Philo of Alexandria

“ Plato and the Cabbalah represent the same mystic spirit in different degrees of intellectual sublimity and religious aspiration; Philo endeavored to unite the two manifestations. He lived in a markedly non-rational age given over to mystical speculation; and Alexandria especially, by her cosmopolitan character, "furnished the soil and seed which formed the mystic philosophy that knew how to blend the wisdom and [pg.236] folly of the ages." ”

“ Born in an atmosphere of power and affluence, Philo, who might have consorted with princes, devoted himself from the first with all his soul to a life of contemplation; like a Palestinian rabbi he regarded as man's highest duty the study of the law and the knowledge of God. ”

“ Philo in this book is not any longer the apt pupil of Greek philosophers, nor the eloquent defender of the Jewish-Alexandrian community against lying detractors. He preaches a mission to the whole world, and he lays before it his gospel of monotheism and humanity. Each Greek school has its ideal type, its Socrates, Diogenes, or Pythagoras; but Philo places above them all "the most perfect man that ever lived, Moses, the legislator of the Jews, [87] as some hold, but according to others the interpreter of the sacred laws, and the greatest of men in every way." ”

“ For the genius of Judaism is religious, and temporal power is not one of the conditions of its development.
Philo belonged to the most distinguished Jewish family of Alexandria, [41] and according to Jerome and Photius, the ancient authorities for his life, was of the priestly rank; his brother Alexander Lysimachus was not only the governor of the Jewish community, but also the alabarch, i.e., ruler of the whole Delta region, and enjoyed the confidence of Mark Antony, who appointed him guardian of his second daughter Antonia, the mother of Germanicus and the Roman emperor Claudius. ”

“ But, devout mystic as he is, [pg.184] he ascribes every consummation to the direct help of the Deity. "The mind is the cause of nothing, but rather the Deity, who is prior to mind, generates thought." [266] The Greek philosopher had ascribed the final synthesis of knowledge to a superhuman force. Philo ascribes to God all the intermediate steps from sense-perception. It may be admitted that his passive notion of philosophy involves the abandonment of the Greek ideal, the eager searching of Plato after truth. ”

“ The importance of Alexandria as a medium of interchange of ideas between the Eastern and Western worlds must also be considered as exploded. Nothing was more common, about forty or fifty years ago, than to hear learned men account for the presence of Oriental ideas in Europe, by the transmission of these ideas through the channel of Alexandria. Alexandria was supposed to be the seat of Oriental philosophy, and Philo, Origen, Porphyry, Plotinos and other great names, were imagined to be the representatives of the alliance between Greek and Oriental thought. ”

“ Those who spread the Christian doctrine among the Hellenized peoples and the sophisticated communities that dwelt round the Mediterranean found it necessary to explain and justify it by the metaphysical and ethical catchwords of the day, and in so doing they took Philo as their model. ”

“ As the Therapeutæ of Philo were the descendants of a Jewish colony who had settled in Egypt, and still retained in some degree their Mosaic ideas and belief in the Old Testament, under the light of the school of Alexandria, where the doctrines of Philo were taught, they readily adopted the Alexandrian ideas of the Logos. The belief in some intermediate or mediatorial power between God and man was common to the Jews as well as most other people. ”

“ Down to the time of Philo, the fusion of thought at Alexandria had been beneficial, and had broadened the Jewish outlook without impairing its strength, but the dissolving forces of civilization never operated more powerfully than in the early centuries of the common era, when the intellect of the world was jaded and weary, and the great movement in culture was a jumbling together of the ideas of East and West. More especially in the cosmopolitan towns, Alexandria, Antioch, and Rome, national life, national culture, and national religion were undermined ”

“ It is probable that contact with Roman jurisprudence had affected the practical interpretations which the Alexandrian Sanhedrin put upon the Biblical legislation, and was the cause of some of their differences from the Palestinian Halakah. In treating the ethical law, Philo's object was to show its agreement with the loftiest conceptions of Greek philosophers, and, indeed, its profounder truth; in treating the civil law of the Bible, his object likewise was to show its agreement with the highest principles of jurisprudence and its superiority to pagan codes. ”

“ Among the many men with whom Gonod transacted business was a certain Jewish banker, Alexander, whose brother, Philo, was a famous religious philosopher of that time. Philo was engaged in the laudable but exceedingly difficult task of harmonizing Greek philosophy and Hebrew theology. Ganid and Jesus talked much about Philo's teachings and expected to attend some of his lectures, but throughout their stay at Alexandria this famous Hellenistic Jew lay sick abed. ”

“ The seeking after sensual pleasure and luxury was the most glaring evil of his city—as the Talmud says, [107] of ten parts of lust nine were given to Alexandria—and with every variety of denunciation he returns again and again to the charge. Epicureanism is detestable not only for its low idea of [pg.94] human life, but for its godless conception of the universe. Its theory that the world was a fortuitous concourse of atoms, which was governed by blind chance, and that the gods lived apart in complete indifference to men—this was to Philo utter atheism, and as such the greatest of sins. ”

“ Of Philo's life we know one incident in very full detail, the rest we can only reconstruct from stray hints in his writings, and a few short notices of the commentators. From that incident also, which we know to have taken place in the year 40 C.E., we can fix the general chronology of his life and works. He speaks of himself as an old man in relating it, so that his birth may be safely placed at about 20 B.C.E. The first part of his life therefore was passed during the tranquil era in which Augustus and Tiberius were reorganizing the Roman Empire after a half-century of war ”

“ No Jewish thinker ever applied this principle more thoroughly than Philo; and it gives an unique color to his work in the history of ancient philosophy. All our lives are one unceasing miracle, due to the constant manifestation of God's power; and the miracles of the Bible are examples of the universal working of Divine care rather than exceptions from it.
The dominant feeling behind Greek thought is that man is the measure of all things: Plato, attacking the standpoint of his nation, had declared that God is the measure, and Philo repeats his maxim with a new intensity. ”

“ On the downfall of Jerusalem in 70 C.E. many of the extreme anti-Roman party, known as the Zealots, fled to Alexandria and stirred up rebellion and dissension. Nothing but disaster could have attended the outbreak, but it is a sad reflection that the governor who put it down and ruthlessly exterminated the rebels was none other than Tiberius Alexander, the nephew of Philo, who was in turn procurator of Judæa and Egypt. ”

“ The doctrines of the Epistle to the Romans, or the Epistle to the Ephesians, are absolutely antipathetic to the ideal of the "Allegories of the Laws." Paul is allied in spirit—though his expression is that of the fanatic rather than of the philosopher—to the extreme allegorist section of philosophical Jews at Alexandria, attacked by Philo for their shallowness in the famous passage, quoted from De Migratione Abrahami (ch. 16 [358] ) , who, because they recognized the spiritual meaning of the law, rejected its literal commands ”

“ Whereas the modern anti-Semite usually complains about Jewish success and dangerous cleverness, Apion accused them of having produced no original ideas and no great men, and no citizen as worthy of Alexandria as himself! Against these charges Philo, the most philosophical Jew of the time and the most distinguished member of the Alexandrian [pg.64] community, was called upon to defend his people, and that part of his works which Eusebius calls ; i.e. apologetics, was probably written in reply to the Stoic attacks. The hatred of the Stoics was a religious hatred, which is the bitterest of all ”

“ The Platonic Theory of Ideas, metaphysical in origin, plays a very important part in his works, but it is adapted mystically, and turned from an ideal of the human intellect to a support of monotheism and piety. Here Philo is at once the leader and the child of his generation; men were no longer satisfied with rational systems, but wanted a religious philosophy, based upon a transcendental principle and a Divine revelation which could give them some certainty and some positive hope in life. ”

“ So great therefore was his inequality of temper towards every one, and most especially towards the nation of the Jews to which he was most bitterly hostile, and accordingly beginning in Alexandria he took from them all their synagogues there, and in the other cities, and filled them all with images and statues of his own form; for not caring about any other erection of any kind, he set up his own statue every where by main force ”

“ All the vulgar fancies and superstitions which Philo had intellectualized, these later Eastern Platonists sought to revive and justify by conceptions of physical emanation blended of false science and mysticism. They hoped to found a universal religion by finding room in one system for the deities of all nations! ”

“ The religious preconceptions of Philo drew him to Plato above all other philosophers, so that his thought is essentially a religious development of Platonism. It is not too much to say that Philo's work has a double function, to interpret the Bible according to Platonic philosophy and to interpret Plato in the spirit of the Bible. The agreement was not the artificial production of the commentator, for in truth Plato was in sympathy with the religious conscience as a whole. The contrast between Hellenism and Hebraism is true, if we restrict it to the average mind of the two races. ”

“ It appears highly probable that there were Greek, Egyptian, and Jewish Therapeutæ. Philo, after eulogizing Anaxagoras, Democritus, and other philosophers, who embraced their way of life, thus expresses himself:
"Similar societies are found in many countries; Greece and other regions enjoy institutions of this consoling character. They are common in Egypt in every district, and particularly in that of Alexandria. The most worthy and moral of the population have withdrawn beyond Lake Mœris to a secluded but convenient spot, forming a gentle declivity. ”

“ From the negative side Philo stands for the struggle against Epicureanism, which in other words is the devotion to material pleasures and sensual enjoyments. In adversity, as he notes, the race is truest to its ideals, but as soon as the breeze of prosperity has caught its sails, then it throws overboard all that ennobles life. The hedonist whom he attacks, like the Epicuros of the rabbis, is not the banal thinker of one particular age, but a permanent type in the history of our people. ”

“ Footnotes ↑ Ps. xix. 14.↑ It may be well here to say a few words in regard to Monachism and Antony’s relation to it:— (1) There is much in the later Platonism, with its austerities and bodily mortifications (see vii. sec. 13, note 2, above) , which is in common with the asceticism of the early Church. The Therapeutæ of Philo, indeed, of whom there were numbers in the neighbourhood of Alexandria in the first century, may be considered as the natural forerunners of the Egyptian monks. ”

“ But he was deceiving himself without knowing it; for the hopes of wicked men are unstable, as they guess what is more favourable to them while they suffer what is quite contrary to it, as in fact they deserve. For Bassus, the centurion, was sent from Italy by the appointment of Gaius with the company of soldiers which he commanded. (110) And having embarked on board one of the fastest sailing vessels, he arrived in a few days at the harbour of Alexandria, off the island of Pharos, about evening ”

“ All these men, having devised a most grievous design against the Jews, proceeded to put it in execution, and coming privately to Flaccus said to him, (22) "All your hope from the child of Tiberius Nero has now perished, and that which was your second best prospect, your companion Macro, is gone too, and you have no chance of favour with the emperor, therefore we must find another advocate, by whom Gaius may be made propitious to us, (23) and that advocate is the city of Alexandria, which all the family of Augustus has honoured from the very beginning, and our present master above all the rest ”

“ This was very unlike Ptolemy, who was a wise, clear-headed man, with much of Alexander’s spirit of teaching and improving people under him, and who ruled so as to make himself much beloved in Egypt, Cyprus, Rhodes, and Palestine. The new city of Alexandria was his capital, and under him and his son Ptolemy Philadelphus it grew to be a great merchant city, and also a school of art, science, and philosophy almost as famous as Athens, and with a library containing all the chief books in the world, including the Old Testament. ”