CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION: PHILO'S METHOD AND BASIC CONCERNS
A. BRIEF SURVEY OF THE LITERATURE
In spite of the immense amount of labor that has been devoted to the study of Philo during the past one hundred years, there is today no generally accepted interpretation of his writings. Admit tedly, scholars have come to agree on many of the details of his thinking, but in reference to his method and basic concerns there is still little accord. On the one hand, Wolfson argues that Philo was "a philosopher in the grand manner," 1 who demonstrated his great intellectual ability both in his critical evaluation of the works of other philos ophers and in his striking out on a new path of his own. Philo demonstrates his originality in every area of his philosophical inquiry, and has left us with a system of philosophy "which is consistent, coherent, and free from contradictions, all of it being based on certain fundamental principles." 2 Indeed, in spite of the fact that Philo left behind him no official group of disciples, "his teachings became the dominant influence in European philosophy for well-nigh seventeen centuries." 3 Wolfson maintains further that all the really significant roots of Philo's thinking are Jewish, and whatever Hellenistic influence we find in his writings is "in language only; not in religious belief or cult." 4 At the other extreme from Wolfson stand Pascher and Goode nough. Drawing at many points on the work of Pascher, 5 Goodenough sees Philo as one who is little interested in the technical problems of philosophy as such. Philo is conversant with much of contem porary philosophy and, in particular, draws heavily on Platonism
1 Harry A. Wolfson.Philo. Foundations ofPhilosophy in Judaism, Christian- ity, and Islam (1947), I, 114. 2 Wolfson, I, 114-15. 3 Wolfson, I, 115. 4 Wolfson, I, 13. 6 Cf. especially Joseph Pascher, H BAI:IAIKN OdOl: Der Konigsweg zu Wiedergeburt und Vergottung bei Philon van Alexandreia (1931).
ALGHJ, III I 2 INTRODUCTION: PHILO'S METHOD AND BASIC CONCERNS and Neo-Pythagoreanism. But his fundamental orientation is religious rather than philosophical, his knowledge of philosophy serving mainly to illuminate and support his religious under standing. According to Goodenough, Philo is deeply indebted to the Greek mystery religions of his day and was particularly influenced by Orphism, the cult of Isis and Osiris, and by the dualism of Iran.1 There is in his writings "an elaborate transformation of Judaism into a mystic philosophy," whose secret teachings were embodied in the writings of the great Moses and whose cultic hierophants were Moses and the High Priest. 2 But this transformation is not to be understood as only a "veneer" or "one of words only"; it resulted in "a Judaism so thoroughly paganized that its objectives were those of Hellenistic mysteries." 3 Indeed, the radical cleft between the material and immaterial worlds-a thoroughly non Jewish motif-is the basic presupposition of the Philonic Mystery, and thus it is understandable that Philo's most significant departure from normative Judaism "lies in the fact that he took to his heart the pagan idea of salvation; that is, that the spirit be released from the flesh in order to return to its spiritual source in God." 4 Goodenough frequently asserts, however, that Philo never thought of himself as breaking away from the religion of his fathers with its central emphasis on the Torah. In his own mind he was from first to last a loyal Jew who presented to his contemporaries the true Judaism.5 Most recent interpretations of Philo have not been as ambitious as those of Wolfson and Goodenough. Such a book as Jean Danielou' s P hilon d' A lexandrie ( 1958), for example, is, as Goodenough points out, mainly a restatement of the work of earlier scholars and thus "cannot be considered a methodological contribution to the
1 Erwin R. Goodenough, By Light, Light: The Mystic Gospel of Hellenistic Judaism (1935), p. 263. See also the discussion of the Amesha Spentas and the Light-Stream on pp. 12-15. 2 Goodenough, p. 263. 3 Goodenough, p. 263. 4 Goodenough, An Introduction to Philo judaeus (2nd ed.; 1962), p. 13. 5 Introduction, p. 160. Systematically to take issue with either Wolfson or Goodenough, or to summarize and comment on other major Philo studies ol the past one hundred years lies outside the scope of this study. Only where particular aspects of these various interpretations are immediately relevant to the subject matter of this study will they be considered critically.