two names of God, "Elohim" and "Jehovah," as connoting His two chief
attributes: (1) the creative or beneficent, (2) the ruling or
judicial, or, as it is sometimes called, the law-giving power.[224]
Names, as we know, were always regarded by Philo as profound symbols,
and naturally the names of God are of vital import; and the twofold
expression for the Hebrew Deity, of which the higher critics have made
much destructive use, was noticed by the earliest commentators, but
made the basis by them of a constructive theology. The ruling and the
creative attributes of God are outlined and contained in the highest
mode of all, the Logos, "the reason of God in every phase and form of
it that is discoverable and realizable by man." For by the Logos, God
is both ruler and good.[225] This is the profound interpretation of
the story in Genesis, that "God placed at the east of the garden of
Eden the two Cherubim and a flaming sword, which turned every way to
keep the way of the tree of life" (Gen. iv. 24). The Cherubim are the
symbols of the powers of majesty and goodness; the flaming sword is
the Logos; "because," says our author quaintly, "all thought and
speech are the most mobile and the most ardent (_i.e._, the most
intensive) of things, and especially the thought and speech of the
only Principle."[226]
To correspond with the descending attributes of God we have the
ascending dispositions of man towards Him, fear, love, and thirdly
their synthesis in loving knowledge. When we are in the first stage of
religion we obey the law in hope of reward or fear of punishment; when
we have progressed higher in thought, we worship God as the good
Creator; when we have ascended one further stage, we surpass both fear
and love in an emotion which combines them, realizing, as Browning
puts it, that "God is law and God is love." In illustration of this
scheme of Philo's we may examine two passages out of his philosophical
commentary. In the first he is commenting upon the appearance of the
three angels to Abraham as he sat outside his tent (Gen. xviii).[227]
And, by the way, it may be remarked that the Midrash commenting on
this passage notes that it begins, "And the Lord appeared unto
Abraham," and then continues, "And he lifted up his eyes and looked,
and, lo, three men stood before him." Hence we may learn that it was
really the one God who appeared to the Patriarch, and that the three
angels were but a vision of his mind. This is the dominant note of
Philo's interpretation, but he as usual elaborates the old Midrash
philosophically.
"The words," he says, "are symbols of things apprehended by
intelligence alone--the soul receives a triple expression of
one being, of which one is the representative of the actual
existent, and the other two are shadows, as it were, cast
from this. So it happens also in the physical world, for
there often occur two shadows of bodies at rest or in
motion. Let no one suppose, however, that shadow is properly
used in relation to God. It is only a popular use of words
for the clearer understanding of our subject. The reality is
not so, but, as one standing nearest to the truth might say,
the middle one is the Father of the universe, who is called
in Scripture the 'Self-existent'; and those on either side
of Him are the two oldest and chief powers, the Creative and
the Regal. The middle one, then, being attended by the
others as by a bodyguard, presents to the contemplative mind
a mental image or representation now of one and now of
three; of one whenever the soul, being properly purified and
perfectly initiated, rises to the idea which is unmingled
and free from limitation, and requires nothing to complete
it; but of three whenever it has not yet been initiated into
the great mysteries, and still celebrates the lesser rites,
unable to apprehend the Being in itself without
modification, but apprehending it through its modes as
either creating or ruling. This is, as the proverb says, a
second-best course, but yet it partakes of godlike opinion.
But the former does not partake of--for it _is_ itself--the
Godlike opinion, or rather it is truth, which is more
precious than all opinion.
"Further, there are three classes of human character, to
each of which one of the three conceptions of God has been
assigned. The best class goes with the first, the conception
of the absolute Being; the next goes with the conception of
Him as a Benefactor, in virtue of which He is called God;
the third with the conception of Him as a Ruler, in virtue
of which He is called Lord. The noblest character serves Him
who is in all the purity of His absolute Being; it is
attracted by no other thing or aspect, but is solely and
intently devoted to the honor of the one and only Being; the
second is brought to the knowledge of the Father through His
beneficent power; the third through His regal power."
In the second passage, which occurs in the treatise on flight from the
world,[228] Philo is allegorizing the law about founding six cities of
refuge (Exodus xxxii). These are but material symbols for the six
stages of the ascent of the mind to the pure God-idea. The chief city,
the metropolis, is the Divine Logos, next come the two powers already
considered, and then three secondary powers, the retributive, the
law-giving, and the prohibitive. "Very beautiful and well-fenced
cities they are, worthy refuges of souls that merit salvation." Each
of these cities is an aspect of the religious mind; when it settles in
the first it obeys the law from fear of punishment and thinks of God
as the Judge; in the second it observes the precepts in hope of reward
and conceives God as the legislator of a fixed code; in the next it is
repentant and throws itself on God's grace, marking the first step of
the spiritual life. Then it ascends in order to the idea of God as the
governor of the universe, and the emotion which the rabbis called
[Hebrew: yrat shmim], the fear of Heaven; and to the idea of God as the
Creator and the universal Providence, which has as its emotional
reflex the love of Heaven, [Hebrew: 'hbt shmim].
But even this, which is the highest stage for many men, is not an
adequate conception. Above it is the contemplation of God, apart from
all manifestations in the perceptible world, in His ideal nature, the
Logos, which at once transcends and comprehends the universe. And the
attitude of this man can be best expressed perhaps by Spinoza's
phrase, "the intellectual love of God," _amor intellectualis Dei_. The
worshipper of the Logos has grasped and has harmonized all the
manifestations of the Deity; he sees and honors all things in God; he
comprehends the universe as the perfect manifestation of one good
Being.
Is this the highest point which man can reach? Many religious
philosophers have held that it is, but Philo, the mystic, yearning to
track out God "beyond the utmost bound of human thought," imagines one
higher condition. The Logos is only the image or the shadow of the
Godhead.[229] Above it is the one perfect reality, the transcendent
Essence. Now, man cannot by any intellectual effort attain knowledge
of the Infinite as He truly is, for this is above thought. But to a
few blessed mortals God of His grace vouchsafes a mystic vision of His
nature. Thus Moses, the perfect hierophant, had this perfect
apprehension, and passed from intellectual love to holy adoration. And
the true philosopher has as the goal of his aspirations the
heaven-sent ecstasy, in which he sees God no longer through His
effects, or in the modes of His activity, but through Himself in His
own essence. The philosopher, when he receives this vision ([Greek:
epopteia]) is possessed by the Shekinah,[230] and, losing
consciousness of his individuality, becomes at one with God.
So much for Philo's theory of man's upward progress. We may add a word
about his treatment of the problem which troubled thinkers in that
age, and which has harassed theologians ever since, viz., to show how
punishment and evil could be derived from a God who was all-powerful
and all-good. The Gnostics were driven by the difficulty to imagine an
evil world-power, which was in incessant conflict with the Good God:
and popular belief had conjured up a legion of subordinate powers, who
took part in the work of creation and the government of the world.
When Philo is speaking popularly, he accepts this current theology and
speaks also of a punitive power of God[231] ([Greek: dunamis
kolastikê]); but not when he is the philosopher. For then, in
perfect faith, he denies the absolute existence of evil. "It is
neither in Paradise nor indeed anywhere whatsoever."[232] Man,
however, by his free will causes evil in the human sphere; and when
God formed in man a rational nature capable of choosing for itself,
moral evil became the necessary contrary of good.[233] Moreover, the
punitive activity of God, though it seems to cause suffering and
misery, is in truth a good, simulating evil, and if men judged the
universal process as a whole, they would find it all good. The
existence of evil involves no derogation from the perfect unity of
God.
If we have understood correctly Philo's theology, neither Logos, nor
subordinate powers, nor angels, nor demons have an objective
existence; they are mere imaginings of varying incompleteness which
the limited minds of men, "moving in worlds not realized," make for
themselves of the one and only true God. Philo's theology is the
philosophical treatment of Jewish tradition, just as Philo's legal
exegesis is the philosophical treatment of the Torah. While
maintaining and striving to deepen the conception of God's unity, he
aims at expounding to the reason how, on the one hand, that unity is
revealed in the world about us, and how, on the other, we may advance
to its true comprehension. It was, however, unfortunate that Philo
expressed his theology in the current language, which was vague and
inexact, and adapted certain foreign theosophical ideas to Judaism;
hence succeeding generations, paying regard to the pictorial
representation rather than to the principles of his thought, sought
and found in him evidence of theories of Divine government to which
Judaism was pre-eminently opposed. The first chapter of the Fourth
Gospel shows that gradual process of thought which finally made the
Logos doctrine the antithesis of Judaism. In the first verse we have a
thought which might well have been written by Philo himself: "In the
beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was
God." But in the fourteenth verse there is manifest the sharp
cleavage: "And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, and we
beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father,
full of grace and truth." There may be a fine spiritual thought
beneath the letter here, but the notion of the Incarnation is not
Jewish, nor philosophical, nor Philonic. Philo's work was made to
serve as the guide of that Christian Gnosticism which, within the next
hundred years, proclaimed that Judaism was the work of an evil God,
and that the essential mission of Jesus--the good Logos--was to
dethrone Jehovah! But though the Logos conception was turned to
non-Jewish and anti-Jewish purposes, it was in Philo the offspring of
a pure and philosophical monotheism. Whatever the later abuse of his
teaching, Philo constructed a theology which, though affected by
foreign influences, was essentially true to Judaism; and more than
that, he was the first to weave the Jewish idea of God into the
world's philosophy.
* * * * *
VI
PHILO AS A PHILOSOPHER
Save for a few monographs of no great importance, because of the
absence of original thought, Philo's works form avowedly an exegesis
of the Bible and not a series of philosophical writings. Nor must the
reader expect to find an ordered system of philosophy in his separate
works, much more than in the writings of the rabbis. As Professor
Caird says,[234] "The Hebrew mind is intuitive, imaginative, incapable
of analysis or systematic connection of ideas." Philo's philosophical
conceptions lie scattered up and down his writings, "strung on the
thread of the Bible narrative which determines the sequence of his
thoughts." Nevertheless, though he has not given us explicit treatises
on cosmology, metaphysics, ethics, psychology, etc., and though he was
incapable of close logical thinking, he has treated all these subjects
suggestively and originally in the course of his commentary, and his
readers may gather together what he has dispersed, and find a
co-ordinated body of religious philosophy. However loosely they are
set forth in his treatises, his ideas are closely connected in his
mind. Herein he differs from his Jewish predecessors, for the notion
of the old historians of the Alexandrian movement, that there was a
systematic Jewish philosophy before Philo, does not appear to have
been well-founded. All that Aristeas and Aristobulus and the
Apocryphal authors had done was to assimilate certain philosophemes to
their religious ideas; they had not re-interpreted the whole system of
philosophy from a Jewish point of view or traced an independent
system, or an eclectic doctrine in the Holy Scriptures. This was the
achievement of Philo. His thought is not original in the sense of
presenting a new scheme of philosophy, but it is original in the sense
of giving a fresh interpretation to the philosophical ideas of his age
and environment. He ranges them under a new principle, puts them in a
new light, and combines them in a new synthesis. This again is
characteristic of the Jewish mind. Intent on God, it does not endeavor
to make its own analysis of the universe by independent reasoning, but
it utilizes the systems of other nations and endeavors to harmonize
them with its religious convictions. Hence it is that nearly all
Jewish philosophy appears to be eclectic; its writers have ranged
through the fields of thought of many schools and culled flowers from
each, which they bind together into a crown for their religion. They
do not, with few exceptions, pursue philosophy with the purpose of
widening the borders of secular knowledge; but rather in order to
bring the light of reason to illuminate and clarify faith, to
harmonize Judaism with the general culture of its environment, and to
revivify belief and ceremony with a new interpretation. All this
applies to our worthy, but at the same time he was a philosopher at
heart, because he believed that the knowledge of God came by
contemplation as well as by practice, and, further, because he had a
firm faith in the universalism of Judaism; and he believed that this
universal religion must comprehend all that is highest and truest in
human thought. Like most Jewish philosophers he is synthetic rather
than analytic, believing in intuition and distrusting the discursive
reason, careless of physical science and soaring into religious
metaphysics. Again, like most Jewish philosophers, he is deductive,
starting with a synthesis of all in the Divine Unity, and making no
fresh inductions from phenomena. It has been said that, though Philo
was a philosopher and a Jew, yet Saadia was the first Jewish
philosopher. But Philo's philosophical ideas are in complete harmony
with his Judaism; and if by the criticism it is meant that most of the
content of his works is based upon Greek models, it is true on the
other hand that the spirit which pervades them is essentially Jewish,
and that by the new force which he breathed into it he reformed and
gave a new direction to the Greek philosophy of his age.
Philo's philosophy is certainly eclectic in some degree, and we find
in it ideas taken from the schools of Plato, Aristotle, Pythagoras,
and the Stoics. Its fixed point was his theology, and wherever he
finds anything to support this he adapts it to his purpose. He
approached philosophy from a position opposed to that of the Greeks:
they brought a questioning and free mind to the problems of the
universe; he comes full of religious preconceptions. Yet in this lies
his strength as well as his limitation, for he gains thus a point of
certainty and a clear end, which other eclectic systems of the day did
not possess. He welds together all the different elements of his
thought in the heat of his passion for God. His cosmology and his
ontology are a philosophical exposition of the Jewish conception of
God's relation to the universe, his ethics and his psychology of the
Jewish conception of man's relation to God.
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. The one is intent on things
secular, the other on God. But the greatest genius of the Hellenic
race, influenced perhaps by contact with Oriental peoples, possessed,
in a remarkable degree, the Hebraic spirit, which is zealous for God
and makes for righteousness. Plato was not only a great philosopher,
but also a great theologian, a great religious reformer, and a great
prophet, the most perfectly developed mind which the world, ancient or
modern, has known. His "Ideas," which are the archetypes of sensible
things, were not only logical concepts but also a kingdom of Heaven
connected with the human individual by the Divine soul. And as he grew
older so his religious feeling intensified, and he translated his
philosophy into theology and positive religion. Platonism, it has been
well said, is a temper as much as a doctrine; it is the spirit that
turns from the earth to Heaven, from creation to God. In his last
work, "The Laws," wherein he designs a theocratic state, which has
striking points of resemblance with the Jewish polity, he says: "The
conclusion of the matter is this, which is the fairest and truest of
all sayings, that for the good man to sacrifice and hold converse with
the Deity by means of prayers and service of every kind is the noblest
thing of all and the most conducive to a happy life, and above all
things fitting."[235]
This is typical of Plato's attitude towards life in his old age; and
further, his metaphysical system of monistic idealism is the most
remarkable approach to Hebrew monotheism which the Greek world made.
The Patristic writers in the first centuries of the Christian era were
so struck by this Hebraism in the Greek thinker, that they attributed
it to direct borrowing. Aristobulus had written of a translation of
the Pentateuch older than the Septuagint, which Plato was supposed to
have studied. Clement called him the Hebrew philosopher, Origen and
Augustine comment on his agreement with Genesis, and think that when
he was in Egypt he listened to Jeremiah.[236] Eusebius worked out in
detail his correspondences with the Bible. Some early neo-Platonist,
perhaps Numenius, declared that Plato was only the Attic Moses; and in
more modern times the Cambridge Platonists of the sixteenth century
harbored similar ideas, and Nietzsche spoke bitterly of the day when
"Plato went to school with the Jews in Egypt."
Of Philo, then, we may say, as Montaigne said of himself, that he was
a Platonist before he knew who Plato was. Yet he was the first
Hellenistic Jew who perceived the fundamental harmony between the
philosopher's idealism and Jewish monotheism, and he was the first
important commentator of Plato who developed the religious teaching of
his master into a powerful spiritual force.
It is true that the seeds of neo-Platonism, _i.e._, the religious
re-interpretation of Platonism under the influence of Eastern thought,
had been sown already; and Philo must have received from his
environment to some extent the mystical version of the master's
system, with its goal of ecstatic union with God, and its tendency to
asceticism as a means thereto. But the earlier products of the
movement had been crude, and had lacked a powerful moving spirit. This
was provided by Philo when he introduced his overmastering conception
of God. The popular saying, "Either Plato Philonizes or Philo
Platonizes"[237] contains a deep truth in its first as well as in its
second part. It not only marks the likeness in style of the two
writers, but it suggests that Philo, on the one hand, made fruitful
the religious germ in Plato's teaching by his Hebraism, and, on the
other, nourished the philosophical seed in Judaism by his Platonism.
Plato's teaching falls into two main classes, the dialectical and the
mythical, and it is with the latter that Philo is in specially close
connection. For in his myths Plato tries to achieve a synthesis by
imaginative flight where he had failed by discursive reason. He
unifies experience by striking intuitions, something in the spirit of
a Hebrew prophet. Moreover his style, as well as his thought, has here
affinity with Jewish modes of thought. As Zeller says, speaking of the
myths: "From the first, in the act of producing his work he thinks in
images. They mark the point where it becomes evident that he cannot be
wholly a philosopher because he is still too much of a poet." And this
is true of all Philo's writings, and to generalize somewhat widely, of
most Jewish philosophy. In "The Timæus," particularly, Plato,
throughout, is the poet-philosopher, writing imaginative myths, which
present pictorially an idealistic scheme of the universe; and "The
Timæus" is for Philo, after the Bible, the most authoritative of
books, the source of his chief philosophical ideas.
The dominant philosophical principle of Plato is what is known as the
Theory of Ideas. He imagined a world of real existences, invisible,
incorporeal, eternal, grasped only by thought, prior to the objects of
the physical universe, and the models or archetypes of them. In "The
Timæus," which is a system of cosmology at once religious and
metaphysical, the "Ideas" are represented as the thoughts of the one
Supreme Mind, the intermediate powers by which the Supreme Unity,
known as the "Idea of the Good," or "the Creator," evolves the
material universe. Thus the universe is seen as the manifestation of
one Beneficent Spirit, who brings it into existence and rules over it
through His "ideal" thoughts. Philo adopts completely and uncritically
this theory of transcendental ideas in his philosophical exegesis of
the cosmogony in Genesis. "Without an incorporeal archetype God brings
no simple thing to fulfilment."[238] There is an idea of stars, of
grass, of man, of virtue, of music. And the Platonic conception
receives a religious sanction. The ideas are a necessary step between
God and the material universe, and those who deny them throw all
things into confusion.[239] "God would not touch matter Himself, but
He did not grudge a share of His nature to it through His powers, of
which the true name is ideas." We have already noticed[240] how
ingeniously Philo deduces the Theory of Ideas from the Biblical
account of the creation, and associates it with the Hebraic conception
of the ministerial Wisdom and Word. He, however, gives a new direction
to the Platonic theory, owing to his Hebraic conception of God. The
ideas with him are not the thoughts of an impersonal mind, but the
emanations of a personal, volitional Deity. Keeping close to Jewish
tradition, he says that they are the words of the Deity speaking. As
human speech consists of incorporeal ideas, which produce an effect
upon the minds of others, so the Divine speech is a pattern of
incorporeal ideas which impress themselves upon a formless void, and
so create the material world.[241] In this way Philo associates his
cosmology with his theology. The creative "Ideas" are equated
collectively with the Supreme Logos,[242] individually with the Logoi
which represent God's particular activities. Thus the Logos represents
the whole ideal or noetic world, "the kingdom of Heaven"; and it is in
this metaphysical sense that the Logos is the first creation, "the
first-born son of God," prior to the physical universe, which is His
grandson. The whole universe is thus seen as the orderly manifestation
of one principle. Philo, expanding a favorite image of the Haggadah,
illustrates God's creation by the simile of a king founding a city.
"He gets to him an architect, who first designs in his mind the parts
of the perfect city, and then, looking continually to his model,
begins to construct the city of stones and wood. So when God resolved
to found the world-city, He first brought its form into mind, and
using this as a model he completed the visible world."[243]