PHILO JUDAEUS

PHILO JUDAEUS (c. 20 bce–50 ce), Hellenistic Jewish thinker, author of an elaborate synthesis of Jewish religious thought and Greek philosophy. Although the church fathers know him as Philo Judaeus (Jerome, De viris illustribus 11), modern scholars often designate him Philo of Alexandria, to distinguish him from various pagan Greek authors of the same name. Philo's work marks the climax of a long chain of Hellenistic Jewish writings. His mildly atticized Greek, which is marked by a strong Platonic coloring, is unexceptionable; his encyclopedic knowledge of Greek literature and rhetoric is impressive. Disdaining a philosophically systematic exposition of his reinterpretation of Judaism, Philo assumed instead the role of scriptural exegete. He may have believed that the success of his entire enterprise was largely dependent on his ability to convince his readers that the mystical Platonism through which his Jewish understanding was refracted was no arbitrary construct imposed on the Mosaic text, but could readily be deduced from every one of its verses.

Although fully acquainted with the Greek philosophical texts firsthand and in no way restricted to manuals or digests, Philo is clearly not to be regarded as an original philosopher. He saw his task more modestly, as that of the great reconciler who would bridge two apparently disparate traditions. Although there is still no consensus, the view is gaining ground that the apparent eclecticism of his thought is in fact representative of the Middle Platonic tradition (stretching from c. 80 bce to c. 220 ce), a highly stoicized form of Platonism, streaked with Neo-Pythagorean concerns, which included a large dose of arithmology, or number symbolism.

Life and Works

Philo belonged to a wealthy, aristocratic Jewish family (of priestly descent, if Jerome is to be credited) that was readily attracted by the glitter of the Hellenistic world. His brother Alexander was an alabarch (usually equated with arabarch ), or customs agent, for the collection of dues on all goods imported into Egypt from the East, and his wealth was such that he could grant Agrippa, the grandson of Herod the Great, a loan of two hundred thousand drachmas (equivalent to fifty-four thousand dollars); thus was established a connection that ultimately led to the betrothal of Agrippa's daughter Berenice to Alexander's son Marcus. His great wealth is further attested by his provision of silver and gold plates for nine gates of the Jerusalem Temple. His other son, Tiberius Julius Alexander, to whom Philo addressed his dialogue On Providence and who was described by Josephus Flavius as "not remaining true to his ancestral practices," served as procurator of the province of Judaea (46–48 ce) and as prefect of Egypt under Nero.

Of Philo himself, aside from the fact that he headed the embassy to (Gaius) Caligula in 39–40 ce and visited the Jerusalem Temple, very little is known. Though silent with regard to his Jewish education, he speaks enthusiastically of his Greek training and with engaging melancholy of his having been torn at some point from his "heavenly lookout," where he had consorted with divine principles and doctrines, to be hurled into a vast sea of civil cares. His constant use of athletic imagery, including references to specific athletic and theatrical events that he himself had attended and a triple reference to God as the "president of the games," shows him to have been an aficionado of the sports world. When this trait is coupled with his passionate devotion to speculative philosophy, one recognizes the presence of a Diaspora Jewish intellectual of a type utterly foreign to his Palestinian counterpart.

The Philonic corpus may be divided into three groups: historical or apologetic, philosophical (comprising four treatises, two of which are in dialogue form and preserved only in Armenian and some Greek fragments), and exegetical. The last is subdivided into three Pentateuchal commentaries: the Allegory of the Law or those treatises which begin with a scriptural passage; the Exposition of the Law or those treatises whose structure is shaped by a broad theme indicated in their title; and Questions and Answers on Genesis and Exodus. There are also references in Philo to a number of his treatises that are no longer extant. The question of the chronology of Philo's works remains problematic but the earlier tendency to assign his philosophical works to a youthful period is no longer accepted.

Exegetical Technique

Philo's attempt to read Greek philosophy into Mosaic scripture was no innovation on his part. He was fully aware of the earlier and less ambitious attempts by Pseudo-Aristeas (c. 130 bce) and Aristobulus (c. 175 bce), though he was also undoubtedly heir to a rich body of scholastic tradition that has vanished but to which he frequently makes allusion. He was also fully alert to the techniques employed by many Middle Platonists in their attempt to foist post-Pythagorean doctrines, including even their own, on Pythagoras (fifth century bce) himself. Following in their footsteps, Philo put Moses forward as the greatest authority of all, as the teacher of Pythagoras and, indeed, of all Greek philosophers and lawgivers.

The main exegetical technique for Philo's vast enterprise, however, was provided by the Greek allegorical tradition, which had been initiated by Theagenes of Rhegium (sixth century bce) in order to defend Homer against the detractors of his theology; the gods' names were made to refer to various dispositions of the soul, and their internecine struggles to the opposition between the natural elements. The Stoics expanded the Cynics' employment of Homeric allegory in the interests of a philosophical system and made much use of the etymologizing of names (of the gods, though not of the heroes), a procedure that had much appeal for Philo. For an important reassessment of Stoic allegorizing, see A. A. Long, "Stoic Readings of Homer," in Homer's Ancient Readers, ed. Robert Lamberton and John J. Keaney (Princeton, 1992) 41–66. Moreover, his preoccupation with the "allegory of the soul" is very similar to the later Neoplatonic allegories clustering around Odysseus, which detect in his adventures the mystical history of the soul on its way to its homeland.

John Dillon in 1977 noted the essential unity in the tradition of commentary that Philo's exegetical works and the Neoplatonic commentaries exemplify and has concluded that their common source was the Stoic exegesis of the last two centuries bce, especially that by Crates of Mallus and Herodicus of Babylon. Thomas H. Tobin pointed out in 1983 that Stoic and Middle Platonic allegory did not include the recognition of different levels of interpretation: the allegorical interpretations involved either a rejection of the literal or complete obliviousness to it. Philo is the earliest extant example of a writer who tries to maintain the validity of both levels; thus he involved himself in a controversy with other Jewish allegorists.

A novice in the use of Hebrew texts, Philo relied on the Septuagint, which he happily considered inspired. D. W. Gooding has demonstrated that Philo shows no awareness of the Hebrew underlying the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible, for he uniformly cites the Septuagint, which, given its frequent inadequacy, he would surely not have done without explanation had he known the underlying Hebrew, and he occasionally offers expositions of the Greek that the Hebrew would have forbidden (see David Winston and John Dillon, Two Treatises of Philo of Alexandria, Chico, 1983, pp. 119–125).

Thought and Influence

Philo's understanding of biblical thought is rooted in his abiding confidence in the existence of God as a supremely transcendent being, one absolutely without quality, whose pervasive immanence rules and directs all. The first half of this seemingly paradoxical concept of transcendent immanence has its source in the Old and Middle Academies, apparently going back to Plato's successor Speusippus (d. 339/8 bce), and was more fully elaborated by some of the Neo-Pythagoreans as well as by the Middle Platonist Eudorus of Alexandria (fl. 25 bce), who postulated a supranoetic First Principle above a pair of opposites, the Monad and the Dyad. The second half derives from a central emphasis of Stoic teaching, which envisions the omnipresent vitality of an all-traversing Logos whose highest terrestrial manifestation is the human intellect, which is identified by both Philo and the Stoics as an inseparable portion of the divine mind. Humans are thus akin to the divine and has unbroken access to it from within.

Philo defines two paths that lead to a knowledge of God's existence. In On Rewards and Punishments 41 he speaks of those who have apprehended God through his works as advancing on a sort of heavenly ladder and conjecturing his existence through plausible inference. The true friends of God, however, "are those who have apprehended him through himself without the cooperation of reasoned inference, as light is seen by light" (ibid.), a formula later used by Plotinus. Although there is no consensus concerning the precise significance of Philo's second way to God, it is very likely based on his notion of humanity's direct access to God from within and may perhaps be viewed as an early form of the ontological argument. A similar argument for God's existence seems to be found in both the works of the Stoics and in Plotinus.

Philo's theory of creation is based on Plato's Timaeus as interpreted by Middle Platonism. God created the universe out of a relatively nonexistent and qualityless primordial matter that contains nothing lovely and is utterly passive and lifeless. All things were created simultaneously, and the sequential account of creation in Genesis is only meant to indicate the logical order in God's design.

Although the human soul, as a fragment of the Logos, might be thought to have a natural claim on immortality, the latter can be forfeited if the soul is not properly assimilated into its divine source. From Philo's Platonist perspective, the body is a corpse entombing the soul, which at its death returns to its own proper life. The gradual removal of the psyche from the sensible realm and its ascent to a life of perfection is represented for Philo by two triads of biblical figures: Enoch, Enosh, and Noah; Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. The Abraham of Philo's allegory is a mystical philosopher who, after having mastered the encyclical or general studies (symbolized by Hagar), in which stage all he could produce was sophistry (Ishmael), abandoned the realm of sense (symbolized in his parting with Lot) for the brighter regions of intelligible reality and, despite his initial flirtation with Chaldean pantheism, has attained to the highest vision of deity, resulting in his transformation into a perfect embodiment of natural law.

In a 1965 work, Pagan and Christian in an Age of Anxiety, E. R. Dodds has correctly noted that the ecstatic form of prophecy as defined by Philo is not a description of mystical union but a state of temporary possession (p. 71f.). Philo, however, speaks also of another form of prophecy, which may be designated "hermeneutical" and is mediated not through ecstatic possession but through the divine voice. Whereas in the state of possession the prophet's sovereign mind is entirely preempted, it is clear from Philo's analysis of the giving of the Decalogue, the paradigm of hermeneutical, or divine-voice, prophecy, that in the latter the inspired mind is extraordinarily quickened. Since ecstatic possession is employed by Philo for the explanation of predictive prophecy alone, whereas the core of the Mosaic prophecy, the special laws, is delivered by him in his role of hermeneutical prophet, it is in this form of prophecy that one must locate Philo's conception of mystical union. In his allegorical interpretation of the divine voice as the projection of a special "rational soul full of clearness and distinctness" making unmediated contact with the inspired mind that "makes the first advance," it is not difficult to discern a reference to the activation of human intuitive intellect (On the Decalogue 33, 35). In Philo's hermeneutical prophecy, then, one may detect the union of the human mind with the divine mind, or, in Dodd's terms, a psychic ascent rather than a supernatural descent.

Philo's mystical passages contain most of the characteristic earmarks of mystical experience: knowledge of God as humanity's supreme bliss and separation from him as the greatest of evils; the soul's intense yearning for the divine; its recognition of its nothingness and of its need to go out of itself; attachment to God; the realization that it is God alone who acts; a preference for contemplative prayer; a timeless union with the All and the resulting serenity; the suddenness with which the vision appears; the experience of sober intoxication; and, finally, the ebb and flow of mystical experience. Philo was thus, at the very least, an intellectual, if not a practicing, mystic.

Philo never had a major impact on Jewish thought. His name appears nowhere in rabbinic literature, and were it not for the preservation of his works by the church, they would surely have perished. In the Middle Ages Jews had access at best to an Arabic or Syriac translation of a small portion of his works. It was not until the sixteenth century that Philo was rediscovered, by ʿAzaryah dei Rossi, who read his work in a Latin translation and outlined a number of his characteristic doctrines in his Me'or ʿeinayim (Mantua, 1573). His attitude toward Philo, however, though appreciative, is at best ambivalent. Yosef Shelomoh Delmedigo (1591–1655) read Philo in the original Greek and made a Hebrew translation of excerpts from his writing, which unfortunately was stolen from him and never recovered. Simone Luzzatto, in his Italian Discorso (1638) on the Jews of Venice, admired Philo, whom he cited from a Latin version, and believed that his motive for allegorizing the scriptures was to attract his pagan audience. Finally, Nahman Krochmal (1785–1840) includes in his Moreh nevukhei ha-zeman (Guide for the Perplexed of the Time, 1851) a Hebrew translation of the account of Philo by J. A. W. Neander (1789–1850, née David Mendel), a baptized Jew who was a professor of church history in Berlin.

See Also

Logos.

Bibliography

The older literature on Philo is fully detailed in Erwin R. Goodenough's The Politics of Philo Judaeus (1938; reprint, Hildesheim, 1967), pp. 127–348. An excellent annotated bibliography for the years 1937–1962 is provided by Louis H. Feldman in Scholarship on Philo and Josephus, 1937–1962 (New York, 1963). Earle Hilgert's "Bibliographia Philoniana, 1935–1975" appears in volume 2.21.1 of Aufstieg und Niedergang der römischen Welt (Berlin and New York, 1984) a volume completely devoted to Philo.

Exhaustive bibliographies of Philo with annotation are provided by Roberto Radice and David T. Runia, Philo of Alexandria: An Annotated Bibliography 1937–1986 (Leiden, 1988); and David T. Runia, Philo of Alexandria: An Annotated Bibliography 1987–1996 (Leiden, 2000). These two annotated bibliographies of Philo are continued in The Studia Philonica Annual ed. by D. T. Runia and Gregory E. Sterling (1989–). Günter Mayer's Index Philoneus (Berlin, 1974), and Peder Borgen et al., The Philo Index: A Complete Greek Word Index to the Writings of Philo of Alexandria (Grand Rapids, 2d ed., 2000)] supplement Hans Leisegang's index (vol. 7) of the Editio maior of Philo, 7 vols. in 4, edited by Leopold Cohn and Paul Wendland (Berlin, 1896–1930).

For German, French, and English translations of Philo, with very useful notes, see Die Werke Philos von Alexandria, 7 vols., edited by Leopold Cohn et al. (Breslau, 1909–1964); Les œuvres de Philon d'Alexandrie, 36 vols., edited by Roger Arnaldez et al. (Paris, 1961–); and Philo, with an English translation by F. H. Colson and G. H. Whitaker, "Loeb Classical Library" (Cambridge, Mass., 1929–1962), plus two supplementary volumes translated by Ralph Marcus (Cambridge, Mass., 1953). Fully annotated editions of Philo's works include In flaccum, by Herbert Box (Oxford, 1939); Legatio ad Gaium, by E. Mary Smallwood (Leiden, 1961); De animalibus, by Abraham Terian (Chico, Calif., 1981); De gigantibus and Quod Deus sit immutabilis, by David Winston and John Dillon (Chico, Calif., 1983); and David T. Runia, Philo of Alexandria: On the Creation of the Cosmos according to Moses, Introduction, Translation and Commentary (Leiden, 2001), which has become the definitive commentary of this work. A useful anthology of Philo's writings, translated by the author of this entry, is Philo of Alexandria: The Contemplative Life, Giants, and Selections (New York, 1981).

The most balanced general book on Philo is Émile Bréhier's Les idées philosophiques et religieuses de Philon d'Alexandrie, 2d ed., rev. (Paris, 1925). The large monographs by Walther Völker, Fortschritt und Vollendung bei Philo von Alexandrien (Leipzig, 1938), and Harry A. Wolfson, Philo: Foundations of Religious Philosophy in Judaism, Christianity and Islam, 2 vols., rev. ed. (Cambridge, Mass., 1962), are indispensable for their very rich presentations of data but are somewhat one-sided in their interpretations. Philon d'Alexandrie: Colloque, Centre national de la recherche scientifique, Lyon, 11–15 septembre 1966 (Paris, 1967) offers a splendid series of articles on Philo.

Valentin Nikiprowetzky's Le commentaire de l'écriture chez Philon d'Alexandrie (Leiden, 1977) is a rich study of Philo's exegetical approach. It is now supplemented by David T. Runia, Exegesis and Philosophy (Variorum, 1990); Peder Borgen, Philo of Alexandria: An Exegete for His Time (Leiden, 1997); David M. Hay, ed., Both Literal and Allegorical: Studies in Philo of Alexandria's Questions and Answers on Genesis and Exodus (Atlanta, 1991); John P. Kenney, The School of Moses: Studies in Philo snd Hellenistic Religion In Memory of H. R. Moehring (Atlanta, 1995); and A. Kamesar, "The Literary Genres of the Pentateuch as Seen from the Greek Perspective: The Testimony of Philo of Alexandria," in The Studia Philonica Annual 9 (1997) 143–189. For Philo's etymologizing of biblical names, see Lester L. Grabbe's thoroughgoing study Etymology in Early Jewish Interpretation: The Hebrew Names in Philo (Atlanta, 1988). Excellent accounts of Philo's Platonism are John Dillon's The Middle Platonists (London, 1977), pp. 139–183, and David T. Runia's Philo of Alexandria and the Timaeus of Plato (Leiden, 1986). A very stimulating study of the exegetical sources of Philo's cosmological exegesis is Thomas H. Tobin's The Creation of Man: Philo and the History of Interpretation (Washington, D.C., 1983).

Important studies of Philo's relationship to Judaism are Isaak Heinemann's Philons griechische und jüdische Bildung (1929; reprint, Hildesheim, 1962); Yehoshua Amir, Die hellenistische Gestalt des Judentums bei Philon von Alexandrien (Neukirchen-Vluyn, 1983); Ellen Birnbaum, The Place of Judaim in Philo's Thought: Israel, Jews, and Proselytes (Atlanta, 1996); Naomi G. Cohen, Philo Judaeus: His Universe of Discourse (Frankfurt am Main, 1995); Alan Mendelsson, Philo's Jewish Identity ; Jutta Leonhardt, Jewish Worship in Philo of Alexandria (Tübingen, 2001); and Maren R. Niehoff, Philo on Jewish Identity and Culture (Tübingen, 2001). For a study of Philo's mysticism, see E. R. Goodenough, By Light Light: The Mystic Gospel of Hellenistic Judaism (New Haven, 1935; reprint by Philo Press, Amsterdam, 1969), which is very stimulating but highly speculative; my book Logos and Mystical Theology in Philo of Alexandria (Cincinnati, 1985); and Christian Noak, Gottesbewusstsein (Tübingen, 2000).

For Philo's theory of Mosaic prophecy, see the excellent study of Helmut Burkhardt, Die Inspiration heiliger Schriften bei Philo von Alexandrien (Giessen, 1988); D. Winston, "Two Types of Mosaic Prophecy According to Philo," Journal for the Study of the Pseudepigrapha 4 (1989): 49–67; "Philo and the Wisdom of Solomon on Creation, Revelation, and Providence," in James L. Kugel, Shem in the Tents of Japhet: Essays on the Encounter of Judaism and Hellenism (Leiden, 2002) 109–130, esp. 116–127. For Philo's views of sex, see Dorothy Sly, Philo's Perception of Women (Atlanta, 1990); Gregory E. Sterling, ed., The Ancestral; Philosophy in Second Temple Judaism: Collected Essays of David Winston (Providence, 2001) 199–219. For Philo's rhetoric, see T. M. Conley, "Philo of Alexandria," in A Handbook of Classical Rhetoric in the Hellenistic Period, ed. S. E. Porter (Leiden, 1997); and Manuel Alexandre, Jr., Rhetorical Argumentation in Philo of Alexandre (Atlanta, 1999). For the role of the encyclical studies in Philo, see the good study by Alan Mendelson, Secular Education in Philo of Alexandria (Cincinnati, 1982), and for Philo and the Sophists, see Bruce W. Winter, Philo and Paul Among the Sophists (2d ed., Grand Rapids, Mich., 2002). A good account of Philo's doctrine of divine providence is Peter Frick, Divine Providence in Philo of Alexandria (Tübingen, 1999). A very useful account of Philo's works and the manuscript tradition is that of Jenny Morris in Emil Schürer, The History of the Jewish People in the Age of Christ (Edinburgh, 1987), revised and edited by Geza Vermes, Fergus Millar, and Martin Goodman, vol. 3.2, pp. 809–870.

David Winston (1987 and 2005)