Supposing Philosophia Judaica is a woman and has a son, what would be his name, if not Philo Judaeus? (The reader is strongly advised to recognize here one of my favorite Nietzschean allusions, which I love to play with, in different contexts.) And then, who might be his father, if not the very great Zeus himself?
Properly Jewish, by his mother, yet bearing some unmistakably Hellenic features, well justifying that other name he is known under: Philo of Alexandria… (The city of Alexandria was named, of course, after that great Hellenizer Alexander the Great.)
What little is known about the life of Philo Judaeus, ought to be taken with a large grain of salt, thanks to the highly discreditable authority of Josephus Flavius (of whom later), who is apparently responsible for the larger chunk of it, while all the other sources of personal knowledge about him, even when put all together, remain miniscule, except for the bits and pieces about himself, which he time and again interjects into his writings in various places. However, there is no argument about the approximate time of his birth between 15 and 10 BC, which makes him, timewise, a younger contemporary of Jesus, of whom, judging by Philo’s writings, he may have known nothing. Raised in the Greek-speaking Jewish community of Alexandria, his lifestyle was assimilationist, not dissimilationist, his educational staples included a broad variety of Greek literature, with epic poetry and drama perhaps the most prominent. He mastered the Greek rhetorical skill and praised the gymnasium. His education may have included all the subjects that he credits the education of Moses with (see his work On the Life of Moses, addressed to the Gentiles, in a consistent effort on his part to harmonize Judaism with the contemporary mainstream trends), that is, arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, harmonics, philosophy, grammar, rhetoric, and logic. (He also enjoyed the Greek theater, and, in one place in his writings he even described his attendance of a Euripidean tragedy in considerable detail. In a nutshell, Philo was “Greek” in more ways than that one, more about which, instantly.
As a Jew, his formal education was quite limited, as the only kind of Jewish schools he chooses to mention were those which met on Sabbaths only, to lecture on Jewish ethics. However he sees himself as a bona fide observant Jew, and insists that no Jew can neglect the observance of any divinely-ordained Jewish practice. Alexandrian Jews in those times held that the Septuagint, that is, the Greek translation of the Biblia Hebraica, had the same aura of divine inspiration, as the King James translation of the Bible was to enjoy among the English-speaking Protestants ages later. Yet Philo was never a fundamentalist in our Christian sense, that is, he was not a literalist, but he maintained a healthy balance between too much literalness and what he saw as excessive emphasis on allegorical interpretation, which in his opinion diluted the importance of observance of the Scripture’s basic precepts.
In his allegorical treatment of the Biblical stories, he presented them as philosophical principles, whereas in the Allegories of the Sacred Laws he considered the texts about the six-day Creation as purely mythical.
Again, as a Jew, he is an invaluable source of commentary on the Jewish law, where, among his 25 extant works on the subject, On the Special Laws and Allegories of the Laws are particularly important. His work on Halakhah and Jewish ritual observance is valued unquestionably as the largest repository of Jewish law, excepting the Talmud, that is, prior to the Middle Ages. And yet, despite all his considerable influence on the later Christian thought, his recognition by his own was practically non-existent, and until most recent times his name was virtually unknown among the Jews.
But of much greater interest to me in this subsection are his works in general philosophy, where he reveals himself as a true son of Zeus, that is, as a plethora of all things Greek, particularly, as a humble disciple of Plato on the one hand, (as a matter of fact, Saint Jerome quotes an apparently very popular quip about him among Jerome’s fellow scholars, namely: “Either Plato philonizes, or Philo platonizes”), and of the Greek Stoics (whose terminology he adopted almost indiscriminately, somewhat akin to Schopenhauer adopting Kantian terminology in his Die Welt, but for the different purpose of much harsher criticism of his golden goose than in Schopenhauer’s case, where Schopenhauer, at least, shows some respect to “one of the very greatest among all philosophers”), on the other.
As if these two major influences were not enough, Philo happily follows Aristotle (whose influence in the questions of cosmology and ethics is easily noticeable), plus, the Neo-Pythagoreans (to whom he owes his addiction to the mystic significance of numbers, especially, of the number seven), plus the Cynics. (To these last, but not least, he owes the distinctive formal structure of his homilies.)
In his relative lack of originality as a philosopher and in his pro-Greek bias, Philo is by no means unique, but quite the contrary, he is a true representative of this earliest stage of general Jewish philosophy, which, in the most conventional sense, emerged under weighty Greek influence. But to Philo goes the credit for the first serious systematic attempt to apply Greek philosophical concepts to the basic Jewish doctrines, or perhaps I should restate this as “to restate” the basic Jewish conceptions in Greek philosophical terms.
In this regard, his most valuable contribution by far (at least in the opinion of the Christian philosophers and theologians) is his application of the Greek concept of “Logos” to Biblical theology, where many authorities on Biblical criticism are ready and willing to credit him with direct influence on his younger contemporary St. John, the author of the Fourth Gospel, in the Evangelist’s use of Logos, and its celebrated identification with Jesus Christ.
Philo actually borrowed the concept of Logos from the Greek Stoics, for whom it signified the universal law at work in the world. While he rejected the Stoic contention of the Logos as being both material and divine, he held that Logos was that very agency by which the transcendent God of Creation acts, and thus manifests His Infinite Self to his finite Creation. (See my discussion of Tzimtzum and Gvul earlier in this section, but not so much in a direct connection to Philo, as in tracing the main thoroughfares of the Jewish thought.)
The idea of God acting through Logos is well-rooted in the Torah. In fact, it is explicitly stated in the very first verses of the first chapter of the Bereshit/Genesis:
“And God said, Let there be light, and there was light.” (Bereshit/Genesis 1:3, et cetera.) So that there could be no doubt as to the very same mode of Creation employed in Bereshit/Genesis 1:1 (“Bereshit bara Elohim et Hashamayim veet Haaretz: In the beginning God created the Heaven and the Earth”), Psalm 33:6 (even though not as authoritative to the Jews than the Torah, still authoritative enough for them as a corroboration of the Torah, and of course of equal authority to the Christians) states that “By the word of the Lord were the heavens made,” putting on the record that same identical mode of Creation by Logos/Word in God’s first Biblical act of Creation.
In his appropriation of the word Logos, Philo is, therefore, hardly a borrower from the Greeks, considering that his own Jewish Torah, our own Christian Bible, starts with God’s act of Creation by word, as much as he is a reconciler of the Jewish and Greek philosophical/theological traditions, finding them in harmony.
There is much more to be said about Philo’s philosophy, for the rest of which I intend to send the reader to proper philosophical anthologies, that may in turn guide him or her toward the most preferable mode of study, namely, reading these writers firsthand. My desire, both in this entry and in all entries like this, is to make a number of important points of my own, but immersing them into a minimal context, allowing a minimum of reference, to keep them comprehensible, in terms of their connection to the already known historical facts.
As a final note, it does not matter how well or little known Philo Judaeus was to the Jewish thinkers of the later generations. Even though his father was Zeus, as I said, in the final analysis, his mother, Philosophia Judaica, has proved herself genetically of greater importance than the father (Hence, my title Mothers and Sons, rather than Fathers and Sons, or Parents and Sons, or any other such variation on the Turgenev theme.) The same genes as Philo Judaeus possessed, can be found in the Talmud, in the Kabbalah, and in the Jewish intellectual propensity as such. I might also add that Philo’s remarkable contention that mystic ecstasy is far superior (in the Schopenhauerian conception of the Will, in its strictest sense, as the Kantian Ding an-Sich) to all kinds of philosophical and theological speculation even with rationality at its best, reveals the genes of the great Jewish Neviim of the Bible, before Philo; and of the wild followers of Baal Shem Tov, after Philo, leading all the way to the existing modern phenomenon of ultra-Conservative Hasidism, the only authentic expression of that Jewish genetic code traced back to its source, the mixed bag as shocking and occasionally revolting as the unembellished and unflattering stories of the Jewish Patriarchs in the Bereshit/Genesis, yet as powerful, steeped in meaningfulness and wisdom, as that one and only component of what may be called our common Judaeo-Christian legacy.
Properly Jewish, by his mother, yet bearing some unmistakably Hellenic features, well justifying that other name he is known under: Philo of Alexandria… (The city of Alexandria was named, of course, after that great Hellenizer Alexander the Great.)
What little is known about the life of Philo Judaeus, ought to be taken with a large grain of salt, thanks to the highly discreditable authority of Josephus Flavius (of whom later), who is apparently responsible for the larger chunk of it, while all the other sources of personal knowledge about him, even when put all together, remain miniscule, except for the bits and pieces about himself, which he time and again interjects into his writings in various places. However, there is no argument about the approximate time of his birth between 15 and 10 BC, which makes him, timewise, a younger contemporary of Jesus, of whom, judging by Philo’s writings, he may have known nothing. Raised in the Greek-speaking Jewish community of Alexandria, his lifestyle was assimilationist, not dissimilationist, his educational staples included a broad variety of Greek literature, with epic poetry and drama perhaps the most prominent. He mastered the Greek rhetorical skill and praised the gymnasium. His education may have included all the subjects that he credits the education of Moses with (see his work On the Life of Moses, addressed to the Gentiles, in a consistent effort on his part to harmonize Judaism with the contemporary mainstream trends), that is, arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, harmonics, philosophy, grammar, rhetoric, and logic. (He also enjoyed the Greek theater, and, in one place in his writings he even described his attendance of a Euripidean tragedy in considerable detail. In a nutshell, Philo was “Greek” in more ways than that one, more about which, instantly.
As a Jew, his formal education was quite limited, as the only kind of Jewish schools he chooses to mention were those which met on Sabbaths only, to lecture on Jewish ethics. However he sees himself as a bona fide observant Jew, and insists that no Jew can neglect the observance of any divinely-ordained Jewish practice. Alexandrian Jews in those times held that the Septuagint, that is, the Greek translation of the Biblia Hebraica, had the same aura of divine inspiration, as the King James translation of the Bible was to enjoy among the English-speaking Protestants ages later. Yet Philo was never a fundamentalist in our Christian sense, that is, he was not a literalist, but he maintained a healthy balance between too much literalness and what he saw as excessive emphasis on allegorical interpretation, which in his opinion diluted the importance of observance of the Scripture’s basic precepts.
In his allegorical treatment of the Biblical stories, he presented them as philosophical principles, whereas in the Allegories of the Sacred Laws he considered the texts about the six-day Creation as purely mythical.
Again, as a Jew, he is an invaluable source of commentary on the Jewish law, where, among his 25 extant works on the subject, On the Special Laws and Allegories of the Laws are particularly important. His work on Halakhah and Jewish ritual observance is valued unquestionably as the largest repository of Jewish law, excepting the Talmud, that is, prior to the Middle Ages. And yet, despite all his considerable influence on the later Christian thought, his recognition by his own was practically non-existent, and until most recent times his name was virtually unknown among the Jews.
But of much greater interest to me in this subsection are his works in general philosophy, where he reveals himself as a true son of Zeus, that is, as a plethora of all things Greek, particularly, as a humble disciple of Plato on the one hand, (as a matter of fact, Saint Jerome quotes an apparently very popular quip about him among Jerome’s fellow scholars, namely: “Either Plato philonizes, or Philo platonizes”), and of the Greek Stoics (whose terminology he adopted almost indiscriminately, somewhat akin to Schopenhauer adopting Kantian terminology in his Die Welt, but for the different purpose of much harsher criticism of his golden goose than in Schopenhauer’s case, where Schopenhauer, at least, shows some respect to “one of the very greatest among all philosophers”), on the other.
As if these two major influences were not enough, Philo happily follows Aristotle (whose influence in the questions of cosmology and ethics is easily noticeable), plus, the Neo-Pythagoreans (to whom he owes his addiction to the mystic significance of numbers, especially, of the number seven), plus the Cynics. (To these last, but not least, he owes the distinctive formal structure of his homilies.)
In his relative lack of originality as a philosopher and in his pro-Greek bias, Philo is by no means unique, but quite the contrary, he is a true representative of this earliest stage of general Jewish philosophy, which, in the most conventional sense, emerged under weighty Greek influence. But to Philo goes the credit for the first serious systematic attempt to apply Greek philosophical concepts to the basic Jewish doctrines, or perhaps I should restate this as “to restate” the basic Jewish conceptions in Greek philosophical terms.
In this regard, his most valuable contribution by far (at least in the opinion of the Christian philosophers and theologians) is his application of the Greek concept of “Logos” to Biblical theology, where many authorities on Biblical criticism are ready and willing to credit him with direct influence on his younger contemporary St. John, the author of the Fourth Gospel, in the Evangelist’s use of Logos, and its celebrated identification with Jesus Christ.
Philo actually borrowed the concept of Logos from the Greek Stoics, for whom it signified the universal law at work in the world. While he rejected the Stoic contention of the Logos as being both material and divine, he held that Logos was that very agency by which the transcendent God of Creation acts, and thus manifests His Infinite Self to his finite Creation. (See my discussion of Tzimtzum and Gvul earlier in this section, but not so much in a direct connection to Philo, as in tracing the main thoroughfares of the Jewish thought.)
The idea of God acting through Logos is well-rooted in the Torah. In fact, it is explicitly stated in the very first verses of the first chapter of the Bereshit/Genesis:
“And God said, Let there be light, and there was light.” (Bereshit/Genesis 1:3, et cetera.) So that there could be no doubt as to the very same mode of Creation employed in Bereshit/Genesis 1:1 (“Bereshit bara Elohim et Hashamayim veet Haaretz: In the beginning God created the Heaven and the Earth”), Psalm 33:6 (even though not as authoritative to the Jews than the Torah, still authoritative enough for them as a corroboration of the Torah, and of course of equal authority to the Christians) states that “By the word of the Lord were the heavens made,” putting on the record that same identical mode of Creation by Logos/Word in God’s first Biblical act of Creation.
In his appropriation of the word Logos, Philo is, therefore, hardly a borrower from the Greeks, considering that his own Jewish Torah, our own Christian Bible, starts with God’s act of Creation by word, as much as he is a reconciler of the Jewish and Greek philosophical/theological traditions, finding them in harmony.
There is much more to be said about Philo’s philosophy, for the rest of which I intend to send the reader to proper philosophical anthologies, that may in turn guide him or her toward the most preferable mode of study, namely, reading these writers firsthand. My desire, both in this entry and in all entries like this, is to make a number of important points of my own, but immersing them into a minimal context, allowing a minimum of reference, to keep them comprehensible, in terms of their connection to the already known historical facts.
As a final note, it does not matter how well or little known Philo Judaeus was to the Jewish thinkers of the later generations. Even though his father was Zeus, as I said, in the final analysis, his mother, Philosophia Judaica, has proved herself genetically of greater importance than the father (Hence, my title Mothers and Sons, rather than Fathers and Sons, or Parents and Sons, or any other such variation on the Turgenev theme.) The same genes as Philo Judaeus possessed, can be found in the Talmud, in the Kabbalah, and in the Jewish intellectual propensity as such. I might also add that Philo’s remarkable contention that mystic ecstasy is far superior (in the Schopenhauerian conception of the Will, in its strictest sense, as the Kantian Ding an-Sich) to all kinds of philosophical and theological speculation even with rationality at its best, reveals the genes of the great Jewish Neviim of the Bible, before Philo; and of the wild followers of Baal Shem Tov, after Philo, leading all the way to the existing modern phenomenon of ultra-Conservative Hasidism, the only authentic expression of that Jewish genetic code traced back to its source, the mixed bag as shocking and occasionally revolting as the unembellished and unflattering stories of the Jewish Patriarchs in the Bereshit/Genesis, yet as powerful, steeped in meaningfulness and wisdom, as that one and only component of what may be called our common Judaeo-Christian legacy.
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