Philo, nevertheless, despite his attack on the Chaldeans, believed in much which we should call astrological. The stars, although not independent gods, are nevertheless divine images of surpassing beauty and possess divine natures, although they are not incorporeal beings. Philo distinguishes between the stars, men, and other animals as follows. The beasts are capable of neither virtue nor vice; human beings are capable of both; the stars are intelligent animals, but incapable of any evil and wholly virtuous.[1570] They were native-born citizens of the world long before its first human citizen had been naturalized.[1571] God, moreover, did not postpone their creation until the fourth day because superiors are subject to inferiors. On the contrary they are the viceroys of the Father of all and in the vast city of this universe the ruling class is made up of the planets and fixed stars, and the subject class consists of all the natures beneath the moon.[1572] A relation of natural sympathy exists between the different parts of the universe, and all things upon the earth are dependent upon the stars.[1573]
They do not cause evil: but it is possible to predict the future from their motions.
Philo of course will not admit that evil is caused either by the virtuous stars or by God working through them. As has been said, he attributed evil to matter or to “the natural changes of the elements,”[1574] drawing a line between God and nature in much the fashion of the church fathers later. But he granted that “before now some men have conjecturally predicted disturbances and commotions of the earth from the revolutions of the heavenly bodies, and innumerable other events which have turned out most exactly true.”[1575] Philo’s interest in astronomy and astrology is further suggested by his interpretation of the eleven stars of Joseph’s dream as referring to the signs of the zodiac,[1576] Joseph himself making the twelfth; and by his interpreting the ladder in Jacob’s dream which stretched between earth and heaven as referring to the air,[1577] into which earth’s evaporations dissolve, while the moon is not pure ether like the other stars but itself contains some air. This accounts, Philo thinks, for the spots upon the moon—an explanation which I do not remember having met in subsequent writers.
Jewish astrology.
Josephus[1578] and the Jews in general of Philo’s time were equally devoted to astrology according to Münter, who says: “Only their astrology was subordinated to theism. The one God always appeared as the master of the host of heaven. But they regarded the stars as living divine beings and powers of heaven.”[1579] In the Talmud later we read that the hour of Abraham’s birth was announced by the stars and that he feared from his observations of the constellations that he would go childless. Münter also gives examples of the belief of the rabbis in the influence of the stars upon the destiny of the Jewish people and upon the fate of individual men, and of their belief that a star would announce the coming of the Messiah.[1580]
Perfection of the number seven.
From Philo’s astrology it is an easy step to his frequent reveries concerning the perfection and mystic significance of certain numbers,—a train of thought which was continued by many of the church fathers, and is also found in various pagan writers of the Roman Empire.[1581] Thomas Browne in his enquiry into “Vulgar Errors”[1582] was inclined to hold Philo even more responsible than Pythagoras or Plato for the dissemination of such doctrines. Philo himself recognizes the close connection between astrology and number mysticism, when, after affirming the dependence of all earthly things upon the heavenly bodies, he adds: “It is in heaven, too, that the ratio of the number seven began.”[1583] Philo doubts if it is possible to express adequately the glories of the number seven, but he feels that he ought at least to attempt it and devotes a dozen chapters of his treatise on the creation of the world to it,[1584] to say nothing of other passages. He notes that there are seven planets, seven circles of heaven, four quarters of the moon of seven days each, that such constellations as the Pleiades and Ursa Major consist of seven stars, and that children born at the end of seven months live, while those who see the light in the eighth month die. In diseases the seventh is a critical day. Also there are either seven ages of man’s life, as Hippocrates says, or, in accordance with Solon’s lines, man’s three-score years and ten may be subdivided into ten periods of seven years each. The lyre of seven strings corresponds to the seven planets, and in speech there are seven vowels. There are seven divisions of the head—eyes, ears, nostrils, and mouth, seven divisions of the body, seven kinds of motion, seven things seen, and even the senses are seven rather than five if we add the vocal and generative organs.[1585]
And of fifty.
Philo’s ideal sect, the Therapeutae, are wont to assemble as a prelude to their greatest feast at the end of seven weeks, “venerating not only the simple week of seven days but also its multiplied power,”[1586] but the chief festival itself occurs on the fiftieth day, “the most holy and natural of numbers, being compounded of the power of the right-angled triangle, which is the principle of the origination and condition of the whole.”[1587]
Also of four and six.