Chapter 8

In this way, by showing how the letter represents the spirit, Philo fulfils the law; his religion is liberal in thought, conservative in practice. He sees clearly that to throw off the law and reject tradition involves in the end chaos and the overthrow of righteousness. And certain Christian--and other--theologians, if one may make bold to say so, fail to realize the spirit of Philo, when they speak of him as a man who approached the light, but was too tied down by the old traditions to receive the full illumination. Rather is it true that the Jewish aspiration of "freedom under the law," or spirit through the letter, is absolutely fundamental in Philo, and loyalty to the Torah is a guiding principle in his religious outlook. He asserts it clearly and strikingly, not only in his ethical commentary on the law, but in his philosophical allegories. Both passages deserve quotation, since they mark the fundamental contrast between Philo and non-Jewish allegorists of the law. In the first Philo is commenting upon the command "Thou shalt not add to or take away from the law" (Deut. xix. 14).[166] He shows first how each of the virtues is marred by excess in either direction; virtue in fact, according to the Aristotelian formula, is "a mean."

"And in the same way, if we add anything great or small to piety, the queen of virtues, or take anything away, we mar it and change its form. Addition will engender superstition, and diminution impiety, and true piety will disappear, which above all things we should pray for to enlighten our souls: for it is the cause of the greatest of goods, inducing in us a knowledge of our conduct towards God, which is a thing more royal and kingly than any public office or distinction. Further, Moses lays down another general command, 'Do not remove the boundary stone of thy neighbor, which thy ancestors have set up.' This, methinks, does not refer merely to inheritances and the boundary of land, but it is ordained with a view to the preservation of ancient customs. For customs are unwritten laws, the decrees of men of old, not carved indeed upon pillars and inscribed upon parchment, but engraved upon the souls of the generations who through the ages maintain the chosen community. Children should take over the paternal customs from their parents as part of their inheritance, for they were reared on them, and lived on them from their swaddling days, and they should not neglect them merely because the tradition is not written. The man who obeys the written laws is not, indeed, worthy of praise, for he may be constrained thereto by fear of punishment. But he who holds fast to the unwritten laws gives proof of a voluntary goodness and is worthy of our eulogy."

Clearly he is arguing here for the observance of the oral law, which later was standardized in the Halakah.

In the other passage, which occurs in the philosophical book "On the Migration of Abraham,"[167] he sets forth the reason of the authority of the law with more argument, and controverts those who would allegorize away the ordinances.

"To whom, then, God has granted both to be and to seem good, he is truly happy and truly renowned. And we must have a great care for reputation, as a matter of great importance and of much value, for our social and bodily life. [By reputation Philo means reputation of being loyal Jews. He is addressing here an esoteric circle who, if they were lax, would bring philosophy into disrepute.] And almost all can secure it, who are well content not to disturb established customs, but diligently preserve the constitution of their nation. But there are some who, looking upon the written laws as symbols of intellectual things, lay great stress on these, but neglect the former. Such men I would blame for their shallowness of mind [Greek: euchereia]. For they ought to give good heed to both--to the accurate investigation of the unseen meaning, but also to the blameless observance of the visible letter. But now, as if they were living by themselves in a desert, and were souls without bodies, and knew nothing of city or village or house or intercourse with men, they despise all that seems valuable to the many, and search for bare and naked truth as it is in itself. Such people the sacred Scripture teaches to give good heed to a good reputation, and to abolish none of those customs which greater and more inspired men than we instituted in the past. For, because the seventh day teaches us symbolically concerning the power of the uncreated God, and the inactivity of the creature, we must not therefore abolish its ordinances, so as to light a fire, or till the ground, or bear a burden, or prosecute a lawsuit, or demand the restoration of a deposit, or exact the repayment of a loan, or do any other thing, which on week-days is allowed. Because the festivals are symbols of spiritual joy and of our gratitude to God, we must not therefore give up the fixed assemblies at the proper seasons of the year. Nor, because circumcision symbolizes the excision of all lusts and passions, and the destruction of the impious opinion according to which the mind imagines that it is itself capable of production, must we therefore abolish the law of fleshly circumcision. We should have to neglect the service of the temple, and a thousand other things, if we were to restrict ourselves only to the allegorical or symbolic sense. That sense resembles the soul, the other sense the body. Just as we must be careful of the body, as the house of the soul, so must we give heed to the letter of the written laws. For only when these are faithfully observed, will the inner meaning, of which they are the symbols, become more clearly realized, and, at the same time, the blame and accusation of the multitude will be avoided."[168]

Philo's position is, then, that man on the one hand owes loyalty to his nation, and on the other is not only a creature of spirit, but has a body and bodily passions. He cannot, therefore, have a religion which is individual or merely spiritual, but he requires common forms and ceremonies that can bind him with the rest of the community, and train his body by good habit to obey his reason. We do not reach the spirit by denying but by obeying the letter. To the mere formal observance of the law and the unreasoning custom which blindly follows the practice of our fathers [Greek: synêtheia] Philo is equally opposed, and he protests, with the earnestness of an Isaiah, against superstitious sacrifice and against the lip-service of the materialist.[169]

"If a man practices ablutions and purifications, but defiles his mind while he cleanses his body; or if, through his wealth, he founds a temple at a large outlay and expense; or if he offers hecatombs and sacrifices oxen without number, or adorns the shrine with rich ornaments, or gives endless timber and cunningly wrought work, more precious than silver or gold--let him none the more be called religious ([Greek: eusebês]). For he has wandered far from the path of religion, mistaking ritual for holiness, and attempting to bribe the Incorruptible, and to flatter Him whom none can flatter. God welcomes genuine service, and that is the service of a soul that offers the bare and simple sacrifice of truth, but from false service, the mere display of material wealth, he turns away."

Lot's daughter, born of a pillar of stone, symbolizes this unthinking, hypertrophied religion; and custom, its mother, which always lags behind and has no seed of life, is the enemy of truth. The religious man pursueth righteousness righteously, the superstitious unrighteously.

Thus Philo holds the balance between a formless spirituality and an unspiritual formalism. The end of religious observance is the love of God, but the love of God requires more than feeling; it must impregnate life. Dubnow, in his summary of Jewish history, formulates an epigram, which, like most of its kind, becomes in its conciseness and pointed antithesis a half-truth. "At Jerusalem," he says, "Judaism appeared as a system of practical ceremonies; at Alexandria as a complex of abstract symbols." No doubt it is true that at Jerusalem the practical side of the law was most prominent, but the spiritual exaltation to which it should lead was appraised as the true end by the great rabbis. Witness Hillel, and indeed all the writers of the gnomic wisdom in the "Ethics of the Fathers." At Alexandria, again, while the philosophical principle underlying the outward practice was especially emphasized, the practice itself was loyally observed, and its value perceived, by those who most thoroughly understood Judaism. Witness the writings of Philo, the Wisdom of Solomon, and the fourth book of the Maccabees. The antithesis between letter and spirit, faith and works, is in truth a false one; and wherever the significance of Judaism has been fully comprehended, the two aspects of the law have been inextricably intertwined. As Philo understood the Jewish mission, it was not merely to diffuse the Jewish God-idea, but quite as much to diffuse the Jewish attitude to God, the way of life. Abstract ideas, however lofty, can never be the bond of a religious community, nor can they be a safeguard for moral conduct. Sooner or later congregations must submit themselves to some law, be it a law of dogma, or be it a law of conduct. Antinomianism, the opposition to the law, to which Paul later gave powerful, even fanatical, expression, was a strong movement at Alexandria in Philo's day. Preparatory to the spread of Christianity, numerous sects sprang up there which purported to follow a spiritual Judaism wherein the law was abrogated because, forsooth, its symbolism was understood! In the extreme allegorists, whom Philo attacks for their shallowness, one may discern the prototypes of the Cainites, Ophites, Melchizedecians, and the rest of the heretical parties that produced the religious chaos of the next centuries. From that welter of opinions there at last emerged dogmatic Christianity. The Christian reformers came to free man from the yoke of the law; but their successors imposed on the mind the fetters of dogma, and, in order to check the passions of the body, advocated renunciation and asceticism. So that not only Judaism as a system of belief, but Judaism as a system of life was lost in their handiwork. Spirituality lacking knowledge and allegorism in excess led to this result. In Philo they are controlled by affection for the Torah, and by a conviction of the need for national cohesion.

Philo is loyal to the Jewish tradition not only because he had a deep feeling for what a modern teacher has called the catholic conscience and the historical continuity of Judaism, but because his philosophy was based on a conviction that the Jewish religion was the truest guide to conduct and righteousness and to the love of God. To him, as to Plato and Aristotle, the law was the outward register of the moral ideal; the "word-and-deed symbols" of ceremonial and prayer were emblems indeed of moral principles, but at the same time they had an intrinsic value, in that they impressed these principles upon the mind, and brought belief and action into harmony. "Religion is law, not philosophy," said Hobbes. With Philo, religion is law _and_ philosophy. Thus the love of the Torah is of the essence of his religious thought. As he puts it in the exhortation to his fellow-ambassadors before Gaius,[170] "to die in defence of it is a kind of life." In his philosophical Judaism he sought always for the universal and the spiritual, but so as always to increase the honor of the law, and not only of the law but of the customs of his ancestors, thinking with the Psalmist that "the Torah is a tree of life to those who keep fast hold of her, and those who support her are blessed."

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V

PHILO'S THEOLOGY

"The most remarkable feature about Judaism," says Darmesteter, "is that without a philosophical system it had reached a philosophical conclusion about the government of the world and the nature of God."[171] The same idea underlies the statement of the Peripatetic writer Theophrastus (who lived in the latter part of the fourth century B.C.E.) that the Jews are a people of philosophers,[172] and the epigram of Heine, that they pray in metaphysics. Intuitively, the lawgiver and prophets of the Hebrew race had attained a conception of monotheism to which the greatest of the Greek philosophers had hardly struggled by reason. The Greeks had started with separate nature-powers, which they had finally resolved into a supreme nature-force; the Hebrews had started with the historical God of their fathers, whom they had universalized into the Creator of the world and Father of all the human race. Wellhausen has suggested that the intellectual development of Judaism with its tendency to become a purified monotheism moved in the same direction towards which Greek thought tended in its philosophical speculation of the universe. The difference between the two conceptions of God, however, remained even in their universalized aspect; the one was an impersonal world-force, the other a personal God in direct relation with individual man. Elsewhere than in Judæa, it has been well said, religious development reaches unity only by sacrificing personality. But the prophets, whose conception of God was imaginative rather than rational, preserved His nearness while expanding His sway. Israel, to use Philo's etymology, is the man who sees God,[173] and his religious genius gave to the world a personal incorporeal Deity, who is both transcendent and immanent, personal and yet above human conception. It is unnecessary to quote evidence of this view of the Godhead in the Bible, and it would be superfluous to adduce passages from the rabbis, did they not bear a striking similarity to the words of Philo. God to them is not only the Creator of the world, but also the Father of the world, the Governor of the world, the Only One of the world, the Space of the world, filling it as the soul fills the body.[174] Now, this Jewish conception of God is dominant in Philo. To him also God is not only the Creator but the Father of the universe.[175] He is the One and the All.[176] He is ever at rest, yet he outstrippeth everything, nearest to everyone, yet far removed, everywhere and nowhere, above and outside the universe, yet filling creation with Himself.[177] Philo loves to attach to the Deity these opposite predicates, for in this way alone can we form for ourselves some conception, however inadequate, of His Being. Strictly, God is unconditioned, and cannot be the subject of predication, for all determination involves negation, and hence in one aspect He is not conceivable nor describable, nor nameable.[178] Siegfried and Zeller press this negative attitude to the Deity, and find that there is an inherent contradiction in Philo's system, which ruins it, in that his God, upon whom all depends and who is the object of all knowledge, is absolutely unknowable and unapproachable. But this is to take Philo according to the strict letter to the neglect of the spirit, and to do that with one so eloquent and so careless of verbal accuracy is utterly to misunderstand him.

The Greek philosophers in their attempt to formulate an exact notion of the First Being by abstract metaphysics had, indeed, conceived it in this fashion; and Philo, harmonizing Greek metaphysics and Hebrew intuition, is drawn at times into a presentation of God which appears to deny His personality and make of Him an abstraction. What has been said of Spinoza is true no less of Philo.[179] "The tendency to unity, to the infinite, to religion, overbalanced itself till, by its mere excess, it seemed to be changed into its opposite. But this is not his spirit, only the dead ultimate result of an imperfect logic that confuses an abstract with a concrete unity." In truth, the moment man tries to define his conception of God's essence in words, he either impairs and perverts his idea, or he must use words that do not really make the idea any clearer than it was unexpressed. Thus in the Hymn of [Hebrew: ygdl] the writer, versifying the creeds of Maimonides, seeks to define God: "He is a Unity, but there is no Unity like His; He is hidden and there is no end to His oneness." But nobody can claim that this gives any adequate conception of what he means; so, too, Philo, when he tries to analyze God's being metaphysically, only obscures the God of his soul, who was the historical God of Israel.

The Hebraic God, like the Greek First Being, has no qualities, but unlike the other He has ethical attributes, and it is by these that we know Him and by these that He is related to the universe and to man. "Failing to comprehend Him in His essence we must aim at the next best thing, to comprehend Him as He is manifested to the world."[180] So in the "Hymn of Unity" it is written, "In images they told of Thee, but not according to Thy essence! They but likened Thee in accordance with Thy works."[181] And this is the manner in which Philo conceives Him: "God's grace and goodness it is which are the causes of creation."[182] "The just man, seeking the nature of all things, makes this most excellent discovery, that all things are due to the grace of God." "To those who ask the origin of creation, one could most easily reply that it is the goodness and grace of God which He bestowed on the race that is after His image."[183] "For all that is in the universe and the universe itself are the gift and bounty and grace of God."[184] Again, "God is omnipotent; He could make all evil, but He wills only what is best."[185] "All is due to God's grace, though nothing is worthy of it;[186] but God looked to His own eternal goodness, and considered that to do good befitted His own blessed and happy nature."

Philo's life-aim, as we have seen,[187] was to see God in all things and all things in God. He is the sole principle of being, exercising continuous causality; and yet He is always at rest, for His energy is the expression of His being. "He never ceases to create, for creation is as proper to Him as it is proper to fire to burn and to snow to cause cold."[188] Further, to Him all human activity and excellence are directly due. He fertilizes virtue by sending down the seed from Heaven,[189] and He brings forth wisdom from the human mind by His own Divine effluence. "It is the distinctive feature of Jewish thought," said Spinoza, "never to make account of particular and secondary causes, but in a spirit of devotion, piety, and godliness to refer all things directly to the Deity." No Jewish thinker ever applied this principle more thoroughly than Philo; and it gives an unique color to his work in the history of ancient philosophy. All our lives are one unceasing miracle, due to the constant manifestation of God's power; and the miracles of the Bible are examples of the universal working of Divine care rather than exceptions from it.

The dominant feeling behind Greek thought is that man is the measure of all things: Plato, attacking the standpoint of his nation, had declared that God is the measure, and Philo repeats his maxim with a new intensity. It means for him that man's mind is a fragment or particle of the Divine universal mind, which, however, is impotent till called into activity by the further Divine gift of inspiration. Knowledge and happiness, therefore, come not through God, but from God.[190] "The Divine Word streams down from the fount of wisdom, and waters the plants of virtuous souls."[191] "To God alone is it fitting to use the word 'my,'"[192] or, put in another way, man has only the usufruct and God the ownership of his powers. Pride of intellect is therefore a deadly sin, because it involves a false, incomplete idea of God, and true knowledge involves reverence. The ideal of the Greek sage, the independent reason, is a godless thing, and those in whom a knowledge of Greek philosophy produces intellectual pride are not disciples of Divine Wisdom. In a fine passage Philo charges with hypocrisy those who talk in high-sounding language about the all-powerful Deity, and yet declare that by their own intellect they can comprehend the world.[193] This was the attitude not only of the proud Stoic, but of certain kindred Jewish sects, which were subject to Greek influences, such as the Gnostics and the Cainites. And upon them Philo appears to be pouring his wrath when he exclaims: "How have you the effrontery to go on making and listening to fine professions about piety and the honor of God, when you have within you, forsooth, the mind equal to God that comprehends all human things, and can combine good and evil portions, giving to some a mixed, to others an unmixed lot? And when anybody accuses you of impiety, you brazenly declare that you belong to the school of that noble guide and teacher Cain (_i.e._ insolent reason), who bade you pay honor to the secondary rather than the primary cause."

Philo has often been reproached with intellectualism, and excessive regard to acquired wisdom, and it may be urged that by his allegorical method he tried to find in the Bible the sanction of two degrees of religious faith, the higher for the philosopher and the lower for the ordinary man. At the same time, however, before his God he retains the childlike simplicity of the most un-Hellenic rabbi, and the perfect humility of the Hasid. His conviction of the dependence of all upon God's grace is the perfect corrective of his intellectual exclusiveness. The idea of God as the unity which comprehends everything and causes everything is the great Jewish contribution to thought, and binds our literature together in all its manifestations. It characterizes and unites the poetical utterance of the Bible prophets, the pious wisdom of the rabbis, the philosophical systems of Philo and Maimonides.