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 was a financier of standing, and a nephew, Tiberius Julius Alexander, rose to high office in the Roman administration. In 39–40 CE, after violence against the Jews of Alexandria, Philo led the delegation that traveled to Rome to plead the community’s case before the emperor Gaius — Caligula — an embassy he later recorded. That episode fixes his dates more firmly than anything in his vast surviving corpus.

The bulk of that corpus is commentary on the books of Moses, and 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 — but he applied it to the Bible with a thoroughness that would shape later exegesis for centuries.

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. He calls it, in various places, the image of God, the first-born, the second God — phrases that later Christian writers, developing their own doctrine of the Logos in the Gospel of John, would find ready to hand.

That afterlife is the source of much modern interest in him, and also of caution. Philo was preserved not by Jews but by Christians, who saw in him an anticipation of their own theology; whether his Logos genuinely prefigures the Christian one, or was read that way after the fact, remains contested. What is clear is that he stands at a real junction. The fusion of biblical monotheism with Greek metaphysics that runs through Christian Platonism, 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.

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