"
* * * * *
V
PHILO'S THEOLOGY
"The most remarkable feature about Judaism," says Darmesteter, "is
that without a philosophical system it had reached a philosophical
conclusion about the government of the world and the nature of
God."[171] The same idea underlies the statement of the Peripatetic
writer Theophrastus (who lived in the latter part of the fourth
century B.C.E.) that the Jews are a people of philosophers,[172] and
the epigram of Heine, that they pray in metaphysics. Intuitively, the
lawgiver and prophets of the Hebrew race had attained a conception of
monotheism to which the greatest of the Greek philosophers had hardly
struggled by reason. The Greeks had started with separate
nature-powers, which they had finally resolved into a supreme
nature-force; the Hebrews had started with the historical God of their
fathers, whom they had universalized into the Creator of the world and
Father of all the human race. Wellhausen has suggested that the
intellectual development of Judaism with its tendency to become a
purified monotheism moved in the same direction towards which Greek
thought tended in its philosophical speculation of the universe. The
difference between the two conceptions of God, however, remained even
in their universalized aspect; the one was an impersonal world-force,
the other a personal God in direct relation with individual man.
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