The Encyclopedia Americana (1920)/Philo Judæus

PHILO JUDÆUS, joo-dē'ŭs, Jewish philosopher: b. about 20 B.C.; d. not later than 54 A.D. He went to Rome in 42 A.D. was one of a deputation from Alexandria to the Emperor Caligula, to persuade him to release the Jews from the obligation of adoring the imperial statue. He was the oldest of five deputies. This and the fact that he visited Jerusalem and belonged to a wealthy family is nearly all that is known of his life.

Before the time of Philo the Hellenized Jews (see Hellenists), particularly those of Alexandria, had begun to blend the ideas of the Greek philosophers with the teaching of their own sacred books; but as they generally held that the Pentateuch itself was the source of inspiration from which the Greeks derived what was true in their philosophy, they endeavored by allegorical interpretations of their own books to find “indications of the profoundest doctrines of philosophy in the simplest stories of the Pentateuch.” It was in this school that Philo was brought up. His philosophy was thus strictly a theosophy. It rested, as its direct foundation, on the Jewish Scriptures as an inspired revelation, and with these it incorporated the speculations of the writer, founded on the systems of Greek philosophy, which best harmonized with the teaching of the Hebrew Scriptures, and especially on the philosophy of Plato.

Philo's idea of God was partly religious, partly philosophical. From his faith as a Jew he derived the principle that God is to be worshipped as a personal being, but in developing his conception of God he is indebted chiefly to philosophical speculations. He held that God is incorporeal and only cognizable by reason. He is the most universal of beings, and higher than knowledge, goodness or beauty, per se. He has, strictly speaking, no attributes, being pure, unqualified being; he is therefore incomprehensible. The attributes ascribed to God in Scripture are to be understood only figuratively. God is present everywhere in the material universe by his operations; nowhere in his essence. God is the only free being. All others are subject to necessity. Philo's notions of matter are not remarkably consistent. He held God to be too perfect to have any association with it, yet he holds Him to be the Creator of the

universe. Between God and the world there is an intermediate being, the Logos. He wavers in his account of the Logos also. The Logos is the most universal of all beings except God. The Logos contains in itself the sum of ideas — powers or spiritual forms which pervade the universe, and which are creative, governing, foreseeing, law-giving, etc. These forms are also regarded as either qualities of the deity or distinct persons. Sophia, wisdom, is sometimes considered as the first of the potencies of the Logos, sometimes as the mother of the Logos. God created the world as already indicated, by the agencies of these potencies, or of the Logos in whom they reside, out of unqualified matter. He gives the Logos the titles of Son of God, Paraclete, and Mediator between God and Man.

Man is a dual being, having a soul that came from God, tied to a body that naturally tends to the things of sense; by the aid of God the soul may be lifted above the body and ultimately regain its original source.

In interpreting Scripture Philo recognizes a double sense, the allegorical, which is the more important, and the literal, which is not to be neglected. The anthropomorphic representations of God in Scripture he regarded as an accommodation to the sensual nature of man. It is a fundamental principle with him that the law, which emanates from the being who is both the creator and the father of the universe, is in harmony with nature, and that he who violates it is punished by natural events. Consult Drummond, ‘Philo Judæus’ (1888); Conybeare, ‘Philo about the Contemplative Life’ (1895); Freudenthal, ‘Die Erkenntnislehre Philons von Alexandria’ (1891), and the ‘Jewish Encyclopedia.’