Chapter XII. On the Theological Doctrine of the Second Cause

THALES of Miletus declared that the first principle of all things is water, Anaximenes the air, Heracleitus fire, Pythagoras numbers, Epicurus and Democritus corporeal atoms, Empedocles the four elements. Let us therefore look also at the oracles of the Hebrews.

Next to the Being of the God of the universe, which is without beginning and uncreate, incapable of mixture and beyond all conception, they introduce a second Being and divine power, which subsisted as the first beginning of all originated things and was originated from the first cause, calling it Word, and ‘Wisdom, and Power of God.’ [1]

And the first to teach us this is Job, saying: ‘But whence was wisdom found? And what is the place of understanding? Man knoweth not the way thereof, nor yet was it found among men,[2]... but we have heard the fame thereof. The Lord established the way thereof, and He knoweth the place thereof.’ [3]

And David also somewhere in the Psalms, addressing Wisdom by another name, says: ‘By the word of the LORD were the heavens established’:[4] for in this manner he celebrated the Word of God the Organizer of all things. Moreover, his son Solomon also speaks as follows in the person of Wisdom herself, saying: ‘I Wisdom made counsel my dwelling, and knowledge and understanding I called unto me.[5] By me kings reign, and rulers decree justice.’[6] And again:

‘The LORD created me as the beginning of His ways unto His works, from everlasting He founded me, in the beginning or ever He made the earth, and before the depths were made, [7]. . . before the mountains were settled, and before all hills He begat me;[8] . . . when He was preparing the heaven I was beside Him;[9] . . . and as He was making safe the fountains beneath the heaven,[10] . . . I was with Him arranging. I it was in whom He daily delighted, and I was rejoicing before Him in every season when He was rejoicing in having completed the habitable world.’ [11]

So Solomon speaks in Proverbs. And the words also which follow are somewhere spoken in Wisdom’s own person: ‘But what wisdom is, and how she came into being, I will declare, and will not hide mysteries from you; but I will trace her out from the beginning of creation.’ [12] To which he afterwards adds: ‘For she is an understanding spirit, holy, alone in kind, manifold, subtil, freely moving, clear, undefiled, . . . all-powerful, all-surveying, and going through all intelligent, pure, and most subtil spirits. [13]

‘For wisdom is more moving than any motion; she penetrateth and passeth through all things by reason of her pureness. For she is a breath of the power of God, and a clear effluence of the glory of the Almighty: therefore doth nothing defiled find entrance into her. For she is an effulgence from everlasting light, an unspotted mirror of the working of God, and an image of His goodness. . . . And she reaches from end to end with full strength: and sweetly doth she order all things.’ [14]

Moreover, the sacred Scripture introduces this divine Word in various ways as sent from the Father for the salvation of mankind: and so it relates that it was He who showed Himself to Abraham and to Moses and to the other prophets beloved of God, and taught them so many things in oracles, and prophesied the things to come, whenever it mentions that God or the Lord appearedand entered into converse with the prophets.

That He also became known to all men as having been sent by the Greater to be a Saviour of the sick and a physician of souls, the Scripture thus declares: ‘He sent His Word and healed them, and delivered them from their destructions.’ [15] And again at another time it says: ‘His Word shall run swiftly.’ [16] Whence the teaching of the Gospel also in renewing the doctrine of the prophets and fathers makes the theology clear in the following way: ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by Him; and without Him was not anything made, that hath been made. In Him was life; and the life was the light of men.’ [17]

With good reason then does Moses in his perfect wisdom, when commencing his account of the creation of the world, inspired by the same Spirit declare that in the beginning aforesaid ‘God created the heaven and the earth’; and introduces God communing with Him, as with His own and first-born Word, upon the creation of man, in the passage where he writes: ‘And God said, Let us make man in our image and after our likeness.’[18]

This the Psalmist also hinted, when describing the First Cause he said: ‘He spake, and they were made; He commanded, and they were created’:[19] plainly supposing the direction and command of the First Cause to the Second, as of a father to a son. For. of course it is quite manifest that every one who speaks at all speaks to another, and he who commands, commands some other than himself.

But expressly mentioning again two Lords both together, that is to say Father and Son, Moses in his narrative of the punishment of the ungodly speaks thus: ‘And the LORD rained brimstone and fire from the LORD upon Sodom and Gomorrah.’ [20]

In accordance with which David also said in a Psalm: ‘The LORD said unto my lord, sit thou on My right hand, until I make thine enemies the footstool of thy feet.’ [21] And further on he hinted at His secret and utterly ineffable generation, saying: ‘From the womb I begat thee before the morning star.’ [22]

Lest, however, you should suppose that these are my subtleties, I will offer you as interpreter of the meaning of the Scripture a man of Hebrew race, who received from his forefathers an accurate knowledge of the history of his country, and had learned the doctrine from his teachers; that is, if you accept Philo as such a man. Listen then to him, how he interprets the divine utterances.