Philo Judæus, the Philosopher, was born at Alexandria, most probably about 20-10 B.C. Belonging to a wealthy family—his brother, according to Josephus, was the alabarch or arabarch Alexander—he received the most liberal education; and such was his zeal for learning that at a very early age he had passed through the ordinary course of Greek studies. Although every one of the different free sciences and arts included in the Encyclica, he says, attracted him like so many beautiful slaves, he yet aimed higher, to embrace the mistress of them all—Philosophy. Metaphysical investigation was the only thing which, he tells us, could give him anything like satisfaction or pleasure. He was intimately acquainted with Plato, the Greek tragedians, and Honer, and he speaks with the warmest praises of the Stoics and the Pythagoreans. With these and especially with Plato his affinities are closest—an old proverb runs: ἡ Πλάτων φιλονίζει ἡ Φίλων πλατωνίζει. Yet with all his Greek culture he remained a Jew, holding Jewish philosophy as the highest wisdom, the divine revelation given to Moses as the source of all true knowledge in religion. He had completely mastered the literature of his nation, but, strange to say, was by no means a profound Hebrew scholar. When over fifty years of age he went to Rome as the advocate of his Alexandrian brethren, who had refused to worship Caligula in obedience to the imperial edict. His De Legatione ad Caium gives a vivid account of this embassy. Of his life we know little except what is recorded above, and that he once went to Jerusalem. His second mission to Rome, to the Emperor Claudius, on which occasion Eusebius reports that he made the acquaintance of the apostle Peter, is doubtful.
The religious and philosophical system of Philo, however, is most minutely known, and deserves the most careful study on account of the vast influence which it has exercised both on the Jewish and Christian world. To understand his system aright it will be necessary to recall to memory the strange mental atmosphere of his day. The Alexandrines had endeavoured to make Judaism palatable to the refined Greeks, by proving it to be identical with the grandest conceptions of their philosophers and poets, and had quite allegorised away its distinctive characteristics. Philo was the first man who, although himself to a great extent imbued with allegorising tendencies, made a bold and successful stand against a like evaporation of the revealed religion of his fathers; which, indeed, in many cases had led people to throw off its yoke also outwardly. Himself a most zealous champion of Judaism, his bitterness knows no bounds in rebuke of those co-religionists who tried to defend their secret or overt apostasy by scoffing at the Law itself, who were 'impatient of their religious institutions, ever on the lookout for matter of censure and complaint against the laws of religion, who, in excuse of their ungodliness, thoughtlessly argue all manner of objections.' He cannot understand how Jews, 'destined by divine authority to be the priests and prophets for all mankind,' could be found so utterly blind to the fact that that which is the position only of a few disciples of a truly genuine philosophy—viz. the knowledge of the Highest—had by law and custom become the inheritance of every individual of their own people; whose real calling, in fact, it was to invoke the blessing of God on mankind, and who, when they offered up sacrifices 'for the people,' offered them up in reality for all men.
To Philo the divinity of the Jewish law is the basis and test of all true philosophy. Although, like his contemporaries, he holds that the greater part of the Pentateuch, both in its historical and legal portions, may be explained allegorically—nay, goes so far even as to call only the Ten Commandments, the fundamental rules of the Jewish theocracy, direct and immediate revelations, while the other parts of the Book are owing to Moses—he yet holds the latter to be the interpreter specially selected by God, to whose dicta in so far also divine veneration and strict obedience are due; and again, while admitting that many explanations of a metaphysical nature may be given to single passages, yet demands in general that their literal meaning shall not be tampered with. This literal meaning, according to him, is the essential part, the other explanations are mere speculation—exactly as the Midrash and some Church Fathers hold. At the same time it is true that, without denying the literal meaning, again and again he puts forward the allegorical meaning as the one really divine, and indeed sometimes he treats the literal meaning as absurd. Only the allegorical method in his hands differed in so far from that of his contemporaries that to him these interpretations—for which he did not disdain sometimes even to use the numbers symbolically, or to derive Hebrew words from Greek roots, and the like—were not a mere play of fancy, in which he could exercise his powers of imagination, but, to a certain extent, a reality, an inner necessity. He clung to philosophy, as combined with the Law. If the former could be shown, somehow or other, to be hinted at in the latter, then only he could be that which all his soul yearned to be—viz. the disciple of both: a Greek, with all the refinement of Greek culture, and a Jew—a faithful, pious, religious Jew. Nay, he even urged the necessity of allegory from the twofold reason of the anthropomorphisms current in Scripture and from certain apparent superfluities, repetitions, and the like, which, in a record that emanated from the Deity, must needs have a special meaning of their own which required investigation and a peculiar interpretation. Yet this fanciful method never for one moment interfered with his real object of pointing out how Judaism most plainly and unmistakably was based upon the highest ethical principles.
His writings develop his ideas and his system in the two directions indicated. In that division of his writings principally which treats of the Creation (κοσμοποιία) he allows allegory to take the reins out of his hands; in that on the Laws (νόμοι), on the other hand, he remains remarkably sober and clear, extolling the Mosaic legislation throughout at the expense of every other known to him. In a very few instances only is he induced to find fault, or to alter slightly, by way of allegory, the existing ordinances.
His idea of God is intended to be in the highest degree philosophical, though its religious significance is never lost sight of. God alone is the real Good, the Perfect, the final cause of all things, which ceaselessly flow outwards from Himself. God is only to be imagined as the primeval light, which cannot be seen by itself, but which may be known from its rays that fill the whole world. Being infinite and uncreated, He is not to be compared with any created thing. He has, therefore, no name, and reveals Himself only in designations expressive of this 'inexpressibility,' such as 'the Place' (the Talmudical Makom), because He comprises all space, and there is nothing anywhere besides Him. He is better than Virtue and Knowledge, better than the Beautiful and the Good (καλοκάθθεια), simpler than the One, more blissful than Bliss. Thus He has properly speaking no quality, or only negative ones. He is the existing Unity or Existence itself (ὁ ὦν), comprised in the unpronounceable Tetragrammaton. As Creator, God manifests Himself to man, and in this phase of active revelation of God, which is as natural to Him as burning is to the heat, and cold to the snow, may be distinguished two distinct sides or essential properties, the Power and the Grace, to which correspond the two Scripture names of Elohim and Adonai. The Power also gives the laws and punishes the offender; while the Grace is the beneficent, forgiving, merciful quality. Yet, since there is not to be assumed an immediate influence of God upon the world, their respective natures being so different that a point of contact cannot be found, an intermediate class of beings had to be created to stand between both, through whom He could act in and upon creation—viz. the spiritual world of ideas, which are not only 'Ideals,' or types, in the Platonic sense, but real, active powers (δυνάμεις), surrounding God like a number of attendant Beings. They are His messengers, who work His will, and by the Greeks are called good dæmons, by Moses angels. There are very many different degrees of perfection among them. Some are immediate 'serving angels;' others are the souls of the pious, of the prophets, and the people of Israel, who rise higher up to the Deity; others, again, are the heads and chief representatives of the different nations, such as Israel does not need, since they conceive and acknowledge the Everlasting Head of all Beings Himself. Collectively the Powers are used as equivalent to the nature or essence of God—his ideas or thoughts dominating and informing the universe; yet they are far from being substitutes for God. Zeller maintains that in Philo's doctrine of the Powers two representations cross each other—the religious notion of personal, and the philosophical of impersonal, mediators. Edersheim also asserts that here Philo's philosophy and theology are hopelessly at issue, the δυνάμεις being undoubtedly represented as hypostases, while yet they have no true personal subsistence. Dr Drummond refuses to admit that Philo imputed personality to the Powers, or that he identified them with the angels. Schürer maintains that we cannot deny definitely the personification of the λόγοι or δυνάμεις, since Philo conceived of them both as independent hypostases and as immanent determinations of the Divine existence.
The Logos, or Divine Reason, comprises all these intermediate spiritual powers in His own essence. It is the universal idea, the one supreme and all-embracing thought which unifies everything into a real cosmos—a property of God, and the representative of God in His relation to the created world. As such the Logos is the highest of the angels, the Beginning, the Name, the Word, the Primeval Angel, the first-born son of God, the second God (δεύτερος θεός, in opposition to ὁ θεός). As the expressed Thought of God it has a twofold aspect regarded as the uttered and the inward Logos, although this is not formally expressed by Philo. It becomes objective in the harmonies of the created world, and stands distinct from the same Thought when hidden in the silent depths of God, and known only to His omniscience. The Logos formed the world out of chaotic matter, regarded as a mass occupying space, and now considered as the μῆ ὄν of Plato, again as the ὄντα of the Stoics. Man is a microcosm, a little world in himself, a creation of the archetypal Logos, through whom he participates in the Deity, or, as Scripture has it, 'he is created in the image of God.' He stands between the higher and lower beings—in the middle of creation. The ethical principles of Stoicism Philo identified with the Mosaic ethics, in which the ideal is most exalted moral perfectibility or sanctity, and man's duties consist in veneration of God, and love and righteousness towards fellow-men. Philo holds firmly the belief in immortality. Eternity is the motionless duration of unalterable being; time but the moving succession of ever-shifting phenomena. Man is immortal by his heavenly nature; but as there are degrees in his divine nature, so there are degrees in his immortality, which only then deserves this name when it has been acquired by an eminence of virtue. There is a vast difference between the mere living after death, which is common to all mankind, and the future existence of the perfect ones. Future recompense and punishment are not taken by him in the ordinary sense of the word. Virtue and sin both have all their rewards within themselves; but the soul, which is 'pre-existing,' having finished its course in the sublunar world, carries this consciousness with it in a more intense and exalted manner. Paradise is Oneness with God; there is no hell with bodily punishments for souls without a body, and no Devil in the Philonic system. Dr Drummond has succeeded in proving against Dähne and others that matter, though eternal, is purely passive, and not itself necessarily evil in Philo's teaching. The source of the imperfection is not in the material as opposed to the spiritual, but in the phenomenal as opposed to the eternal. The human πνεῦμα is itself an emanation from Deity, subject meantime to the bondage of sense, and the loftiest principle of ethics is the utmost possible renunciation of sensuousness. The direct vision of God is possible only for those souls which have been lifted out of themselves and illumined by renunciation and severe purity. And transcending this ecstasy is the complete deliverance from the body beyond the gates of death, when the soul that has freed itself in life from the bondage of sense returns again to its original condition as pure spirit.
Philo's Messianic notions are vague in the extreme, and he partly even interprets certain scriptural passages alluding to some future Redeemer as referring to the soul. Yet he indicates his belief in a distant time when some hero will arise out of the midst of the nation who will gather all the dispersed together; and these, purified by long punishments, will henceforth form a happy, sinless, most prosperous community, to which all the other nations will be eager to belong. Still the Messianic hope is very obscure, and Dähne's identification of the Logos with the Messiah is indefensible.
We have only been able to indicate, in the slightest of outlines, the principal features of Philo's theology and philosophy, without endeavouring to follow any one of the manifold systematic schemes into which his scattered half-obscure dicta have been pressed. His method of exegesis and the main elements of his religious philosophy passed into the Christian church, and exercised a powerful influence over its thinkers. Nor can Philo ever lose his importance in the history of thought as the earliest eclectic religious philosopher, the first to construct a real philosophy of religion, in which were harmonised the rational and the irrational—the results of speculative thought with the suppositions of a supernatural revelation.
Philo's writings are numerous, and their arrangement presents no small difficulty to the student. Many of his writings in the list given by Eusebius (H. E. ii. 18) are lost, but the bulk even of these have been preserved in the Fathers and early Christian writers, like Eusebius, who quote Philo to an enormous extent. Many detached portions have also been preserved in the Florilegia and similar compilations of the earlier Christian Parallelists. The first and very imperfect edition of the Greek text was that published by Turnebus (Paris, 1552), containing only thirty-nine treatises. The best is still that of Thomas Mangey (2 vols. folio, Lond. 1742), but a satisfactory collected edition is still a desideratum, neither that promised by Grossmann so long ago as 1829, nor that for which Tischendorf collected materials, ever having appeared. The Libellus de Opificio Mundi was edited by Leop. Cohn in 1889 as a specimen of a projected edition. Some writings of Philo preserved only in Armenian have been published in Latin translations by Jo. Bapt. Aucher (Venice, 1822, 1826); and Greek portions of greater or less extent have been given by Mai, Grossmann, Tischendorf, Cardinal Pitra, and Professor J. Rendel Harris (Cambridge Press, 1886). The more recently collected materials are contained in the hand edition of C. E. Richter (8 vols. Leip. 1828-30) and the Tauchnitz stereotype edition (8 vols. Leip. 1851-53). See the brief account of each book in Schürer's Hist. of the Jewish People (div. 2, vol. iii. 1886) in Clark's translation. An important contribution to Philo bibliography is that by L. Massebieau (Paris, 1889). There is an Eng. trans. by C. D. Yonge in Bohn's 'Eccles. Library' (4 vols. 1854-55).
More than three-fourths of what has come down to us from Philo consists of three chief works on the Pentateuch: (1) Ζητήματα καὶ λύσεις (Questiones et Solutiones)—in Armenian—a short explanation of Genesis and Exodus in question and answer; (2) Νόμων ἱερῶν ἀλληγορίαι, a large allegorical commentary on Genesis, in which the history is interpreted as a system of psychology and ethics, itself filling almost the whole of Mangey's first volume, and consisting of a series of sixteen special treatises; (3) a group of compositions intended as an Exposition of the Mosaic legislation for non-Jews, and falling naturally into three divisions—an Account of the Creation (κοσμοποιία, De Opificio Mundi), the Biographies of Virtuous Men, and the Legislation proper. Besides these have been preserved, either entire or in fragments, the following works: Περὶ βίου Μωϋσέως (Vita Mosis), Περὶ τῶν πάντα σπουδαίων εἶναι ἐλεύθερον (Quod omnis probus liber), Εἰς Φλάκκον (Adversus Flaccum) and Περὶ ἀρετῶν καὶ πρεσβείας πρὸς Γάιον (De legatione ad Caïum), Περὶ προνόίας (De Providentia), Ἀλέξανδρος ἢ περὶ τοῦ λόγου ἔχειν τὰ ἄλογα ζῶα (only in Armenian), Ὑποθετικὰ (known only from Eusebius), and Περὶ Ἰουδαίων.
Other works now generally regarded as spurious are De Incorruptibilitate mundi, De Mundo, and Interpretatio Hebraicorum noninum. The Philonic authorship of the De Vita contemplativa was attacked by Lucius (Die Therapeuten, 1879), but defended by Edersheim in Smith's Dict. of Christ. Biography, and with great ingenuity by F. C. Conybeare in his admirable edition of the text (1895).
See H. C. Ryle, Philo and Holy Scripture (1895); Herriot, Philon le Juif (Paris, 1898); Gfrörer, Philo und die Alexandrinische Theosophie (Stuttgart, 1831); Dähne, Die Jüdisch-Alexandrinische Religions-Philosophie (Halle, 1834); Keferstein, Philo's Lehre von den göttlichen Mittelwesen (Leip. 1846); Siegfried, Philo von Alexandria als Ausleger des Alten Testaments an sich selbst und nach seinem geschichtlichen Einfluss betrachtet (Jena, 1875); Zeller, in part iii. div. 2 of Die Philosophie der Griechen (3d ed. 1881); Edersheim's Life and Times of Jesus the Messiah (2 vols. 1883); and Principal Drummond's admirable Philo-Judeus, or the Jewish-Alexandrian Philosophy in its Development and Completion (2 vols. 1888).