trifler, was he not?
Atherton. Something better, I should say.
Gower. Not, surely, when his great characteristic is an unsurpassed facility for allegorical interpretation. Is not mystical exegesis an invariable symptom of religious dilettantism?
Atherton. With the successors and imitators—yes; not with the more earnest originals,—such names as Philo, Origen, Swedenborg.
Gower. But, at any rate, if this spiritualizing mania be Philo’s great claim to distinction, head a list of mystical commentators with him, and pass on to some one better.
Atherton. He need not detain us long. For our enquiry he has importance chiefly as in a sort the intellectual father of Neo-Platonism—the first meeting-place of the waters of the eastern and the western theosophies. This is his great object—to combine the authoritative monotheism of his Hebrew Scriptures with the speculation of Plato.
Gower. Absurd attempt!—to interpret the full, clear utterance of Moses, who has found, by the hesitant and conflicting conjectures of Plato, who merely seeks.
Willoughby. Yet a very natural mistake for a Jew at Alexandria, reared in Greek culture, fascinated by the dazzling abstractions of Greek philosophy. He belonged less to Jerusalem, after all, than to Athens.
Atherton. There lies the secret. Philo was proud of his saintly ancestry, yet to his eye the virtues of the Old Testament worthy wore a rude and homely air beside the refinement of the Grecian sage. The good man of Moses and the philosopher of Philo represent two very different ideals. With the former the moral, with the latter the merely intellectual, predominates. So the Hebrew faith takes with Philo the exclusive Gentile type,—despises the body, is horrified by matter, tends to substitute abstraction for personality, turns away, I fear, from the publican and the sinner.