Million Book Collection - The Fishers of Men Ministries

RESURRECTION OF CULTURED HEATHENISM I 5 Ispirit, lie places the origin of evil in the conflictof these two. From1 God only what is good andperfect can derive only life and order. The imperfectionof the finite, the strife and opposition betweenthings, the necessity of nature, the lifelessness ofmaterial things, the evil in the world, can be tracedback only to a source distinct from the divine operation.Accordingly the body is an absolute contradictionto the mind, and as such the source of all evils.The earthly shell is a prison out of which the spiritlongs to be set free, a carcase which the soul dragsabout with it. Thus it is the conflict between the fleshand spirit, rather than the abuse of free-will, which ismade the source of evil. Philo is further notoriousfor his extravagant use of allegory, both in the interpretationof Scripture on the one side, and in givinga moral sense to the Greek myths on the other.Now in all these four points, the conception of theSupreme God as the builder of the world, not as itsCreator, of matter as existing originally and beforethe divine operation, of the human soul as aneffluence of the divine, and of the conflict betweenmatter and spirit viewed as the cause of evil, the doctrineof Plutarch is the same as that of Philo. Tosay the least, Plutarch vies with Philo in the extravagancewith which he uses allegory in order to draw ameaning in accordance with his system out of theGreek mythology. But in all this it is Philo whoGrecises, not Plutarch who Judaises. In anotherdoctrine, however, which in Philo forms the crowningpoint of union between God and man, Plutarch1 Zeller, v. 336, who observes that this train of thought in Philo iclearly seen not only in particular passages, but from all his statementsrespecting Matter. See also p. 349.