The three
chief rungs of the ladder are the attributes of creation, and of
ruling power, and the Logos. The perfect unity of the Godhead is not,
of course, properly the subject of attributes, but the limited mind of
man so conceives it for its own understanding, and speaks of God's
justice, God's goodness, God's wisdom. These are, to use philosophical
terminology, categories of the religious understanding, which are
finally resolved by the perfect sage in "the synthetic apperception of
Unity."
Philo follows what may have been a Hebrew tradition in explaining the
two names of God, "Elohim" and "Jehovah," as connoting His two chief
attributes: (1) the creative or beneficent, (2) the ruling or
judicial, or, as it is sometimes called, the law-giving power.[224]
Names, as we know, were always regarded by Philo as profound symbols,
and naturally the names of God are of vital import; and the twofold
expression for the Hebrew Deity, of which the higher critics have made
much destructive use, was noticed by the earliest commentators, but
made the basis by them of a constructive theology. The ruling and the
creative attributes of God are outlined and contained in the highest
mode of all, the Logos, "the reason of God in every phase and form of
it that is discoverable and realizable by man." For by the Logos, God
is both ruler and good.
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