Who is philo

In the same sentence at Post. In De providentia as well we find strong elements of a refutation of Epicurean denial of Providence. And in Aet. In addition, atomism becomes an allegorical instrument in the splendid exegesis of Moses killing the Egyptian Fug. The Egyptian, who symbolizes pleasure, is buried in the sand, symbol of atoms. Nothing in all this is truly unexpected.

Moreover, despite many appearances, Philo does not consider pleasure an absolute evil. For him, it has a place in the divine program of Creation since it plays an essential role in procreation. The error lay with those who would transform a relative good into a perfect one. There are many arguments to defend this association, but it would be an error to affirm that he was merely an allegorist. In many passages he defines with precision what can be called his methodology of allegory.

In Praem. It must be added that he not only uses the word allegoria , but also uponoia , a Platonic term which by this time may have been somewhat archaic. The two terms are not exactly synonymous for him. In Opif. Nevertheless, according to Philo, it is an error to exclude literal meanings.

As he notes in Migr. Such men I for my part should blame for handling the matter in too easy and off-hand a manner: they ought to have given careful attention to both aims, to a more full and exact investigations of what is not seen and in what is seen to be stewards without reproach. For example, an allegorical interpretation of the garment of the high priest Mos. This suggests a Jewish source.

He does not hesitate to evoke some of these by name. For example, speaking about the earth in Aet. The allegorical interpretation is here based on etymology, as are those of the greatest Stoic allegorist of the imperial period, Cornutus. Most of the time, however, he adapts classical allegorical interpretations to a Jewish context. For example, in Conf. Philo denies that this should be interpreted as a general principle of politics; under his own interpretation, it is instead a poetic reference to almighty God.

In one of his most famous passages, Philo interprets the tale of Mambre, in Genesis —15, where Abraham receives three men he initially believed to be foreigners. The author reminds his readers QG 4.

Since he evokes them regarding the interpretation of some Biblical difficulties, they were most likely Jewish exegetes using Stoic methods in which, at least at that time, etymology played a strong role. Stoic allegoresis, he says,. In fact, the problem of the exact nature of Stoic allegoresis is controversial. Especially when mentioning the fusikoi , he himself draws upon etymology, for example, about Sara whose name in the Chaldean language i.

If it is probable that in Alexandria at this time there were a great variety of allegorists blending literary, philosophical, and spiritual currents, then we can say that Philo was very skillful in drawing upon each of these. The best way to understand the meaning of this phrase is given by Plutarch when he says that Alexander, seeking the proper place for the Egyptian city destined to bear his name, had a vision Life of Alexander In it, Homer recites two verses for him in which he mentioned the island of Paros Odyssey 4.

In the latter case, Homer is not only the greatest poet but also the father of all science. In the former, it is not the poet but the exegete that unveils the meanings of dreams. And dreams sent by God always reveal something about the truth of the world. Philo is also considered the founder of negative theology in the history of monotheistic faith. Given the association of his faith with contemporary forms of Skepticism, he was also the founder of at least a kind of fideism, i.

His apparent versatility in exegesis can give the impression that his only purpose is to make philosophical themes and words coincide with the text of Bible. However, though Philo is not as systematic as Plotinus, there is much more coherence in his physics and metaphysics than one might think. Such a hypothesis cannot be dismissed, but there is no clear evidence of its truth. In any case, negativity is, par excellence , the manner of speaking in the best way possible about God.

It is not the only one; there is also the possibility of declaring His perfection and infinite glory. And metaphors, like those of monarchy, the sower, and the sun, are still different.

I myself was initiated under Moses the God-beloved into his great mysteries, yet when I saw the prophet Jeremiah and knew him to be not only himself enlightened, but a worthy minister of the holy secrets, I was not slow to become his disciple.

Many other elements, especially those of the sacred banquet, resonate with the theme of the mysteries. Many scholars suggested that Philo situated himself in the Platonic tradition of philosophically transposing the Eleusinian mysteries.

In this perspective, the mystery is the allegoric method itself. However, one could object to this interpretation that the meaning of a metaphor is not monolithic. It depends in great part on the identity of the addressee, about which we know little.

Indeed, there was at least one ambiguity: did Philo want to prove to hypothetic Greek readers that Eleusinian mysteries were shadowy images of the only true mysteries, the Jewish ones?

Was he using a kind of spiritual lingua franca elaborated during the pluralistic honeymoon at the beginning of the Ptolemaic period? Even the man who was the closest to God, Moses, could not see Him in the Sinai. This means that without Revelation, it would be impossible to say anything about Him that bore relation with truth.

At the same time, the absolute transcendence of God, as theorized by Philo, could have implied His perfect indifference to the world of matter, time, and sensibility.

Yet, through His providence, God is present in the world He created. It is highly improbable, however, that philosophy had a determining role in shaping his faith and beliefs.

More probable is that he perceived himself in the tradition of biblical translators, the Septuagint being so highly praised by him in the Vita Mosis. In a time when Egypt was Ptolemaic, these translations had both political and cultural purposes.

To comment upon the Bible with philosophical concepts was, in a certain way, to translate it into the language of the new cultural elite, the Roman as well as Greek. Regardless, the central idea was that the word of God had to be mediated to become accessible outside of Israel.

From this point of view, mediation was a central Philonian concept, not only linguistically and culturally, but also ontologically: in Somn. These variations were probably a means to avoid the implication that these powers had an ontological autonomy. Their nature, rather, is merely linguistic and functionalist. From a philosophical point of view, the genealogy of dunamis is incredibly rich since each great Greek philosopher used it with his own semantic specificity. In the Bible, God is omnipotent but there is no systematic presentation of His powers.

Just before the apparition of Middle Platonism, dunamis was present in Stoic doctrine, but with a more reduced range of meaning. The beneficent and the legislative powers are subordinated to them, but in Spec. Before trying to specify the relation between these powers and the logos , it is necessary to add that dunamis is not only a metaphysical term. It bears a psychological meaning as well, for example at Opif. The main problem, in human psychology as with the divine powers, lies in their relation to the logos.

It seems that Philo did his utmost to make the relation between God and the logos as complex as possible. As an example of these difficulties, in Leg. Other things, Philo adds, only exist in speech and sometimes amount to mere nothingness. In the third book of the same treatise Leg.

From a philosophical point of view, if somebody remains in the world of immanence, he can refer to the universal logos , and only to him. But to see the logos as the ultimate expression of the absolute is for Philo an absolute impiety. In Fug. The Pythagorean-Platonic model of Creation acting on undefined matter is thus both preserved and richly transformed. God is unity, and only unity. It is the logos which carries in itself the principle of contraries, mixing good and evil.

This leads in turn to a distinction between ontology and methodology. Anyone who divinizes the world, seeing it as the most perfect expression of the logos , is deeply wrong, since he omits God, the truly supreme genus and the only one not to have been created.

However, the theologian is, mutatis mutandis , like the biologist who today chooses some cells to place under his microscope. This act, of course, does not imply that the biologist forgets the tissue of which these cells are a part.

Themes and language of immanence are for him only a means to better understand the world created by God. For a Stoic, the two formulae were strictly synonymous.

The intermediary status of the logos and the many nuances in the expression of its nature do not prevent Philo from providing a more or less systematic framework. While the demiurge contemplates the Ideas in order to create the World in the Timaeus , in the De opificio , God not only creates the Ideas but organizes them into an intelligible world.

In Her. The former word refers to a Stoic concept, that of spermatikoi logoi , defined as the rational patterns inherent in the principles of organization of the world, but which Philo preferred not to use with precision. In the Quis heres , perhaps under the influence of a Stoicized interpretation of the Timaeus , Philo explains how God created the four elements from undifferentiated matter, then individual beings, by mixing these elements together. For the Stoics, the logos and the law of Nature are perfectly synonymous.

In their definition, the law of Nature is the command of the logos as to what must be done and what avoided. This is perhaps more than a stylistic variation; instead, it may have served to reveal a distance with regard to the canonical doctrine of the law of Nature. This distance appears to be essential, despite many variations and occasional contradictions.

Last but not least, Philo emphasizes the fact that before the Torah, the patriarchs were unwritten incarnations of the law of Nature. Admittedly, his task bordered on the impossible. He had to take into account both the historicity of the Torah and its eternity, its universality, and its institutional status as law of Israel. It is not impossible that he had in mind a model similar to the translation of the Torah into Greek.

There is a plasticity of the law of Nature, at first incarnated by the patriarchs, then written; and a plasticity of the Torah, first in Hebrew, then in Greek. At the same time, their underlying function is always the same: defining a principle of ethical responsibility not exclusively from the rationality of the world but by reference to a personal God who chose Israel to incarnate and bear witness to this principle in its different forms.

The De opificio was often defined as a Jewish version of the Timaeus. In this treatise, Philo proclaims, against Aristotelianism and Stoicism, that God is the unique Creator both of the models for the world and of the world itself.

That does not prevent him from drawing upon patterns elaborated in the somewhat confused but rich period at the end of the first century BCE. The evaluation of the most common model of cosmological creation in the De opificio , that of an active power acting on unqualified matter, is difficult since Philo seems to affirm that God created the world ex nihilo in some passages.

It is probable that there was no significant difference between unqualified matter and pure void for him. The chief contents of the incorporeal cosmos were heaven, an invisible earth, air and void, water, spirit, and light. After the creation of the firmament and of the earth, on the fourth day God proceeded to order the heaven and to adorn it with splendid heavenly bodies.

The explanation of this fourth day is especially interesting given the following elements:. God has absolute liberty, and creates the less-important earth before the more-important celestial bodies. He knows what the then non-existent human beings will think and wants to prevent them from thinking that the movement of the celestial bodies is the cause of everything.

At this point he begins an extensive section on Pythagorean arithmology, including a meditation on the perfection of the number four. On the fifth day, God creates the living beings according to a scala naturae replete with Platonic, Aristotelian, and Stoic echoes. As has been remarked, there is a crucial difference between Plato and Philo on this point Runia Between the fishes, which are the first created, and man, crown of Creation, are birds and land animals.

In fact, argues Philo, God needed no one to create the human being, but preferred that human sins not be attributed to Him. In addition, he cites the Platonic idea of contemplation leading to philosophy, a risky idea since it could lead to such a fascination with worldly things that the Creator would be forgotten and denied, as was the case with the Chaldeans. After a long arithmologic meditation on the hebdomad, the seventh day or Shabbat, Philo arrives at original sin.

It is said that the first man the name Adam is never evoked was most excellent in his body as well as his soul. He lived in perfect harmony with nature, homeless, but the cosmos was his home and city, where he resided with complete safety.

God ascribed to the first man the imposition of names, a philosophical theme with strong Platonic connotations. In the following paragraphs Philo explains his descent into wickedness by the creation of woman. It would be absurd to deny that there are many offensive assertions regarding women in his work.

Woman is the symbol of sensation, man that of reason. These problems are essential in that they deal with sexuality, ethics and ontology alike.

Without trying to defend Philo systematically, one must however emphasize the first sentence of Opif. But since nothing is stable in the world of becoming, mortal beings necessarily undergo reverses and changes, the first human being too had to enjoy some ill fortune.

The first man could not eternally have a perfect life in a world which was not the intelligible one. In Stoic doctrine, the similarity between the sage and God is a permanent one. Philo is much more cautious when saying at Opif. As long as he was single, he resembled God and the cosmos in his solitariness, receiving the delineations of his soul, not all of them but as many as a mortal constitution could contain.

It is necessary in the created world and it is said in Leg. The defenders of pleasure are not absolutely wrong when they say that offspring feel an affinity with it. Their error is not in defending pleasure but in transforming its auxiliary role into the alpha and omega of ethics.

He exposes all that we know about the first three, for example, that body has three dimensions and six ways of moving. But about the intellect, he says that it is absolutely unintelligible. Nothing is known about its nature, its way of arriving in the body, or its place. As with the place of heaven in the world, we are unable to say anything about it. But in contrast with this scientific and philosophical ignorance, the Bible gives its reader true information.

The intellect is a divine emanation Somn. There are grounding elements of the problem: what must the human being do in the face of such problems? She must, like Socrates or like Terah father of Abraham in the Torah, make a constant effort to have better self-knowledge.

Socrates is the man who had no other philosophy than to know himself, while Terah is the very idea of knowing oneself. What does it mean to know oneself? The human being has no other personal good than reason.

The paradoxical aim of reason is to perceive the distance between God and His creation Somn. To know oneself does not mean to have a perfect science of what a soul is. Philo knows all the suppositions elaborated by philosophers and he uses many of them, but without ever saying that he is in possession of knowledge of the soul. In this kind of psychology, it was not essential to know if a soul has seven components besides reason, as it is said by the Stoics, or three, like in the Platonic division, or if it contains, besides reason, nutritive and sensitive parts like in Aristotelianism.

This metaphor strongly reminds us of the Stoic comparison with the octopus, but is also very different from this image. The octopus is a living unity, while the puppet master is essentially different from his puppets.

The Stoic metaphor of the octopus is a monist one, but the Philonian image, inspired from Plato Laws d , is strongly dualistic. The puppets are not even irrational beings as they are mere objects. But it is true that in Leg. There is, however, no contradiction in all this. But when he arrives to the human being at 1. A Stoic image is a good way to speak about living beings, but it is not enough when the narrative is about humans. However, it must be added that in Philo, dualistic images do not imply the division of the soul.

Such are the multi-layered levels of language Philo is capable of using at every page. For him, it is impossible to know what a human soul is, but it is not necessary to have this kind of knowledge in order to try to understand what the meaning of the word of the Lord is. To be conscious of her ignorance in the field of psychology, far from being an obstacle, actually helps to have a better perception of the limitations inherent to human nature.

But this consciousness itself necessarily rises from the confrontation of the philosophical doctrines. It would be an error to affirm that Philo despises and hates the body.

Even if he is often very harsh towards it, he never forgets that when God created the first human being, He made him not only spiritually perfect, but also physically beautiful. He does not see any inconvenience in emphasizing the perfection of sensation or sexuality.

It is said in Opif. It is strange to find in a Jewish biblical commentator the explicit expression of this Greek ideal of humanity. At the same time, it could mean that for Philo the Greek conception of this expression was an erroneous one, since it did not imply an immediate link with divine transcendence. The beauty of the body is in Opif. All these concepts can be found in Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics, but it does not mean that Philo uses them in the same way. In Philo, the body is not a principle of evil, though it can be used as an instrument of perversion when the human being focuses more on himself than on the powers of God.

We find in Leg. The meaning of the expression is perfectly clear, but it is also necessary to remember the context. Philo is commenting on Genesis , where it is said that God killed Er without any justified reason. But at the same time Philo specifies that to create the best things, God had to create less good things. Creation is good by nature fusei and the body is an element of the Creation. The example of Issachar in Leg.

But at the same time, the knowledge of the body can be only phenomenological, while real research is ontological. But all this verbal violence is addressed more to human error on the value of the body than to the body itself created by God. The Hellenistic period was that of a naturalism that only the sceptic Academy undertook to fight it.

The great change brought by Middle Platonism was the irruption of transcendence which seemed to have been forgotten for at least two centuries. And in the case of Philo, transcendence was not only philosophical, but also religious, mainly that of the God of the Bible.

His own description of the world of childhood is a frightening one, a description Sigmund Freud would not have spurned. For him the main ethical purpose is to become closer and closer to God, and so to be in a spiritual kinship with Him. It is not, as in Stoicism, an initial impulse, indicating the path of nature, but the result of a pious asceticism, getting rid of desire and passionate impulses.

It has been suggested that the resemblance to God did not have in Philo any concrete social or ethical consequences, but things are much more complex. In Stoicism, there is a kind of family relationship between human beings, since they alone among animals share reason in a world which is itself exclusively rational.

Philo puts great weight on the specific status of Israel as the only people able to see God, an etymology of which he is very fond. In Alexandria, anti-Semitic propagandists accused Jews of being a group unified through their hatred of other nations, and today in the scholarship, the problem of universalism in Philo is much discussed Berthelot However, it is necessary to distinguish between the ontological level and the ethical level.

Because of its specific relation with God, Israel is the priest of the Nations, for whom it prays and offers sacrifices Abr. At the same time, Philo never denied that non-Jews could reach wisdom.

For him, as well as Jews, Greeks and Barbarians could be ascetics of wisdom. Jewish superiority lies in the unique capacity to articulate the three levels: human individual perfection, with the examples of the patriarchs and Moses; social perfection, that of a society ruled by the laws of Moses; and ontological specificity, due to a deep kinship with God.

In Ios. The main cause of this disaster is the reign of passion, a theme very often evoked in the philosophy of his time. In his exegesis of the Biblical passages relating to human errors, Philo uses many philosophical terms and metaphors. Philo composed commentary-type writings that expounded the text verse by verse, and these provide an important witness to at least one approach to the Scriptures in the Second Temple period from a Jewish-Hellenistic perspective.

For example, there is now a sizeable amount of literature comparing the citation practices of Philo and Paul, since both appear to have relied upon the Septuagint rather than the original Hebrew text, in most cases. But both authors were comfortable modifying the Greek text to their needs, paraphrasing and editing as context required.

Third, Philo famously employed an allegorical hermeneutic to his interpretation of Scripture. Philo was a master of this method, able to couple a Greek worldview—that is, Platonic philosophy—with a Hebrew culture, thoroughly informed by the writings of the Pentateuch.

This syncretistic coupling of the biblical text with Hellenistic thought famously allowed him to reshape Moses, the icon of Second Temple Judaism, according to the image of Plato, the lynchpin of Greek culture and thinking. His historical writings add to our understanding of the life and times of the Roman Empire during the time of the New Testament, including his works On the Embassy to Gaius and Against Flaccus.

His philosophical writings provide an ideal partner for comparisons with thinkers such as the apostle Paul, and include such works as On Providence, On the Virtues, and On the Contemplative Life. Numerous other volumes are currently in preparation.

Martin is a world-renowned scholar and teacher of the New Testament. He discusses the importance of Philo to understanding the New Testament as Scripture in a series of lectures given at Yale. In this lecture, he discusses the role of Philo in the development of Christian exegesis as preceding Origen, Clement of Alexandria, and Irenaeus. Who Was Philo Judaeus of Alexandria?

He specializes in Jewish history and thought and gives a good introduction to Philo in this extended lecture. Many of them can be downloaded and searched for more specific topics of interest. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single entry from a reference work in OR for personal use for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice.

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