Million Book Collection - The Fishers of Men Ministries

150 THE FORMATION OF CHRISTENDOMworship to his god Apollo was impious; and couldhimself venerate all the rites of his country's worshipas parts of a worship at the head of which stood theSupreme God. Philosophy in his hands did at leastin some degree endeavour to bring back the componentparts of that worship, prayer and sacrifice, oracles andmysteries, to the positive meaning which lay beneaththem, to detach the corruption and draw out thetruth.In so doing Plutarch's spirit of piety is in strikingcontrast not merely with Seneca, not merely with thefrivolous love of infidel negation, which breathesthrough the poets and historians of Augustan literature,but with Cicero, with Aristotle, and even withPlato, from whom he assumes to derive his notion cGod. There is in him an intimacy of relation betweenman and God as his author, ruler, and provider, suchas had been strange for ages at least to those mindswhich can be said to have been formed or influencedby Greek philosophy, and have come down to posterityin their works.And here I would recur to Philo in order to notecertain very important points in which his love ofGreek philosophy had led him, as it seems unconsciously,to desert the divine tradition of Moses andthe orthodox Jewish belief. Thus God to Philo isnot, strictly speaking, the world's Creator, but only itsconstructor or builder, for Philo asserts the independentexistence of matter, which God found in a chaoticstate at the beginning, and moulded by His divinepower the universe out of it. In like manner headmitted the Stoic doctrine of the human soul beinga fragment or derivation of the divine spirit; andafter thus conceiving the origin both of matter and