decisive and normative authority is to him the "holy laws" of Moses, and this not only in the sense that everything they contain is true but that all truth is contained in them. Everything that is right and good in the doctrines of the Greek philosophers had already been quite as well, or even better, taught by Moses Thus, since Philo had been deeply influenced by the teachings of Greek philosophy he actually finds in the Pentateuch everything which he had learned from the Greeks From these premises he assumes as requiring no proof that the Greek philosophers must in some way have drawn from Moses, a view indeed which is already expressed by Aristobulus. To carry out these presuppositions called for an exegetical method which seems very strange to us, that, namely, of the allegorical interpretation of Scripture. The allegorical method had been practised before Philo's date in the rabbinical schools of Palestine, and he himself expressly refers to its use by his predecessors, nor does he feel that any further justification is requisite. With its aid he discovers indications of the profoundest doctrines of philosophy in the simplest stories of the Pentateuch.[1]
This merely formal principle of the absolute authority of Moses is really the one point in which Philo still holds to genuinely Jewish conceptions. In the whole substance of his philosophy the Jewish point of view is more or less completely modified—sometimes almost extinguished—by what he has learned from the Greeks. Comparatively speaking, he is most truly a Jew in his conception of God. The doctrine of monotheism, the stress laid on the absolute majesty and sovereignty of God above the world, the principle that He is to be worshipped without images, are all points in which Philo justly feels his superiority as a Jew over popular heathenism. But only over popular heathenism, for the Greek philosophers had long since arrived at least at a theoretical monotheism, and their influence on Philo is nowhere more strongly seen than in the detailed development of his doctrine of God. The specifically Jewish (i e particularistic) conception of the election of Israel, the obligation of the Mosaic law, the future glory of the chosen nation, have almost disappeared, he is really a cosmopolitan and praises the Mosaic law just because he deems it cosmopolitan. The true sage who follows the law of Moses is the citizen not of a particular state but of the world. A certain attachment which Philo still manifests to the particularistic conceptions of his race is meant only "in majorem Judaeorum gloriam." The Jewish people has received a certain preference from God, but only because it has the most virtuous ancestry and is itself distinguished for virtue. The Mosaic law is binding, but only because it is the most righteous, humane and rational of laws, and even its outward ceremonies always disclose rational ideas and aims. And lastly, outward prosperity is promised to the pious, even on earth, but the promise belongs to all who turn from idols to the true God. Thus, in the whole substance of his view of the universe, Philo occupies the standpoint of Greek philosophy rather than of national Judaism, and his philosophy of the world and of life can be completely set forth without any reference to conceptions specifically Jewish.
His doctrine of God starts from the idea that God is a Being absolutely bare of quality. All quality in finite beings has limitation, and no limitation can be predicated of God, who is eternal, unchangeable simple substance, free, self-sufficient, better than the good and the beautiful. To predicate any quality (ποιότης) of God would be to reduce Him to the sphere of finite existence. Of Him we can say only that He is, not what He is, and such purely negative predications as to His being appear to Philo, as to the later Pythagoreans and the Neoplatonists, the only way of securing His absolute elevation above the world. At bottom, no doubt, the meaning of these negations is that God is the most perfect being, and so, conversely, we are told that God contains all perfection, that He fills and encompasses all things with His being.
A consistent application of Philo's abstract conception of God would exclude the possibility of any active relation of God to the world, and therefore of religion, for a Being absolutely without quality and movement cannot be conceived as actively concerned with the multiplicity of individual things. And so in fact Philo does teach that the absolute perfection, purity and loftiness of God would be violated by direct contact with imperfect, impure and finite things. But the possibility of a connexion between God and the world is reached through a distinction which forms the most important point in his theology and cosmology, the proper Being of God is distinguished from the infinite multiplicity of divine Ideas or Forces. God himself is without quality, but He disposes of an infinite variety of divine Forces, through whose mediation an active relation of God to the world, is brought about. In the details of his teaching as to these mediating entities Philo is guided partly by Plato and partly by the Stoics, but at the same time he makes use of the concrete religious conceptions of heathenism and Judaism. Following Plato, he first calls them Ideas or ideal patterns of all things, they are thoughts of God, yet possess a real existence, and were produced before the creation of the sensible world, of which they are the types. But, in distinction from Plato, Philo's ideas are at the same time efficient causes or Forces (δυνάμεις), which bring unformed matter into order conformably to the patterns within themselves, and are in fact the media of all God's activity in the world. This modification of the Platonic Ideas is due to Stoic influence, which appears also when Philo gives to the ίδέαι or δυνάμεις the name of λόγοι, i.e. operative ideas—parts, as it were, of the operative Reason. For, when Philo calls his mediating entities λόγοι, the sense designed is analogous to that of the Stoics when they call God the Logos, i.e. the Reason which operates in the world. But at the same time Philo maintains that the divine Forces are identical with the "daemons" of the Greeks, and the "angels" of the Jews, i e servants and messengers of God by means of which He communicates with the finite world. All this shows how uncertain was Philo's conception of the nature of these mediating Forces. On the one hand they are nothing else than Ideas of individual things conceived in the mind of God, and as such ought to have no other reality than that of immanent existence in God, and so Philo says expressly that the totality of Ideas, the κόσμος νοητός, is simply the Reason of God as Creator (θεού λόγος ήόη κοσμοποιούντος). Yet, on the other hand, they are represented as hypostases distinct from God, individual entities existing independently and apart from Him. This vacillation, however, as Zeller and other recent writers have justly remarked, is necessarily involved in Philo's premises, for, on the one hand, it is God who works in the world through His Ideas, and therefore they must be identical with God, but, on the other hand, God is not to come into direct contact with the world, and therefore the Forces through which He works must be distinct from Him. The same inevitable amphiboly dominates in what is taught as to the supreme Idea or Logos. Philo regards all individual Ideas as comprehended in one highest and most general Idea or Force—the unity of the individual Ideas—which he calls the Logos or Reason of God, and which is again regarded as operative Reason. The Logos, therefore, is the highest mediator between God and the world, the firstborn son of God, the archangel who is the vehicle of all revelation, and the high priest who stands before God on behalf of the world. Through him the world was created, and so he is identified with the creative Word of God in Genesis (the Greek λόγος meaning both "reason" and "word"). Here again, we see, the philosopher is unable to escape from the difficulty that the Logos is at once the immanent Reason of God, and yet also an hypostasis standing between God and the world. The whole doctrine of this mediatorial hypostasis is a strange intertwining of very dissimilar threads; on one side the way was prepared for it by the older Jewish distinction between the Wisdom of God and God Himself, of which we find the beginnings even in the Old Testament (Job xxviii 12 seq.; Prov. viii, ix), and the fuller development in the books of Ecclesiasticus and Wisdom, the latter of which comes very near to Philo's ideas if we substitute for the term "wisdom"
- ↑ For details, see Gfrorer, Philo, i 68 seq; Zeller, Phil. der Gr. (3rd ed., vol. iii, pt. ii., pp 346–352); Siegfried, Philo, pp. 160 seq.
