Million Book Collection - The Fishers of Men Ministries

138 THE FORMATION OF CHRISTENDOMgiver of it to man by grace, union with whom is theend of man's life. He is a God who is to be reachednot by the effort of a scientific knowledge on the partof man, but by His own gift, dependent on a moraland spiritual state in man, which likewise springs fromGod. All this is completely unlike the course of Greekphilosophy up to Philo's time. We cannot assure ourselvesbetter of this fact than by comparing him inthese respects with Seneca. Philo was older thanSeneca by about twenty years. When he visitedRome in the beginning of the reign of Claudius, hewas already a grey-haired man. He is supposed to havedied a few years later, but twenty-five years after thisvisit of his, Seneca was the representative of suchphilosophy as then existed at Borne. Now in certainpoints these writers show a similarity of tendencies.If Seneca exalted philosophy into a sort of religion,assigning to it the solution of the most importantproblems of human life, and requiring submission toit as the guide and teacher of man, Philo, on the otherhand, sought to penetrate his theology with philosophicthought, and scrupled not to select Platonic, Peripatetic,and Stoic doctrines, which he attempted to reconcilewith the doctrine of Moses. In this processhe was unconscious of being in any point untrue tothe supremacy which he accorded without doubting tothat doctrine. Nevertheless in picking and choosingfrom the Greek schools he was an eclecticlike Seneca.Again, in their ascetic doctrine of subduing the fleshto the reason, in their view of the antagonism betweenmind and matter, there was much in common. Philoalso agrees with the Stoic in declarin that the wiseman knows himself to be as a citizen of the world notconfined to any particular country, but feels himself to