Chapter 16

What is new in the Christian position is not the magnifying of faith; it is the severance of faith from the law and the particular faith which is magnified. Philo, and the rabbis, too, believed that faith was the goal of virtue, and the culmination of the moral life; but faith to them implied the sanctification of the whole of life, the love of God "shown in obedience to a law of conduct." Paul, however, hating the law, set up a new faith in the saving power of Jesus and in certain beliefs about him, which afterwards were crystallized, or petrified, into merciless dogmas, contrary alike to the Jewish ideas of God and of life. The new religion, when it was denationalized, inevitably became ecclesiastical: for as the national regulation of life was rejected, in order to ensure some kind of uniformity, it had to bind its members together by definite articles of belief imposed by a central authority. The true alternative was not between a legal and a spiritual religion--for every religion must have some external rule--but between a law of conduct and a law of belief. Philo and the rabbis chose the former way; Paul and the Church, the latter. Christian theology, no less than the Christian conception of religion, exhibits also a complete breach with the Jewish spirit of Philo. In the Epistles there are, indeed, in many places doctrines of the Logos in the same images and the same Hebraic metaphors as Philo had worked into his system; but their purport is entirely changed by association with new un-Jewish dogmas. Philo, allegorizing,[362] had seen the holy Word typified in the high priest, and in Melchizedek, the priest of the Most High; he had called it the son of God and His first-born. Paul, dogmatizing, exalts Jesus Christ, the incarnate Word, above Melchizedek and the high priest, and calls on the Hebrews to gain salvation by faith in the son of God, who died on behalf of the sinful human race. Philo, in his poetic fancy, speaks of God associating with the virgin soul and generating therein the Divine offspring of holy wisdom;[363] the Christian creed-makers enunciated the irrational dogma of the immaculate conception of Jesus. So, too, the earliest philosophical exponents of Christianity, Clement of Alexandria, and Origen, may have derived many of their detailed ideas from Philo, but they converted--one might rather say perverted--his monotheistic theology into a dogmatic trinitarianism. They exalted the Logos, to Philo the "God of the imperfect," and a second-best Deity, to an equal place with the perfect God. For man, indeed, he was nearer and the true object of human adoration. And this not only meant a departure from Judaism; it meant a departure from philosophy. The supreme unity of the pure reason was sacrificed no less than the unity of the soaring religious imagination. The one transcendental God became again, as He had been to the Greek theologians, an inscrutable impersonal power, who was unknown to man and ruled over the universe by His begotten son, the Logos. The sublimity of the Hebrew conception, which combines personality with unity, was lost, and the harmony of the intellectual and emotional aspirations achieved by Philo was broken straightway by those who professed to follow him. The skeleton of his thought was clothed with a body wherein his spirit could never have dwelt. It was the penalty which Philo paid for vagueness of expression and luxuriance of words that his works became the support of doctrines which he had combated, the guide of those who were opposed to his life's ideal.

The experience of the Church showed how right was Philo's judgment when he declared that the rejection of the Torah would produce chaos. The fourth and fifth centuries exhibit an era of unparalleled disorder and confusion in the religious world,[364] sect struggling with sect, creed with creed, churches rising and falling, dogmas set up by councils and forced upon men's souls at the point of the Roman sword! And out of this struggling mass of beliefs and fancies, theologies and superstitions, sects and political forces, there arose a tyrannical, dogmatic Church which laid far heavier burthens on men's minds than ever the most ruthless Pharisee of the theologian's imagination had laid upon their body and spirit. The yoke of the law of Moses, sanctifying the life, had been broken; the fiat of popes and the decrees of synods were the saving beliefs which ensured the Kingdom of Heaven! Was it to this that the allegorizing of the law, the search for the spirit beneath the letter, the reinterpretation of the holy law of Moses in the light of philosophical reason, had brought Judaism? And was the association of Jewish religion with Greek philosophy one long error? That would be a hard conclusion, if we had to admit that Judaism cannot stand the test of contact with foreign culture. But in truth the Hellenistic interpretation of the Bible, so long as it was genuinely philosophical, remained loyal to Judaism. Only when it became hardened into dogma, fixed not only as good doctrine, but as the only saving doctrine, as the tree of life opposed to the Torah, the tree of death--only then did it become anti-Jewish, and appear as a bastard offspring of the Hebraic God-idea and Greek culture. Nor should it be forgotten that the Christian theology and the Christian conception of religion are a falling away also from the highest Hellenic ideas; for to Plato as well God was a purely spiritual unity, and religion "a system of morality based upon a law of conduct and touched with emotion." In Philo, as we have seen, the Hebraic and Hellenic conceptions of God touch at their summits in their noblest expressions; the conceptions of Plato are interfused with the imagination of the prophets. The Christian theology was a descent to a commoner Hellenism--or one should rather call it a commoner syncretism--as well as to an easier, impurer Hebraism.

It must not be put down to the fault of the Septuagint or the allegorists or Philo that the Alexandrian development of Judaism led on to Roman Christianity. It is to be ascribed rather to the infirmity of human nature, which requires the ideas of its inspired teachers and peoples to be brought down to the common understanding, and causes the progress towards universal religion to be a slow growth. The masses of the Alexandrian Jews in his own day cannot have grasped his teaching; for Philo, to some degree, lived in a narrow world of philosophical idealism, and he did not calculate the forces which opposed and made impossible the spread of his faith in its integrity. He was aiming at what was and must for long remain unattainable--the establishment among the peoples of philosophical monotheism.

No man is a prophet in his own land--or in his own time--and because Philo has in him much of the prophet, he seems to have failed. But it is the burden of our mission to sow in tears that we may reap in joy. And the work of the Alexandrian-Jewish school may be sad from one aspect of Jewish history, but it is nevertheless one of the dominating incidents of our religious annals. It did not succeed in bringing over the world to the pure idea of God, but it did help in undermining cruder paganism. It brought the nations nearer to God, and it introduced Hebraism into the thought of the Western peoples. It marked, therefore, a great step in the religious work of Israel; yet by the schools of rabbis who felt the hard hand of its offspring upon their people it was regarded as a long misfortune, to be blotted from memory. What seemed so ominous to them was that the annihilation of the nation came at the same time as the cleavage in the religion. Judaism seemed attacked no less by internal foes than by external calamity; and was likely to perish altogether or to drift into a lower conception of God, unless it could find some stalwart defence. Hence they insisted on the extension of the fence of the law, and abandoned for centuries the mission of the Jews to the outer world. This was the true Galut, or exile; not so much the political exclusion from the land of their fathers, but the enforced exclusion from the mission of the prophets. Philo is one of the brightest figures of a golden age of Jewish expansion, which passed away of a sudden, and has never since returned. In the silver and bronze ages which followed, his place in Judaism was obscured. But this age of ours, which boasts of its historical sense, looking back over the centuries and freed from the bitter dismay of the rabbis, can appraise his true worth and see in him one who realized for himself all that Judaism and Jewish culture could and still can be.

Some Jewish teachers have thought that Philo's work was a failure, others that it provides a warning rather than an example for later generations of Jews, proving the mischief of expanding Judaism for the world. As well one might say that Isaiah's prophecy was a calamity, because the Christian synoptics used his words as evidences of Christianity. What is universal in Jewish literature is in the fullest sense Jewish, and we should beware of renouncing our inheritance because others have abused and perverted it. Other critics, again, say that Philo is wearisome and prolix, artificial and sophisticated. There is certainly some truth in this judgment; but Philo has many beautiful passages which compensate. Part of his message was for his own generation and the Alexandrian community, and with the passing away of the Hellenistic culture, it has lost its attraction. But part of it is of universal import, and is very pertinent and significant for every generation of Jews which, enjoying social and intellectual emancipation, lives amid a foreign culture. Doubtless the position of Philo and the Alexandrian community was to some extent different from that of the Jews at any time since the greater Diaspora that followed the destruction of the temple. They had behind them a national culture and a centre of Jewish life, religious and social, which was a powerful influence in civilization and united the Jews in every land. And this gave a catholicity to their development and a standard for their teaching which the scattered communities of Jews to-day do not possess. None the less Philo's ideal of Judaism as religion and life is an ideal for our time and for all time. Its keynote is that Israel is a holy people, a kingdom of priests, which has a special function for humanity. And the performance of this function demands the religious-philosophical ordering of life. From the negative side Philo stands for the struggle against Epicureanism, which in other words is the devotion to material pleasures and sensual enjoyments. In adversity, as he notes, the race is truest to its ideals, but as soon as the breeze of prosperity has caught its sails, then it throws overboard all that ennobles life. The hedonist whom he attacks, like the Epicuros ([Hebrew: 'fikuros]) of the rabbis, is not the banal thinker of one particular age, but a permanent type in the history of our people. We seem to spend nearly all our moral strength in the resistance of persecution, and with tranquillity from without comes degradation within. Emancipation, which should be but a means to the realization of the higher life, is taken as an end, and becomes the grave of idealism. With a reiteration that becomes almost wearisome, but which is the measure of the need for the warning, Philo protests against this desecration of life, of liberty, and of Judaism. His position is, that a free and cultured Jewry must pursue the mission of Israel alike by the example of the righteous life devoted to the service of God, and by the preaching of God's revealed word. This is his "burden of the word of the Lord" to the worldly-wise and the materialists of civilized Alexandria--and to Jews of other lands.

From the positive side Philo stands for the spiritual significance of the religion. Judaism, which lays stress upon the law, the ceremonial, and the customs of our forefathers, is threatened at times with the neglect of the inward religion and the hardness of legalism. Not that the law, when it is understood, kills the spirit or fetters the feelings, but a formal observance and an unenlightened insistence upon the letter may crush the soul which good habits should nurture. Religion at its highest must be the expression of the individual soul within, not the acceptance of a law from without. Although Philo's estimate of the Torah is from the historical and philological standpoint uncritical, in the religious sense it is finely critical inasmuch as it searches out true values. Philo looks in every ordinance of the Bible for the spiritual light and conceives the law as an inspiration of spiritual truth and the guide to God, or, as he puts it sometimes, "the mystagogue to divine ecstasy." For the crown of life to him is the saint's union with God. In mysticism religion and philosophy blend, for mysticism is the philosophical form of faith. Just as the Torah to Philo has an outward and an inward meaning, so, too, has the religion of the Torah; and the outward Judaism is the symbol, the necessary bodily expression of the inward, even as the words of Moses are the symbol, the suggestive expression of the deeper truth behind them. Yet mystic and spiritual as he is, Philo never allows religion to sink into mere spirituality, because he has a true appreciation and a real love for the law. The Torah is the foundation of Judaism, and one of the three pillars of the universe, as the rabbis said; and neither the philosopher nor the mystic in Philo ever causes him to forget that Judaism is a religion of conduct as well as of belief, and that the law of righteousness is a law which must be practiced and show itself in active life. He holds fast, moreover, to the catholicity of Judaism, which restrains the individual from abrogating observance till the united conscience of the race calls for it; unless progress comes in this ordered way, the reformer will produce chaos.

Philo is conservative then in practice, but he is pre-eminently liberal in thought. The perfect example himself of the assimilation of outside culture, he demands that Judaism shall always seek out the fullest knowledge, and in the light of the broadest culture of the age constantly reinterpret its religious ideas and its holy books. Above all it must be philosophical, for philosophy is "the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge," and it vivifies the knowledge of God as well as the knowledge of human things. Without it religion becomes bigoted, faith obscurantist, and ceremony superstitious. But the Jew does not merely borrow ideas or accept his philosophy ready-made from his environment; he interprets it afresh according to his peculiar God-idea and his conception of God's relation to man, and thereby makes it a genuine Jewish philosophy, forming in each age a special Jewish culture. And as religion without philosophy is narrow, so, to Philo, philosophy without religion is barren; remote from the true life, and failing in the true purpose of the search for wisdom, which is to raise man to his highest function. Philosophy, then, is not the enemy of the Torah: it is its true complement, endowing it with a deeper meaning and a profounder influence. Thus the saying runs in the "Ethics of the Fathers,"

[Hebrew: 'm 'yn tora 'yn hkma; 'm 'yn hkma 'yn tora]

"If there is no Torah, there is no wisdom; if there is no wisdom, there is no Torah." The thought that study of the law is essential to Judaism Philo shares with the rabbis, and the Torah is in his eyes Israel's great heritage, not only her literature but her life. As Saadia said later,[365] "This nation is only a nation by reason of its Torah." It is because Philo starts from this conviction that his mission is so striking, and its results so tragical. The Judaism which he preached to the pagan world was no food for the soul with the strength taken out to render it more easily assimilated. He emphasizes its spiritual import, he shows its harmony, as the age demanded, with the philosophical and ethical conceptions of the time, but he steadfastly holds aloft, as the standard of humanity, the law of Moses. The reign of "one God and one law" seemed to him not a far-off Divine event, but something near, which every good Jew could bring nearer. He was oppressed by no craven fear of Jewish distinctiveness; and the Biblical saying that Israel was a chosen people was real to him and moved him to action. It meant that Israel was essentially a religious nation, nearer God, and possessed of the Divine law of life, and that it had received the Divine bidding to spread the truth about God to all the world. It was a creed, and more, it was an inspiration which constantly impelled to effort. It would be difficult to sum up Philo's message to his people better than by the verses in Deuteronomy which he, the interpreter of God's Word and the successor of Moses, as he loved to consider himself, proclaims afresh to his own age, and beyond it to the congregation of Jacob in all ages, "Keep therefore my commandments and do them; for this is your wisdom and your understanding in the sight of the nations, which shall hear all these statutes, and say, Surely this great nation is a wise and understanding people.

"For what nation is there so great, who hath God so nigh unto them, as the Lord our God is in all things that we call upon Him for?

"And what nation is there so great that hath statutes and judgments so righteous as all this law, which I set before you this day?" (Deut. iv. 5-7).

* * * * *

BIBLIOGRAPHY

The following are the chief works which have been consulted and are recommended to the student of Philo:

The standard edition of Philo is still that of Thomas Mangey, _Philonis Judæi opera quæ reperiri potuerunt omnia._ 1742. Londini.

A far more accurate and critical edition, which is provided with introductory essays and notes upon the sources of Philo, is in course of publication for the Berlin Academy, by Dr. Leopold Cohn and Dr. Paul Wendland. The first five volumes have already appeared, and the remainder may be expected before long. The only complete edition which contains the Latin text of the _Quaestiones_ as well as the Greek works is that published by Tauchnitz in eight volumes; but the text is not reliable.

There is an English translation of Philo's works in the Bohn Library (G. Bell & Sons) by C.D. Yonge (4 vols.), but it is neither accurate nor neat. The same may he said of the German translation of Jost, but an admirable German version edited by Dr. L. Cohn is now appearing, which contains notes of the parallel passages in rabbinic and patristic literature.

Works bearing on Philo and his period generally:

Schürer, "History of the Jewish People at the Time of Jesus Christ" (English translation).

Siegfried, _Philo von Alexandrien als Ausleger der heiligen Schrift_.

Zeller, _Geschiehte der Philosophie der Griechen_, vol. III, sec. 2.

Drummond, "Philo-Judæus and the Jewish Alexandrian School." 2 vols. (London.)

Herriot, _Philon le Juif_.

Vacherot, _École d'Alexandrie_, vol. I.

Eusebius, _Præparatio Evangelica_, ed. Gifford.

Freudenthal, J., _Hellenistische Studien_.

Harnack, "History of Dogma," vol. I.

Josephus, "Wars of the Jews"; "Antiquities of the Jews."

Mommsen, Th., "The Roman Provinces."

Works bearing on the special subjects of the different chapters:

I. THE JEWISH COMMUNITY AT ALEXANDRIA Graetz, "History of the Jews" (Eng. trans.), vol. II. Swete, "introduction to the Septuagint." Hirsch, S.A., "The Temple of Onias," in the Jews' College Jubilee Volume. Friedländer, M. (Vienna), _Geschichte der jüdischen Apologetitc_ and _Religiöse Bewegungen der Juden irn Zeitalter von Jesus._

II. THE LIFE AND TIMES OF PHILO Conybeare, edition of _De Vita Contemplativa_. (Oxford.) Hils, _Les juifs en Rome. Revue des Etudes Juives_, vols. 8 and 11. Reinach, Théodor, _Textes d'auteurs grecs et romains rélatifs au Judaisme_. Bréhier et Massebieau, _Essai sur la chronologie de Philon. Revue de l'Histoire des Religions,_ 1906.

III. PHILO'S WORKS AND METHOD Hart, J.H.A., "Philo of Alexandria," Jewish Quarterly Review, vols. XVII and XVIII. Massebieau, _Du classement des oeuvres de Philon_. Cohn, Leopold, _Einteilung und Chronologie der Schriften Philon_.

IV. PHILO AND THE TORAH Treitel, L., _Der Nomos in Philon. Monatsschrift für Geschichte und Wissenschaft des Judenthums_, 1905.

V. PHILO'S THEOLOGY Montefiore, C., _Florilegium Philonis_, Jewish Quarterly Review, vol. VIII. Caird, Ed., "Evolution of Theology in the Greek Philosophers." Heinze, _Die Lefire vom Logos_, Bucher, _Philonische Studien_. Von Arnim, _Philonische Studien._

VI. PHILO AS A PHILOSOPHER Freudenthal, Max, _Die Erkenntnisstheorie von Philo._ Bigg, "The Christian neo-Platonists of Alexandria." Bussell, "The School of Plato." Stewart, J.A., "The Myths of Plato." Cuyot, H., _Les reminiscences de Philon chez Plotin_. 1906. Neumark, _Geschichte der jildischen Philosophie des Mittelalters_.

VII. PHILO AND JEWISH TRADITION Schechter, "Aspects of Rabbinic Theology." Taylor, "Ethics of the Fathers." Ritter, Bernhard, _Philo und die Halacha_. Breslau, 1879. Dei Rossi, "Meor Einayim," ed. Cassel. Krochmal, "Moreh Nebuchei Hazeman," ed. Zunz. Frankel, Z., _Ueber den Einfluss der palästinensischen Exegese auf die alexandrinische Hermeneutik_. Epstein, _Le livre des Jubilis, Philon et le Midrasch Tadsché_, Revue des Etudes Juives, XXI. Ginzberg, L., "Allegorical Interpretation," in Jewish Encyclopedia. Joel, M., _Blicke in die Religionsgeschichte_. Treitel, L., _Agadah bei Philo. Monatsschrift für Geschichte und Wissenschaft des Judenthums_, 1909.

ABBREVIATIONS USED FOR THE REFERENCES

The references to Philo's works are made according to the chapters in Conn and Wendland's edition, so far as it has appeared. In referring to the works which they have not edited, I have used the pages of Mangey'a edition; but I have frequently mentioned the name of the treatise in which the passage occurs, as well as the page-number.

I have employed the following abbreviations in the references:

L.A. I-III Legum Allegoriae. De Mundi Op. De Mundi Opificio. De Sacrif. De Sacrifices Abelis. Quod Det. Quod Deterius Potiori Insidiatur. De Post. C. De Posteritate Caini. De Gigant. De Gigantibus. Quod Deus. Quod Deus Sit Immutabilis. De Agric. De Agricultura. De Plant. De Plantatione. De Ebr. De Ebrietate. De Confus. De Confusione Linguarum. De Migr. De Migratione Abrahami. Quis Rer. Div. Quis Rerum Divinarum Heres. De Cong. De Congressu Eruditorum Causa. De Fuga. De Fuga et Inventione. De Mut. Nom. De Mutatione Nominum. De Somn. De Somniis. De Abr. De Vita Abrahami. De Jos. De Vita Josephi. De V. Mos. De Vita Mosis. De Mon. De Monarchia. De Spec. Leg. De Specialibus Legibus. De Sac. De Sacerdotum Honoribus et de Victimis. De Leg. De Legatione ad Gaium. In Flacc. In Flaccum. De Decal. De Decalogo. De Septen. De Septenario. De Concupisc. De Concupiscentia. De Just. De Justitia. De Exsecr. De Exsecrationibus. Ant. Josephus: Antiquities of the Jews, tr. by Whiston. Bell. Jud. Wars of the Jews. C. Apion. Contra Apionem. Hist. Ecclesiast. Eusebius: Historia Ecclesiastica. Praep. Evang. Eusebius: Praeparatio Evangelica. Photius, Cod. Photius: Codex.

INDEX

Abraham (_see_ Lives of Abraham and Joseph), 83; model of the excellent man, 244.