THE DIVINE LOGOS. to the first, and is the mediating power between it and the dead unformed matter. This mediating power is the Logos, or Word of God, the world maker. Philo gives the Logos a variety of names: He is the He is God's mediator between mortal and immortal races; name, God's interpreter, God's vicar; to man He is God; but on the divine side, the second God, or the image of God. The spirit world is the divine thought; the sensuous world, the divine speech; and the Logos, the capacity of God to think and speak. As thought, He is the Logos immanent; as speech, the Logos transient. Philo identifies the Logos with that wisdom which God is said to have created as the first of His works, and established before the Eons, the spouse of God, who is the father and the Mother of the all. Sometimes the Logos is plural, not only the Word, but the words of God; and these are identical with the divine powers or attributes. The two Cherubim in Genesis are the two highest powers of God; His goodness and His might. By the one He has created all, by the other he preserves all. Between these as a uniting bond, is the Logos, which embraces both; for, by the Logos, God rules, and creates, and shews mercy. The Cherubim were the symbols of these powers, and the flaming sword that turned either way was the divine Logos. In the same way the Logos is identified with other attributes, and distributed into different potencies of the divine Being; and as all these potencies are consubstantial, having their substratum in God, the Logos is identical now with the potencies, and now with the first Cause or supreme God; so that Philo ends in ascribing to the first Cause, through the Logos, those qualities, works and attributes, which he had otherwise denied Him; considering them unworthy of the first God. The Deity could not pervade matter, nor come into any relation to it; but through the Logos He is the maker and preserver of the world. By the Logos, God is restored to the world, and the oneness of the created and the uncreated becomes manifest through the mediating power or powers, for those powers are identical with God; they are also the spiritual world-plan, the perfect world after which this sensuous world is formed; and even it, so far as it is well formed, is itself the Logos or word of God. The spirit worlds are God's first begotten, and the sensuous His "Ideas," ," "demons," "heroes," "angels," "the younger sons. higher powers," have the same relation to the lower that God has to the higher. The necessity of personification may cause them to appear as distinct beings: but they have all in their degrees 86 GOD FILLS ALL SPACE. a divine existence. Angels and spirits are the divine thought, and not separate from Him who thinks. He is the God of gods. The Chaldeans said "Either the visible world is itself a god or God contained in Himself is the soul of all things." From this view, says Philo, Moses differs, for he maintains either that the world-soul is the first God, or that the stars and their host cause what happens to man; but that all this universe is held together by invisible powers, which the world maker has extended from the uttermost part of the heavens to the end of the earth." Philo intended to differ from the Chaldeans by means of the Logos, word, words, or invisible powers distinct from God and yet identical with Him; but he differed only in intention, for Philo's chief God filled all things and went through them all, and left no place void or empty of Himself. All the inferior Gods, the divine mediating powers, as well as the world, are all parts of the first God. He is the place of all things-that which embraces all things, but is Himself embraced by none. He extends Himself to all visible things, and fills the all with Himself. He is original light; matter is the darkness; the circles of being are light circles about the first Being. The Logos is a brilliant far-shining light, most like to God. The individual powers are rays which spread wider and wider the light they receive. The entire creation is an enlightened becoming of matter through the first light. It is the one God who is working always and in all. "The Lord looked down to see the city and the tower," "after the manner of men," says Philo, "Moses speaks; since who does not know that he who looks down, necessarily leaves one place and takes another. But all is full of God. He embraces, but is not embraced; and to Him alone it happens to be everywhere, and yet nowhere. Nowhere, because he created space and things corporeal; and it is not becoming to say that the Creator is contained in others, the things created, but everywhere, because He leaves no part of the world void; since by His presence He holds together the earth and water, and the wide heaven, and all things." The Logos made the world. The ideal of creation, according to Plato, existed in the mind of God. Philo said that the Logos created the world after the pattern set forth in the ideal. But we must take care that the necessity of personifying does not mislead us. We have already seen that the ideal was itself the Logos. God's thought was His image, and as the thought was * The soul of the universe, is, according to our definition, God.—Philo. CREATION IDEAL AND VISIBLE. the likeness of God, so man was the likeness of the Logos. Creation may thus be regarded either as flowing forth from God, or, as being willed by Him. It is in reality an emanation; but as we personify God in the Logos, we must consider it as an act of the will."Moses," says Philo, "taught that the material or younger creation was formed on the model of the archetypal or elder creation. As a plan exists in the mind of an architect, so did creation exist ideally in the mind of God. In the beginning, that is, out of time, God created the incorporeal heaven and the incorporeal earth, after the model perceptible by the mind. He created also the form of air and of empty space. He He then called the air darkness, and the space the deep.' 999 6 made the incorporeal substances of the elements, and at last the ideal man; after forming the invisible heaven and earth with their inhabitants, the Creator formed the visible. But He could not be entirely responsible for the creation of mixed natures; so he The creation of Adam called in others. Let us make man.' was the creation of human reason not yet united to a body. Through its union with the sensuous came the fall of man. The fall, in Philo's judgment, was a necessity, the natural result of creation; but it was a step in the divine proceedure. Man shall rise through the Logos, through the working of the divine Reason within him; for the mind of man is a fragment of the Deity; his immortal nature is no other than the Spirit of God. It shall yet subdue the body, and rise to the purely divine.* * *To make out for Philo something like a congruous system, it has been thought desirable to pass by his inconsistencies, and especially his allegorical trifling with the Scriptures. "It is no easy matter," says Dähne," to determine the qualities which Philo gives to matter, since he, like all his philosophical predecessors, in order to lead over all imperfection to this which he did not know how to separate in any other way from the most perfect God, placed matter along aside of God as a second principle, which was naturally bound up with Him; but with this the national faith was at war; and as the faith of the people forbade its entrance, it was kept in the back ground; sometimes he seems to forget it, and sometimes he goes from one school to another. The same with all the Alexandrians, Heathen and Christian, and the same too with the Gnostic Heretics. Philo calls matter the void,' that which is empty; and, like Plato's evil world-soul, he makes it the cause of evil. He seems to admit its existence as a something; and though he receives the axiom that nothing from nothing comes, he speaks, at times, of matter as if it had been created, having had no previous existence. And though he has spoken in full, concerning creation and the first existence of the sensuous world, he ret says that 'It is the most absurd of all ideas, to fancy that there ever was a time when the world did not exist, for its nature is without any beginning and withGod eternally creates. There was no time before the world. out any end."" It is constituted by the movement of the heavens. Eternity has no past or future, it is now. There is no time in God. The days of creation are merely the THE CABBALA.-The Cabbala is the secret tradition of the Jews, which explains the hidden meaning of the Scriptures, and contains the true exoteric doctrine of Rabbinical Judaism. The origin of the Cabbala is unknown. The present collection of books which profess to unfold it are supposed to have originated about the first or second century of the Christian era; but concerning the age of the doctrines contained in them we know nothing. The mystical Rabbis ascribe the Cabbala to the Angel Razael, the reputed teacher of Adam, and say that the Angel gave Adam the Cabbala as his lesson book in paradise. From him it descended to generation after generation. Noah read it in the ark; Abraham treasured it up in his tent; and through Jacob it was bequeathed to the chosen people. It was the charter of the national wisdom; their secret masonic order of succession. God speaks, and it is done. "When God spoke to Moses, symbol. By its instruction Moses brought the Jews out of Egypt, and by its cunning wisdom Solomon built the temple without the sound of a hammer. That the collection of books which we possess is the original Cabbala may be true, though its wisdom much resembles that of the schools of Alexandria. The likeness of the Cabbalistic theology in some points to that of Zoroastrianism, has suggested the time of the captivity as the probable date of the origin of its earlier parts; but a likeness of this kind proves nothing. Its nearest kindred is the writings of Philo, and it is of nearly the same intrinsic worth. The whole conceivable universe of being, spiritual and material, is one. It proceeded from one, and the process of this procession is the subject of the metaphysics of the Cabbala. It shows how all spirits and spirit worlds are on the one side blended with God, and how on the other they flow out into the visible worl 1, and are connected with it. The first of beings, the chief Being, is En-soph; eternal and necessary, the everlasting or the oldest of existences. He is the absolute Unity, the Essence of essences, pre-eminently Being. But that He may not be considered as any one of the things that are, He is also called Non-being. He is separated from all that is, because He is the substance of all that is, the principle of all things, both as potential and as actual. Before creation, He is Gcd concealed, dwelling in the thick darkness; but by creation, He is God revealed, with His light filling space infinite. Unrevealed He is the unopened fountain of spirit, life, and light; with His selfmanifestation, these flow forth to all beings. He opened His eye, according to the Cabbalistic hieroglyphic, and light, spirit, and life streamed forth to all worlds. This self-manifesting of God concealed, was creation or emanation. The power of the Infinite flowed forth in its threefold form. The first act of unfolding, that which preceeded creation, was called the word or speech of God. It is not distinct from God and the world. Priority or antecedence merely expresses the order of sequence. The Cabbalists, like Philo, know nothing of time, but as existing for the human mind. God and His manifestations are eternal. This Word was the first ray, the original, in which the principles of conception and production were united; the father and mother principle of the actual universe; the alpha and omega, the universe of forms; the first-born of God, and the creator of all things; at once the image of the ineffable God, and the form or pattern of the visible worlds, through which it proceeds as a divine ray in all |