THE

PROSPECTIVE REVIEW.

No. XVI.

ART. I.—GFRÖRER'S ORIGIN OF CHRISTIANITY.

Critical History of the Origin of Christianity; consisting of, Philo and the Alexandrian Theosophy; The Century of Salvation (Jahrhundert des Heils); The Sacred Legends (Heilige Sage); The Sanctuary and the Truth (Heiligthum und Wahrheit). In seven volumes. By A. Fr. Gfrörer, Professor and Librarian at Stuttgard.

DISSATISFACTION with the different critical systems which have one after the other professed to give a full account of the New Testament narratives, and dislike of the socalled orthodoxy which has arisen from investing the speculations of Schelling and Hegel with the terms of theology, induced the author of the work before us to attempt a thorough investigation of all existing documents which throw light upon the customs, habits of mind, and opinions of the men amongst whom the sacred records originated, and to endeavour by means of the materials so obtained, and in a spirit of pure historical criticism, to illustrate their true character. The result is contained in the seven volumes before us. The collection of materials, which is, as we think, far the most important part of the book, occupies the first four volumes; the three latter consist chiefly of criticism on the Gospels. As it is our wish to call attention to what appears to us a most valuable work, rather than to criticise its merits, we shall endeavour to give a short analysis of the whole, dwelling partiCHRISTIAN TEACHER.-No. 42.

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cularly on those parts which relate to the Alexandrian Theosophy.

The first volume is occupied with a digest of the opinions of Philo, the Alexandrian Jew. These are derived from his own works, proved to have been written before the year A. D. 40, and consequently before Christianity could have made any great impression at Alexandria : which is important, as showing, what is indeed sufficiently obvious from the manner in which he writes, that nothing which he held in common with the Christians was borrowed from them. He appears to have been a man of birth and rank, and of considerable importance amongst his people in Egypt: he was on one special occasion chosen by them as their envoy and representative at the Court of Rome. But the bent of his mind was towards speculation, and he was deeply versed in all those various forms of philosophy and religious opinion which met and mingled in Alexandria, the great emporium for the thought as well as the trade of Europe and Asia. His intellect was not ill suited for his position. Collective and comparative, rather than original and penetrating, he seems to have taken kindly to all the systems presented to him, and to have endeavoured more or less successfully to unite and assimilate them. Hence a most miscellaneous assortment. From the distant East came the idea that God must exist in a state of purity and tranquillity, far from this changing and perishable world; from the same source was derived the cognate opinion of the impurity of matter, and the degradation which the soul suffers during its sojourn in the body; in other words, the doctrine that the flesh or matter is the origin of evil, with all its important consequences: from the Greek came the apprehension of the beauty of the Universe, the belief in its existence as a Divine whole, and the feeling that God must be perpetually living and working in it; from the Greek too, was, immediately at any rate, derived the Platonic doctrine of abstract Ideas, sometimes strangely modified by Jewish influences into personal beings; whilst, inconsistent as it may seem with some of these views, Philo retained the old Hebrew faith in the Divine personality of one God, and the intense national belief in His peculiar relation to the Jewish people, in His choice of them and special revelation of Himself to

them, and in His intention to exalt and glorify them at the expense of the other nations of the world. This mixture of opinions is matter of special interest to us, who live in a time when the elements of thought are no less various and discordant, when old theologies and philosophies of all ages and kinds are weltering in a seemingly hopeless chaos. Gfrörer tells us that he knows of no better historical parallel for the state of thought in modern Germany than the philosophy of Alexandria at the beginning of the Christian era.

Of all Philo's doctrines, the most characteristic as well as the most original, if any opinions of such a school can be called original, is that of the Logos. Upon this Gfrörer has spent more than usual trouble, supporting every statement by long quotations. This doctrine was no unnatural product of the endeavour to unite discordant theosophies. It was an attempt, and, as history proves, turned out the most important attempt ever made by speculation, to reconcile the different thoughts which men have had concerning God and the world; to wed the human with the Divine, the world with God, the finite with the Infinite, the transitory with the Imperishable. Though the solution of these questions enters more or less into all religious creeds, their difficulty was not strongly felt by men with whom one view of the character of the Divine Being prevailed to the comparative exclusion of others. The Oriental, whose Ideal was Purity and Tranquillity, could think of God as of a Being far removed from the world, with whom the purest of mankind alone hold a mystical and spiritual communion, without being anxious to attribute to him constant activity or the immediate management of earthly and material things. The Greek, with open sense for external nature, and ready wit and constant practice in all the business of social and political life, could remain content with the child-like worship of the numerous Deities in whom he personified the powers of nature and the qualities of men, or with the more abstract Pantheism of the latter schools, without feeling conscious of any chasm between the physical and the spiritual, and of the distance which disobedience to a moral Ruler places between man and God. With the Jews as a nation and as individuals these elements were in a great measure excluded by the intense

personality which was the ground-work of their religion. Each man felt his relation to God to be that of a weak and disobedient servant to a High and Holy Master, and this feeling dictated those sacred hymns and confessions beside which all other human utterances are feeble. The same element is as strongly, though less admirably, displayed in their belief of the relation of God to the Jewish nation and to mankind. He had, as one man with others, arbitrarily chosen to enter into a contract with them to do certain things for them at the expense of other nations, on their performing certain conditions. He had perpetually assisted them as he assisted no others, and had appeared in person to their national heroes; every event which affected them was attributed to His special interference. But the Jew had no room for the tranquil and meditative spiritualism of the East; and any attempt to comprehend and admire the order and harmony of the Universe by means of science or art was beyond his wants and powers-Law was lost in Will. These separate elements met for the first time on purely neutral ground in Alexandria under the tolerant and eclectic Ptolemies. This could not last long, especially in that age of criticism and comparison, without arousing men's consciousness to the fact, that the elements of their opinions were separated by vast chasms which required some effort of no common character to bridge over. If God was an invisible Spirit, how could He have appeared personally to the Jews? If His purity was liable to contamination and His tranquillity to disturbance by contact with the material world, how could He be working in the Laws and Powers which govern the Universe? Nay, how could they themselves be proper objects of wonder and admiration? If He in his spiritual Essence is pure, and if men from their contact with flesh and matter are necessarily impure, and yet as responsible servants are to be punished for their impurity, how are they to be pardoned and restored to communion with Him? If again He is simply a personal Being, and His mode of action arbitrary and undetermined, what room is there for Law and its exponent, Science? If He has chosen one nation and intends to aggrandize them at the expense of others, what place is left for a General Providential Government of the world? These and other similar difficulties are more or

less distinctly intimated in every page of Philo. Some of them have now lost their interest; others of them men still seek to solve, though any complete solution is, perhaps, beyond the reach of the human intellect. But this the Alexandrian Jews, like our modern German neighbours, would or could (for the growth of their system was probably gradual and unconscious) by no means admit; the elements were assumed to be true, and some means of reconciling them, some bond of union between them, must be discovered. Of all the different expedients invented for this purpose, the most important is the Logos. We cannot give a definition of this being; we hardly know whether to use a personal pronoun; Emanation, Power, Quality, Genius, Law, Idea, Reason, Providence, Angel, Personal Mediator, Viceroy of God, inferior God,—it is all these in turn. There is one idea and one only which is constant, viz., the holding a middle place between God on the one hand, and Man and the World on the other. But we must, in order to give any clear notion of Philo's views on the subject, follow Gfrörer a little more closely, taking first those notions which are abstract and impersonal, and proceeding through a mist of similes and allegories, to the distinct personification of the Logos.-(I. Philo, pp. 168326.)

The Logos, with the epithet vonrós, is used as signifying the mind of God, which is the seat of the (Platonic) Ideas, after which, as after a pattern, the world and things in the world are framed.* Each of these Ideas, for which the word λoyo is sometimes used, is a genus, and, as such, opposed and superior to species: the Xoyos is called YEVIKOTαTоs, the supreme or all-embracing Idea. So far

* The doctrine of ideas, in its original form, is much too abstract for the New Testament writers; traces of it are however to be found in Heb. viii. 2, 5, and ix. 8, 9, 11, 23, 24, which speak of the Mosaic ordinances as though framed after the pattern of heavenly realities. This is a gross rendering of the doctrine, such as might be expected from men as little versed in the subtleties of abstract speculation, as the generality of the Jews. That the doctrine should be applied to the institutions of Moses is not surprising, when we consider that these were regarded with much the same veneration as the laws of Creation (I. Philo, 64). The same doctrine, still more grossly rendered, probably gave rise to the notion of a heavenly Jerusalem. Gal. iv. 26; Heb. xii. 22; Rev. iii. 12, and xxi. 2, 10. That the idea of the existence in heaven of actual models of the things upon earth was a common one with the Jews, see II. Jahrhundert des Heils, 25.