theology, philosophy, Koranic exegesis, etc., etc., have been published in critical editions and in part translated. The palm of honor unmistakably belongs to Germany and France, though Holland, Italy, and England, have undoubtedly produced some of our foremost modern Arabic Scholars and Orientalists. In America the increasing interest in Arabic and Oriental studies in general is also rapidly progressing, and in our principal Universities, such as Yale, Harvard, Columbia, Chicago, California, Pennsylvania, Princeton, Johns Hopkins', etc. we have special chairs of Arabic professorships, well organized and fully equipped.

GABRIEL OUSSANI.

PHILO AND THE DAY OF ATONEMENT

G. S. Hitchcock, S. J.

At Alexandria, among the many Hellenists, Jews who spoke Greek, allegorical interpretation reigned; and in Philo, it found a spirit eager to extend its dominion. Born about a quarter of a century before the Christian era (L. C. 1 and 28), and winning literary renown while our Lord was forming the Mystery of His Own Hidden Life, Philo took the Sacred Books of his nation, just as he found them in their Old Greek dress, and made Moses and the Prophets foretell the problems, mystic and moral, of the Platonic schools. In his works, there are fourteen references to the Day of Atonement, and some of these occur in such contexts as to suggest that the Solemn Fast was very familiar to his mind.

In one passage (S. and F. 23), he accounts for the ordinance as providing training in self-control, opportunity for prayer and a fitting prelude to the autumn harvest. He labours to explain why it was held on the tenth day, and will have it that as ten includes all the proportions, arithmetical, harmonic and geometrical, Moses intended to show hunger is not necessarily an evil, but an ally to the reasoning power, which becomes so strengthened by the body's fast, it can march without stumbling towards that worth seeing and hearing.

Because of the virtue inherent in lowliness, Philo held that the Day of Expiation and Atonement was arranged to fall according to the perfect number of the decade (P. C. 13). Therefore on the tenth day, souls should humble themselves; and by renouncing pride, they would work the pardon of their unjust deeds, whether these were voluntary or involuntary. Hellenising still more daringly in blending Mosaic tradition and Platonic speculation (C. E. G. 19), he speaks of the Expiation as made on the tenth of the month, because then the soul made its supplication to the tenth God, not to those gods who rule the nine spheres of created existence, whether the earth or the seven planets or the firmament itself, but to Him Who never came into being, because He ever is.

As to the fasting (L. A. III. 61.), the Expiation is by affliction that God may prove propitious; and for this the Eternal Himself

provides the hunger, which Philo transforms by allegory into abstinence from passion and vice. Then the soul imitates Moses in pitching its tent beyond the camp of all that is material, and begins to worship God, even entering the darkness and the invisible sanctuary, where it may abide in most holy achievements. Yet it was but once a year, the highpriest entered within the veil; and hardly once a year is the highpriest in the human soul, its Word or Reason, authorised to occupy itself with the holy decrees (G.II.).

Then in the changing of the priestly raiment, and in the laying aside of the splendid robe, which fell about the feet, Philo beheld the soul putting off its vestment of opinion and imagination, leaving that to such as love external things and honour mere opinion as though it were the truth. For to him, the clothing represented the parts or powers of the irrational nature, which sometimes overshadowed the rational (L. A. II. 15).

But it must be remembered that the great Jewish dreamer held the earthly tabernacle for a symbol of two temples, of which one is the universe, and there the Divine Word, God's Firstborn, is highpriest, and the other is the rational soul, in which what is truly man is priest. Entering within the latter, and abandoning the material order with all that speaks of it, he lives in the most Holy Place of pure intelligence, pouring out the soul's blood in libation and burning the whole intelligence as incense to the Saviour and beneficient God (L. A. II. 15) Therefore the highpriest was vested in white linen, bright and clean, the symbol of activity and incorruption (S. I. 37). And this was intended as an indication that those, who would serve the Self-Existent, must first use strength of mind to spurn all human things, for these allure and injure and enfeeble.

But in that scorn of earth and in that ambition to live as a pure intelligence, there breathed the spirit of Platonism, and Philo hesitates on the brink of its Pantheism. We ask him what becomes of the soul, when it has entered the Most Holy Place, and in three different passages, he gives us three different answers, but all founded on a misreading of his Greek translation. Taking the words of the Hebrew text one by one, we read that "every man shall not be in the tent," when the priest enters; and the Hebrew idiom implies that "no man shall be” there. Philo's Old Greek or Septuagint version translated the Hebrew sentence word by word. And Philo, omitting the first word "every," understood the passage to mean that the highpriest "shall not be man" when he enters.

Therefore, he says that the intellect, when it offers God the pure service of worship is not human but divine (Q. R. D. H. 16) If it then turns to anything human, it descends from heaven, or rather, fallen to earth, it comes forth from the Most Holy Place.

Yet elsewhere (S. II. 28.) he hesitates to assert plainly such deification of the intellect in its communion with God. The reason, he would have it, is belittled in association with the other parts or powers of the human soul, though it be the president of these, and the only one that can call them into council. But none the less, although it be alone, reason is sufficient for all speculation and action, itself a whole judgment-place, a whole council-hall, a whole people, a whole multitude, all the race of men in one. And having so chanted its resources, he urges it is a nature on the limit line between God and man, inferior indeed to God, but superior to man. Growing bolder, he says that the highpriest, entering the Most Holy Place, shall not be man. Who then, he asks, if not man? Is he then indeed God? Philo declines to say, but contents himself with reminding us that the lot of this name fell to the archprophet Moses, when he was yet in Egypt, and was addressed as Pharao's God.

But a little later (S. II. 34), he resumes the question, and tellsus the beautiful limit line for the soul is to be neither God nor man, but to touch both extremes, the humanity of a mortal race and the virtue of the Immortal. And turning for a comparison to "the oracular utterance concerning the great priest," he repeats the passagefor the third time, still misreading it. When the high priest enters the Holy of Holies, Philo misquotes, "he shall not be man until he come out." Then he argues that if the highpriest becomes one who is not a man, it is clear that neither is he God, but God's minister, one who offers Him the public service of worship, in regard to what is mortal dwelling in the world of change, but in regard to what is immortal, dwelling with the Uncreated.

Thus, the just man, regarded as an individual apart from the sacred nation of Israel's children, and apart from the consecrated tribe of Levi's sons, may pass into the Most Holy Place, when that is understood as the world of pure intellect, and then he will occupy the middle rank between the Creator and the created. The same idea is present. to Philo, when he would explain the two lots in the ritual (P. 14). One of these was for God the Lord, Who is the Self-Existent, never coming into being, because He ever is. And the other was for that sent away, the world of creatures, that come into being and are subject to

the dominion of change in the realm of birth and death. He then, who venerates the Primal Cause of all things, obtains honour as his lot. But he who venerates the created shall be put to flight, driven from the most sacred places, fall upon regions pathless and profane, and meet at the end deep pits of ruin.

In another passage also (Q. R. D. H. 37), Philo reads the same meaning into the casting of the lot, which he describes as a divider, neither visible nor evident, yet separating the two goats. For of

the two persons implied, he who busies himself in all that concerns Divine virtue, is consecrated and offered to God the Creator. But the other, studious of what regards human illfortune, is delivered to the created world, that flees away.

The veneration of the Eternal is intimately connected with the life of God (P. C. 20). And because God is the fount of reason, he, whose mode of living is irrational, must be separated as by a cord. from the life of God. But Moses (Dt. XXX. 20), for so Philo quotes him, had said that it is our life to love Him Who is; and therefore to live according to God consists in loving Him. As to the opposite mode of living, an example is laid before us in the case of the goat, over which the expiation was to be made.

Then again, the lots are explained as representing the world of intellect and that of sense (L. A. II. 14). On the one side is God, the Father of the Universe, and God's Virtue and Wisdom, the mother of all things. But the intellect, leaving these to wed the world of sense, becomes one flesh with it; and in choosing its life of feeling and passion, becomes like the goat sent away.

So Philo translated the Day of Atonement into questions of knowledge and virtue, but these in regard to the individual soul only. This was the easier for Alexandrian Hellenists, Jews who thought Moses and spoke Greek, because they lived apart from the sacred places of their nation, knew their sacred books in a Greek translation, and neighboured those who spoke Greek and thought Plato.

G. S. HITCHCOCK, S. J.