obscurer Persian-Jewish writer, may appear far-fetched and not worth
the making. In itself doubtless it is unimportant, but it serves to
keep Philo, however barely, within Jewish tradition. For it shows that
Alexandrian literature, though probably through the medium of a
Mohammedan source, was known to some Jews in the centuries of
transition. It may be that further examination of the great Genizah
collection, which has opened to Jewish scholarship a new world, will
reveal further and stronger ties to unite Philo with his philosophical
successors, of whom the first is Saadia Gaon (892-942 C.E.). Indeed
the main interest of this newly-discovered connection, if it can be
seriously so regarded, is that it suggests the possibility of Saadia's
acquaintance with Philo by means of a translation. That Saadia read
the works upon which Christian theologians relied, is certain; and a
fragment in which he refers to the teaching of Judah the
Alexandrian[331]--also unearthed from the Cairo Genizah--goes some way
to support the suggestion. The passage refers to the connection of the
number "fifty" with the different seasons of the year, and though it
does not tally exactly with any piece of the extant Philo, it is in
the Philonic manner. And Philo, who was surnamed Judæus by the Church,
would have been re-named by his own people, translating from the
Church writers, [Hebrew: yhuda]. One would the more willingly catch on to
this floating straw, because Saadia was at once a compatriot of Philo,
born in the Fayyum of Egypt, and the first Jew who strove to carry on
his work. He aimed at showing the philosophy of the Torah, and its
harmony with Greek wisdom in particular. Aristotle, who had been
translated into Arabic, had meantime supplanted Plato as the master of
philosophy for theologians, and Saadia's _magnum opus_, [Hebrew: amonot
tsd'ot], is colored throughout by Aristotelian ideas. But the difference
of masters does not obscure the likeness of aim, and, albeit
unconsciously, Saadia renews the task of the Hellenic-Jewish school.
Saadia's work was carried on and expanded in a great outburst of the
Jewish genius, which showed itself most brilliantly in the
Moorish-Spanish kingdom. The general cultural conditions of Alexandria
in the first century B.C.E. were reproduced in Spain in the tenth
century. Once again the Jews found themselves politically emancipated
amid a sympathetic environment, and again they illumined their
religious tradition with all the culture which their environment could
afford. The mingling of thought gave birth to a great literature, both
creative and critical; to a striking body of lyric poetry; to a
systematic theology, and a religious philosophy.
While the study of the old Talmudic lore was maintained, the greatest
teachers developed tradition afresh by a philosophical restatement
designed to make it appeal to the mental attitude of the enlightened.
The sermon flourished again, collections of Haggadah (Yalkut) were
made as storehouses of homilies, and metaphysical treatises modelled
upon the works of the schoolmen set forth a philosophical Judaism for
the learned world. It is notable also that these last were not written
in Hebrew or in the Talmudic dialect, but in Arabic, the language of
their cultured environment; for though the missionary spirit was dead,
the controversial activity of the period impelled the Jewish
philosophers to present their ideas in the form used by the
philosophers of the general community.
It is not only the general conditions of the Arab-Jewish period, but
also the special development of Jewish ideas, which recalls the work
of the Alexandrian school. This was, indeed, to be expected, seeing
that in both cases there was a mingling of Hebraism and Hellenism. In
Spain, however, the Jews acquired Hellenism at second hand, and
through the somewhat distorted medium of Arabic translations or
scholastic misunderstanding, and hence the harmony is neither complete
nor pure. They endeavored to show that the teachings of Aristotle are
implicit in the written and the oral law, but the interpretation is
hardly convincing even in "The Guide of the Perplexed," of Maimonides,
the monumental work which marks the culmination of mediæval Jewish
philosophy.
If there is one figure in Jewish tradition with whom Philo challenges
at once comparison and contrast, it is Maimonides, the brightest star
of the Arabic, as he was of the Hellenic, development of the Jewish
religion. Though there is nothing on which to found any direct
influence of the one on the other, the aim, the method, the scope of
their philosophical work are the same, the relation which they hold to
exist between faith and philosophy wellnigh identical. The metaphysics
of the Bible, according to both, is hidden beneath an allegory, and
is meant only for the more learned of the people. To Maimonides the
Bible is not only the standard of all wisdom, but it is "the Divine
anticipation of human discovery." In the words of Hosea, God has
therein "multiplied visions and spoken in similitudes" (xii. 11). The
duty of the Jewish philosopher is to expound these metaphors and
similes; and Maimonides, endeavoring to knit Greek metaphysics closely
with Jewish tradition, propounds a science of allegorical values,
which by exact philological study traces the inner as well as the
outer meaning of the Hebrew words. But differentiated as it is by
greater mastery of the tradition and closer adherence to the Hebrew
text, his method is nearly as artificial and his thought as extraneous
to the text as the method and thought of Philo. The content of their
philosophies is, indeed, strikingly alike, save that the one is a
Platonist, the other an Aristotelian. This involves not so much a
difference of philosophical views as a difference of temper and of
objective. The followers of Plato are mystics, yearning for the love
of God; the followers of Aristotle are rationalists, seeking for the
abstract knowledge of God. Hence in Maimonides there is less soaring
and more argument than in Philo. Everything is deduced, so far as may
be, with exactitude and logical sequence--according to the logic of
the schoolmen--and everything is formalized according to scholastic
principles. But the subjects treated are the same--the nature of God
and His attributes, His relation to the universe and man, the manner
of the creation, and the way of righteousness.
Maimonides, who is in form more loyal to Jewish tradition, is to a
larger degree than Philo dependent on authority for the philosophical
ideas which he applies to religion. To a great extent this is due to
the spirit of his age, for in the Middle Ages not only was the matter
of thought, but also its form, accepted on authority, and Aristotle
ruled the one as imperiously as the Bible ruled the other. The
differences of form and substance do not, however, obscure the
essential likeness with Philo's interpretation of Judaism. With him
Maimonides holds that the essential nature of God is incognizable.[332]
No positive predication can properly be applied to Him, but we know
Him by His activities in relation to man and the world, _i.e._, by His
attributes or by what Philo called His powers. Maimonides does not
preserve the absolute monarchy of the Divine government, but places
between God and man intermediate beings with subordinate creative
powers--the separate intelligences of the stars, which are identified
with the angels of the Bible.[333] But he maintains inviolate the sole
causality of God and His immanence in the human soul. Maimonides, like
Philo, gives in addition to a metaphysical theology a philosophical
exposition of the law of Moses, which has the same guiding principle
as the books on the "Specific Laws." Moses was the perfect
legislator,[334] whose ordinances are [Hebrew: tsdikim], _i.e._, perfectly
equitable, attaining "the mean"--the Aristotelian conception of
excellence--and identical with the eternal laws of nature.[335]
Numerous details of Maimonides' interpretations agree with those given
in the books on the "Specific Laws." Whether correspondence of thought
is merely an indication of the similar workings of Jewish genius in
similar conditions, or whether it is the effect of an early tradition
common to both, or whether, finally, there was connection, however
indirect, between the two minds, it is now impossible to say. But at
least the philosophy of Maimonides confirms the inner Jewishness of
the philosophy of Philo, and its essential loyalty to Jewish
tradition.
Not less striking than his correspondence with later Jewish religious
philosophy, though not less indefinite, is the relation of Philo to
the later Jewish mystical and theosophical literature, purporting also
to be a development of hoary tradition, and indeed calling itself
simply the tradition, [Hebrew: kbla]. Between Philo and the Cabbalah it is
as difficult to establish any direct connection as between Philo and
rabbinic Midrash, but the likeness in spirit and the signs of a common
source are equally remarkable. To trace God in all things through
various attributes and emanations, to bring God and man into direct
union, to prove that there is an immanent God within the soul of the
individual, and to show how this may be inspired with the
transcendental Deity--this is common to both. In the earliest times
the mystic doctrine appears to have been a form of Jewish Gnosticism,
speculation about the nature of God and His connection with the world.
It probably embraced the [Hebrew: m'sha br'shit] and the [Hebrew: m'sha
mrkba], though we know not what these exactly contained.[336] But it was
not till the Middle Ages that Jewish mysticism received definite and
separate literary expression, and by that time it was mixed up with a
number of neo-Platonic and magical fancies and foreign theosophies. The
later compilations of this character form what is more regularly known
as the Cabbalah; but, apart from the professions of the later writers,
a continuous train of tradition affirms the existence of secret
teachings in Judaism from the time of the Babylonian captivity. Jewish
mysticism is as much a continuous expression of the spirit of the race
as the Jewish law. We may then without rashness conclude that the
later Cabbalah is a coarser development, for a less enlightened and
less philosophical age, of the Gnostic material which Philo
refashioned in the light of Platonism for the Hellenized community at
Alexandria. Modern scholars have favored the idea that the Essenes
were the first systematizers of and the first practitioners in the
Cabbalah, and have interpreted their name[337] to mean those engaged
in secret things, but the mystic tradition itself is earlier than the
foundation of a special mystic sect. It is part of the heritage from
the Jewish prophets and psalmists and the Babylonian interaction with
Hebraism.
Philo had large sympathies with the Essenic development of Judaism, and
he speaks at times as though he had joined one of their communities, and
therein had been initiated into the great mysteries and secret
philosophies of the sages. We have noted that he offers his most
precious wisdom to the worthy few alone, "who in all humility practice
genuine piety, free from all false pretence." They, in turn, are to
discourse on these doctrines only to other members of the brotherhood.
"I bid ye, initiated brethren, who listen with chastened ears, receive
these truly sacred mysteries in your inmost souls, and reveal them not
to one of the uninitiated, but laying them up in your hearts, guard them
as a most excellent treasure in which the noblest of possessions is
stored, the knowledge, namely, of the First Cause and of virtue, and
moreover of what they generate."[338] These mysteries, it is not
unlikely, represent according to some scholars the [Hebrew: sod] of the
Talmudical rabbis, which was elaborately developed in the Zohar and
kindred writings. Be this as it may, Philo's religious intensity
expresses the spirit of the Cabbalists, his mystic soaring is the
prototype of their theosophical ecstasies; his persistent declaration
that God encloses the universe, but is Himself not enclosed by anything,
contains the root of their conception of the En Sof ([Hebrew: 'yn
sof]),[339] his Logos-idealism, with its Divine effluences, which are
the true causes of all changes, physical and mental, is companion to
their system of [Hebrew: 'olmim] and [Hebrew: sfirot], emanations and
spheres. His fancies about sex and the struggle between a male and
female principle in all things[340] are a constant theme of their
teachers, and form a special section of their wisdom, [Hebrew: sof
htsrog], the mystery of generation. His conception of the Logos as the
heavenly archetype of the human race, the "Man-himself," is the Platonic
counterpart of their [Hebrew: adm kdmon], or "primal man," who is known
in the ancient allegorizing of the Song of Songs. His number-mysticism
and his speech-idealism reappear more crudely, but not obscurely, in
their ideas of creative letters, of which the cosmogony by the
twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet in the Sefer Yezirah is
typical. Finally, his teachings of ecstasy and Divine possession are
repeated in divers ways in their descriptions of the pious life
([Hebrew: hnanot]).
Philo, indeed, viewed from the Jewish standpoint, is the Hellenizer
not only of the law but also of the Cabbalah, the philosophical
adapter of the secret traditional wisdom of his ancestors. He brings
it into close relation with Platonism and purifies it; he clears away
its anthropomorphisms and superstitious fantasies, or rather he raises
them into idealistic conceptions and sublime exaltations of the soul.
By his deep knowledge of the intellectual ideas of Greece he refined
the strange compound of lofty imagination and popular fancy, and
raised it to a higher value. 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 folly of the
ages."[341] Through the mass of apocalyptic literature that was poured
forth in the first centuries of the common era, through the later
books of the Apocrypha, through the Sefer Yezirah of the ninth and the
Zohar of the thirteenth century, and through the vast literature
inspired by these books, run the ideas that composed Philo's mystic
theology. Philo himself was unknown, but his religious interpretation
of Platonism had entered into the world's thought, and inspired the
mystics of his own race as well as of the Christian world.
After a thousand years of Latin domination the Renaissance revived the
study of Greek in Western Europe, and to the most cultured of his race
Philo was no longer a sealed book. The first Jewish writer to show an
intimate acquaintance with him and a clear idea of his relation to
Jewish tradition was Azariah dei Rossi, who lived in the sixteenth
century. His "Meor Einayim" dealt largely with the Hellenistic epoch
of Judaism, and its attitude towards it is summed up in the remark
that "all that is good in Philo agrees with our law."[342] He pointed
out many instances of agreement, and some of disagreement, but he
objected in general to the allegorizing of the historical parts of the
Torah and to the absence of the traditional interpretations in Philo's
commentaries. He shared largely the rabbinical attitude and could not
give an independent historical appreciation of Philo's work. That was
not to come for two hundred years more. To Dei Rossi we owe the Jewish
translation of Philo's name, [Hebrew: ydydim 'lksndri].[343] To the outer
world Philo was "the Jew"; to his own people, "the Alexandrian."
As soon as Greek was reintroduced into the scholarly world, Philo
began to reassert an important influence on theology. One remarkable
school of English mystics and religious philosophers, the Cambridge
Platonists, who wrote during the seventeenth century, founded upon him
their method and also their general attitude to philosophy.[344] They
were Christian neo-Platonists, who looked for spiritual allegories in
the Old and New Testaments, and combined the teachings of Jesus with
the emotional idealism of the Alexandrian interpreters of Plato. They
affirmed enthusiastically God's revelation to the universe and to
individual man through the Logos. Their imitation of Philo's
allegorism serves to mark the important place that he occupied in the
learned world during the seventeenth century; and supports, however
slightly, the suggestion that he influenced, directly or indirectly,
the supreme Jewish philosopher of the age, Baruch de Spinoza. That he
was well known in Holland at the time is shown in divers ways. He is
quoted by the famous jurist Grotius in his book which founded the
science of international law; he is quoted and criticised, as we have
seen, by Scaliger; and curiously enough, his name, "Philo-Judæus," is
applied by Rembrandt to the portrait of his own father, now in the
Ferdinandeum at Innsbruck. It is tempting to conjecture that there was
a direct connection between the Jewish philosophers of the ancient and
the modern world. Whether it existed or not, there is certainly
kinship in their ideas. Spinoza does actually refer in one place, in
his "Theologico-Political Tractate" (ch. x), to the opinion of
Philo-Judæus upon the date of Psalm lxxxviii, and there are other
places in the same book, where he almost echoes the words of the
Jewish Platonist; as where he speaks of God's eternal Word being
divinely inscribed in the human mind: "And this is the true original
of God's covenant, stamped with His own seal, namely, the idea of
Himself, as it were, with the image of His Godhead" (iv); or, again,
"The supreme reward for keeping God's Word is that Word itself."
Spinoza knew no Greek, but, master as he was of Christian theology, he
may have studied Philo in a Latin translation, and caught some of his
phrases. With or without influence, he developed, as Philo had done, a
system of philosophy, starting from the Hebrew conception of God and
blending Jewish tradition with scientific metaphysics. The Unity of
God and His sole reality were the fundamental principles of his
thought, as they had been of Philo's. He rejected, indeed, with scorn
the notion that all philosophy must be deduced from the Bible, which
was to him a book of moral and religious worth, but free from all
philosophical doctrine. Theology, the subject of the Bible, according
to him, demands perfect obedience, philosophy perfect knowledge.[345]
Both alike are saving, but the spheres of the two are distinct: and
Moses and the prophets excel in law and imagination, not in reason and
reflection. Hence Spinoza approached the Bible from the critical
standpoint; and, on the other hand, he approached philosophy with a
free mind searching for truth, independent of religious dogmatism, and
he was, therefore, the founder of modern philosophy. None the less his
view of the universe is an intellectual expression of the Hebraic
monotheism, which unites a religious with a scientific monism. He
regards God as the only reality, sees and knows all things in Him, and
deduces all things from His attributes, which are the incomplete
representations that man makes of His true nature; he explains all
thought, all movement, and all that seems material as the working of
His modes; and, finally, he places as the end of man's intellectual
progress and the culmination of his moral life the love of God. In
truth, Jewish philosophy has its unity and its special stamp, no less
than Jewish religion and tradition, from which it receives its
nurture. Thrice it has towered up in a great system: through Philo in
the classical, through Maimonides in the mediæval, through Spinoza in
the modern world. In the Renaissance of Jewish learning during the
nineteenth century, Philo was at last studied and interpreted by scholars
of his own people. The first modern writer to reveal the philosophy of
Jewish history was Nachman Krochmal (1785-1840), and his posthumous Hebrew
book, "The Guide of the Perplexed of the Time," edited by Zunz,
contained the first critical appreciation of the Hellenistic Jewish
culture by a rabbinic scholar. He knew no Greek, but he studied the
works of German writers, and in his account of Philo gives a summary
of the remarks of the theologian Neander, himself a baptized Jew. In
his own criticism he discerns the weakness and strength of Philo from
the Jewish aspect. "There are," he says, "many strange things in
Philo's exegesis, not only because he draws far-fetched allegories
from the text, but also because he interprets single words without a
sure foundation in Hebrew philology. He uses Scripture as a sort of
clay which he moulds to convey his philosophical ideas. Yet we must be
grateful to him because many of his interpretations are beautiful
ornaments to the text; and we may apply to them what Ibn Ezra said of
the teachings of the Haggadah, 'Some of them are fine silks, others as
heavy as sack-cloth.'"
Krochmal translated into Hebrew examples of Philo's allegories and
gave parallels and contrasts from the Talmud. The relation between the
Palestinian and the Alexandrian exegesis was more elaborately
considered by a greater master of Hellenistic literature, Zacharias
Frankel (1801-1875), who has been followed by a band of Jewish scholars.
Yearly our understanding of the Alexandrian culture becomes fuller.
Philo, too, has in part been translated into Hebrew. Indirect in the
past, his influence on Jewish thought in the future bids fair to be
direct and increasing.
* * * * *
VIII
THE INFLUENCE OF PHILO
The hope which Philo had cherished and worked for was the spreading of
the knowledge of God and the diffusion of the true religion over the
whole world.[346] The end of Jewish national life was approaching, but
rabbis in Palestine and philosophers at Alexandria, unconscious of the
imminent doom, thought that the promise of the prophet was soon to be
fulfilled, and all peoples would go up to worship the one God at the
temple upon Mount Zion, which should be the religious centre of the
world. In Philo's day a universal Judaism seemed possible, a Judaism
true to the Torah as well as to the Unity of God,[347] spread over the
Megalopolis of all peoples; and in the light of this hope Philo
welcomed proselytism. The Jews had a clear mission; they were to be
the light of the world, because they alone of all peoples had
perceived God. Israel ([Hebrew: 'shr'l]), to repeat Philo's etymology, is
the man who beholds God, and through him the other nations were to be
led to the light. The mission of Israel was not a passive service, but
an active preaching of God's word, and an active propagation of God's
law to the Gentile. He must welcome the stranger that came within the
gates.[348] Philo struggled against the separative and exclusive
tendency which characterized a section of his race. He laid stress
upon the valuelessness of birth, and the saving power of God's grace
to the pagan who has come to recognize Him, in language which
Christian commentators call incredible in a Jew, but which was in fact
typical of the common feeling at Alexandria. Appealing to the
Gentiles, Philo declared that "God has special regard for the
proselyte, who is in the class of the weak and humble together with
the widow and orphan[349]; for he may be alienated from his kindred
when he is converted to the honor of the one true God, and abandons
idolatrous, polytheistic worship, but God is all the more his advocate
and helper." And speaking to the Jews he says:[350] "Kinship is not
measured by blood alone when truth is the judge, but by likeness of
conduct and by the pursuit of the same objects." Similarly, in the
Midrash, it is said that proselytes are as dear to God as those who
were born Jews;[351] and, again, that the Torah was given to Israel
for the benefit of all peoples;[352] or[353] that the purpose of
Israel's dispersion was that they might make proselytes. Philo's short
treatise on "Nobility" is an eloquent plea for the equal treatment of
the stranger who joins the true faith; and the author finds in the
Bible narratives support for his thesis, that not good birth but the
virtue of the individual is the true test of merit. Of the
valuelessness of the one, Cain, Ham, and Esau are types; of the
supreme worth of the other, Abraham, who is set up as the model of the
excellent man brought up among idolaters, but led by the Divine
oracle, revealed to his mind, to embrace the true idea of God. If the
founder of the Hebrew nation was himself a convert, then surely there
was a place within the religion for other converts. Remarkable is the
closing note of the book: