g was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was
God." But in the fourteenth verse there is manifest the sharp
cleavage: "And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, and we
beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father,
full of grace and truth." There may be a fine spiritual thought
beneath the letter here, but the notion of the Incarnation is not
Jewish, nor philosophical, nor Philonic. Philo's work was made to
serve as the guide of that Christian Gnosticism which, within the next
hundred years, proclaimed that Judaism was the work of an evil God,
and that the essential mission of Jesus--the good Logos--was to
dethrone Jehovah! But though the Logos conception was turned to
non-Jewish and anti-Jewish purposes, it was in Philo the offspring of
a pure and philosophical monotheism. Whatever the later abuse of his
teaching, Philo constructed a theology which, though affected by
foreign influences, was essentially true to Judaism; and more than
that, he was the first to weave the Jewish idea of God into the
world's philosophy.

* * * * *

VI

PHILO AS A PHILOSOPHER

Save for a few monographs of no great importance, because of the
absence of original thought, Philo's works form avowedly an exegesis
of the Bible and not a series of philosophical writings. Nor must the
reader expect to find an ordered system of philosophy in his separate
works, much more than in the writings of the rabbis. As Professor
Caird says,[234] "The Hebrew mind is intuitive, imaginative, incapable
of analysis or systematic connection of ideas." Philo's philosophical
conceptions lie scattered up and down his writings, "strung on the
thread of the Bible narrative which determines the sequence of his
thoughts." Nevertheless, though he has not given us explicit treatises
on cosmology, metaphysics, ethics, psychology, etc., and though he was
incapable of close logical thinking, he has treated all these subjects
suggestively and originally in the course of his commentary, and his
readers may gather together what he has dispersed, and find a
co-ordinated body of religious philosophy. However loosely they are
set forth in his treatises, his ideas are closely connected in his
mind. Herein he differs from his Jewish predecessors, for the notion
of the old historians of the Alexandrian movement, that there was a
systematic Jewish philosophy before Philo, does not appear to have
been w