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Liber XIX · Judaism

Liber XIX · Judaism · Chapter VI: Jewish Philosophy

Philo of Alexandria: Allegory, the Logos and Jewish Platonism

Philo of Alexandria explained: the Jewish philosopher's life, allegorical reading of the Torah, doctrine of the Logos, mysticism and his Christian afterlife.

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Philo of Alexandria (c. 20 BCE – c. 50 CE) was a Jewish philosopher and biblical interpreter who read the Greek Torah through the lens of Plato and the Stoics. He is best known for his allegorical method, which treated the stories of Genesis and Exodus as journeys of the soul, and for his doctrine of the Logos, the divine Reason that mediates between a transcendent God and the created world. Ignored by the rabbis but preserved by Christian scholars, his work became a bridge between Jewish scripture, Greek philosophy and later Christian, Gnostic and Hermetic speculation.

Life of Philo in Roman Alexandria§

Almost everything known about Philo's life comes from his own writings and from the historian Josephus. He was born around 20 BCE into one of the richest Jewish families of Alexandria, then the intellectual capital of the Greek-speaking world and home to perhaps the largest Jewish community outside Judaea. His brother Alexander held the office of alabarch, a customs or tax official, and was wealthy enough to plate gates of the Jerusalem Temple with gold and silver. Alexander's son, Tiberius Julius Alexander, abandoned Jewish practice and rose to be prefect of Egypt.

Philo received a full Greek education in grammar, rhetoric, mathematics, music and philosophy, which he later described as the "handmaids" that prepare the mind for wisdom. He mentions a pilgrimage to Jerusalem to pray and sacrifice at the Temple, but his world was Alexandria. His Hebrew was probably limited; he read the Bible in the Greek Septuagint, which he regarded as an inspired translation.

The one securely dated event of his life is political. In 38 CE anti-Jewish riots broke out in Alexandria under the Roman prefect Flaccus, and the city's Jews lost many of their civic rights. In the winter of 39–40 Philo, by then an old man, led a delegation to Rome to plead the community's case before the emperor Gaius. His treatises Against Flaccus and On the Embassy to Gaius describe the riots and the humiliating audience with an emperor who demanded to be worshipped as a god. Philo probably died around 50 CE.

Philo's Writings and the Three Commentaries§

Philo's surviving work is large: around fifty treatises in Greek, with more preserved only in an ancient Armenian translation. Scholars usually group them into three series of biblical commentary and a set of independent works.

  • The Allegorical Commentary works verse by verse through Genesis 2–41, drawing out moral and spiritual meanings. Treatises such as Allegories of the Laws, On the Cherubim and On the Migration of Abraham belong to it.
  • The Exposition of the Law is a more systematic presentation for a wider readership, covering creation (On the Creation of the World), the lives of the patriarchs as "living laws", the Ten Commandments and the special laws.
  • Questions and Answers on Genesis and Exodus takes the form of short problems and solutions, and survives mainly in Armenian.

Alongside these are historical and apologetic works, a Life of Moses, philosophical treatises on providence, the eternity of the world and the freedom of the good man, and On the Contemplative Life, which describes the Therapeutae, a community of Jewish ascetics of both sexes living near Lake Mareotis and devoted to prayer, study and hymn-singing.

The Allegorical Method: Scripture as a Map of the Soul§

Philo did not invent allegory. Greek philosophers had long read Homer allegorically, and earlier Alexandrian Jews such as Aristobulus had applied similar techniques to the Bible. But Philo applied it on an unprecedented scale and with great consistency.

For Philo, the literal sense of scripture was real and binding. He criticised Jews who reasoned that, once they understood the symbolic meaning of circumcision or the Sabbath, they need no longer keep them. Yet beneath the letter lay a deeper sense, accessible to the trained mind, in which the persons and places of the Bible stand for powers and states of the soul. Adam is mind, Eve is sense-perception and the serpent is pleasure. Abraham's migration from Chaldea to Haran and then to Canaan becomes the soul's departure from astrology and the worship of the visible heavens, through self-knowledge gained by examining the senses, to the knowledge of the invisible God. The three patriarchs represent three routes to virtue: Abraham by learning, Isaac by natural endowment and Jacob by practice.

Philo also held that Moses was the greatest of philosophers and that Greek thinkers, including Plato and Pythagoras, had borrowed from the books of Moses. This claim of dependence, turned around by later writers, fed the Renaissance idea of an "ancient theology" in which Hermes Trismegistus, Moses and Plato taught one wisdom.

The Logos and the Powers of God§

Philo's God is utterly transcendent: "He Who Is", whose existence can be known but whose essence lies beyond every human concept. To explain how such a God relates to a changing material world, Philo drew on Platonic and Stoic ideas to describe intermediaries.

The most important is the Logos, the divine Word or Reason. In Philo's reading of the creation story, God first conceived the intelligible world, the pattern of ideas, which exists in the Logos much as the plan of a city exists in the mind of its architect before it is built. The Logos is the image of God and the pattern after which the human mind was made. Philo gives it many titles: firstborn son, archangel, high priest, the "man of God", and once, in a passage preserved in the Questions on Genesis, a "second god". He also describes the Logos as the "cutter" that divides creation into its ordered parts, and as the bond that holds the cosmos together.

Beside the Logos stand God's two chief Powers: the creative power, associated with the name "God" (theos), and the ruling power, associated with "Lord" (kyrios). Philo used them to explain the different divine names in scripture and to interpret the cherubim over the Ark. He also distinguished between the heavenly man of Genesis 1, made "after the image", and the earthly Adam of Genesis 2, moulded from clay.

These ideas belong to what historians call Middle Platonism, the period between Plato's Academy and Plotinus, and Philo is one of its richest surviving witnesses. Whether he meant the Logos as a distinct being or as an aspect of God's own activity remains debated.

Mysticism, Ecstasy and the Ascent of the Mind§

Philo was not only an exegete. Several passages describe the mind's flight above the senses and the heavens toward the vision of God. He speaks of a "sober intoxication", a phrase that would have a long career in Christian mysticism, in which the soul is filled with divine joy while remaining clear. In one autobiographical passage he describes how, at times when he came to write empty, he was suddenly filled with ideas "from above", and at other times found his mind barren.

The goal of this ascent is not union with God's essence, which remains unknowable, but seeing that God is. Israel, for Philo, means "the one who sees God", and true Israel is the soul capable of such vision. Scholars such as Erwin Goodenough argued that Philo reflects a Hellenistic Jewish "mystery" religion of light; most now see his mysticism as philosophical and literary rather than evidence of an organised cult, but the language of initiation and ascent is unmistakable.

Influence on Christian, Gnostic and Hermetic Thought§

Philo had almost no influence on rabbinic Judaism, which developed in Hebrew and Aramaic and did not preserve his works. His survival is owed to Christians. Clement of Alexandria and Origen used his allegories extensively, Eusebius of Caesarea copied long extracts and repeated a legend that Philo had met the apostle Peter in Rome, and Jerome listed him among ecclesiastical writers. Ambrose of Milan reworked whole treatises in his sermons. Some manuscripts even preserve Christian interpolations, and medieval readers sometimes spoke of "Philo the Christian".

The resemblance between Philo's Logos and the prologue of John's Gospel has been discussed since antiquity. Most scholars think both draw on a shared Hellenistic Jewish vocabulary rather than on each other directly. Similar themes appear in the Poimandres, the first treatise of the Hermetic corpus, which combines a creative Word, a heavenly archetypal Man and an echo of Genesis; scholars such as C. H. Dodd placed it close to the world of Alexandrian Judaism. Philo's heavenly man, his mediating powers and his sharp contrast between God and matter also offered material that Gnostic thinkers could radicalise, though Philo himself never treated the creator as ignorant or evil.

Among Jews, Philo was rediscovered in the sixteenth century, when the Italian scholar Azariah de' Rossi discussed him critically in his Light of the Eyes (1573–75). Modern Jewish scholarship, beginning in nineteenth-century Germany, has made him a central figure in the history of Jewish philosophy.

Frequently asked questions§

What is Philo of Alexandria known for?§

Philo is known for interpreting the Hebrew Bible allegorically in terms of Greek philosophy, especially Platonism and Stoicism. His doctrine of the Logos as God's mediating Reason, and his reading of biblical figures as stages of the soul, influenced early Christian theology deeply.

Did Philo know Jesus or the apostles?§

There is no evidence that he did. Philo never mentions Jesus or the early Christian movement. The story that he met Peter in Rome is a later Christian legend reported by Eusebius.

What does Logos mean in Philo?§

In Philo, the Logos is God's Word or Reason: the pattern of the ideas by which the world was made, the image of God, and the bond that holds creation together. He calls it firstborn son, high priest and archangel, and once a "second god", while insisting on the uniqueness of the one God.

Why was Philo forgotten by Jews?§

Philo wrote in Greek within a Hellenistic culture that did not survive the crises of the first and second centuries. Rabbinic Judaism developed in Hebrew and Aramaic and did not transmit his works, which survived only in Christian libraries until Jewish scholars rediscovered him in the Renaissance.

Sources and further reading§