This is the teaching of Moses, not
mine. At any rate in what follows, when he records the origin of man, he
declares outright that man was made in the image of God. But if a part
(of creation) reflects the type, so also must the entire manifestation,
this intelligible ordered world, which is a reproduction of the divine
image on a larger scale than that of man."[13]
[Sidenote: Motives Underlying his Distortion of Hebraism.]
[Sidenote: Not Pantheistic.]
How Philo managed to extort this out of the Pentateuch is a question of
interest, but one on which I cannot delay. Suffice it, that while he
thus showed his reverence for the traditions of his race, his whole aim
is to fire philosophy with religious devotion. But he was not, in any
strict sense of the word, a Pantheist, though he regarded the Logos as
an emanation from the Eternal, and the kosmos, the ordered world, as in
some way emanating from the Logos. Perhaps, indeed, if we could exclude
from emanation the idea of time, as Christians are supposed to do when
they speak of the "eternal generation" of the Divine Son or the
"procession" of the Holy Ghost, we might regard Philo, with the
succeeding Neo-Platonists and some of the Gnostics, as approximately
Pantheistic. But his vagueness and uncertainty about matter forbid such
a conclusion. For whether he regarded matter as eternally existing apart
from the divine substance, or whether he looked upon it as the opposite
of Being, as a sort of positive nothing, in either case, it cannot be
said that for him the whole Universe was God, and nothing but God.
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