Philo-Judæus of Alexandria

by Norman Bentwich

Philo's first ideal of life was to attain to the profoundest knowledge of God so as to be fitted for the mission of interpreting His Word: and he relates in one of his treatises how he spent his youth and his first manhood in philosophy and the contemplation of the universe.[56] "I feasted with the truly blessed mind, which is the object of all desire (i.e., God), communing continually in joy with the Divine words and doctrines. I entertained no low or mean thought, nor did I ever crawl about glory or wealth or worldly comfort, but I seemed to be carried aloft in a kind of spiritual inspiration and to be borne along in harmony with the whole universe." The intense religious spirit which seeks to perceive all things in a supreme unity Philo shares with Spinoza, whose life-ideal was the intuitional knowledge of the universe and "the intellectual love of God." Both men show the pursuit of righteousness raised to philosophical grandeur.

In his early days the way to virtue and happiness appeared to Philo to lie in the solitary and ascetic life. He was possessed by a noble pessimism, that the world was an evil place,[57] and the worldly life an [pg.54] evil thing for a man's soul, that man must die to live, and renounce the pleasures not only of the body but also of society in order to know God. The idea was a common one of the age, and was the outcome of the mingling of Greek ethics and psychology and the Jewish love of righteousness. For the Greek thinkers taught a psychological dualism, by which the body and the senses were treated as antagonistic to the higher intellectual soul, which was immortal, and linked man with the principle of creation. The most remarkable and enduring effect of Hellenic influence in Palestine was the rise of the sect of Essenes,[58] Jewish mystics, who eschewed private property and the general social life, and forming themselves into communistic congregations which were a sort of social Utopia, devoted their lives to the cult of piety and saintliness. It cannot be doubted that their manner of life was to some degree an imitation of the Pythagorean brotherhoods, which ever since the sixth century had spread a sort of monasticism through the Greek world. Nor is it unlikely that Hindu teachings exercised an influence over them, for Buddhism was at this age, like Judaism, a missionizing religion, and had teachers in the West. Philo speaks in several places of its doctrines.[59] Whatever its moulding influences, Essenism represented the spirit of the age, and it spread far and wide. At Alexandria, above all places, where the life of luxury and dissoluteness [pg.55] repelled the serious, ascetic ideas took firm hold of the people, and the Therapeutic life, i.e., the life of prayer and labor devoted to God, which corresponded to the system of the Essenes, had numerous votaries. The first century witnessed the extremes of the religious and irreligious sentiments. The world was weary and jaded; it had lost confidence in human reason and faith in social ideals, and while the materialists abandoned themselves to hideous orgies and sensual debaucheries, the higher-minded went to the opposite excess and sought by flight from the world and mortification of the flesh to attain to supernatural states of ecstasy. A book has come down to us under the name of Philo[60] which describes "the contemplative life" of a Jewish brotherhood that lived apart on the shores of Lake Mareotis by the mouth of the Nile. Men and women lived in the settlement, though all intercourse between the sexes was rigidly avoided. During six days of the week they met in prayer, morning and evening, and in the interval devoted themselves in solitude to the practice of virtue and the study of the holy allegories, and the composition of hymns and psalms. On the Sabbath they sat in common assembly, but with the women separated from the men, and listened to the allegorical homily of an elder; they paid special honor to the Feast of Pentecost, reverencing the mystical attributes of the number fifty, and they celebrated a religious banquet [pg.56] thereon. During the rest of the year they only partook of the sustenance necessary for life, and thus in their daily conduct realized the way which the rabbis set out as becoming for the study of the Torah: "A morsel of bread with salt thou must eat, and water by measure thou must drink; thou must sleep upon the ground and live a life of hardship, the while thou toilest in the Torah."[61]

We do not know whether Philo attached himself to one of these brotherhoods of organized solitude, or whether he lived even more strictly the solitary life out in the wilderness by himself. Certainly he was at one period in sympathy with ascetic ideas. It seemed to him that as God was alone, so man must be alone in order to be like God.[62] In his earlier writings he is constantly praising the ascetic life, as a means, indeed, to virtue rather than as a good in itself, and as a helpful discipline to the man of incomplete moral strength, though inferior to the spontaneous goodness which God vouchsafes to the righteous. Isaac is the type of this highest bliss, while the life of Jacob is the type of the progress to virtue through asceticism.[63] The flight from Laban represents the abandonment of family and social life for the practical service of God, and as Jacob, the ascetic, became Israel, "the man who beholdeth God," so Philo determined "to scorn delights and live laborious days" in order to be drawn [pg.57] nearer to the true Being. But he seems to have been disappointed in his hopes, and to have discovered that the attempt to cut out the natural desires of man was not the true road to righteousness. "I often," he says,[64] "left my kindred and friends and fatherland, and went into a solitary place, in order that I might have knowledge of things worthy of contemplation, but I profited nothing: for my mind was sore tempted by desire and turned to opposite things. But now, sometimes even when I am in a multitude of men, my mind is tranquil, and God scatters aside all unworthy desires, teaching me that it is not differences of place which affect the welfare of the soul, but God alone, who knows and directs its activity howsoever he pleases."

The noble pessimism of Philo's early days was replaced by a noble optimism in his maturity, in which he trusted implicitly in God's grace, and believed that God vouchsafed to the good man the knowledge of Himself without its being necessary for him to inflict chastisements upon his body or uproot his inclinations. In this mood moderation is represented as the way of salvation; the abandonment of family and social life is selfish, and betrays a lack of the humanity which the truly good man must possess.[65] Of Philo's own domestic life we catch only a fleeting glimpse in his writings. He realized the place of woman in the home; "her absence is its destruction," [pg.58]
he said; and of his wife it is told in another of the "Fragments"
that when asked one day in an assembly of women why she alone did not wear any golden ornament, she replied, "The virtue of a husband is a sufficient ornament for his wife."

Though in his maturity Philo renounced the ascetic life, his ideal throughout was a mystical union with the Divine Being. To a certain school of Judaism, which loves to make everything rational and moderate, mysticism is alien; it was alien indeed to the Sadducee realist and the Karaite literalist; it was alien to the systematic Aristotelianism of Maimonides, and it is alien alike to Western orthodox and Reform Judaism. But though often obscured and crushed by formal systems, mysticism is deeply seated in the religious feelings, and the race which has developed the Cabbalah and Hasidism cannot be accused of lack of it. Every great religion fosters man's aspiration to have direct communion with God in some super-rational way. Particularly should this be the case with a religion which recognizes no intermediary. The Talmudic conceptions of

, the Divine Presence, and

the holy spirit, which was vouchsafed to the saint, certainly are mystic, and at Alexandria similar ideas inspired a striking development. Once again we can trace the fertilizing influence of Greek ideas. Even when the old naturalistic cults had flourished in Greece, and political life had provided a worthy goal for man, mystical beliefs and ceremonies had a powerful [pg.59] attracion for the Hellene; and, when the belief in the old gods had been shattered, and with the national greatness the liberal life of the State had passed away, he turned more and more to those rites which professed to provide healing and rest for the sickening soul. Many of the Alexandrian Jews must have been initiated into these Greek mysteries, for Philo introduces into his exegesis of the law of Moses an ordinance forbidding the practice.[66] He himself advocates a more spiritual mysticism, and it is a cardinal principle of his philosophy to treat the human soul as a god within and its absorption in the universal Godhead as supreme bliss, the end of all endeavor. He claimed to have attained, himself, to this union, and to have received direct inspiration. Giving a Greek coloring to the Hebrew notion of prophecy, "My soul," he says, "is wont to be affected with a Divine trance and to prophesy about things of which it has no knowledge"[67].... "Many a time have I come with the intention of writing, and knowing exactly what I ought to set down, but I have found my mind barren and fruitless, and I have gone away with nothing done, but at times I have come empty, and suddenly been full, for ideas were invisibly rained down upon me from above, so that I was seized by a Divine frenzy, and was lost to everything, place, people, self, speech, and thought. I had gotten a stream of interpretation, [pg.60] a gift of light, a clear survey of things, the clearest that eye can give."[68]

In his "Guide of the Perplexed,"[69] Maimonides describes the various degrees of the