Strictly, God is unconditioned, and cannot
be the subject of predication, for all determination involves
negation, and hence in one aspect He is not conceivable nor
describable, nor nameable.[178] Siegfried and Zeller press this
negative attitude to the Deity, and find that there is an inherent
contradiction in Philo's system, which ruins it, in that his God, upon
whom all depends and who is the object of all knowledge, is absolutely
unknowable and unapproachable. But this is to take Philo according to
the strict letter to the neglect of the spirit, and to do that with
one so eloquent and so careless of verbal accuracy is utterly to
misunderstand him.
The Greek philosophers in their attempt to formulate an exact notion
of the First Being by abstract metaphysics had, indeed, conceived it
in this fashion; and Philo, harmonizing Greek metaphysics and Hebrew
intuition, is drawn at times into a presentation of God which appears
to deny His personality and make of Him an abstraction. What has been
said of Spinoza is true no less of Philo.[179] "The tendency to unity,
to the infinite, to religion, overbalanced itself till, by its mere
excess, it seemed to be changed into its opposite. But this is not his
spirit, only the dead ultimate result of an imperfect logic that
confuses an abstract with a concrete unity.
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