VIII
THE INFLUENCE OF PHILO
The hope which Philo had cherished and worked for was the spreading of the knowledge of God and the diffusion of the true religion over the whole world.[346] The end of Jewish national life was approaching, but rabbis in Palestine and philosophers at Alexandria, unconscious of the imminent doom, thought that the promise of the prophet was soon to be fulfilled, and all peoples would go up to worship the one God at the temple upon Mount Zion, which should be the religious centre of the world. In Philo's day a universal Judaism seemed possible, a Judaism true to the Torah as well as to the Unity of God, [347] spread over the Megalopolis of all peoples; and in the light of this hope Philo welcomed proselytism. The Jews had a clear mission; they were to be the light of the world, because they alone of all peoples had perceived God. Israel (
), to repeat Philo's etymology, is the man who beholds God, and through him the other nations were to be led to the light. The mission of Israel was not a passive service, but an active preaching of God's word, and an active propagation of God's law to the Gentile. He must welcome the stranger [pg.243] that came within the gates.[348] Philo struggled against the separative and exclusive tendency which characterized a section of his race. He laid stress upon the valuelessness of birth, and the saving power of God's grace to the pagan who has come to recognize Him, in language which Christian commentators call incredible in a Jew, but which was in fact typical of the common feeling at Alexandria. Appealing to the Gentiles, Philo declared that "God has special regard for the proselyte, who is in the class of the weak and humble together with the widow and orphan[349]; for he may be alienated from his kindred when he is converted to the honor of the one true God, and abandons idolatrous, polytheistic worship, but God is all the more his advocate and helper." And speaking to the Jews he says:[350] "Kinship is not measured by blood alone when truth is the judge, but by likeness of conduct and by the pursuit of the same objects." Similarly, in the Midrash, it is said that proselytes are as dear to God as those who were born Jews;[351] and, again, that the Torah was given to Israel for the benefit of all peoples;[352] or[353] that the purpose of Israel's dispersion was that they might make proselytes. Philo's short treatise on "Nobility" is an eloquent [pg.244] plea for the equal treatment of the stranger who joins the true faith; and the author finds in the Bible narratives support for his thesis, that not good birth but the virtue of the individual is the true test of merit. Of the valuelessness of the one, Cain, Ham, and Esau are types; of the supreme worth of the other, Abraham, who is set up as the model of the excellent man brought up among idolaters, but led by the Divine oracle, revealed to his mind, to embrace the true idea of God. If the founder of the Hebrew nation was himself a convert, then surely there was a place within the religion for other converts. Remarkable is the closing note of the book:
"We should, therefore, blame those who spuriously appropriate as their own merit what they derive from others, good birth; and they should justly be regarded as enemies not only of the Jewish race, but of all mankind; of the Jewish race, because they engender indifference in their brethren, so that they despise the righteous life in their reliance upon their ancestors' virtue; and of the Gentiles, because they would not allow them their meed of reward even though they attain to the highest excellence of conduct, simply because they have not commendable ancestors. I know not if there could be a more pernicious doctrine than this: that there is no punishment for the wicked offspring of good parents, and no reward for the good offspring of evil parents. The law judges each man upon his own merit, and does not assign praise or blame according to the virtues of the forefathers."
And, again, he writes: "God judges by the fruit of the tree, not by the root; and in the Divine judgment [pg.245] the proselyte will be raised on high, and he will have a double distinction, because on earth he 'deserted' to God, and later he receives as his reward a place in Heaven."[354]
Unfortunately, the development of missionizing activity, which followed Philo's epoch, threatening, as it did, the fundamental principles of Judaism, necessitated the reassertion of its national character and antagonism to an attitude which sought expansion by compromise. It is the tragedy of Philo's work that his mission to the nations was of necessity distrusted by his own race, and that his appeal for tolerance within the community was turned to a mockery by the hostility which the converts of the next century showed to the national ideas. Christian apologists early learned to imitate Philo's allegorical method, and appropriated it to explain away the laws of Moses. Within a hundred years of Philo's death, his ideal, at least in the form in which he had conceived it, had been shattered for ages. While he was preaching a philosophical Judaism for the world at Alexandria, Peter and Paul were preaching through the Diaspora an heretical Judaism for the half-converted Gentiles. The disciples of Jesus spread his teaching far and wide; but they continually widened the breach which their Master had himself initiated, and so their work became, not so much a development of Judaism, as an attack upon it. In some of its principles, [pg.246] indeed, the message of Jesus was the message of Philo, emphasizing, as it did, the broad principles of morality and the need of an inner godliness. But it was fundamentally differentiated by a doctrine of God and the Messiah which was neither Jewish nor philosophical, and by the breaking away from the law of Moses, which cut at the roots of national life. Whatever the moral worth of the preaching of Jesus, it involved and involves the overthrow of the Jewish attitude to life and religion, which may be expressed as the sanctification of ordinary conduct, and as morality under the national law. To this ideal Philo throughout was true, and the Christian teachers were essentially opposed, and however much they approximated to his method and utilized his thought, they were always strangers to his spirit. Philo's philosophy was in great part a philosophy of the law; the Patristic school borrowed his allegorizing method and produced a philosophy of religious dogma! Those who spread the Christian doctrine among the Hellenized peoples and the sophisticated communities that dwelt round the Mediterranean found it necessary to explain and justify it by the metaphysical and ethical catchwords of the day, and in so doing they took Philo as their model. They followed both in general and in detail his allegorical interpretations in their recommendation of the Old Testament to the more cultured pagans, as the apology of Justin, the commentaries of Origen, and the philosophical miscellany (
