Knight of the East and West | Chapter 17 Part 2

The WORD was also found in the Phœnician Creed. As in all those of Asia, a WORD of God, written in starry characters, by the planetary Divinities, and communicated by the Demi-Gods, as a profound mystery, to the higher classes of the human race, to be communicated by them to mankind, created the world. The faith of the Phœnicians was an emanation from that ancient worship of the Stars, which in the creed of Zoroaster alone, is connected with a faith in one God. Light and Fire are the most important agents in the Phœnician faith. There is a race of children of the Light. They adored the Heaven with its Lights, deeming it the Supreme God.

Everything emanates from a Single Principle, and a Primitive Love, which is the Moving Power of All and governs all. Light, by its union with Spirit, whereof it is but the vehicle or symbol, is the Life of everything, and penetrates everything. It should therefore be respected and honored everywhere; for everywhere it governs and controls.

The Chaldaic and Jerusalem Paraphrasts endeavored to render the phrase, DEBAR-YAHOVAH [‏ו ?D?B?R ?Y?H?W?H‎], the Word of God, a personality, wherever they met with it. The phrase, “And God created man,” is, in the Jerusalem Targum, “And the Word of IHUH created man.”

So, in xxviii. Gen. 20, 21, where Jacob says: “If God [‏ו ?Y?H?Y?H ?A?L?H?Yמ‎

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[paragraph continues] IHIH ALHIM] will be with me . . . then shall IHUH be my ALHIM [‏ו ?W?H?Y?H ?Y?H?W?H ?L?Y ?L?A?L?H?Yמ‎, UHIH IHUH LI LALHIM]; and this stone shall be God’s House [‏ו ?Y?H?Y?H ?B?Y?Tה ?A?L?H?Yמ‎, IHUH BITH ALHIM]: Onkelos paraphrases it, “If the word of IHUH will be my help . . . . then the word of IHUH shall be my God.”

So, in iii. Gen. 8, for “The Voice of the Lord God” [‏ו ?Y?H?W?H ?A?L?H?Yמ‎ IHUH ALHIM], we have, “The Voice of the Word of IHUH.”

In ix. Wisdom, 1, “O God of my Fathers and Lord of Mercy! who has made all things with thy word. ἐν λόγου σου.”

And in xviii. Wisdom, 15, “Thine Almighty Word [Λογος] leaped down from Heaven.”

Philo speaks of the Word as being the same with God. So in several places he calls it “δεύτερος Θεἰος Λόγος” the Second Divinity; “εἰκὼν του Θεοῦ,” the Image of God: the Divine Word that made all things: “the ὕπαρχος” substitute, of God; and the like.

Thus, when John commenced to preach, had been for ages agitated, by the Priests and Philosophers of the East and West, the great questions concerning the eternity or creation of matter: immediate or intermediate creation of the Universe by the Supreme God; the origin, object, and final extinction of evil; the relations between the intellectual and material worlds, and between God and man; and the creation, fall, redemption, and restoration to his first estate, of man.

The Jewish doctrine, differing in this from all the other Oriental creeds, and even from the Alohay_istic legend with which the book of Genesis commences, attributed the creation to the immediate action of the Supreme Being. The Theosophists of the other Eastern Peoples interposed more than one intermediary between God and the world. To place between them but a single Being, to suppose for the production of the world but a single intermediary, was, in their eyes, to lower the Supreme Majesty. The interval between God, who is perfect Purity, and matter, which is base and foul, was too great for them to clear it at a single step. Even in the Occident, neither Plato nor Philo could thus impoverish the Intellectual World.

Thus, Cerinthus of Ephesus, with most of the Gnostics, Philo, the Kabalah, the Zend-Avesta, the Puranas, and all the Orient, deemed the distance and antipathy between the Supreme Being and the material world too great, to attribute to the former the creation of the latter. Below, and emanating from, or created

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by, the Ancient of Days, the Central Light, the Beginning, or First Principle [Αρχὴ], one, two, or more Principles, Existences, or Intellectual Beings were imagined, to some one or more of whom [without any immediate creative act on the part of the Great Immovable, Silent Deity], the immediate creation of the material and mental universe was due.