Filo de Alexandria

Philo of Alexandria (c.15 bc–c. ad 50)

Philo of Alexandria is the leading representative of Hellenistic-Jewish thought. Despite an unwavering loyalty to the religious and cultural traditions of his Jewish community, he was also strongly attracted to Greek philosophy, in which he received a thorough training. His copious writings – in Greek – are primarily exegetical, expounding the books of Moses. This reflects his apologetic strategy of presenting the Jewish lawgiver Moses as the sage and philosopher par excellence, recipient of divine inspiration, but not at the expense of his human rational faculties. In his commentaries Philo makes extensive use of the allegorical method earlier developed by the Stoics. Of contemporary philosophical movements, Philo is most strongly attracted to Platonism. His method is basically eclectic, but with a clear rationale focused on the figure of Moses.

Philo’s thought is strongly theocentric. God is conceived in terms of being. God’s essence is unreachable for human knowledge (negative theology), but his existence should be patent to all (natural theology). Knowledge of God is attained through his powers and, above all, through his Logos (‘Word’ or ‘Reason’), by means of which he stands in relation to what comes after him. In his doctrine of creation Philo leans heavily on Platonist conceptions drawn from reflection on Plato’s Timaeus. The conception of a creation ex nihilo (‘from nothing’) is not yet consciously worked out. Philo’s doctrine of human nature favours the two anthropological texts in Genesis 1–2, interpreting creation ‘according to the image’ in relation to the human intellect. With regard to ethics, both Stoic concepts and peculiarly Jewish themes emerge in Philo’s beliefs. Ethical ideals are prominent in the allegorical interpretation of the biblical patriarchs.

Philo’s influence was almost totally confined to the Christian tradition, which preserved his writings. He was unknown to medieval Jewish thinkers such as Maimonides.

 

1 Life and works

The thought of Philo of Alexandria is very much the product of his combined Alexandrian and Jewish background. Biographical details are very scarce, but we know that he was born into a prominent and extremely wealthy Jewish family (Josephus, Antiquities XVIII 258). In ad 39 he was chosen as leader of a delegation that sailed to Rome to protest to the emperor Gaius Caligula against the pogrom suffered by the Jewish community of Alexandria at the hands of the local populace. The interview with the emperor went badly, but did not cost him his life (see the unintentionally hilarious report in Embassy to Gaius 349–67). This incident is often connected with a passage at the beginning of On the Special Laws, where Philo complains that involvement in political affairs distracts him from more serious pursuits, and looks back wistfully to the time when he could fully devote himself to the life of philosophy.

From his writings it is apparent that Philo received a thorough training in Greek philosophy, although we have no idea from whom he received it (it has been suggested he may have had house tutors). His knowledge of the Platonic and Stoic traditions is especially thorough. His writings thus provide important, although imprecise, information on contemporary philosophical developments in Alexandria. Philo’s extensive use of Plato’s Timaeus and other dialogues reflects the beginnings of the Middle Platonist movement associated especially with the figure of Eudorus (see Platonism, Early and Middle §1). He is also the first writer to cite the so-called ’ten modes’ of the Neo-Pyrrhonist Aenesidemus, who was active in Alexandria a generation before his birth.

Philo was a prolific writer, and the majority of his works appear to have survived. These amount to exactly fifty treatises in all. They can best be divided into three separate groups:

(1) There are five purely philosophical treatises, discussing subjects such as the eternity of the cosmos, divine providence, and the rationality of animals. These offer much valuable material on Greek philosophy, and it is only occasionally possible to discern that their author was Jewish.

(2) In addition there are four historical/apologetic works, in which Philo defends Judaism against contemporary attacks.

(3) The remaining forty-one works are all commentaries on the books of Moses.

These are best sub-divided into four categories:

(a) Two books on the life of Moses, introducing the writer of the holy books to a broad public, both Jewish and Greek.

(b) Ten books on the Exposition of the law, first describing the creation of the world (Genesis 1–3) and the lives of the patriarchs Abraham and Joseph, then expounding the Decalogue, the Special Laws and other subjects related to Mosaic legislation.

(c) The Allegorical commentary in twenty-one books, giving an astonishingly complex running commentary on Genesis 2–17, in which the chief exegetical method used is allegorization of the text.

(d) Eight books of Questions and answers on Genesis and Exodus, in which questions are posed on most verses of the biblical text, and both literal and allegorical answers are given in a consecutive but formally unconnected way.

The great majority of Philo’s writings thus concentrate on the five books of Moses (or Pentateuch), which he read in the Greek translation of the Septuagint. The direction of Philo’s loyalties is very clear. He wishes to defend the cultural and religious heritage of his people in their minority position in Alexandrian society. His chief apologetic strategy is to focus in on the figure of the great sage Moses, exploiting the considerable prestige accorded to barbarian sages such as Zoroaster and the Egyptian priests in contemporary Greek philosophy. Moses is the great sage and paradigm for righteous and holy living. His writings, if appropriately read, are an inexhaustible fount of wisdom.

It may seem, however, that Philo is facing an impossible task. Only a few passages in the Pentateuch, such as the creation account and the stories of Moses on the mountain, offer much scope for philosophical elucidation. His solution is to exploit the method of allegorical interpretation, invented and developed by earlier Greek philosophers (including Stoics) in order to defend the authority of Homer. Like Homer, Moses allegorized: that is to say, he said one thing but meant another. The meaning behind his words has to be uncovered. Moses tells the story of the patriarch Abraham (and Philo would never deny that this progenitor of the Jewish race existed), but the deeper meaning of the text reveals the story of the human soul on the path to perfection and felicity (see §6). Philo is one of the great masters of the allegorical method. In practice it gives him the scope he needs to introduce Greek philosophical doctrines and so develop his own philosophical views by means of a presentation of Mosaic thought.

 

2 Philosophical position

Understandably, Philo shows no loyalty to any particular school of Greek philosophy. None can match the prestige enjoyed by the school of Moses. From this viewpoint Philo’s method may be considered thoroughly eclectic, but with a clear rationale. It is apparent from his commentaries, however, that his philosophical sympathies lie with Platonism. He is particularly attracted to the revival of transcendentalism undertaken in the Middle Platonist movement. Stoic doctrines are found especially in the area of ethics (see §6). Other themes reflect the influence of Jewish thought, and so offer interesting contrasts with ideas in Greek philosophy.

 

3 Epistemology

Philo makes no attempt to present a systematic theory of knowledge, but there is at least one epistemological question that he cannot avoid: How was it possible for Moses to attain the pinnacle of human wisdom? Moses is regarded as a prophet, exalted beyond other human beings. Philo distinguishes between two types of prophecy, both of which have antecedents in Greek reflection on the subject. In the first kind, which enables the prophet to predict the future, the prophet is empowered to ‘stand outside’ himself and through divine possession become an instrument of the divine voice speaking through him. This may be called ecstatic prophecy. In the second type the prophet is also inspired by God, but remains in full possession of his rational abilities, which allows his mind to contemplate the nature of reality in its fullness. This may be termed noetic prophecy. The prophet is one who ‘through virtue rather than birth has advanced to the service of the truly Existent,…since he has within him a noetic sun and shadowless beams of light, which give him the clear apprehension of things invisible to sense but perceptible to the mind’ (On the Special Laws 4.192). Philo’s Platonist assumptions emerge clearly here, even if the term ‘apprehension’ (katalēpsis) has a Stoic background. It is above all this second type of prophecy, exemplified by Moses’ vision of the paradeigma (a Platonic technical term) of the tabernacle and its contents on Mount Sinai (Exodus 25: 9), that enables him to be the sage par excellence and the author of the sacred books.

 

4 Theology

As a result of his Jewish background Philo’s thought is resolutely theocentric. God is conceptualized primarily in terms of true being. The link to Platonism is apparent, but for Philo the source is above all God’s words to Moses in Exodus 3:14, ‘I am he who IS’. It is typical of Philo that he alternates speaking of God in personal and impersonal terms: that is, between ‘he who is’ and ‘that which is’.

Crucial to Philo’s theology is the distinction between God’s existence and his essence. Through observation and experience of the natural world and particularly of their own intellectual powers, human beings can without any difficulty conclude that God exists and that he is creator of the universe. However, gaining knowledge of God’s essence is beyond the reach of human conceptual abilities. Not even the great Moses, although he made many requests, was granted this privilege. God is unknowable in his essence, and thus also unnameable, uncircumscribable and unutterable: that is, there is no name or description that can give accurate expression to his essential nature. Philo thus has a negative and a positive theology, rather similar to what one finds in the Middle Platonist handbook of Alcinous.

God is thus utterly transcendent. At the same time, however, he stands in close relation to the cosmos as its creator and provident maintainer (see §5). Philo argues that the two chief names for God refer to his powers (dynameis). The name theos (God) indicates his creative power (from the root tithēmi, ‘I set in place’); the name kyrios (Lord) indicates his ruling power. More famously the figure of God’s Logos (usually rendered ‘Word’, but ‘Reason’ is better) is invoked in order to explain God’s relation to what is other than him. Philo’s Logos doctrine is complex and certainly not always philosophically consistent. This is due to its double origin in both Jewish thought (especially the ‘and God said’ in Genesis 1) and Greek thought (especially Stoicism (§3)) (see Logos). The Logos has an immanent aspect, indicating the divine presence in the created realm. It also has a transcendent aspect, and is sometimes identified with the intelligible world. The chief difficulty posed by Philo’s doctrine of the Logos is the following. Sometimes Philo speaks of the Logos as if it were simply an aspect of the divine nature, namely that aspect which is accessible to human thought precisely because it is related (in a model/image relation) to that which follows it. At other times the Logos is treated as a hypostasis, that is, a self-subsistent theological entity that is at least to some degree independent of God himself. As a Jew, however, Philo refuses to accept the Platonist solution of a hierarchy of divine principles at different ontological levels (see Neoplatonism §3).

 

5 Doctrine of creation

A second pillar of Philo’s thought is the doctrine of creation. Philo is utterly convinced that visible material reality has been created by God, and has nothing but scorn for the minority opinion that it was the result of chance or spontaneous development. Furthermore, because God has created the universe, he will also take care of it through the action of divine providence. Philo agrees with Plato against the Stoics that, although the universe had a beginning, it will not be subject to total destruction. This, he argues, was already Moses’ view, as shown by Genesis 8: 22 (see On the Indestructibility of the Cosmos 1–19).

In his treatise On the Creation of the Cosmos According to Moses, Philo presents his views on creation in greater detail. The cosmos was created in six days. This does not mean that God needed a length of time in which to complete his work. In fact, everything came into being simultaneously, because time commenced with the cosmos itself. The details of Philo’s interpretation are strongly influenced by contemporary interpretations of Plato’s Timaeus. Remarkably, the first day of creation is taken to describe the creation of the intelligible cosmos, which serves as model for the visible cosmos and is equated with the Logos (see §4). If one would wish to summarize the doctrine of creation, Philo writes, ‘one might say that the noetic cosmos [of day one] is none other than the Logos of God while he [that is God] is engaged in his creative task’ (On the Creation of the Cosmos 24). It is noteworthy that Philo does not dissociate God from the creative task and attribute it solely to his Logos, because this would surely endanger the conviction of a unique God.

Philo is less than clear on the origin and ontological status of matter, and especially on the question whether it is created by God or has an independent existence before creation. He does not discuss the question in his commentary on the creation account (Genesis 1: 2 is taken to refer to the intelligible world), and elsewhere he appears to vacillate. It is safest to conclude that he remains prisoner of the axiom almost universally present in Greek philosophy that nothing can come out of nothing, and so is unable to face the full consequences of a doctrine of creation ex nihilo such as was developed in early Christian thought (in reaction to Gnosticism).

Philo’s cosmology follows the dominant Platonic-Aristotelian model. The cosmos is a work of great beauty and order, produced by a good and gracious creator. It is not autonomous, and certainly should not be worshipped. This was the mistake made – in terms of Philo’s allegorical scheme – by the Chaldaeans, whom Abraham left behind in his search for the true God (On the Life of Abraham 68–71).

 

6 Doctrine of human nature, ethics

Philo’s doctrine of human nature, the third pillar of his thought, is based primarily on the two texts in the creation account, Genesis 1: 26–27 and 2: 7, both of which are interpreted in terms of the Greek philosophical ideal of human reason. In the former text human beings, male and female, are created ‘according to the image (eikōn) of God’, which is taken to mean that they resemble God not in terms of the body or the lower soul with its passions, but through the rational soul or the mind, which is also their immortal part. In the latter text the human body is ‘inbreathed’ by God’s spirit (pneuma). This creative act is also taken to refer to the formation of the human rational faculty. Following basically Platonist lines, Philo regards the human goal (telos) as ‘assimilation (homoiōsis) unto God’. This can be accomplished because of the human image relation to God: that is, it can be accomplished through the powers of the intellect. It is in gaining knowledge of God that humans become like God. This was the nature of Moses’ paradigmatic quest. What might seem to be the ultimate goal, however, the knowledge of God’s essence, is unreachable, because then assimilation would become identity, which is impossible on account of the gulf separating creator and creature (an instructive contrast can be drawn with Plotinus’ doctrine of the union with the One; see Plotinus §3).

In the formulation of his ethical ideals Philo extracts much from Stoicism, but places it in a basically Platonist framework. The journey of the soul involves various stages. It begins with the struggle against the passions resulting from association with the body. As learners advance, they develop the exercise of reason and embark on the path of the virtues. The goal to be attained is the life of perfection, the life lived by the wise person (sophos). The wise person is characterized by a freedom from all passion (apatheia), not in the sense of having no emotions whatsoever, but because irrational passions have been converted into rational emotional states (eupatheiai). However, the ideal of the wise person as represented by Moses is lofty and seldom attained. For many the patriarchs are more accessible symbols of the level a human being can attain. They represent three aspects of the quest for perfection. Abraham is the learner, Isaac is the man with natural aptitude for the quest, Jacob is the practiser who never yields in his struggle to reach the goal. The quest for perfection and the ideal of the wise person is the fourth and final pillar of Philo’s thought.

Philo’s ethics are not entirely Greek. In his treatment of the virtues Jewish themes can be detected. Philo is more positive towards the feelings of repentance and pity than we find in Greek ethics, and tends to regard piety as the greatest of the virtues. Foreign to Greek philosophical thought also is his emphasis on the nothingness (oudeneia) of human beings before God’s face, a theme which anticipates the role of humility in Christian ethics.

7 Influence

Philo’s influence on the course of philosophical thought was limited to the Christian tradition. The church fathers preserved his works because his method of using Greek philosophical themes to explain scripture appealed to them. Attempts by Wolfson (1947, 1968) and others to demonstrate Philo’s influence on later Platonist thought have not been successful. Medieval Jewish philosophers did not know Philo, and Jewish interest in him did not revive until the sixteenth century. From the viewpoint of the history of ideas Philo is interesting above all because in his writings the traditions of Greek philosophy and Judaeo-Christian thought converge for the first time.