appropriate as their own merit what they derive from others,
good birth; and they should justly be regarded as enemies
not only of the Jewish race, but of all mankind; of the
Jewish race, because they engender indifference in their
brethren, so that they despise the righteous life in their
reliance upon their ancestors' virtue; and of the Gentiles,
because they would not allow them their meed of reward even
though they attain to the highest excellence of conduct,
simply because they have not commendable ancestors. I know
not if there could be a more pernicious doctrine than this:
that there is no punishment for the wicked offspring of good
parents, and no reward for the good offspring of evil
parents. The law judges each man upon his own merit, and
does not assign praise or blame according to the virtues of
the forefathers."
And, again, he writes: "God judges by the fruit of the tree, not by
the root; and in the Divine judgment the proselyte will be raised on
high, and he will have a double distinction, because on earth he
'deserted' to God, and later he receives as his reward a place in
Heaven."[354]
Unfortunately, the development of missionizing activity, which
followed Philo's epoch, threatening, as it did, the fundamental
principles of Judaism, necessitated the reassertion of its national
character and antagonism to an attitude which sought expansion by
compromise. It is the tragedy of Philo's work that his mission to the
nations was of necessity distrusted by his own race, and that his
appeal for tolerance within the community was turned to a mockery by
the hostility which the converts of the next century showed to the
national ideas. Christian apologists early learned to imitate Philo's
allegorical method, and appropriated it to explain away the laws of
Moses. Within a hundred years of Philo's death, his ideal, at least in
the form in which he had conceived it, had been shattered for ages.
While he was preaching a philosophical Judaism for the world at
Alexandria, Peter and Paul were preaching through the Diaspora an
heretical Judaism for the half-converted Gentiles. The disciples of
Jesus spread his teaching far and wide; but they continually widened
the breach which their Master had himself initiated, and so their work
became, not so much a development of Judaism, as an attack upon it. In
some of its principles, indeed, the message of Jesus was the message
of Philo, emphasizing, as it did, the broad principles of morality and
the need of an inner godliness. But it was fundamentally
differentiated by a doctrine of God and the Messiah which was neither
Jewish nor philosophical, and by the breaking away from the law of
Moses, which cut at the roots of national life. Whatever the moral
worth of the preaching of Jesus, it involved and involves the
overthrow of the Jewish attitude to life and religion, which may be
expressed as the sanctification of ordinary conduct, and as morality
under the national law. To this ideal Philo throughout was true, and
the Christian teachers were essentially opposed, and however much they
approximated to his method and utilized his thought, they were always
strangers to his spirit. Philo's philosophy was in great part a
philosophy of the law; the Patristic school borrowed his allegorizing
method and produced a philosophy of religious dogma! 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.
They followed both in general and in detail his allegorical
interpretations in their recommendation of the Old Testament to the
more cultured pagans, as the apology of Justin, the commentaries of
Origen, and the philosophical miscellany ([Greek: Strômateis]) of
Clement abundantly show.
Certain parts of the New Testament itself exhibit the combination of
Hebraism and Hellenism which characterizes the work of Philo. In the
sayings of Jesus we have the Hebraic strain, but in Luke and John and
the Epistles the mingling of cultures. Thus the Apostles seem to some
the successors of Philo, and the Epistles the lineal descendants of
the "Allegories of the Laws." In the Fourth Gospel and the Epistle to
the Hebrews especially the correspondence is striking. But there is,
in fact, despite much that is common, a great gulf between them. The
later missionaries oppose the national religion and the Torah: Philo
was pre-eminently their champion.
The most commanding of the Apostles, Paul of Tarsus, when he took the
new statement of Judaism out of the region of spirit and tried to
shape it into a definite religion for the world, "forgot the rock from
which he was hewn." As a modern Jewish theologian says,[355] "His
break with the past is violent; Jesus seemed to expand and
spiritualize Judaism; Paul in some senses turns it upside down." His
work may have been necessary to bring home the Word to the heathen,
but it utterly breaks the continuity of development. Paul himself was
little of a philosopher, and those to whom he preached were not
usually philosophical communities such as Philo addressed at
Alexandria, but congregations of half converted, superstitious pagans.
The philosophical exposition of the law was too difficult for them,
while the observance of the law in its strictness demanded too great a
sacrifice. The spiritual teaching of Jesus was dissociated by his
Apostle from its source, and the break with Judaism was deliberate and
complete. The fanatical zest of the missionary dominated him, and he
proclaimed distinctly where the new Hebraism which was offered to the
Gentile should depart from the historic religion of the Jews: "For Christ
is the end of the law for righteousness to everyone that believeth,"[356]
he says to the Romans; and to the Galatians: "As many as are of the works
of the law are under the curse."[357] "Christ hath redeemed us from the
curse of the law.... But before faith came, we were kept under the law,
shut up with the faith which should afterwards be revealed. Wherefore
the law was our schoolmaster to bring us unto Christ that we might be
justified by faith. But after that faith is come, we are no longer
under a schoolmaster." Paul's position then--and he is the forerunner
of dogmatic Christianity--involved a rejection of the Torah; and it is
this which above all else constituted his cleavage from both Judaism
and the Philonic presentation of it.
Philo is commonly regarded as the forerunner of Christian teaching,
and it is doubtless true that he suggested to the Church Fathers parts
of their theology, and represented also the missionary spirit which
inspired the teaching of some Apostles. But it must be clearly
understood that he shared still more the spirit of Hillel, whose maxim
was "to love thy fellow-creatures and draw them near to the Torah,"
and that he would have been fundamentally opposed to the new
missionary attitude of Paul. 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; because they saw that circumcision
symbolized the abandonment of the sensual life, no longer observed the
ceremony. The same antinomian spirit is shown in the Epistle to the
Galatians by the allegory of the children whom Abraham had by Hagar
the bondwoman and Sarah the free wife: "For there are the two
covenants, the one from the mount of Sinai which gendereth to bondage,
which is Hagar.... But we, brethren, as Isaac was, are the children of
promise." To Philo the law and the observance of the letter were the
high-road to freedom and the Divine spirit, and, remaining loyal to
the Jewish conception of religion, for all his philosophical outlook,
he said: "The rejection of the [Greek: Nomos] will produce chaos in
our lives." To Paul the law was an obstacle to the spread of religious
truth and a fetter to the spiritual life of the individual.
It is possible that an extremist section of the Jews pressed the
letter of the law to excess, so as to lose its spirit, but the
opposite excess, into which Paul plunged the new faith, was as narrow.
It involved a glorification of belief, which did not imply any
relation to conduct. Philo had pleaded no less earnestly than the
Apostle for the reliance upon grace and the saving virtue of faith,
but he did not therefore absolve men from the law which made for
righteousness.[359] And lest it be thought that the stress laid upon
faith was peculiar to Hellenizing Judaism, we have only to note such
passages as Dr. Schechter has adduced from the early Midrash on the
rabbinic conception.[360] "Great was the merit of faith which Israel
put in God; for it was by the merit of this faith that the Holy Spirit
came over them, and they said the [Hebrew: shira], (_i.e._, the Song of
Moses) to God, as it is said, 'And they believed in the Lord and His
servant Moses. Then sang Moses and the children of Israel this song
unto the Lord.'" Or again[361]--and the passage reminds us still more
strongly of both Philo and Christian Gospel--"Our Father Abraham came
into the possession of this world and the world hereafter only by the
merit of his faith."
What is new in the Christian position is not the magnifying of faith;
it is the severance of faith from the law and the particular faith
which is magnified. Philo, and the rabbis, too, believed that faith
was the goal of virtue, and the culmination of the moral life; but
faith to them implied the sanctification of the whole of life, the
love of God "shown in obedience to a law of conduct." Paul, however,
hating the law, set up a new faith in the saving power of Jesus and in
certain beliefs about him, which afterwards were crystallized, or
petrified, into merciless dogmas, contrary alike to the Jewish ideas
of God and of life. The new religion, when it was denationalized,
inevitably became ecclesiastical: for as the national regulation of
life was rejected, in order to ensure some kind of uniformity, it had
to bind its members together by definite articles of belief imposed by
a central authority. The true alternative was not between a legal and
a spiritual religion--for every religion must have some external
rule--but between a law of conduct and a law of belief. Philo and the
rabbis chose the former way; Paul and the Church, the latter.
Christian theology, no less than the Christian conception of religion,
exhibits also a complete breach with the Jewish spirit of Philo. In
the Epistles there are, indeed, in many places doctrines of the Logos
in the same images and the same Hebraic metaphors as Philo had worked
into his system; but their purport is entirely changed by association
with new un-Jewish dogmas. Philo, allegorizing,[362] had seen the holy
Word typified in the high priest, and in Melchizedek, the priest of
the Most High; he had called it the son of God and His first-born.
Paul, dogmatizing, exalts Jesus Christ, the incarnate Word, above
Melchizedek and the high priest, and calls on the Hebrews to gain
salvation by faith in the son of God, who died on behalf of the sinful
human race. Philo, in his poetic fancy, speaks of God associating with
the virgin soul and generating therein the Divine offspring of holy
wisdom;[363] the Christian creed-makers enunciated the irrational
dogma of the immaculate conception of Jesus. So, too, the earliest
philosophical exponents of Christianity, Clement of Alexandria, and
Origen, may have derived many of their detailed ideas from Philo, but
they converted--one might rather say perverted--his monotheistic
theology into a dogmatic trinitarianism. They exalted the Logos, to
Philo the "God of the imperfect," and a second-best Deity, to an equal
place with the perfect God. For man, indeed, he was nearer and the
true object of human adoration. And this not only meant a departure
from Judaism; it meant a departure from philosophy. The supreme unity
of the pure reason was sacrificed no less than the unity of the
soaring religious imagination. The one transcendental God became
again, as He had been to the Greek theologians, an inscrutable
impersonal power, who was unknown to man and ruled over the universe
by His begotten son, the Logos. The sublimity of the Hebrew
conception, which combines personality with unity, was lost, and the
harmony of the intellectual and emotional aspirations achieved by
Philo was broken straightway by those who professed to follow him. The
skeleton of his thought was clothed with a body wherein his spirit
could never have dwelt. It was the penalty which Philo paid for
vagueness of expression and luxuriance of words that his works became
the support of doctrines which he had combated, the guide of those who
were opposed to his life's ideal.
The experience of the Church showed how right was Philo's judgment
when he declared that the rejection of the Torah would produce chaos.
The fourth and fifth centuries exhibit an era of unparalleled disorder
and confusion in the religious world,[364] sect struggling with sect,
creed with creed, churches rising and falling, dogmas set up by
councils and forced upon men's souls at the point of the Roman sword!
And out of this struggling mass of beliefs and fancies, theologies and
superstitions, sects and political forces, there arose a tyrannical,
dogmatic Church which laid far heavier burthens on men's minds than
ever the most ruthless Pharisee of the theologian's imagination had
laid upon their body and spirit. The yoke of the law of Moses,
sanctifying the life, had been broken; the fiat of popes and the
decrees of synods were the saving beliefs which ensured the Kingdom of
Heaven! Was it to this that the allegorizing of the law, the search
for the spirit beneath the letter, the reinterpretation of the holy
law of Moses in the light of philosophical reason, had brought
Judaism? And was the association of Jewish religion with Greek
philosophy one long error? That would be a hard conclusion, if we had
to admit that Judaism cannot stand the test of contact with foreign
culture. But in truth the Hellenistic interpretation of the Bible, so
long as it was genuinely philosophical, remained loyal to Judaism.
Only when it became hardened into dogma, fixed not only as good
doctrine, but as the only saving doctrine, as the tree of life opposed
to the Torah, the tree of death--only then did it become anti-Jewish,
and appear as a bastard offspring of the Hebraic God-idea and Greek
culture. Nor should it be forgotten that the Christian theology and
the Christian conception of religion are a falling away also from the
highest Hellenic ideas; for to Plato as well God was a purely
spiritual unity, and religion "a system of morality based upon a law
of conduct and touched with emotion." In Philo, as we have seen, the
Hebraic and Hellenic conceptions of God touch at their summits in
their noblest expressions; the conceptions of Plato are interfused
with the imagination of the prophets. The Christian theology was a
descent to a commoner Hellenism--or one should rather call it a
commoner syncretism--as well as to an easier, impurer Hebraism.
It must not be put down to the fault of the Septuagint or the
allegorists or Philo that the Alexandrian development of Judaism led
on to Roman Christianity. It is to be ascribed rather to the infirmity
of human nature, which requires the ideas of its inspired teachers and
peoples to be brought down to the common understanding, and causes the
progress towards universal religion to be a slow growth. The masses of
the Alexandrian Jews in his own day cannot have grasped his teaching;
for Philo, to some degree, lived in a narrow world of philosophical
idealism, and he did not calculate the forces which opposed and made
impossible the spread of his faith in its integrity. He was aiming at
what was and must for long remain unattainable--the establishment
among the peoples of philosophical monotheism.
No man is a prophet in his own land--or in his own time--and because
Philo has in him much of the prophet, he seems to have failed. But it
is the burden of our mission to sow in tears that we may reap in joy.
And the work of the Alexandrian-Jewish school may be sad from one
aspect of Jewish history, but it is nevertheless one of the dominating
incidents of our religious annals. It did not succeed in bringing over
the world to the pure idea of God, but it did help in undermining
cruder paganism. It brought the nations nearer to God, and it
introduced Hebraism into the thought of the Western peoples. It
marked, therefore, a great step in the religious work of Israel; yet
by the schools of rabbis who felt the hard hand of its offspring upon
their people it was regarded as a long misfortune, to be blotted from
memory. What seemed so ominous to them was that the annihilation of
the nation came at the same time as the cleavage in the religion.
Judaism seemed attacked no less by internal foes than by external
calamity; and was likely to perish altogether or to drift into a lower
conception of God, unless it could find some stalwart defence. Hence
they insisted on the extension of the fence of the law, and abandoned
for centuries the mission of the Jews to the outer world. This was the
true Galut, or exile; not so much the political exclusion from the
land of their fathers, but the enforced exclusion from the mission of
the prophets. Philo is one of the brightest figures of a golden age of
Jewish expansion, which passed away of a sudden, and has never since
returned. In the silver and bronze ages which followed, his place in
Judaism was obscured. But this age of ours, which boasts of its
historical sense, looking back over the centuries and freed from the
bitter dismay of the rabbis, can appraise his true worth and see in
him one who realized for himself all that Judaism and Jewish culture
could and still can be.
Some Jewish teachers have thought that Philo's work was a failure,
others that it provides a warning rather than an example for later
generations of Jews, proving the mischief of expanding Judaism for the
world. As well one might say that Isaiah's prophecy was a calamity,
because the Christian synoptics used his words as evidences of
Christianity. What is universal in Jewish literature is in the fullest
sense Jewish, and we should beware of renouncing our inheritance because
others have abused and perverted it. Other critics, again, say that
Philo is wearisome and prolix, artificial and sophisticated. There is
certainly some truth in this judgment; but Philo has many beautiful
passages which compensate. Part of his message was for his own
generation and the Alexandrian community, and with the passing away of
the Hellenistic culture, it has lost its attraction. But part of it is
of universal import, and is very pertinent and significant for every
generation of Jews which, enjoying social and intellectual emancipation,
lives amid a foreign culture. Doubtless the position of Philo and the
Alexandrian community was to some extent different from that of the Jews
at any time since the greater Diaspora that followed the destruction of
the temple. They had behind them a national culture and a centre of
Jewish life, religious and social, which was a powerful influence in
civilization and united the Jews in every land. And this gave a
catholicity to their development and a standard for their teaching which
the scattered communities of Jews to-day do not possess. None the less
Philo's ideal of Judaism as religion and life is an ideal for our time
and for all time. Its keynote is that Israel is a holy people, a kingdom
of priests, which has a special function for humanity. And the
performance of this function demands the religious-philosophical
ordering of life. 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 ([Hebrew: 'fikuros]) of the rabbis,
is not the banal thinker of one particular age, but a permanent type in
the history of our people. We seem to spend nearly all our moral
strength in the resistance of persecution, and with tranquillity from
without comes degradation within. Emancipation, which should be but a
means to the realization of the higher life, is taken as an end, and
becomes the grave of idealism. With a reiteration that becomes almost
wearisome, but which is the measure of the need for the warning, Philo
protests against this desecration of life, of liberty, and of Judaism.
His position is, that a free and cultured Jewry must pursue the mission
of Israel alike by the example of the righteous life devoted to the
service of God, and by the preaching of God's revealed word. This is his
"burden of the word of the Lord" to the worldly-wise and the
materialists of civilized Alexandria--and to Jews of other lands.
From the positive side Philo stands for the spiritual significance of
the religion. Judaism, which lays stress upon the law, the ceremonial,
and the customs of our forefathers, is threatened at times with the
neglect of the inward religion and the hardness of legalism. Not that
the law, when it is understood, kills the spirit or fetters the
feelings, but a formal observance and an unenlightened insistence upon
the letter may crush the soul which good habits should nurture.
Religion at its highest must be the expression of the individual soul
within, not the acceptance of a law from without. Although Philo's
estimate of the Torah is from the historical and philological
standpoint uncritical, in the religious sense it is finely critical
inasmuch as it searches out true values. Philo looks in every
ordinance of the Bible for the spiritual light and conceives the law
as an inspiration of spiritual truth and the guide to God, or, as he
puts it sometimes, "the mystagogue to divine ecstasy." For the crown
of life to him is the saint's union with God. In mysticism religion
and philosophy blend, for mysticism is the philosophical form of
faith. Just as the Torah to Philo has an outward and an inward
meaning, so, too, has the religion of the Torah; and the outward
Judaism is the symbol, the necessary bodily expression of the inward,
even as the words of Moses are the symbol, the suggestive expression
of the deeper truth behind them. Yet mystic and spiritual as he is,
Philo never allows religion to sink into mere spirituality, because he
has a true appreciation and a real love for the law. The Torah is the
foundation of Judaism, and one of the three pillars of the universe,
as the rabbis said; and neither the philosopher nor the mystic in
Philo ever causes him to forget that Judaism is a religion of conduct
as well as of belief, and that the law of righteousness is a law which
must be practiced and show itself in active life. He holds fast,
moreover, to the catholicity of Judaism, which restrains the
individual from abrogating observance till the united conscience of
the race calls for it; unless progress comes in this ordered way, the
reformer will produce chaos.