Philo of Alexandria

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Philo of Alexandria (c. 20 BCE – c. 50 CE), known also as Philo Judaeus, was a Jewish thinker of Roman Alexandria who set out to show that the philosophy of the Greeks and the revelation of Moses were, at bottom, one truth told twice. He wrote in Greek, for a community at home in Greek learning, and he read the Pentateuch as a Platonist would read a sacred text — convinced that beneath its plain narrative lay a deeper teaching about God, the soul, and the world.

What is securely known of his life is little, and most of it political. He belonged to one of the wealthiest and most prominent Jewish families in the city; his brother Alexander served as a customs administrator — the alabarch — of standing, and through him Philo had two nephews of consequence, Marcus Julius Alexander, briefly married to the Herodian princess Berenice, and Tiberius Julius Alexander, who left Judaism and rose to high office in the Roman administration, becoming prefect of Egypt. In 38 CE the prefect Aulus Avillius Flaccus permitted, and then abetted, the first recorded pogrom against the Jews of Alexandria — the desecration of synagogues, the herding of the community into a single quarter, public floggings of the elders. In 39–40 CE Philo led the delegation that traveled to Rome to plead the community’s case before the emperor Gaius — Caligula — an embassy he later recorded in the Legatio ad Gaium, the companion piece to his account of the prefect’s downfall in the In Flaccum. That episode, datable to a precise year, fixes his chronology more firmly than anything in his vast surviving corpus, and the encounter with imperial Rome — a ruler who demanded to be worshipped as a god, confronting a people for whom that demand was the one thing forbidden — left its mark on everything he wrote afterward.

The corpus and the method of allegory

The bulk of that corpus is commentary on the books of Moses. Some three dozen treatises survive in Greek, with a further substantial body — the Questions and Answers on Genesis and Exodus, On Providence, On Animals — preserved only in a sixth-century Armenian translation. Modern scholarship maps the whole onto four groupings descending from the Cohn–Wendland critical edition: the Allegorical Commentary, a running esoteric reading of Genesis for advanced students; the Exposition of the Law, a more accessible presentation of the Mosaic legislation organized around the patriarchs as living embodiments of the law; the historical-apologetic works, which include the two political memoirs and the account of the Therapeutae; and the philosophical treatises proper. The spine of his theology runs through the first group.

Its governing method is allegory. Philo took it for granted that scripture, being divine, could not mean only what it appeared to say; the literal sense was real but preliminary, and the patriarchs, the migrations, the laws were also figures for movements of the soul toward God. The technique was not his invention — Greek readers had long allegorized Homer, and the Stoics had read the gods of myth as natural forces — but he applied it to the Bible with a thoroughness that would shape later exegesis for centuries. In the Allegorical Interpretation the garden of Eden becomes virtue, and Eden’s name, glossed as “luxury,” becomes the delight the soul takes in it; the four rivers of paradise become the four cardinal virtues — prudence, courage, temperance, justice. The two creation accounts of Genesis, long an embarrassment to literal readers, become a doctrine: the man made after the image of God in the first chapter is the heavenly, intelligible man, the pattern; the man molded from the dust in the second is the earthly, sense-bound creature. The heavenly man, Philo writes, is the cultivator and guardian of the virtues, while the earthly man, the one Yonge’s translation calls “factitious,” neither cultivates them nor keeps them.

Allegory for Philo is not a license to discard the letter. He keeps the Sabbath, keeps the festivals, defends circumcision against those Alexandrian Jews who had allegorized the commandments so thoroughly that they felt free to stop observing them. The literal law is the body; the hidden meaning is the soul; and a soul without a body, in this world, does not walk. The relation is the same one he draws for the Therapeutae, for whom the whole of the law resembles a living animal whose express commandments are its body and whose concealed meaning is its soul.

The Logos and the powers

His most consequential idea is the Logos. In Philo the term, already rich in Stoic and Platonic use, names the divine reason through which the unknowable God makes and orders the cosmos: at once God’s thought, the pattern of creation, and the mediating bond between a transcendent deity and the material world. The problem the Logos solves is the central problem of his whole system. The God of Moses is utterly transcendent — beyond name, beyond quality, knowable only that he is and never what he is — and yet this God makes a world and speaks to it. A gulf that absolute cannot be crossed directly. The Logos is the crossing.

The clearest statement comes in On the Creation of the World, the treatise that opens the Exposition of the Law. Before God made the visible cosmos, Philo argues, he made an intelligible one — a world of forms existing nowhere but in the divine mind, the model from which the sensible world was copied. He illustrates it with the figure of a king founding a city: the architect does not begin with stone but first sketches the whole city in his own mind and carries, as Yonge renders it, “the image of a city, perceptible as yet only by the intellect,” before a single wall is raised. So God conceived the form of the world in his mind and made first an intelligible world after that form, and then the visible one. And the intelligible world, Philo says in the same treatise, “is nothing else but the reason of God, already occupied in the creation of the world” — the Logos is the blueprint and the act of drawing it at once, the kosmos noetos considered as the mind of God in the work of making.

He calls the Logos, across the corpus, by a cascade of titles: the image of God, the first-born son, the archetypal seal, the idea of ideas, the high priest who stands between God and the world, the man of God. In one notorious passage of the Questions on Genesis he names it a second god — deuteros theos — at once asserting and carefully qualifying the claim, for Philo is emphatic elsewhere that strictly only the First is God, and that the Logos is neither uncreated as God is nor created as a creature is, but stands on the boundary between. From the one Logos he distinguishes two primary powers through which God governs: the creative power, by which God makes and which scripture names “God” (theos), and the regent or kingly power, by which God rules and which scripture names “Lord” (kyrios). The two cherubim over the mercy seat, and the flaming sword between them, become for Philo a diagram of this structure — the powers flanking the Logos that holds them in unity. It is a Middle Platonist architecture, built with Stoic materials, laid over the God of Israel: the transcendent One, the mediating Reason, the powers that reach down into the world.

The Therapeutae

One treatise stands somewhat apart. On the Contemplative Life describes a Jewish community of men and women — Therapeutae and Therapeutrides — living in separate cells on a low hill above Lake Mareotis, near Alexandria, given over wholly to the contemplative pursuit of God. Philo had paired them in advance with the Essenes, whose communal labor he treats as the active life, the contemplative community being its counterpart. They are called Therapeutae, Philo explains, because they profess an art of healing higher than the physicians’ — the physicians cure bodies, these cure souls. Each spends the solitary days in prayer and in the allegorical study of scripture, reading the sacred writings, as Yonge translates, and “investigating the allegories of their national philosophy,” treating the literal text as a symbol of a hidden meaning of nature. They eat nothing before sundown, some only every third or sixth day; they own nothing; they have left family and property behind.

On the seventh week they gather, and on the great feast of the fiftieth day they hold an all-night vigil. The men and the women, seated apart behind a low partition, take their meal of bread and salt and hyssop, and then form two choirs that sing antiphonally — hymns to God in many meters — until, caught up, the two choirs become one, in imitation, Philo says, of the single choir established at the Red Sea after the crossing — which he elsewhere describes as led by Moses and Miriam. They sing until dawn, and when they see the sun rise they stretch out their hands to heaven and pray for a bright day and for truth and clear-sightedness of reason. This is contemplative Judaism rendered as a way of life rather than a doctrine, and it is the closest Philo comes to describing, from the outside, the ascent his exegesis everywhere prescribes. Whether such a community existed exactly as he draws it, or whether the portrait is idealized, the text was prized and preserved — for a reason that turns out to be a misreading, treated below.

Influence and afterlife

The afterlife of Philo’s thought is the source of much modern interest in him, and also of caution. He was preserved not by Jews but by Christians, who saw in him an anticipation of their own theology. The Logos he had placed between the transcendent God and the world the Fourth Gospel would identify with a particular man, declaring that the Word was in the beginning with God, was God, and became flesh; whether Philo’s Logos genuinely prefigures the Christian one, or was read that way after the fact, has been argued for over a century. What is not in doubt is the channel of transmission. Clement of Alexandria, a century and a half later in the same city, reworked Philo’s allegories so closely that whole passages of the Stromateis can be set beside their Philonic source. Origen absorbed Philo’s allegorical method into the threefold sense of scripture that became the foundation of Christian exegesis — and Origen is also the physical pivot of the whole tradition: his copies of Philo, deposited in the library at Caesarea, descend to nearly every surviving Greek manuscript of the corpus. Through these two Alexandrians Philo passes into Justin Martyr, into the Cappadocians, into Ambrose and the Latin West.

His own people lost him. He is virtually absent from the Talmudic and rabbinic literature, and from the streams of pre-Zoharic Jewish mysticism that ran through the same centuries, his Greek and his allegory alien to a tradition that built itself on Hebrew and on the legal letter. He returned to Jewish reading only in the sixteenth century, when Azariah dei Rossi recovered him in the Me’or Einayim (Mantua, 1573–75) under the Hebraized name Yedidiah the Alexandrian — and even then with reservations, dei Rossi faulting him for leaning on the Greek Septuagint and for allegory that cut loose from the plain sense.

The thread that matters for the wider history runs through the Logos. The same question Philo was answering — how a divine mediating intelligence can be both the immanent agent of creation and an attribute of the unknowable First — was being asked in the same Greek-speaking, scripturally saturated milieu by the authors of the Book of Wisdom, who hypostatized Sophia in much the language Philo would use of the Logos, and by the writers of the philosophical Hermetica, whose Poimandres watches a Holy Word come forth from the Light upon the dark waters. These are not the same doctrine; they are the same conversation. The fusion of biblical monotheism with Greek metaphysics that runs through Christian Platonism, through Neoplatonism’s religious turn, and through much of Western mysticism after it, has one of its earliest and fullest sources in this Alexandrian Jew who never left Judaism and never stopped reading Plato.

Texts, editions, and modern scholarship

The full corpus survives in the critical Greek edition of Leopold Cohn and Paul Wendland, Philonis Alexandrini opera quae supersunt (Berlin: Reimer / de Gruyter, 1896–1930), whose grouping of the treatises remains standard. The only complete English translation in the public domain is Charles Duke Yonge’s The Works of Philo Judaeus (London: Bohn, 4 vols., 1854–55), made from Thomas Mangey’s pre-critical Greek text of 1742; it smooths Philo’s technical vocabulary into Victorian devotional English and omits almost all of the Armenian-only works, but it remains the indispensable open-access Philo and underlies the consolidated Hendrickson reprint. The complete critical English translation is the Loeb Classical Library Philo of F. H. Colson, G. H. Whitaker, and Ralph Marcus (1929–62), entering the public domain volume by volume as the years roll over.

• C. D. Yonge, trans., The Works of Philo Judaeus (1854–55) — the only complete public-domain English Philo, the basis of nearly all online access; the companion Hellenistic-Jewish texts that travel with Philo, including the Book of Wisdom and 4 Maccabees, are gathered in R. H. Charles’s Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament, held in full in this library: /library/apocrypha/charles-apot/.
• David T. Runia, Philo of Alexandria and the Timaeus of Plato (Leiden: Brill, 1986) — the definitive demonstration of how thoroughly Philo’s cosmology is built on Plato’s creation dialogue; documented at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_T._Runia.
• David T. Runia, Philo of Alexandria, On the Creation of the Cosmos according to Moses: Introduction, Translation and Commentary (Brill, 2001) — the standard modern commentary on De Opificio Mundi, the treatise where the Logos-as-intelligible-world doctrine is set out; described at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_opificio_mundi.
• David T. Runia, Philo in Early Christian Literature: A Survey (Assen: Van Gorcum / Minneapolis: Fortress, 1993) — the standard account of how Philo passed through Clement, Origen, and the Fathers into the Christian tradition; see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_T._Runia.
• Erwin R. Goodenough, By Light, Light: The Mystic Gospel of Hellenistic Judaism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1935) — the foundational, much-contested argument that Philo is the chief witness to a Hellenistic-Jewish mystery religion.
• Harry A. Wolfson, Philo: Foundations of Religious Philosophy in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, 2 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1947) — the most ambitious systematic reading of Philo as a single coherent philosophical project.
• David Winston, Logos and Mystical Theology in Philo of Alexandria (Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press, 1985) — the most disciplined account of the contemplative-philosophical theology, and of the sense in which “mystical” responsibly applies to Philo.
• Maren R. Niehoff, Philo of Alexandria: An Intellectual Biography (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018) — the current standard biography, which makes the embassy to Rome the turning point of Philo’s intellectual life; reviewed at https://bmcr.brynmawr.edu/2018/2018.05.36/.
• Adam Kamesar, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Philo (Cambridge University Press, 2009) — the indispensable scholarly map of the corpus, method, and reception; https://doi.org/10.1017/CCOL9780521860901.

The historiography of the Therapeutae is its own dense file. Eusebius, in his Ecclesiastical History, identified the community of On the Contemplative Life as the first Christian monks of Alexandria, founded by the Evangelist Mark — a reading that dominated reception through the Middle Ages and is the reason the treatise was so carefully copied, and that is now understood to be a retrojection with no basis in the text. In 1879 P. E. Lucius argued that the treatise was itself a third-century Christian forgery; the case was answered decisively by F. C. Conybeare’s Philo About the Contemplative Life (Oxford: Clarendon, 1895), which established Philonic authorship on philological grounds beyond serious dispute. The modern reassessment runs through Joan E. Taylor’s Jewish Women Philosophers of First-Century Alexandria (Oxford University Press, 2003), which recovers the Therapeutrides as historical Jewish women philosophers, against Ross S. Kraemer’s contrary reading of the community as largely a literary ideal. The ongoing apparatus of the field — the Studia Philonica Annual, edited for three decades by Runia and Gregory E. Sterling — keeps the whole corpus under continuous revision.

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