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 Judaea, 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.

More philosophical than the doctrine of angels was the conception of different attributes of God [Hebrew: mdot], which were different manifestations of His activity, to the human mind separable and distinguishable from each other, though absolutely they were inseparable aspects of the Godhead. Chief among these were the attribute of mercy and the attribute of justice, [Hebrew: mdt hrhmim] and [Hebrew: mdt hdin],[195] by which, according to a Midrash, Adam was driven from Eden. And these conceptions, though distrusted by the Synagogue, entered into later parts of the Prayer Book. "Attribute of Mercy, reveal thyself for us; make our supplication to fall at the feet of Thy Creator; and on behalf of Thy people beseech for mercy"; thus runs a fine prayer in the Ne'ilah service of the Day of Atonement, and many of the other Selihot prove the persistence of this development of Jewish belief. The theory of Divine attributes was common to Palestine and Alexandria, and plays, as we shall see, an important part in Philo's[196] thought; but the distinctive Hellenistic theology is the hypostasis of the Wisdom and the Word of God. In the Bible itself, and notably in Proverbs, we find Wisdom personified—the first vague, poetical suggestion of a Jewish theology. As the Jews came into contact with Hellenic influence, the tendency to develop the personification into a power increased, and may be traced through the first flower of Graeco-Jewish culture, the Wisdom literature. The Greek philosophers had conceived the First Cause as a ruling Mind, or universal Reason, and influenced by this conception, yet loyal to their monotheistic faith, the Jewish writers of the Hellenistic age spoke of the Wisdom as the minister of God, the power by which He ruled creation. The apocryphal books of Ecclesiasticus and the Wisdom of Solomon exhibit Wisdom passing from the poetical personification of the Bible to the separate hypostasis of theology. In the verse of the Bible sage, "Wisdom hath builded her house, she hath hewn out her seven pillars" (Prov. ix. 1), she is the creation of the purely poetical fancy, but in the Wisdom of Solomon she has become a link between Heaven and earth, the creation of the theologian's reflection. "She reacheth from one end of the world to the other with strength, and ordereth all things graciously. She is settled by God on His throne, and by her He made the world, by her the righteous were saved. She watched over the father of the human race, and she delivered Israel from Egypt." In Ecclesiasticus it is written, "All Wisdom is from the Lord and is with Him forever. She cometh forth from the mouth of the Most High, and was created before all things. God having fashioned her from the beginning placed her over all His works. Then she covered the earth as a mist, she pitched her tent in high places and her palace was in a pillar of cloud. She ministered in the tabernacle, and was established in Zion, in Jerusalem, the beloved city." In similar strain, in the apocalyptic book of Enoch (xxx), God says, "On the sixth day I ordered My Wisdom to make man"; and in the Sibylline Oracles and Aristobulus she appears as the assessor of God who ruleth over men.

Parallel with Wisdom, the Word of God was developed into something between a poetical image and a separate power. Again the development starts from a Biblical metaphor. "By the word of the Lord were the heavens created, and all their host by the breath of His mouth" (Ps. xxxiii). "God of our Fathers and Lord of Mercy, who didst make all things by Thy word," says the writer of the Wisdom of Solomon. Inspired again by the phrase of the Psalmist, "He sent His word, and healed them" (Ps. cvi. 20), he hymns the Divine Logos as the all-powerful emissary doing God's bidding among men. "It was neither herb nor emollient that cured Israel in the wilderness (when bitten by the fiery scorpions), but Thy Logos, O Lord, which heals all things." Later, when he describes the destruction of the first-born in Egypt, he rises in a paean to a finer poetical flight: "When tranquil silence folded all things, and night in her own swiftness was in the midst of her course, Thy all-powerful Logos leaped from heaven, from his royal throne, a stern warrior into the midst of the doomed land, bearing as a sharp sword Thy Divine commandment, and having taken his stand filled all things with death: and he touched heaven and walked upon earth." The Jewish poet, rejecting the idea that the perfect God could descend to earth and slay men, brushes away the anthropomorphism of the Bible, and summons from his mind this creation mixed of Hebrew imagination and Greek reason. So, too, Onkelos, wherever activity upon earth was ascribed to God, wrote, in his translation (Targum) of Scripture, "the word of the Lord," and for the material hand he substituted the more abstract might. The same development,[197] under the names of Memra and (less frequently) of [Hebrew: dbor], shows that the word-agent of God appealed to certain of the rabbis in their desire to explain away, on the one hand, expressions in the Bible which seemed to invest the Deity with corporeal qualities, and, on the other, so to divide His infinite perfection as to make His presence immanent upon earth.

The teachers at Alexandria were above all others induced to develop the Word into the active power, since they seemed thereby to find in the Bible a remarkable anticipation of Greek philosophy. The Greek Logos, by which "the Word" was translated in the Septuagint, meant also thought and reason, and during the Hellenistic age was the regular term by which the philosophical schools expressed the impersonal world-force which governed all things. The Logos idea among the Jews was a modification of intuitive and naive monotheism; among the Greeks it was a step upwards, demanded by reason, from polytheism to a monistic view of the universe. By the first century its recognition as the ruling power in both the physical and moral universe had become a point of union in all philosophical schools—the common stamp of philosophical theology. Between the Semitic ministerial word uttered by a personal Being and the Greek pantheistic governing reason, there was probably an early connection, due to Eastern influences which operated upon the founders of Greek philosophy, which later schools lost sight of. When the Hebrew Scriptures were translated, the two coalesced more fruitfully in the Greek term Logos, and a point of union was provided between the philosophical and the Jewish theology. Moreover the local Egyptian influence aided the union, for the god Thoth was also identified with the Logos, which thus appeared as a religious conception common to all races, the basis of a universal creed. And besides the world-reason of the philosophers, another Greek influence no doubt tended to further the development of the Logos in Jewish thought. One of the most marked characteristics of the Hellenistic age is the renascence of wonder at the institutions of human life, and more especially at numbers and speech.

Numbers were held to contain the essence of things, and the marvellous powers of four, seven, and ten received honor from all sects and schools. Words, too, were regarded almost as a mystic power, distinct from thought, incorporeal things which made thought real and gave it expression. The mystical susceptibility of Philo to the power of numbers has been noticed by every critic and exaggerated by not a few; his mystical valuation of words and speech, though far more important in his thought, has been commonly passed over. The analysis which Greek writers made of the relation between the mental thought, the sound which utters it, and the mind which thinks it, was invested with special importance for the Jewish thinker, who transferred it from the human to the Divine sphere. He applied it to interpret the constant Biblical phrases "and God said" or "and God spoke," according to notions in which philosophy and theology are mixed; and propounded a mystic idealism and a mystic cosmology, in which God's thought or comprehensive Word becomes the archetype of the visible universe, His single words the substantive universe and the laws of nature. A century before Philo, Aristobulus—assuming the genuineness of his Fragments—wrote:[198] "We must understand the Word of God, not as a spoken word, but as the establishment of actual things, seeing that we find throughout the Torah that Moses has declared the whole creation to be words of God." Philo, following his predecessor, says, "God speaks not words but things,"[199] and, again, commenting on the first chapter of Genesis, "God, even as He spake, at the same moment created."[200] And of human speech he has this pretty conceit a little before: "Into the mouth there enter food and drink, the perishable food of a perishable body; out of it issue words, immortal laws of an immortal soul, by which rational life is guided."[201] If human speech is "immortal law," much more is the speech of God. His words are ideas seen by the eye of the soul, not heard by the ear.[202] The ten commandments given at Sinai were "ideas" of this incorporeal nature, and the voice that Israel heard was no voice such as men possess, but the [Hebrew: shkina], the Divine Presence itself, which exalted the multitude.[203] Philo is here expanding and developing Jewish tradition. In the "Ethics of the Fathers" (v) we read: "By ten words was the world created"; and in the pages of the Midrash the [Hebrew: bt-kol], i.e._, the mystic emanation of the Deity, which revealed itself after the spirit of prophecy had ceased to be vouchsafed, is credited with wondrous and varied powers, now revealing the Decalogue, now performing some miracle, now appearing in a vision to the blessed, now prophesying the future fate of the race to a pious rabbi. The fertilizing stream of Greek philosophical idealism nourished the growth of the Jewish pious imagination, and in the Logos of Philo the fruit matured. It is idle to try to formulate a single definite notion of Philo's Logos. For it is the expression of God in all His multiple and manifold activity, the instrument of creation, the seat of ideas, the world of thought which God first established as the model of the visible universe, the guiding providence, the sower of virtue, the fount of wisdom, described sometimes in religious ecstasy, sometimes in philosophical metaphysics, sometimes in the spirit of the mystical poet. Of his last manner let us take a specimen singled out by a Christian and a Jewish theologian as of surprising beauty. Commenting on the verse of the Psalmist, "The river of God is filled with water," Philo declares that it is absurd to call any earthly stream the river of God.

"The poet clearly refers to the Divine Logos that is full of the fountain of wisdom, and is in no part itself empty. Nay, it is diffused through the universe, and is raised up on high. In another verse the Psalmist says, 'The course of the river gladdens the city of God.' And in truth the continuous rush of the Divine Logos is borne along with eager but regular onset, and overflows and gladdens all things. In one sense he calls the world the city of God, for it has received the 'full cup' of the Divine draught, and has quaffed a perpetual, eternal joy. But in another sense he gave this name to the soul of the wise, wherein God is said to walk as in a city. And who can pour out the sacred measures of their joy to the blissful soul which holds out the holy cup, that is its own reason, save the Logos, the cupbearer of God, the master of the feast? Nor is the Logos cupbearer only, but it is itself the pure draught, itself the joy and exultation, itself the pouring forth and the delight, itself the ambrosial philtre and potion of bliss."[204]

Through the luxury of metaphor and imagination one may discern the underlying thought of the mystic writer, that the Logos is the effluence of God, either in the whole universe or the individual man, filling the one as the other with the Divine Shekinah. It is the link which joins God and man, the ladder of Jacob's dream, which stretches from Heaven to earth.[205] That man can attain the Divine state by the help of God's effluence was a cardinal thought of Philo's; this, indeed, is the form in which he conceives the Messianic hope. God does not come down to earth incarnate in man's form, but God's active influence possesses the soul of man, and makes it live with God, and if man be peculiarly blessed, carries it up to the ineffable Spirit. Similarly his idea of the Messiah is more spiritual than that of the popular belief. The ascent of man to God's height, not the descent of God to man's level, will produce the age of universal peace.

There are various degrees of the Divine influence, stretching from complete possession by the Deity Himself to the advent of single Divine thoughts. These Philo regards as [Greek: logoi], words or thoughts—for he does not clearly distinguish between the two—and he resolves the realistic angels of the Bible into this spiritual conception.[206] Thus he says, "the place" where Jacob alighted and had the vision (Gen. xxvii. 11) is the symbol of the perfect contemplation of God; the angels which he saw ascending and descending are the inferior light of Divine precepts. These thoughts are continually vouchsafed to all of us, prompting us to noble actions, comforting us in times of sadness, inspiring lofty ideas.

"Up and down through the whole soul the Logoi of God move without end; when they ascend, drawing it up with them, and severing it from the mortal part, and showing only the vision of ideal things; but when they descend, not casting it down, but descending with it from humanity or compassion towards our race, so as to give assistance and help, in order that, inspiring what is noble, they may revive the soul which is borne along on the stream of the body."[207]

Conversely, the rabbis taught that from each word that proceeded from the mouth of God an angel was created, as it is said: "By the word of the Lord the Heavens were made, and all the host of them by the breath of His mouth."[208]

Apart from these sudden and occasional emanations of the Divine Spirit, the individual man has within him a permanent Divine Logos by which he may direct his conduct aright. Viewed in this aspect, the Logos, i.e., the activity of God, is conscience, the Judge in the soul, which is the true man dwelling within,[209] ruler and king, judge and arbiter, witness and accuser, correcting and restraining. Rising to bolder personification, Philo, who loves to present a spiritual thought in a concrete image, calls it the undefiled high priest in us.[210] In this power he finds a sure refutation of skepticism; for in virtue of the Divine voice man may secure moral certitude: and he finds also a philosophical value for popular superstition. It was a common notion of the pagans as well as the Jews of the time that an intermediate order of beings passed between heaven and earth and brought supernatural aid to men; and also that a familiar spirit, or Daemon, dwelt within the soul of each man. The finer spirit of Philo resolves the attendant Daemon and the messenger-daemons or angels into the spiritual effluences of the one Deity; save for a few places where he makes a pose of agreement with popular notions and speaks of winged denizens of Heaven[211] who descend to earth, he habitually expounds angels as inward revelations of God.

As the revelation of God to the individual is a Logos, so, too, is his revelation to the whole of mankind. It was pointed out in the last chapter that Philo identified the Torah with the law of nature, and he did this by regarding it as the Divine Logos. The more perfect emanation of God is in one view the power by which He directs the physical creation, in another the perfect law which He set up as the model of conduct for His highest creatures. The rabbis, indeed, were prone to glorify the law as the primal creation of God, and the instrument of all the later creations, [Hebrew: kli hmra shbu gbrao shmim].[212] They speak of it as the light, the pillar, and the bond of the universe, the model whereon the architect looked;[213] and Philo amplifies this simple poetical concept and develops it afresh in the light of Greek idealistic and cosmical notions,[214] so that the Torah, as the Logos of God, is equated with the source of all being, wisdom, and knowledge, with the ideal world which is the archetype of the material, and with all the law and order of nature. And as the Torah is the Logos, so also its particular precepts are Logoi.

It seems difficult to trace the unity among all these different aspects of the "Word," but in fact they are only different expressions of the Divine activity in the universe. All these are comprehended in the Logos, and then again divided out of it, so that it is, as it were, a crystal prism reflecting the light of the Godhead in a myriad different ways. One curious illustration of the universal sense in which Philo understood the Logos is his interpretation of the manna; it is typical also of his manner of exegesis and his habit of spiritualizing the material. It is related in Exodus (xvi. 15) that when the Israelites saw the heavenly food they exclaimed [Hebrew: mn hu'], "What is it?" and hence the food obtained its name of manna. Now the Greek Septuagint word for [Hebrew: mn] is [Greek: ti], which means not only "what" but "anything." Philo sees in the gift of the heavenly food a symbol of the inspiration of the chosen people by the Divine Logos, and says that the Logos is rightly called manna, i.e., anything, because it is the "most generic of all things, and that by which man may be nourished."[215]

The central thought of Philo's system is that God is immanent in all His work; but it would seem to him sacrilegious to apply to the Godhead itself this universal, unceasing activity, and so he develops the Logos as the most ideal attribute of the Deity, and the sum of all His immanence and effluence. He preferred the Logos to the older Wisdom, probably because he could by this conception bring his idea of God into closer relation with Greek philosophical notions, for already the Hellenistic world had come spontaneously to revere the cosmical Logos. Only Philo gave to the expression of their physical and metaphysical speculation a religious warmth new to it, when he associated it with the word uttered by the personal God. Philosophy, theology, and religion were all joined and harmonized in his conception.

If we have followed thus far the spirit of Philo aright, the Logos is only the immanent manifestation of the One God, who is both transcendental and immanent, metaphorically, not metaphysically, separate. In other words, it is the complete aspect of God as He reveals Himself to the world. Above it and including it is the being or essence of God, seen in Himself, and not in relation to His outward activity. But it is often suggested that the Logos appears to Philo as a second God, subordinate, indeed, to the Supreme Being, but yet a separate personality. It is said, with truth, that he speaks of it as a person, now calling it king, priest, primal man, the first-born son of God, even the second God, and identifying it at other times with some personal being, Melchizedek or Moses, and apostrophizing it as man's helper, guide, and advocate.[216] Now we have reason to think that Gnostic sects of Jews, both in Alexandria and in Palestine, were at this time tending towards the division of the Godhead into separate powers. The heresy of "Minut," frequently mentioned in the Talmud, consisted originally, in the opinion of modern scholars, of a Gnostic ditheism;[217] and during the latter part of the first century and thereafter we hear of sects in Egypt and Syria which supported similar theories. Theology here produced its fantastic offspring theosophy, and the followers of the esoteric wisdom let their speculations carry them away from the cardinal principle of Judaism. Influenced by Egyptian speculation, they imagined an incarnation of the Divine Spirit, and in the mystical thought of the day they adumbrated theories of virgin birth.

Now these prototypes of Christian belief had undoubtedly manifested themselves at Alexandria in Philo's day. His treatises show traces of them,[218] and the question is whether he countenanced them or tried to summon the theosophists of his generation back to the true Jewish conception of God. Certain Christian and philosophical critics of Philo, for whom the wish was perhaps father to the thought, have found in Philo's Logos a conception which is at times impersonal, at times personal, at times an aspect of the One God, and at times a second independent God. If we take Philo literally, this certainly is the case. But let it be clearly understood, this interpretation not only involves Philo in inconsistency, but it utterly ruins and destroys his religious and philosophical system. It means that the champion of Jewish monotheism wanders into a vague ditheism. And in view of this, the modern commentators of Philo, notably Professor Drummond,[219] have examined his words more carefully and studied them in relation to their context; and they have shown how, judged in this critical fashion, the personality of the Logos is only figurative. It is, indeed, probable that certain extreme passages, where the Logos is presented most explicitly as a separate Deity, are due to Christological interpolation. The Church Fathers found in the popular belief in the Divine Word a remarkable support of the Trinity, and regarding, as they did, Philo's writings as valuable testimony to the truth of Christianity, they had every temptation to bring his passages about the Logos still closer to their ideas. And between the first and the fifth century, when we first hear from Eusebius of manuscripts of Philo at the Christian monastery of Caesarea—from which we can trace our texts in direct line—there was no high standard in dealing with ancient authorities. It is the Christian teachers who preserved Philo, and they preserved him not as scholars but as missioners. The best editors have recognized that our text has been interfered with by evidenced-making scribes, as where a passage about the new Jerusalem appears, agreeing almost word for word with the picture of Revelations. Similarly, not a few passages about the Logos are probably spurious.[220]

Yet, even when we have expurgated our text of Philo, there remain, it will be said, numerous passages where the Logos is spoken of and apostrophized as a person. This is so, but the conclusion which is drawn, that the Logos is regarded as a second deity, is unjustifiable. The Jewish mind from the time of the prophets unto this day has thought in images and metaphors, and the personification of the Logos is only the most striking instance of Philo's regular habit of personifying all abstract ideas. The allegorical habit particularly conduces to this, for as persons are constantly resolved into ideas, so ideas come to be naturally represented as persons. There are thus two steps in Philo's theology, which seem to some extent to counteract each other; in the first place, he resolves the concrete physical expressions of the Bible into spiritual ideas, in the second he portrays those ideas in pictorial language and clothes them in personifications. The allegorizer requires an allegorist to interpret him aright.

Nor must it be forgotten that Philo was preaching spiritual monotheism not only to Jews, but also to the Hellenic world, for whom it was a vast bound from their naturalistic polytheism. Zealous as he was for the pure faith, he realized that mankind could not attain it directly, but must approach it by conceptions of the One God gradually increasing in profundity and truth. The Greek thinkers had approximated closest to the Hebraic God-idea when they conceived one supreme, immanent reason in the universe; and Philo, in carrying his audiences beyond this to the transcendent-immanent Being, transformed the Greek cosmical concept into a Divine power of the One Being. For the true believer this is the stepping-stone to the perfect idea. "The Logos," he says, "is the God of us imperfect people, but the true sages worship the One Being."[221] And, again, "The imperfect have as their law the holy Logos."[222] And in this sense, it is "intermediate ([Greek: methorios]) between God and man."[223] What such passages mean is that the separation of the Logos is a stage in man's progress up to the true idea of God. It is a second-best Deity, so to say, rather than a second Deity; for those who regard the Logos as God have no conception at all of the perfect Being of which it is only the principal attribute.

The theology of Philo is characterized throughout by a tolerant and philosophical grasp of the difficulty of pure monotheism, and of the necessity of a long intellectual searching before the goal can be attained. To declare the Unity of God is simple enough; to have a real conception of it is a very different and a very difficult thing. And Philo's theology has a two-fold aim, in which either part complements the other. It explains, on the one hand, how God is revealed to the world through His powers or attributes or modes of activity, and, on the other, how man can ascend to an ecstatic union with the Real Being through comprehension of those powers. By the ideal ladder which brings down God to earth, man can climb again to Heaven. The three chief rungs of the ladder are the attributes of creation, and of ruling power, and the Logos. The perfect unity of the Godhead is not, of course, properly the subject of attributes, but the limited mind of man so conceives it for its own understanding, and speaks of God's justice, God's goodness, God's wisdom. These are, to use philosophical terminology, categories of the religious understanding, which are finally resolved by the perfect sage in "the synthetic apperception of Unity."

Philo follows what may have been a Hebrew tradition in explaining the 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 kolastike]); 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 Timaeus," particularly, Plato, throughout, is the poet-philosopher, writing imaginative myths, which present pictorially an idealistic scheme of the universe; and "The Timaeus" 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 Timaeus," 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]

The theory of religious idealism is the centre of Philo's philosophy, and provides the basis of his explanation of the material universe. Physics, indeed, he considered of small account, because he believed there could be no certainty in such speculations.[244] His mind was utterly unscientific; but as a religious philosopher he found it necessary to give a theory of the creation. Jewish dogma held that the world had been called into being out of nothing; the Greek philosophers repudiated such an idea, and held that creation must be the result of a reasonable process; Aristotle had imagined that matter was a separately existent principle with mind, and that the world was eternal; and the Stoics held that matter was the substance of all things, including the pantheistic power itself:

"All are but parts of one stupendous whole, Whose body nature is, and God the soul."

Philo impugns both these theories,[245] the one because it denies the creative power of God, the other because it confuses the Creator with His creation. He looked for a system which should satisfy at once the Jewish notion that the world was brought out of nothing by the will of God, and the philosophical concept that God is all reality; and he found in Plato's idealism a view of the creation which he could harmonize with the religious view. Plato declared that the material world had been created out of the Non-Ens ([Greek: me on]) i.e., that which has no real existence. He conceived space and matter as the mere passive receptacle of form, which is nothing till the form has given it quality. Though Philo's language is vague, this seems to be his view when he is speaking philosophically. It is, perhaps, a slight deviation from the earlier religious standpoint of the Jews, which looks to a direct and deliberate creation of the world-stuff, rather than to the informing of space by spirit, and regards the world as separate from God, and not as a manifestation of His being. But the more philosophical conception appears likewise in the Wisdom of Solomon. "For Thine all-powerful hand that created the world out of formless matter," says the author (xi. 17), establishing before Philo the compromise between two competing influences in his mind. More emphatically Philo rejects the notion of creation in time.[246] Time, he says, came into being after God had made the universe, and has no meaning for the Divine Ruler, whose life is in the eternal present.

Summing up, we may say that Philo regards the universe as the image of the Divine manifestation or evolution in thought produced by His beneficent will; and this view is true to the religious standpoint of traditional Judaism in spirit if not in letter.

In his conception of the human soul, Philo again harmonizes the simple Jewish notion with the developed Greek psychology by means of the Platonic idealism. The soul in the Bible is the breath of God; in Plato it is an Idea incarnate, represented in "The Timaeus" as a particle of the Supreme Mind. Philo, following the psychology of his age, divides the soul into a higher and a lower part: (1) the Nous; (2) the vital functions, which include the senses. He lays all the stress upon the former, which gives man his kinship with God and the ideal world, while the other part is the necessary result of its incarnation in the body. He variously describes the Nous as an inseparable fragment of the Divine soul, a Divine breath which God inspires into each body, a reflection, an impression, or an image of the blessed Logos, sealed with its stamp.[247] Following the Platonic conception, Philo occasionally speaks of the Divine soul as having a prenatal existence,[248] holding, as the English poet put it, that

"The soul that rises with us, our life's star, Hath had elsewhere its setting And cometh from afar."

Here, too, he follows an older Jewish-Hellenistic tradition, which appears in the Wisdom of Solomon (viii. 19 and 20), where it is written: "A good soul fell to my lot. Nay rather, being good, I came into a body undefiled." The Nous is in fact the god within, and it bears to the microcosm Man the relation which the infinite God bears to the macrocosm.[249] Indeed, it is the Logos descended from above, but yearning to return to its true abode. Thus Philo sings its Divine nature:

"It is unseen, but sees all things: its essence is unknown, but it comprehends the essence of all things. And by arts and sciences it makes for itself many roads and ways, and traverses sea and land, searching out all things within them. And it soars aloft on wings, and when it has investigated the sky and its changes it is borne upwards towards the aether and the revolutions of the heavens. It follows the stars in their orbits, and passing the sensible it yearns for the intelligible world."

The Nous is the king of the whole organism, the governing and unifying power, and hence is often called the man himself. The senses, resembling the powers of God, are only the bodyguard, subordinate instruments, and inferior modes of the Divine part.[250] So Philo explains that all our faculties are derived from the Divine principle, and he draws the moral lesson that our true function is to bend them all to the Divine service, so as to foster our noblest part. The aim of the good man is to bring the god within him into union with the God without, and to this end he must avoid the life of the senses,[251] which mars the Divine Nous, and may entirely crush it. The Divine soul, as it had a life before birth, so also has a life after death; for what is Divine cannot perish. Immortality is man's most splendid hope. If the Divine Presence fills him with a mystic ecstasy, he has, indeed, attained it upon this earth, but this bliss is only for the very blessed sage; and he, too, looks forward to the more lasting union with the Godhead after this terrestrial life is over.[252] True at once to the principles of Platonism and Judaism, Philo admits no anthropomorphic conception of Heaven or of Hell. He is convinced that there is a life hereafter, and finds in the story of Enoch the Biblical symbol thereof,[253] but he does not speculate about the nature of the Divine reward. The pious are taken up to God, he says, and live forever,[254] communing alone with the Alone.[255] The unrighteous souls, Philo sometimes suggests, in accordance with current Pythagorean ideas, are reincarnated according to a system of transmigration within the human species ([Greek: palengenesia]).[256] Yet the sinner suffers his full doom on earth. The true Hades is the life of the wicked man who has not repented, exposed to vengeance, with uncleansed guilt, obnoxious to every curse.[257] And the Divine punishment is to live always dying, to endure death deathless and unending, the death of the soul.[258]

The Divine Nous constitutes the true nature of man; Philo, however, insists with almost wearisome repetition, that the god within us has no power in itself, and depends entirely on the grace and inspiration of God without for knowledge, virtue, and happiness.[259] The Stoic dogma, that the wise man is perfectly independent and self-contained ([Greek: autarches]) appears to him as a wicked blasphemy. "Those who make God the indirect, and the mind the direct cause are guilty of impiety, for we are the instruments through which particular activities are developed, but He who gives the impulse to the powers of the body and the soul is the Creator by whom all things are moved."[260] All thought-functions, memory, reasoning, intuition, are referred directly to Divine inspiration, which is in Platonic terminology the illumination of the mind by the ideas. Thus, finally, all human activity is referred back to God.

This guiding principle determines Philo's attitude to knowledge, involving, as it does, that we only know by Divine inspiration, or, as he says, by the immanence of the Logoi.[261] The possibility of knowledge was one of the burning questions of the age, and it was the failure of the old dogmatic schools to answer it which led to a great religious movement in Greek philosophy. How can man attain to true knowledge, it was asked, about the universe, seeing that perceptions vary with each individual, and of conceptions we have no certain standard? The old Hebrew attitude to this question is expressed by the verse of the Psalmist: "The heavens are the heavens of the Lord, but the earth hath He given to the sons of men" (Psalm cxv), which implies that man must not try to penetrate the secrets of the universe. Philo is sufficiently a philosopher to desire knowledge about things Divine and human, but at the same time he has a complete distrust in the powers of human sense and human reason. About the physical universe he is frankly a skeptic,[262] but his religious faith leads him to hold that God vouchsafes to man some knowledge of Himself and of the proper way of life, i.e., ethics. "Man knows all things in God."[363] Plato similarly had despaired of knowledge of the physical world, and had turned to the heavenly ideas as the true object of thought. Moreover, in his early period, while his theory was still poetical and mystical, he had conceived that knowledge was made possible in the subject, by the entrance of "forms," or emanations, from the ideas. This theory Philo adapts to his Jewish outlook. Like Plato, he turns away from the physical to the ideal world,[264] and he regards the ideas of wisdom, virtue, bravery, etc., which are theologically powers of God, as continually sending forth Logoi, forms or forces (the angels of popular belief), to inform and enlighten our minds. Throughout, God is the cause of all knowledge as well as of being, for these effluences are but an expression of God's activity. In Philo's theory, object and subject are really one. What can be known are the modes or attributes of God, which philosophically are "Ideas"; what knows is the emanation of the Idea, which God sends into the human soul that is prepared to receive it by pious contemplation. "Through the heavenly Wisdom, wisdom is seen, for wisdom sees itself." "Through God, God is known, for He is His own light."[265]

Thus all knowledge is intuition, and man's function is not so much to reason as to lead a life of piety and contemplate the Divine work in the hope of being blessed with inspiration. It would be a mistake, however, to take Philo's words quite literally. He does not deny the need of human effort and striving for knowledge; for the Divine influence is not vouchsafed till we have prepared for it and consecrated all our faculties to God. But, devout mystic as he is, he ascribes every consummation to the direct help of the Deity. "The mind is the cause of nothing, but rather the Deity, who is prior to mind, generates thought."[266] The Greek philosopher had ascribed the final synthesis of knowledge to a superhuman force. Philo ascribes to God all the intermediate steps from sense-perception. It may be admitted that his passive notion of philosophy involves the abandonment of the Greek ideal, the eager searching of Plato after truth. He lived in an age in which, through loss of intellectual power, man had come to despair of the attainment of knowledge by human effort, and to rely entirely upon supernatural means, Divine revelations, visions, and the like. It is consistent with his whole position that the crown of life is represented, not as an intellectual state, but as a superhuman ecstasy of the Nous, wherein it is freed not only from the body but from the rest of the soul, and is, so to say, led out of itself.[267] He comments on the verse, "And the sun went down and a deep sleep fell on Abraham" (Gen. xv. 12). "When the Divine light," he says, "shines upon the mortal soul, the mortal light sinks, and our reason is driven out at the approach of the Divine spirit."[268] This is the Alexandrian interpretation of [Hebrew: shkina] and [Hebrew: nboah], and though it is much affected by Greek mystical ideas, yet at the same time it is broadly true to the spirit of Jewish mysticism, as we see it presented in writers of all ages, and as the Psalmist expressed it, "to abide under the shadow of the Almighty."

Philo's ethics, like the rest of his philosophy, exhibits the transfusion of Greek ideas with his Hebrew spirit. The Greek philosophers had evolved a rational plan of life, while the Jewish teachers were impregnated with burning ardor for the living God; and Philo brings the two things together, making ethics dependent on religion. The Stoics, who were the most powerful school of his day, regarded as the ideal of goodness life according to unbending reason and in complete independence of God or man. Philo understands God as a personal power making for righteousness, and man's excellence, accordingly, which is likeness to God, is piety and charity.[269] Above all he insists upon Faith ([Greek: pistis]) and he defines virtue as a condition of soul which fixes its hopes upon the truly Existent God. The Stoics also professed to honor faith or confidence above all things, but the virtue which they meant was reliance upon man's own powers. Philo's virtue is almost the converse of this. Man must feel completely dependent upon God, and his proper attitude is humility and resignation. So only can he receive within his soul the seed of goodness, and finally the Divine Logos.[270] Yet at the same time Philo remains loyal to the Jewish ideal of conduct: faith without works is empty, and, as he puts it, "The true-born goods are faith and consistency of word and action."[271]

The attainment of the highest excellence demands severe discipline, save for those few blessed souls whom God perfects without any effort on their part. The rest can only secure self-realization by self-renunciation; they must avoid the bodily passions and bodily lusts.[272] At times the Divine enthusiasm causes Philo, like many a Jewish saint and like his master Plato, to scorn all bodily limitations and recommend "insensibility" ([Greek: apatheia])[273] by which he means that man should crush his physical desires and repress his feelings. Not that the good life seems to him to imply absence of pleasure. On the contrary, it is filled with the purest of joy, for when man rises to the love of God "in calm of mind, all passion spent," then and then alone has he tasted true joyousness. The symbol of this bliss is Isaac ([Hebrew: ytshk]), the laughter of the soul.

It was noticed in the second chapter that Philo modified his ethical ideas during his life. In the earlier period he insists more strongly on the need of ascetic self-denial, and has almost a horror of the world. Maturer experience, however, taught him that man is made for this world, and that a wise use of its goods was a surer path to happiness and to God than flight from all temptations. In his later writings, therefore, he exhibits a striking moderation. He reproaches the ascetics for their "savage enthusiasm,"[274] probably hinting at the extreme sects of the Essenes and the Therapeutae. "Those who follow a gentler wisdom seek after God, but at the same time do not despise human things."

"Truth will properly blame those who without discrimination shun all concern with the life of the State, and say that they despise the acquisition of good repute and pleasure. They are only making grand pretensions, and they do not really despise these things. They go about in torn raiment and with solemn visage, and live the life of penury and hardship as a bait, to make people believe that they are lovers of good conduct, temperance, and self-control."[275]

Philo's aphorism, which follows, "Be drunk in a sober manner," is characteristic. The Stoic extreme of passionlessness is almost as false as the Epicurean hedonism, and the mean between them is the ideal Jewish life, in which godliness and humanity are blended.

We have now examined the main divisions of Philo's philosophy, and we see that his metaphysics, cosmology, theory of knowledge, and ethics are all religious in tone, and all determined in their main lines by his Jewish outlook. His Hebraism is a seal which stamps all that enters his mind from Greek sources, and the Bible, spiritually interpreted, is the canon of all his wisdom.

There remains one minor aspect of his work which must be briefly examined, because it has become closely associated with his name. This is his number-symbolism, by which he ascribes important powers to certain numbers, so that they are regarded as holy themselves and sanctifying that to which they are attached. This feature of his thought is commonly ascribed to Pythagorean influence, which was strong at Alexandria, and, indeed, throughout the world, at this era. The exact details of the holiness of four, seven, ten, fifty, etc., Philo may have borrowed from neo-Pythagorean sources, but the general tendency was the natural result of his environment and his stage of thought. It was a feature of the recurring childishness of ideas and the renascence of wonder at common things which is apparent on many hands. To have denied the powers of numbers would have seemed as absurd and eccentric then as to deny the powers of electricity to-day. And in all ages people have been found to regard numbers mystically as a link between God and earth, and a means of solving all physical and metaphysical problems. The Hebrew intellect, primitive as it was, tended particularly to the reverence of the numerical powers. Witness the Bible itself, which emphasizes certain numbers; and witness also the fifth chapter of the Pirke Abot, with its lists ranged under four, seven, and ten, which is only typical of the rabbinical attitude. Philo is not original in his views concerning numbers, not above nor below the loose thinking of his age. He accepts unquestioningly the potency of seven, because of its marvellous mathematical properties, ratios, etc., its geometrical efficacy, and because of the seven periods of life from infancy to old age, of the seven parts of the body, the seven motions, the seven strings of the lyre, the seven vowels, and the very name, which is connected with worship ([Greek: sebasmos]). All this is trifling and trite, but what is of importance is the use which Philo makes of the sentiment. He converts it throughout to the support and glorification of Jewish institutions. Thus, if a man honors seven, he says, he will devote the Sabbath to meditation and philosophy.[276] Further, as seven is the symbol of rest and tranquillity, the Sabbath must be a day of perfect rest. Ten is magnified so as to honor the Decalogue,[277] fifty so as to honor the Feast of Pentecost. So, too, the Pythagoreans' mathematical conceptions of God as "the beginning and limit of all things," or, again, as the principle of equality, are approved by Philo, "because they breed in the soul the fairest and most nourishing fruit—piety." In short, Philo's Pythagoreanism only emphasizes his commanding purpose—to deepen and recommend the Jewish God-idea and the Jewish method of life.