he is truly happy and truly renowned. And we must have a
great care for reputation, as a matter of great importance
and of much value, for our social and bodily life. [By
reputation Philo means reputation of being loyal Jews. He is
addressing here an esoteric circle who, if they were lax,
would bring philosophy into disrepute.] And almost all can
secure it, who are well content not to disturb established
customs, but diligently preserve the constitution of their
nation. But there are some who, looking upon the written
laws as symbols of intellectual things, lay great stress on
these, but neglect the former. Such men I would blame for
their shallowness of mind [Greek: euchereia]. For they
ought to give good heed to both--to the accurate
investigation of the unseen meaning, but also to the
blameless observance of the visible letter. But now, as if
they were living by themselves in a desert, and were souls
without bodies, and knew nothing of city or village or house
or intercourse with men, they despise all that seems
valuable to the many, and search for bare and naked truth as
it is in itself. Such people the sacred Scripture teaches to
give good heed to a good reputation, and to abolish none of
those customs which greater and more inspired men than we
instituted in the past. For, because the seventh day teaches
us symbolically concerning the power of the uncreated God,
and the inactivity of the creature, we must not therefore
abolish its ordinances, so as to light a fire, or till the
ground, or bear a burden, or prosecute a lawsuit, or demand
the restoration of a deposit, or exact the repayment of a
loan, or do any other thing, which on week-days is allowed.
Because the festivals are symbols of spiritual joy and of
our gratitude to God, we must not therefore give up the
fixed assemblies at the proper seasons of the year. Nor,
because circumcision symbolizes the excision of all lusts
and passions, and the destruction of the impious opinion
according to which the mind imagines that it is itself
capable of production, must we therefore abolish the law of
fleshly circumcision. We should have to neglect the service
of the temple, and a thousand other things, if we were to
restrict ourselves only to the allegorical or symbolic
sense. That sense resembles the soul, the other sense the
body. Just as we must be careful of the body, as the house
of the soul, so must we give heed to the letter of the
written laws. For only when these are faithfully observed,
will the inner meaning, of which they are the symbols,
become more clearly realized, and, at the same time, the
blame and accusation of the multitude will be avoided."[168]
Philo's position is, then, that man on the one hand owes loyalty to
his nation, and on the other is not only a creature of spirit, but has
a body and bodily passions. He cannot, therefore, have a religion
which is individual or merely spiritual, but he requires common forms
and ceremonies that can bind him with the rest of the community, and
train his body by good habit to obey his reason. We do not reach the
spirit by denying but by obeying the letter. To the mere formal
observance of the law and the unreasoning custom which blindly follows
the practice of our fathers [Greek: synêtheia] Philo is equally
opposed, and he protests, with the earnestness of an Isaiah, against
superstitious sacrifice and against the lip-service of the
materialist.[169]
"If a man practices ablutions and purifications, but defiles
his mind while he cleanses his body; or if, through his
wealth, he founds a temple at a large outlay and expense; or
if he offers hecatombs and sacrifices oxen without number,
or adorns the shrine with rich ornaments, or gives endless
timber and cunningly wrought work, more precious than silver
or gold--let him none the more be called religious ([Greek:
eusebês]). For he has wandered far from the path of
religion, mistaking ritual for holiness, and attempting to
bribe the Incorruptible, and to flatter Him whom none can
flatter. God welcomes genuine service, and that is the
service of a soul that offers the bare and simple sacrifice
of truth, but from false service, the mere display of
material wealth, he turns away."
Lot's daughter, born of a pillar of stone, symbolizes this unthinking,
hypertrophied religion; and custom, its mother, which always lags
behind and has no seed of life, is the enemy of truth. The religious
man pursueth righteousness righteously, the superstitious
unrighteously.
Thus Philo holds the balance between a formless spirituality and an
unspiritual formalism. The end of religious observance is the love of
God, but the love of God requires more than feeling; it must
impregnate life. Dubnow, in his summary of Jewish history, formulates
an epigram, which, like most of its kind, becomes in its conciseness
and pointed antithesis a half-truth. "At Jerusalem," he says, "Judaism
appeared as a system of practical ceremonies; at Alexandria as a
complex of abstract symbols." No doubt it is true that at Jerusalem
the practical side of the law was most prominent, but the spiritual
exaltation to which it should lead was appraised as the true end by
the great rabbis. Witness Hillel, and indeed all the writers of the
gnomic wisdom in the "Ethics of the Fathers." At Alexandria, again,
while the philosophical principle underlying the outward practice was
especially emphasized, the practice itself was loyally observed, and
its value perceived, by those who most thoroughly understood Judaism.
Witness the writings of Philo, the Wisdom of Solomon, and the fourth
book of the Maccabees. The antithesis between letter and spirit, faith
and works, is in truth a false one; and wherever the significance of
Judaism has been fully comprehended, the two aspects of the law have
been inextricably intertwined. As Philo understood the Jewish mission,
it was not merely to diffuse the Jewish God-idea, but quite as much to
diffuse the Jewish attitude to God, the way of life. Abstract ideas,
however lofty, can never be the bond of a religious community, nor can
they be a safeguard for moral conduct. Sooner or later congregations
must submit themselves to some law, be it a law of dogma, or be it a
law of conduct. Antinomianism, the opposition to the law, to which
Paul later gave powerful, even fanatical, expression, was a strong
movement at Alexandria in Philo's day. Preparatory to the spread of
Christianity, numerous sects sprang up there which purported to follow
a spiritual Judaism wherein the law was abrogated because, forsooth,
its symbolism was understood! In the extreme allegorists, whom Philo
attacks for their shallowness, one may discern the prototypes of the
Cainites, Ophites, Melchizedecians, and the rest of the heretical
parties that produced the religious chaos of the next centuries. From
that welter of opinions there at last emerged dogmatic Christianity.
The Christian reformers came to free man from the yoke of the law; but
their successors imposed on the mind the fetters of dogma, and, in
order to check the passions of the body, advocated renunciation and
asceticism. So that not only Judaism as a system of belief, but
Judaism as a system of life was lost in their handiwork. Spirituality
lacking knowledge and allegorism in excess led to this result. In
Philo they are controlled by affection for the Torah, and by a
conviction of the need for national cohesion.
Philo is loyal to the Jewish tradition not only because he had a deep
feeling for what a modern teacher has called the catholic conscience
and the historical continuity of Judaism, but because his philosophy
was based on a conviction that the Jewish religion was the truest
guide to conduct and righteousness and to the love of God. To him, as
to Plato and Aristotle, the law was the outward register of the moral
ideal; the "word-and-deed symbols" of ceremonial and prayer were
emblems indeed of moral principles, but at the same time they had an
intrinsic value, in that they impressed these principles upon the
mind, and brought belief and action into harmony. "Religion is law,
not philosophy," said Hobbes. With Philo, religion is law _and_
philosophy. Thus the love of the Torah is of the essence of his
religious thought. As he puts it in the exhortation to his
fellow-ambassadors before Gaius,[170] "to die in defence of it is a
kind of life." In his philosophical Judaism he sought always for the
universal and the spiritual, but so as always to increase the honor of
the law, and not only of the law but of the customs of his ancestors,
thinking with the Psalmist that "the Torah is a tree of life to those
who keep fast hold of her, and those who support her are blessed."
* * * * *
V
PHILO'S THEOLOGY
"The most remarkable feature about Judaism," says Darmesteter, "is
that without a philosophical system it had reached a philosophical
conclusion about the government of the world and the nature of
God."[171] The same idea underlies the statement of the Peripatetic
writer Theophrastus (who lived in the latter part of the fourth
century B.C.E.) that the Jews are a people of philosophers,[172] and
the epigram of Heine, that they pray in metaphysics. Intuitively, the
lawgiver and prophets of the Hebrew race had attained a conception of
monotheism to which the greatest of the Greek philosophers had hardly
struggled by reason. The Greeks had started with separate
nature-powers, which they had finally resolved into a supreme
nature-force; the Hebrews had started with the historical God of their
fathers, whom they had universalized into the Creator of the world and
Father of all the human race. Wellhausen has suggested that the
intellectual development of Judaism with its tendency to become a
purified monotheism moved in the same direction towards which Greek
thought tended in its philosophical speculation of the universe. The
difference between the two conceptions of God, however, remained even
in their universalized aspect; the one was an impersonal world-force,
the other a personal God in direct relation with individual man.
Elsewhere than in Judæa, it has been well said, religious development
reaches unity only by sacrificing personality. But the prophets, whose
conception of God was imaginative rather than rational, preserved His
nearness while expanding His sway. Israel, to use Philo's etymology,
is the man who sees God,[173] and his religious genius gave to the
world a personal incorporeal Deity, who is both transcendent and
immanent, personal and yet above human conception. It is unnecessary
to quote evidence of this view of the Godhead in the Bible, and it
would be superfluous to adduce passages from the rabbis, did they not
bear a striking similarity to the words of Philo. God to them is not
only the Creator of the world, but also the Father of the world, the
Governor of the world, the Only One of the world, the Space of the
world, filling it as the soul fills the body.[174] Now, this Jewish
conception of God is dominant in Philo. To him also God is not only
the Creator but the Father of the universe.[175] He is the One and the
All.[176] He is ever at rest, yet he outstrippeth everything, nearest
to everyone, yet far removed, everywhere and nowhere, above and
outside the universe, yet filling creation with Himself.[177] Philo
loves to attach to the Deity these opposite predicates, for in this
way alone can we form for ourselves some conception, however
inadequate, of His Being. Strictly, God is unconditioned, and cannot
be the subject of predication, for all determination involves
negation, and hence in one aspect He is not conceivable nor
describable, nor nameable.[178] Siegfried and Zeller press this
negative attitude to the Deity, and find that there is an inherent
contradiction in Philo's system, which ruins it, in that his God, upon
whom all depends and who is the object of all knowledge, is absolutely
unknowable and unapproachable. But this is to take Philo according to
the strict letter to the neglect of the spirit, and to do that with
one so eloquent and so careless of verbal accuracy is utterly to
misunderstand him.
The Greek philosophers in their attempt to formulate an exact notion
of the First Being by abstract metaphysics had, indeed, conceived it
in this fashion; and Philo, harmonizing Greek metaphysics and Hebrew
intuition, is drawn at times into a presentation of God which appears
to deny His personality and make of Him an abstraction. What has been
said of Spinoza is true no less of Philo.[179] "The tendency to unity,
to the infinite, to religion, overbalanced itself till, by its mere
excess, it seemed to be changed into its opposite. But this is not his
spirit, only the dead ultimate result of an imperfect logic that
confuses an abstract with a concrete unity." In truth, the moment man
tries to define his conception of God's essence in words, he either
impairs and perverts his idea, or he must use words that do not really
make the idea any clearer than it was unexpressed. Thus in the Hymn of
[Hebrew: ygdl] the writer, versifying the creeds of Maimonides, seeks to
define God: "He is a Unity, but there is no Unity like His; He is
hidden and there is no end to His oneness." But nobody can claim that
this gives any adequate conception of what he means; so, too, Philo,
when he tries to analyze God's being metaphysically, only obscures the
God of his soul, who was the historical God of Israel.
The Hebraic God, like the Greek First Being, has no qualities, but
unlike the other He has ethical attributes, and it is by these that we
know Him and by these that He is related to the universe and to man.
"Failing to comprehend Him in His essence we must aim at the next best
thing, to comprehend Him as He is manifested to the world."[180] So in
the "Hymn of Unity" it is written, "In images they told of Thee, but
not according to Thy essence! They but likened Thee in accordance with
Thy works."[181] And this is the manner in which Philo conceives Him:
"God's grace and goodness it is which are the causes of creation."[182]
"The just man, seeking the nature of all things, makes this most
excellent discovery, that all things are due to the grace of God." "To
those who ask the origin of creation, one could most easily reply that
it is the goodness and grace of God which He bestowed on the race that
is after His image."[183] "For all that is in the universe and the
universe itself are the gift and bounty and grace of God."[184] Again,
"God is omnipotent; He could make all evil, but He wills only what is
best."[185] "All is due to God's grace, though nothing is worthy of
it;[186] but God looked to His own eternal goodness, and considered
that to do good befitted His own blessed and happy nature."
Philo's life-aim, as we have seen,[187] was to see God in all things
and all things in God. He is the sole principle of being, exercising
continuous causality; and yet He is always at rest, for His energy is
the expression of His being. "He never ceases to create, for creation
is as proper to Him as it is proper to fire to burn and to snow to
cause cold."[188] Further, to Him all human activity and excellence
are directly due. He fertilizes virtue by sending down the seed from
Heaven,[189] and He brings forth wisdom from the human mind by His own
Divine effluence. "It is the distinctive feature of Jewish thought,"
said Spinoza, "never to make account of particular and secondary
causes, but in a spirit of devotion, piety, and godliness to refer all
things directly to the Deity." 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. It means for him that man's mind is a fragment or
particle of the Divine universal mind, which, however, is impotent
till called into activity by the further Divine gift of inspiration.
Knowledge and happiness, therefore, come not through God, but from
God.[190] "The Divine Word streams down from the fount of wisdom, and
waters the plants of virtuous souls."[191] "To God alone is it fitting
to use the word 'my,'"[192] or, put in another way, man has only the
usufruct and God the ownership of his powers. Pride of intellect is
therefore a deadly sin, because it involves a false, incomplete idea
of God, and true knowledge involves reverence. The ideal of the Greek
sage, the independent reason, is a godless thing, and those in whom a
knowledge of Greek philosophy produces intellectual pride are not
disciples of Divine Wisdom. In a fine passage Philo charges with
hypocrisy those who talk in high-sounding language about the
all-powerful Deity, and yet declare that by their own intellect they
can comprehend the world.[193] This was the attitude not only of the
proud Stoic, but of certain kindred Jewish sects, which were subject
to Greek influences, such as the Gnostics and the Cainites. And upon
them Philo appears to be pouring his wrath when he exclaims: "How have
you the effrontery to go on making and listening to fine professions
about piety and the honor of God, when you have within you, forsooth,
the mind equal to God that comprehends all human things, and can
combine good and evil portions, giving to some a mixed, to others an
unmixed lot? And when anybody accuses you of impiety, you brazenly
declare that you belong to the school of that noble guide and teacher
Cain (_i.e._ insolent reason), who bade you pay honor to the secondary
rather than the primary cause."
Philo has often been reproached with intellectualism, and excessive
regard to acquired wisdom, and it may be urged that by his allegorical
method he tried to find in the Bible the sanction of two degrees of
religious faith, the higher for the philosopher and the lower for the
ordinary man. At the same time, however, before his God he retains the
childlike simplicity of the most un-Hellenic rabbi, and the perfect
humility of the Hasid. His conviction of the dependence of all upon
God's grace is the perfect corrective of his intellectual
exclusiveness. The idea of God as the unity which comprehends
everything and causes everything is the great Jewish contribution to
thought, and binds our literature together in all its manifestations.
It characterizes and unites the poetical utterance of the Bible
prophets, the pious wisdom of the rabbis, the philosophical systems of
Philo and Maimonides.
The more sublime and exalted the conception of God, the more
imperative became the need for the thinking Jew to explain how the
perfect infinite Being came into relation with the imperfect finite
world of man and matter. How can the incorporeal God be the founder of
the material universe? How can the infinite mind be present in the
finite thought of man? How can the all-good Power be the creator of
the evil which we see in the material world and of the wickedness that
flourisheth among men? These questions presented themselves to the
Israelite after he had consummated his marvellous religious intuition,
and became the starting-point of a theology which is nascent in the
Wisdom literature of the Bible. Theology is the reasoning about God
which follows always in the footsteps of religious certitude. First,
man by his intuitive reason rises to some idea of the Godhead
satisfying to his emotion; next, by his discursive reason, he
endeavors to justify that idea to his experience in analyzing God's
operations. Renan, disposing sweepingly of a great question, declares
that the Jewish monotheism excluded any true theology. But, in fact,
in Palestine, and still more in Alexandria from the third century
B.C.E., Jewish thought had as one of its constant aims to develop a
theory of the operations of the one God in the world of material
plurality. When the Jews came in contact with the cosmological
mythology of Babylon, their God seemed to soar beyond the reach of
men, and they looked to powers nearer them to bridge the widening
gulf. To some extent this aim engendered a modification in the
religious monotheism, and led to the interposition of intermediate
conceptions between the Inconceivable and man. "The whole angelology,"
says Deutsch,[194] "so strikingly simple before the Captivity and so
wonderfully complex after it, owes its quick development in Babylonian
soil to some awe-stricken desire which grows with growing culture,
removing the inconceivable Being further and further from human touch
or knowledge." Speaking generally, it may be said that reflection
about God's relations produced in Palestine the doctrine of angels, in
Alexandria the doctrine of Wisdom and the Logos. At the same time the
Wisdom and the Word were not unknown to the Palestinian Midrash, and
the hierarchies of angels to the Alexandrian, for the suggestion of
the different subordinate powers had been evolved before the two
traditions had become independent. The doctrine of angels never indeed
won recognition from the rabbis, but it was for centuries an element
of popular belief.