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Philo of Alexandria and the Hellenistic theology
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VIII
PHILO OF ALEXANDRIA AND THE HELLENISTIC THEOLOGY
CONCERNING PHILO AND HIS METHOD
Seeing that a study of the Trismegistic literature is essentially a study in Hellenistic theology, no introduction to this literature would be adequate which did not insist upon the utility of a careful review of the writings of Philo, the famous Jewish Hellenist of Alexandria, and which did not point to the innumerable parallels which are traceable between the basic principles of the Jewish philosopher-mystic and the main ideas embodied in our tractates. To do this, however, in detail would require a volume, and as we are restricted to the narrow confines of a chapter, nothing but a few general outlines can be sketched in, the major part of our space being reserved for a consideration of what Philo has to say of the Logos, or Divine Reason of things, the central idea of his cosmos.
In perusing the voluminous writings 1 of our witness, the chief point on which we would insist at the very outset, is that we are not studying a novel system devised by a single mind, we are not even face to face with a new departure in method, but that the writings
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of our Alexandrian 1 came at the end of a line of predecessors; true that Philo is now, owing to the preservation of his writings, by far the most distinguished of such writers, but he follows in their steps. His method of allegorical interpretation is no new invention, 2 least of all is his theology.
In brief, Philo is first and foremost an “apologist”; his writings are a defence of the Jewish myths and prophetic utterances, interpreted allegorically, in terms not of Hellenic philosophy proper, but rather of Hellenistic theology, that is, of philosophy theologised, or of theology philosophised; in other words, in the language of the current cultured Alexandrian religio-philosophy of his day.
As Edersheim, in his admirable article, 3 says, speaking
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of this blend of the faith of the synagogue with the thinking of Greece: “It can scarcely be said that in the issue the substance and spirit were derived from Judaism, the form from Greece. Rather does it often seem as if the substance had been Greek and only the form Hebrew. ”
But here Edersheim seems to be not sufficiently alive to the fact that the “Greek thinking” was already in Hellenistic circles strongly theologised and firmly wedded to the ideas of apocalypsis and revelation. How, indeed, could it have been otherwise in Egypt, in the face of the testimony of our present work?
Philo, then, does but follow the custom among the cultured of his day when he treats the stories of the patriarchs as myths, and the literally intractable narratives as the substance of an ethical mythology. It was the method of the religio-philosophy of the time, which found in allegorical interpretation the “antidote of impiety, ” and by its means unveiled the supposed under-meaning (ὑ π ν ό ι α ) of the myths.
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The importance of Philo, then, lies not so much in his originality, as in the fact that he hands on much that had been evolved before him; for, as Edersheim says, and as is clear to any careful student of the Philonean tractates: “His own writings do not give the impression of originality. Besides, he repeatedly refers to the allegorical interpretation of others, as well as to canons of allegorism apparently generally recognised. He also enumerates differing allegorical interpretations of the same subjects. All this affords evidence of the existence of a school of Hellenist [Hellenistic, rather] interpretation” (p. 362).
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But this does not hold good only for the interpretation of “the myths of Israel” by Hellenistic Jews; it holds good of the whole cultured religious world of the time, and pre-eminently of the Hellenistic schools of every kind in Egypt. In brief, Philo’s philosophy was often already philosophised myth before he ingeniously brought it into play for the interpretation of Hebrew story.
In short, the tractates of Philo and our Trismegistic sermons have both a common background—Hellenistic theology or theosophy. Both use a common language.
Philo, of course, like the rest of his contemporaries, had no idea of criticism in the modern sense; he was a thorough-going apologist of the Old Covenant documents. These were for him in their entirety the inerrant oracles of God Himself; nay, he even went to the extent of believing the apologetic Greek version to be literally inspired. 1
Nevertheless he was, as a thinker, confronted with the same kind of difficulties as face us to-day with immeasurably greater distinctness. The ideas of God, of the world-order, and of the nature of man, were so far advanced in his day beyond the frequently crude and repugnant representations found in the ancient scriptures of his people, that he found it impossible to claim for them on their surface-value the transcendency of the last word of wisdom from God to man, at anyrate among the cultured to whom he addressed himself. These difficulties he accordingly sought to remove by an allegorical interpretation, whereby he read into them the views of the highest philosophical and religious environment of his time.
Having no idea of the philosophy of history, or of the history of religion, or of the canons of literary
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criticism, as we now understand these things, he never stopped to enquire whether the writers of the ancient documents intended their narratives to be taken as myths embodying an esoteric meaning; much less did he ask himself, as we ask ourselves to-day, whether these writers had not in all probability frequently written up the myths of other nations into a history of their own patriarchs and other worthies; on the contrary, he relieved them of all responsibility, and entirely eliminated the natural human element, by his theory of prophecy, which assumed that they had acted as impersonal, passive instruments of the Divine inspiration.
But even Philo, when he came to work it out, could not maintain this absolutism of inspiration, and so we find him elsewhere unable to ascribe a consistent level of inspiration to his “Moses, ” who of course, in Philo’s belief, wrote the Pentateuch from the first to the last word. Thus we find him even in the “Five Fifths” making a threefold classification of inspiration: (i. ) The Sacred Oracles “spoken directly of God by His interpreter the prophet”; (ii. ) Those prophetically delivered “in the form of question and answer”; and (iii) Those “proceeding from Moses himself while in some state of inspiration and under the influence of the deity. ” 1
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But what is most pleasant is to find that Philo admitted the great philosophers of Greece into his holy assembly, and though he gives the pre-eminence to Moses, yet it is, as it were, to a first among equals—a wide-minded tolerance that was speedily forgotten in the bitter theological strife that subsequently broke forth.
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