onists who followed
Philo brought to their interpretation less noble conceptions of the
Godhead, the Gnosticism of Syria, the dualism of Persia, the
impersonal pantheism of India, and the theurgies of Egypt, and
produced strange hybrids of the human mind. The one point of agreement
between them is that they conceive the Supreme God as impersonal and
entirely inactive, "a deified Zero," and endeavor by a system of
emanation to trace the descent of this baffling principle into man and
the universe. Philo was as unfortunate in his philosophical as in his
religious following, who both transformed his poetical metaphors into
fixed and rigid dogmas. His doctrine of the Logos was, on the one
hand, the forerunner of the Trinity of the Church, on the other of the
Trinity of the Alexandrian neo-Platonists. It is difficult, indeed, to
trace with certainty the connection between Philo and the later school
of Alexandrian Platonists, but there appears to be at least one clear
link in the teaching of the Syrian Numenius, who flourished in the
middle of the second century. To him are attributed the two sayings:
"Either Plato Philonizes or Philo Platonizes," and "What is Plato but
the Attic Moses?" Modern scholars have questioned the correctness of
the reference, but be this as it may, it is certain that Numenius used
the Bible as evidence of Platonic doctrines. "We should go back," he
says, in a fragment, "to the actual writings of Plato and call in as
testimony the ideas of the most cultured races; comparing their holy
books and laws we should bring in support the harmonious ideas which
are to be found among the Brahmans and the Jews."[278] Origen tells
us,[279] moreover, that he often introduced excerpts from the books of
Moses and the Prophets, and allegorized them with ingenuity. In one of
the few remains of his writings which have come down to us, we find
him praising the verse in the first chapter of Genesis, "The spirit of
God was upon the waters"; because, as Philo had interpreted
it--following perhaps a rabbinical tradition--water represents the
primal world-stuff. And elsewhere he mentions the efforts of the
Egyptian magicians to frustrate the miracles of Moses, following
Philo's account in his life of the Jewish hero.

The work of Philo helped to spread a knowledge of the Hebrew
Scriptures far and wide and to give them general authority as a
philosophical book; but it did not succeed in spreading the pure
Hebrew monotheism.