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.

[Sidenote: Neo-Platonism.]

[Sidenote: Resultant of Contact between East and West.]

If I have given more space to the great Alexandrian Jew than my narrow
limits ought to afford, it is because I think I may thus avoid the
necessity of saying much about the philosophic schemes of the
Neo-Platonists, the phantasies of the Gnostics, or the occasionally
daring speculations of the Christian Fathers. For whether the works of
Philo were much studied by the Greeks or not, they certainly described
the spiritual resultant--so to speak--emerging from the mutual impact of
Western and Oriental, especially Jewish, ideas. Which resultant was "in
the air" from the first century of the Christian age; and the later
epistles ascribed to St. Paul, as well as the Fourth Gospel, show clear
traces of it.[14]