It is that curious trait in Mr. Gladstone’s character which makes it so difficult for him in his public speeches to make a statement without qualifying it, or amplifying it, or stating several hypothetical cases with reference to it, that renders his conversation so charming. Beginning to tell you something about Pius IX., for instance, he will branch off into a story about Father Newman, an anecdote of Mazzini, a reminiscence of Orsini, Palmerston, or Louis Napoleon, an adventure that happened to himself in Naples, his feelings when he recognized an old college chum of his as a bare-footed friar in a monastery on the Alps, and so on. It is like the Arabian Nights, for one story grows out of the other, and all the time he does not forget the original subject, the Pope, but comes back to him, and winds up with the story about him, told with all due emphasis and action. There was a time when for Pius IX. Mr. Gladstone entertained what seemed to be a truly sincere admiration and respect; occasionally the feeling appeared to be even that of affection. As for the insensate hatred and dread of the church which fills the breasts of Messrs. Newdegate and Whalley, Mr. Gladstone never shared it. This, however, did not prevent him from making his outrageous attacks upon the church, in order to revenge himself upon the Irish and English bishops for refusing to support him in his University Bill. His passions are very strong. The difference between him and Mr. Disraeli is that the latter seems never wholly in earnest, while the former always is. Some of the language in which he has allowed himself to indulge in his recent speeches on the war question have been marked with a degree of passionate violence that would seem to indicate a mind overwrought. There used to be a cruel saying in the London clubs that “Mr. Gladstone would die either in a mad-house or a monastery.” I believe the credit of the mal mot was given to Mr. Disraeli. There seems small hope left of the monastery, and there was probably never any danger of the mad-house. But Mr. Gladstone has now been out of power for four years; he reflects that his own imprudence thrust him out; he can see no prospect of a return to power; and he feels that under the guidance of Earl Beaconsfield England is being led into grave dangers. He chafes and frets, and the apparently unreasonable violence of his language is only the candid expression of his sincere wrath and fear.
Of these three statesmen, Earl Derby, Mr. Gladstone, and Mr. Bright, Mr. Bright is the dandy. The earl is negligent in his dress, and thrifty therein; but his valet, or some one else, manages to turn him out neatly every morning. Mr. Gladstone is positively careless as regards his attire, and one imagines that nobody but himself has anything to do with it. It has been whispered about that Mr. Gladstone’s tailor pays a large sum every year to have his identity concealed, for Mr. Gladstone’s clothes fit him so badly, or seem to do so, that the tailor’s business would be ruined if his name were known. The shocking bad hat of Mr. Gladstone, and his baggy “Sairey Gamp” of an umbrella, so often pictured in Punch, are no exaggerations; the last time I saw him he was sailing down Pall Mall under full steam for the Reform Club, with this identical hat and umbrella. There is a deep mystery connected with his legs, or with his trowsers, for they bag to an incredible extent at the knees, and are always too long at the lower extremities. I have said that he was not an Adonis, but when he is pleased and happy there is something winning in the expression of his mouth, and his eyes are wonderfully eloquent. Mr. Bright’s rich but plain costume is always faultlessly neat and clean; his linen spotless; his shoes have an almost unearthly lustre; his hat shines in rivalry with them. When, on the occasion of his taking office as chancellor of the Duchy of Lancashire, he went to Windsor “to kiss hands,” the queen, it is said, was enchanted with him, and the Princess Beatrice, who is much given to speaking out her mind, is reported to have exclaimed: “Ever since Louise married young Mr. Argyll, I have supposed that nothing was left for me but one of Marshal and Snelgrove’s young men. But if any one of those tradesmen were as handsome and good as this old tradesman, I’d take him in a moment.”
Mr. Bright’s handwriting is small, elegant, and beautifully distinct. Mr. Gladstone writes a rapid, bold, and running hand, at times rather illegible. He is somewhat too fond of his pen; of late he has written too much on unimportant subjects. Earl Derby has a happy dread of committing himself on paper, and writes but few letters. “Do not write to me,” he said one day; “come and talk with me; it will be better for each of us.” Mr. Gladstone once made a very happy retort to a question put to him in the House of Commons concerning one of his letters. Mr. Bouverie, with all due solemnity, and after having given a day’s notice of his question, asked the premier if his attention had been called to a letter published in the Times, purporting to have been addressed by him to the correspondent of a New York journal, and whether he had really written the letter. “It is quite true,” Mr. Gladstone replied. “Mr. —— addressed me a very proper and courteous letter, upon certain matters connected with the Treaty of Washington and the negotiations at Geneva, and I replied to it. He subsequently obtained my permission to make the letter public. And I have to add that I often have to write letters to much less important persons than the representative of an influential American journal.” As he had recently written a letter to Mr. Bouverie, the hit was thought to be a good one, and the House laughed.
RELATIONS OF JUDAISM TO CHRISTIANITY.
II.
THE INFLUENCE OF JEWISH IDEAS ON HEATHEN PHILOSOPHY.
Strabo, after having mentioned the great number of Jews residing in Cyrene, a city celebrated for its schools of Greek literature, adds that “it would be difficult to show a spot upon earth where they were not found and where their influence was not felt.” The influence of which he speaks must not be restricted to that which they acquired everywhere by their remarkable industry, commercial capacity, and wealth; it was felt in the higher field of thought, and was brought to bear on heathen philosophy, in which it produced considerable modifications. We are chiefly concerned with the Greeks, whom all admit to be the representatives of philosophical speculations in the ages we are reviewing.
It is the opinion of Aristobulus, of Aristeas, and of Philo that the Greek philosophers were acquainted with the sacred books of the Hebrews, and that they derived from them those great truths relating to God, the soul, a future life which we find in their writings. We can easily understand this to have been the case when we reflect that the Hebrews were already in Egypt in great numbers, when the learned men of Greece repaired thither in search of knowledge; and in order to account for the opinion just mentioned it is by no means necessary to have recourse to the national pride with which its supporters are supposed by our rationalists to have been animated. Because Aristobulus, Aristeas, and Philo were Jews it does not follow that they should have been so blinded by the desire of glorifying their nation as to make them lose their well-known critical acuteness. Besides, they were not the only ones who perceived that the Greeks had borrowed from the Hebrews. Antiquity is at one in recognizing the fact. The Fathers of the primitive church who had occasion to touch upon the subject do not hesitate to affirm it from observations of their own. “Our sacred books,” says Tertullian, “are the treasure from which philosophers have drawn all their riches. Who is the poet, who is the sophist, that has not borrowed from the prophets? It is at those sacred sources that the philosophers have striven to quench their thirst. These men, impelled by their passion for glory, endeavored to reach the sublimity of our Holy Scriptures, and when they found in them anything that suited their views they made it their own. But as they did not consider them as divine, they made no scruple to alter them. And, moreover, they could not understand many a passage the sense of which was obscure even for the Hebrews, to whom the books belonged.” St. Justin equally affirms that “Plato took from Moses his doctrine of creation, as well as his notions on the Word, or Logos, and the Energy or Spirit of God, though all these truths appear strangely disfigured in the Athenian philosopher.” Again, Clement of Alexandria tells the Neo-Platonics that their master, Plato, had borrowed from the books of Moses his most sublime doctrines and purest moral precepts, and adds: “We state the fact that the Greeks, not satisfied with transferring to their writings the wonderful events related in our sacred books, have stolen from us our principal dogmas in altering them. They are caught in the very act of theft as to what regards faith, wisdom, knowledge and science, hope and charity, penance, chastity, and the fear of God, which virtues are the offspring of truth alone.” Eusebius tells us that Pythagoras had held communications with the prophets at the time when the Jews were exiles in Egypt and Babylonia. Hennippus, according to the testimony of Josephus, confirms that fact by saying that Pythagoras had embraced and professed a part of the doctrines of the Jews, and had transmitted their philosophy to the Gentiles. Clearchus affirms that Aristotle had spoken to him of his conversations with a Jew “from whom much was to be learnt.” Theodoret is not less positive. “Anaxagoras and Pythagoras,” he says, “in their travels in Egypt, had made the acquaintance of learned men of that country and of Judea. It is to the same source that Plato came later in search of knowledge, as we are informed by Plutarch and by Xenophon.” “What is Plato?” said the Pythagorean Numerius. “He is a certain Moses who speaks Attic.” The negations without proofs which men of rationalistic tendencies oppose to this view cannot stand before the overwhelming testimony of the Fathers, doctors, and historians of the primitive church, corroborated as it is by more than one pagan author. Our modern Catholic writers, without any exception that we know of, have recognized that influence of revelation on the heathen mind. “The laws which Solon gave to the Athenians,” remarks Fleury, “had a great analogy with those of Moses. The principles of Socrates are founded on those of the Hebrew legislator; his notions of the unity of God, the immortality of the soul, the distinction between good and evil, the merits and rewards of virtue, the chastisements of vice, are all derived from the sacred books. The political system exposed by Plato in his Republic, in which he enjoins that every one should live by his own labor, without luxury or ambition, without innovation or change, under the sway of justice the greatest of all goods, and the government of a wise ruler devoted to the happiness of his subjects, is nothing else but the theory of the constitution which governed Judea.” “Aristotle,” says M. de Maistre, alluding to a passage already quoted, “conversed with a Jew in comparison with whom the most distinguished philosophers of Greece seemed to him but barbarians. The translation of the sacred books into a language which had become that of the universe, the dispersion of the Jews over the whole world, and man’s natural curiosity for everything new and extraordinary had caused the Mosaic law to be known everywhere, which thus became an introduction to Christianity.” “The doctrine of the Hebrews,” writes M. de Bonald, “was spread with their writings in those parts of Asia and of Europe bordering on Palestine. It was not unknown to the Greeks, and undoubtedly gave to the philosophy of Plato that stamp of elevation and of truth by which it is characterized.”
But it is to Alexandria that we must turn in order to follow the developments and modifications of Greek thought in the three centuries which immediately preceded, and in the four centuries which followed, the coming of Christ. Ptolemy I., during his glorious reign, that lasted from 306-285 B.C., among other monuments with which he adorned the city of Alexander, established the famous Museum or University of Alexandria, with its vast library, which is said to have contained seven hundred thousand volumes. It soon became the centre of intellectual life. There the most renowned teachers in philosophy, poetry, mathematics, astronomy, and the arts lived and taught. Thither would resort the learned of many countries and religions. From the time of its foundation to that of Proclus, the most important of the Neo-Platonics, who died four hundred and eighty-five years after Christ, that school continued to flourish, but then began to decline until every trace of it disappeared before the invasions of the barbarian Mussulman. For a long time the philosophy of the Museum consisted in commentaries on Plato and Aristotle. But the Jews of the Greco-Egyptian city, which had become after Jerusalem the most important seat of their religion, were destined to give a new direction to these speculations; and from it arose that peculiar school of thought denominated Neo-Platonism. It was an effort made to reconcile together popular belief with philosophic thought, and was common both to the Jewish and to the Grecian schools. The first endeavored to blend Judaism with Hellenism, as the latter did to give a logical and doctrinal foundation to heathenism.
It is not easy to fix the date when the movement began. Some trace it back to Aristobulus. He lived under Ptolemy Euergetes, whose reign extended from 247-221 B.C., and had been the teacher of that illustrious prince, who, disdaining the coarse divinities of Egypt, addressed his homage to Jehovah, the God of the Hebrews, and sacrificed in the Temple of Jerusalem, where he left marks of his munificence and of his piety. It is true that Aristobulus appealed to Orphic poems in which Jewish doctrines are found in support of the assertion that the Greek poets and philosophers had borrowed their wisdom from the Jews. But this opinion, which is shared by Aristeas and others in those ages, is not peculiar to Neo-Platonism, and is by no means one of its characteristics. Others pretend that the earliest traces of Jewish-Alexandrian philosophy are to be found in the Septuagint. According to them, the authors of this version of the Biblical writings into Greek, made by order of Ptolemy Philadelphus (285-247 B.C.), knew and approved the principal doctrines of this philosophy, and contrived to suggest them by apparently insignificant deviations from the original text. But the passages on which they rest their argument do not necessarily force us to admit this conclusion. We find that they avoid representing God under sensible forms; such ideas as God’s repenting, being angry, etc., are toned down in their expression; in the same way euphemisms are used when there is question of sensible manifestations of the Divinity; there are omissions and explanations in the translation which are not authorized by the original text. It is evident that the translators were influenced in their work by the dread they had lest Jehovah should be assimilated to the false divinities of pagan mythologies. All this competent critics concede, but fail to see in the Septuagint a union of Greek philosophemes with Jewish ideas. Be this as it may, it was at the dawn of Christianity, when the Ptolemies had gone and the Romans came in, that the Neo-Platonic movement was really inaugurated; and if it did not originate with Philo, it was in him, at any rate, that it first attained to importance. Philo belonged to a rich family of Alexandria, and was born about twenty-five years before our era. He lived long enough to be placed at the head of the legation to Caligula in favor of his people, and to write an account of it in the reign of Claudius. What gives a special interest to his writings is that they were composed at the very last period of the Jewish nation, before the appearance of Christianity. In religion a zealous Jew penetrated with the truth and goodness of the Hebrew revelation, and a Greek by education—a man, besides, of high intellectual gifts—it is no wonder that he should wish to blend in a harmonious whole the two elements of his own being, and to fuse the form of Greek thought with the substance of Jewish belief. In his endeavors to realize this object Philo falls into grievous errors, and on several points deflects from the Jewish faith into Greek views. “His love of Greek philosophy,” says Allies, “had led him, as it seems unconsciously, to desert the divine tradition of Moses and the orthodox Jewish belief.” Here, then, we are concerned with two questions: first, What did Philo contribute to Greek thought? and, secondly, How far his orthodoxy suffered by its contact with it.
Philo introduced into philosophy two principles the result of which can be traced throughout the whole subsequent periods of Neo-Platonism: the principle of faith, or the need of a revelation in order to acquire the knowledge of God and of the great problems relating to human life; and the principle of grace, or of a special assistance from heaven in order to make this knowledge practically available. Now, these principles had been either entirely ignored by the Greek philosophers or had remained without any significance to them down to Philo’s time. Reason was the only light by which they were guided, and scientific thought their only source of knowledge. We find in them no assumption of supernatural revelation, no requirement of contact with the divine other than what might be produced by the effect of thought itself. Greek philosophy in its whole tenor was rationalistic. “On the contrary,” observes Allies in his Formation of Christendom, “the religious and philosophical system of Philo is based upon the idea of a revelation made to man by God, and of holiness, the result of divine assistance. His conception of God is derived to him from the theology of the Old Testament; it comes to him as a gift from above, not as an elaboration of his own mind.” Hence it is that his notion of the Supreme Being is so much above that given us by Plato and Aristotle. The God of Plato is an ideal and metaphysical God, not absolutely personal, not free; the God of Aristotle, or his Primum movens, the first Motor, is mechanical, and holds in the universe the office of the spring in a watch, by which all its parts are moved; but the God of Philo is life, and, as he constantly calls him, “the living God.” “He is one, simple, eternal, unoriginated, and absolutely distinct from the world which is his work. His own being is incomprehensible. We can only predicate of him that he is ‘He who is.’ He is most pure and absolute mind, better than virtue and better than knowledge, better than the idea of goodness and the idea of beauty. He is his own place, and full of himself, and sufficient for himself, filling up and embracing all that is deficient or empty, but himself embraced by nothing, as being one person and yet everything” (Legis Allegor., l. xiv., quoted in Allies). His providence is fully recognized. “Those who would make the world to be unoriginated, cut away, without being aware of it, the most useful and necessary constituents of piety—that is, the belief in Providence. For reason proves that what has an origin is cared for by its father and maker. For a father is anxious for the life of his children, and a workman aims at the duration of his works, and employs every device imaginable to ward off everything that is pernicious or injurious, and is desirous by every means in his power to provide everything which is useful and profitable for them. But with regard to what has had no origin there is no feeling of interest, as if it were his own, in the breast of him who has not made it. It is a worthless and pernicious doctrine to establish in the world what would be anarchy in a city, to have no superintendent, regulator, or judge by whom everything must be distributed and governed” (De Mundi Opificio, apud Allies). In his work entitled Quod Deus est Immutabilis Philo ascribed to God absolute knowledge. “To God,” he says, “as dwelling in pure light, all things are visible, for he, penetrating into the very recesses of the soul, is able to see transparently what is invisible to others, and by means of prescience and providence, his own peculiar excellences, allows nothing to abuse its liberty or exceed the range of his comprehension. For, indeed, there is with him no uncertainty even in the future; for there is nothing uncertain and nothing future to God. It is plain, then, that the producer must have knowledge of all that he has produced, the artificer of all that he had constructed, the governor of all that he governs. Now, Father, Artificer, and Governor he is in truth of all things in heaven and the world. And whereas future things are overshadowed by the succession of time, longer or shorter, God is the Maker of time also.... For the world by its motion has made time, but he made the world, and so with God there is nothing future, who has the very foundations of time subject to him. For their life is not time, but the archetype and model of time, eternity; and in eternity nothing is past and nothing is future, but there is the present only.” In his conceptions of the Godhead and of his attributes it is evident that Philo, as long as he follows the light of revelation and keeps clear of the false notions which he had drawn from Greek sources, rises far above the speculations of the Greek philosophers on the same subjects. Plato himself in his happiest moments never reached such heights. For Philo, God is goodness and sanctity itself. By this he does not mean only that he is the boundless ocean of all perfections, the archetype of all holiness and of everything that is good, but that he is the origin of all human virtue, which flows from him into his rational creatures as from its only source. “It is God,” he writes in his Allegories of the Law, “who sows and plants all virtue upon earth in the mortal race, being an imitation and image of the heavenly.” According to him, man, in order to reproduce in himself the divine resemblance in which holiness consists, must be freed from the influence of his sensuous nature, the source of his weakness and sinfulness. But in that nature no power is to be found to transform itself, as no nature has the power of changing itself into anything other than what it is. The consequence is that “he must betake himself to a higher power, and receive from it as a loan that strength which fails in himself.” The difference between this doctrine and that of the older philosophers is palpable. When Plato and Pythagoras recommend to their disciples the subduing of the senses as a condition to reaching truth, they suppose that man can do it by his own efforts and without any help from above; and this is precisely what Philo denies. Furthermore, the knowledge of God, in which man finds his perfection and supreme happiness, is not a mere ray of cold light, but it leads to an intimate union with him, which is the ultimate point of Philo’s system; and this union, as everything perfect in human nature, is an immediate gift of God. Thus Philo would reach knowledge and virtue by the gift of God, bestowed through his grace, whilst down to his time Greek philosophy, adhering to its own principle, scientific thought, would reach them by the exercise of reason alone.
It is impossible to overrate the influence which Philo, with his powerful genius and vast erudition, must have exercised not only among his co-religionists but among the Greek-speaking populations of Alexandria and other countries. The most authorized writers have at all times rendered justice to his great merits. Josephus says that he was “a man illustrious in all things”; Eusebius extols “the abundance, the richness, the sublimity of his style and the depth of his thoughts”; St. Jerome, speaking of his works, says that “they are most remarkable and innumerable”; St. Augustine praises him as “a philosopher of universal erudition, whose language the Greeks do not hesitate to compare to that of Plato.” Photius also testifies that “his writings gave him an immense reputation among the Greeks.” This truly admirable man went, as did all the great philosophers of antiquity, over the whole range of human knowledge: history, ethics, jurisprudence, politics, metaphysics, cosmogony, physics, mathematics—no department of learning did he leave unexplored. In morals he rises far above Stoicism, and approaches to the sublimity of the Gospel—a fact which probably was the origin of the opinion entertained by some that Philo had embraced Christianity. But the glaring errors which are found in his works on several important points show that he was rather the disciple of Plato than a follower of Christ.