Chapter 6

It is a serious misconception to imagine that Philo's philosophical allegories were meant for the general body of Alexandrian Jews. He frequently[102] declares that he is speaking to a specially initiated sect, and warns his hearers not to divulge his teaching. The notion of an esoteric doctrine for the aristocracy of intellect had become a fixed idea in the Greek schools for three centuries, ever since the days of Aristotle; and whether through Greek influence or otherwise it had been generally adopted by the Jewish teachers. The rabbis of the Talmud derived from the first chapters of Genesis the inner mystery of the law, which was cognizable only by the sage; and the same idea is found in later Jewish tradition, which, expounding Paradise ([Hebrew: prds]) as four stages of interpretation, each marked by a letter of the word, Peshat, Remez, Derash, and Sod ([Hebrew: sod]),[103] regarded the last as the final reward of the devoted seeker after God, as it is said in the Psalms, "The secret of the Lord is for those who fear Him." Jewish religious philosophers have in all ages designed their work for a select few. The Halakah, or way of life, is the fit study of the many. So Maimonides wrote his Moreh only for those who already were masters of the law. And Philo likewise at Alexandria taught an esoteric doctrine to an esoteric circle, which alone was fitted to receive the profoundest theology.[104] The allegories of the law do not take the place of the law itself, nor of its ethical ordinances. They are additional to the other exegesis and distinct, destined only for the man of learning. And as we shall see, he asserts emphatically in the midst of his allegories[105] that the perception of the philosophical value does not release man from the practice itself. The wise man even as the fool must obey the law.

Why, it may be asked, does Philo artificially attach his philosophy to the Scriptures? He does so for two reasons: first, because he holds and wishes to prove that between faith and philosophy there is no conflict, and his generation worked out the agreement by this method; he does so also because he wishes to establish the Torah and Judaism upon a sure foundation for the man of outside culture. The pursuit of philosophy must have menaced the attachment to Judaism and challenged the authority of the Bible at Alexandria. A superficial knowledge of the materialistic or rationalistic theories, which were propagated respectively by the Epicurean and Stoic schools, was made the excuse for indifference to the law. Then as now the advanced Jew would mask his self-indulgence under the guise of a banal philosophy, and jeer easily at archaic myths and tribal laws. The dominating motive of Philo's work is to show that the Bible contains for those who will seek it the richest treasures of wisdom, that its ethical teaching is more ideal and yet more real than that which hundreds of sophists poured forth daily in the lecture-theatres[106] to the gaping dilettanti of learning, and lastly that the cultured Jew may search out knowledge and truth to their depths, and find them expressed in his holy books and in his religious beliefs and practices. Philo frequently introduces into his philosophical interpretation a polemic against the disintegrating and demoralizing forces which were at work in the Alexandria of his day. His commentary therefore is a strange medley, compounded of idealistic speculation, theology, homiletics, moral denunciation, and polemical rhetoric. The idea, which is not uncommon, that Philo represents the extreme Hellenic development of Judaism, and that he gathered into his writings the opinions of all Greek schools to the ruin of his Jewish individuality, is utterly erroneous. In fact, he chooses out only the valuable parts of Greek thought, which could enter into a true harmony with the Hebraic spirit; and he not only rejects, but he attacks unsparingly those elements which were antagonistic to holiness and righteousness. With the enthusiasm of a Maccabee, if with other weapons, he fought against the bastard culture, which meant self-indulgence and the excessive attention to the body, the idol-worship, the degraded ideas of the Divine power, and the disregard of truth and justice, that were current in the pagan society about him. The seeking after sensual pleasure and luxury was the most glaring evil of his city--as the Talmud says,[107] of ten parts of lust nine were given to Alexandria--and with every variety of denunciation he returns again and again to the charge. Epicureanism is detestable not only for its low idea of human life, but for its godless conception of the universe. Its theory that the world was a fortuitous concourse of atoms, which was governed by blind chance, and that the gods lived apart in complete indifference to men--this was to Philo utter atheism, and as such the greatest of sins. He attacked paganism not only in its crude form of idolatry,[108] but in its more seductive disguise of a pretentious philosophy. Always and entirely he was the champion of monotheism.

Nearly as godless, and therefore as vile in his eyes as the follower of Epicurus, is the follower of the Stoic doctrines. It has been shown that the Jews and the Stoics were continually in conflict at Alexandria; and the "Allegories of the Laws" are filled with attacks, overt and hidden, upon the Stoic doctrines. The Stoics, indeed, believed in one supreme Divine Power, not however in a transcendental and personal God, but a cosmic, impersonal, fatalistic world-force.[109] To Philo this conception, with its denial of the Divine will and the Divine care for the individual, was as atheistic as the Epicurean "chance." Equally repulsive to his religious standpoint was the Stoic dogma, that man is, or should be, independent of all help, and that the human reason is all-powerful and can comprehend the universe by its own unaided power.[110] Repulsive also were their pride, their rejection of the emotions, their hard rationalism. The battle of Philo against the Stoics is the battle of personal monotheism against impersonal pantheism, of religious faith and revelation against arrogant rationalism, and of idealism against materialism. Hostile as he is to the Stoic intellectual dogmatism, Philo is none the less opposed to its converse, intellectual skepticism and agnosticism. Man, he is convinced, has a Divine revelation[111] which he may not deny without ruin. He holds with Pope that we have

"Too much of knowledge for the Skeptic side, Too much of weakness for the Stoic's pride,"

and he attacks the Skeptics of the day who devoted their minds to destructive dialectical quibbling and sophistry[112] instead of seeking for God and the human good. They are the Ishmaels of philosophy.

Philo's polemic is directed less against the Greek schools in themselves than against the Jewish followers of the Greek schools. He saw the danger to Judaism in the teachings of these anti-religious philosophers, and deeply as he loved Greek culture, he loved more deeply his religion. He wanted to reveal a philosophy in the Bible which should win back to Judaism the men who had been captivated by foreign thought. In one aspect, therefore, his master-work is a plea for unity. The community at Alexandria was a very heterogeneous body; not only were the sects which had appeared in Palestine, the Sadducees, Samaritans, Pharisees, and Essenes, represented there too, but in addition there were parties who attached themselves to one or other of the Greek schools, the Pythagoreans, Skeptics, and the like, and lastly Gnostic groups, who cultivated an esoteric doctrine of the Godhead, and were lax in their observance of the law, which they held to be purely symbolical and of no account in its literal meaning. The mental activity which this growth of sects exemplified was in some respects a healthy sign, but it contained seeds of religious chaos, which bore their fruit in the next century. Men started by thinking out a philosophical Judaism for themselves; they ended by ceasing to be Jews and philosophers. Philo foresaw this danger, and he tried to combat it by presenting his people with a commentary of the Bible which should satisfy their intellectual and speculative bent, but at the same time preserve their loyalty to the Bible and the law. To the Greek world he offered a philosophical religion, to his own people a religious philosophy. Thus the allegorical commentary is the crowning point of his work, the offering of his deepest thought to the most cultured of the community; and though much of its detail had only relevancy for its own time, and its method may repel our modern taste, yet the spirit which animates it is of value to all ages, and should be an inspiration to every generation of emancipated Jews. That spirit is one of fearless acceptance of the finest culture of the age combined with unswerving love of the law and loyalty to catholic Judaism.

We have already treated of the general characteristics of Philo's method of allegorical interpretation, but we must now consider rather more closely the way in which he employs it. The general principle upon which he depends is, that besides and in addition to the literal meaning which the Bible bears for the common man, it has a hidden and deeper meaning for the philosopher. It is, as it were, a sort of palimpsest; the writing on the top all may read, the writing below the student alone can decipher. With the rabbis Philo holds that the Torah was written "in the language of the sons of man,"[113] but he believes with them again that it contains all wisdom. And if the ideas of reason do not appear in its literal meaning, then they must be searched out in some inner interpretation. Commenting on the verse in Genesis (xi. 7), "Let us confound their language, that they may not understand one another's speech," he says: "Those who follow the literal and obvious interpretation think that the origin of the Greek and barbarian languages is here described; [the contrast between Greek, on the one hand, and barbarian--in which Hebrew, it seems, is included--on the other, is remarkable]. I would not find fault with them, because they also, perhaps, employ right reason, but I would call on them not to remain content with this, but to follow me to the metaphorical renderings, considering that the actual words of the holy oracle are, as it were, shadows of the real bodies, and the powers which they reflect are the true underlying ideas."[114]

Elsewhere he tells a story of the condign punishment which befell a godless and impious man, perchance a Samaritan Jew, who made mock of the race of allegorical interpreters, jeering at the idea that the change of names from Abram to Abraham and from Sarai to Sarah contained some deep meaning. He soon paid a fitting penalty for his wicked wit, for on some very trivial pretext he went and hanged himself. Which was just, says Philo; for such a rascal deserved a rascal's death.[115] It is noteworthy that the Talmud also lays stress upon the deep meaning of the patriarch's change of name.[116] "He who calls Abraham Abram," said Bar Kappara, "transgresses a positive command" [Hebrew: mtsva 'sha]. "Nay," said Rabbi Levi, "he transgresses both a positive and a negative command (and commits a double sin)." Clearly this was a test-question and an article of faith, possibly because the letter [Hebrew: h], which was added to the name, was a letter of mystical import in the opinion of the age. Both the rejection of the literal and the rejection of the allegorical value of the Bible, Philo regarded as impious, and he had to struggle against opposite factions that were one-sided. The true son of the law believes in both [Greek: to hrêton] and [Greek: to en hyponoiais].[117] Seeing that the Bible was the inspired revelation of God, who is the fountain of all wisdom and knowledge--this is Philo's cardinal dogma--it is not to be supposed, on the one hand, that it was silent about the profoundest ideas of the human mind, or, on the other, that it contained ideas opposed to right reason and truth. Yet at first sight it seemed to lack any definite philosophy and to offer anthropomorphic views of God. Hence the true interpreter must use the actual words of the sage as metaphors, following the maxim, "Turn it about and about, because all is in it, and contemplate it and wax grey over it, for thou canst have no better rule than this."[118] The principle upon which Philo, Saadia, Maimonides, and in fact the whole line of Jewish philosophical exegetes have worked, is that the "words of the law are fruitful and multiply"; or, as the Bible phrase runs, "The Torah which Moses commanded unto us is the inheritance of the congregation of Jacob." It is the separate inheritance of each generation, which each must cultivate so as to gather therefrom its own fruit.

The Halakah is the outcome of this devotion in one aspect, the philosophical exegesis in another. In the one case Jewish jurisprudence and the body of legal tradition, in the other, philosophical ideas inspired by outer civilization, are attached to the text of the Bible by ingenious devices of association. The device is partly a pious fiction, partly a genuine belief; in other words, the teachers honestly thought that there was respectively a hidden philosophical meaning in the Bible and an oral tradition, supplementary to the written law and arising out of it; but on the other hand they would not have urged that their particular interpretation alone was portended by the Scriptures. This is shown in the Talmud by the fact that different rabbis deduced the same lessons from different verses, and contrary laws from the same verse; in Philo by the fact that he often gives various interpretations of one text in different parts of his work. All that was claimed was that knowledge and truth must be primarily referred to the Divine revelation, and all law and practice to the authority of the Mosaic code. Philo, then, in the same way as the rabbis, deduces all his teaching from the Bible, not because he holds that it was explicitly contained there, but because he desires to give to his philosophical notions Divine authority. Like the rabbis, again, he suggests definite rules of interpretation which may always be applied [Greek: kanones tês allêgorias].[119] He declares that every name in the Torah has a deep symbolical meaning, and symbolizes some power.[120] Thus the names of the sons of Jacob typify each some moral quality, and these qualities together make the perfect man and the perfect nation. Reuben is "the son of insight" [Hebrew: ru'bn], Simeon is learning [Hebrew: shm'-on], Judah [Hebrew: yhuda] stands for the praise of God.[121] It may be noted, by the way, that all these values show traces of Hebrew etymology. Again, the synonyms in the Bible are to be carefully studied, while even particles and parts of words have their special value and importance. And the skilful exegete may for homiletical purposes make slight changes in a word, following the rabbinical rule,[122] "Read not so, but so." Thus he plays upon the name Esau, and takes the Hebrew word as though it were written, not [Hebrew: 'eshaw] but [Hebrew: 'ashav], a thing made.[123] Whence he shows that Esau represents the sham (made-up) greatness, which is boastful and insolent and shameless. Philo is referring perhaps to Apion, the vainglorious anti-Semite, whom he often covertly attacks. Again, whenever there is repetition in the text, a deeper meaning is portended. Dealing with the verse, "Sarah the wife of Abraham took Hagar the Egyptian" (Gen. xvi. 3), Philo comments, that we already knew that Sarah was Abraham's wife: why, then, does the Bible mention it again? And following certain values which he has made, he draws the lesson that the study of philosophy must always go together with the study of general culture.[124] These examples are not isolated; yet it is rather a barren science to search for the canons of Philo's allegory, as Siegfried has done.

For his allegory is a very flexible instrument, which can be employed at pleasure to deduce anything from anything. And Philo regards these "points of construction" as the excuse, not as the motive, of his ethical and philosophical teaching. He does not depend on such devices, for he wanders into allegory more often than not without any pretext of the kind.

The modern reader may consider the allegorical method artificial and unconvincing, even if he does not go so far as Spinoza, and say that it is "useless, harmful, and absurd."[125] We prefer to-day to show the inner agreement of philosophical with Biblical teaching, rather than pretend that all philosophy is contained within the Bible; and we accept the Bible as it stands, as a book of supreme religious worth, without requiring more of it. But that is mainly a difference of taste or of method, and in Philo's day, and in fact down to the time of the sixteenth-century Renaissance, Jew and Gentile alike preferred the other way. For thought, ancient and mediæval, was pervaded with the craving for authority or a plausible show of it. The Bible was not only the great book of morality, but the standard of truth, that from which knowledge in all its branches started, and that by which it was to be judged. As all knowledge came from God, so all knowledge was in God's Book; and allegory was the method by which the intellectual conceptions of succeeding ages were attached to it.

The two main heads of Biblical interpretation which the Jewish religious genius developed, Peshat and Derash,--these represent two permanent attitudes of mind. In the first the commentator tries to get at the exact meaning of the text before him, to make its lesson clear and discuss the circumstances of the composition, the exact relations of its parts. He is satisfied to take the writer of the Biblical book for what he says in his own form of utterance. In the second the commentator is more anxious to inculcate ideas and lessons which do not arise obviously from the text, and to widen the significance of what he finds in the Bible. The interpretation ceases to be a mere exposition; it becomes creative or conciliating thought, and the interpreter becomes a religious reformer, a philosopher, a prophet. To this school Philo belongs, and the framework of his teaching or the ingenuity by which he develops it from his text is of small account. It is what he teaches and what he considers to be the vital things in religion and life to which we must pay attention. Judged on this ground Philo is a supreme master of Derash, and must take a place among the most creative of the interpreters of the Bible.

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IV

PHILO AND THE TORAH

Over and over again Philo declares that his function is to expound the law of Moses. Moses was the interpreter of God's word to Israel; and Philo aspired to be the interpreter of the revelation of Moses to the Hellenistic world, "the living voice of the holy law." He believed that Israel was a chosen people in the sense that it had received the Divine message on behalf of the whole human race,[126] a Kingdom of Priests, in that it occupied to other nations the position which the priest--using the word in the fullest sense--occupied to the common people.[127] The Torah is God's covenant, not only with one small nation, but with all His children, and its teachings are true for all times and for all places. "The Bible," as Professor Butcher says,[128] "is the one book which appears to have the capacity of eternal self-adjustment, of uninterrupted correspondence with an ever-shifting and ever-widening environment." Nowadays this appears a truism, but the truth first presented itself to the Jewish-Alexandrian community when they came in contact with external culture. The Palestinian and Babylonian Jews, free for the most part from outside influences, developed the Torah for the Jewish people, amplified the tradition, and determined the Halakah, the practical law. But the Alexandrian Jews in the first place found their own attitude to the Torah affected by their acquaintance with Greek ethics and metaphysics, and also found it necessary to interpret the Bible in a new fashion in order to make its value known to their environment. The Greek world required to be shown the general principle, the broad ethical idea in each ordinance. And thus it came about that the Alexandrian interpreters always emphasized the universal beneath the particular, the moral spirit beneath the forms.

It had been one of the chief functions of the prophets to demonstrate the moral import of the law. In their vision the God of Israel became the God of the universe, and His law of conduct was spread over all mankind. "For the law shall go forth from Zion, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem" (Micah iv. 2). Philo in effect expounds Judaism in their spirit, though he speaks their message in the voice of Plato and to a people whose minds were trained in Greek culture. Yet it is significant that he wrote all his commentaries round the Five Books of Moses, and used the prophets and other Biblical books only to illustrate and support the Mosaic teaching, which contains the whole way of life and the whole religious philosophy. According to the rabbis also the Prophets formed only a complement to the Torah, "a species of Agadah";[129] and the prophetic vision of Moses was much clearer than that of his successors. Philo, too, clearly realized that Judaism was the religion of the law. His view of the Torah is what the modern world would call uncritical: that is to say, he accepts the idea that the whole of the Five Books was an objective revelation to Moses at Sinai. But though--or because--he is innocent of the higher criticism, and believes in the literal inspiration of the Torah, his conception is none the less enlightened and spiritual. The law--the Divine Logos--is not the enactment of an outside power, arbitrarily imposed, and to be obeyed because of its miraculous origin; it is the expression of the human soul within, when raised to its highest power by the Divine inspiration. Every man may fit himself to receive the Divine word, which is, in modern language, revelation.[130] Moses, then, is distinguished above all other legislators, not because he alone received it, but because he received it in its purest form, and because he was the most noble interpreter of it. It is for this reason that the law of Moses is of universal validity for conduct. The Divine spirit possessed him so fully that his Logos, or revelation, is eternally true, and by following it all men become fit to be blessed with the Divine gift themselves. This is true of the other prophets of the Bible to a smaller degree, and in a still minor degree Philo hoped that it was true of himself.

It should be premised that the "law of nature" was at the time of Philo an idea as widely accepted as "evolution" is to-day. Men believed that by a study of the processes of the universe the individual might discover the law of conduct that should bring his action into harmony with the whole. What the Greek philosophers declared to be the privilege of the few, Philo declared to have been imparted by God to His people as their law of life. Hence the Mosaic legislation is the code of nature and reason, and the righteous man directs his conduct in accordance with those rules of nature by which the cosmos is ordered.[131] Obedience to the law should not be obedience to an outward prescription, but rather the following out of our own highest nature. The ideal which the Stoic sage continually aspired for and never attained to--the life according to nature and right reason--this Philo claimed had been accomplished in the Mosaic revelation, handed down by God to Israel and through them to the world.