Philonism

The claim

Scripture has a literal sense and a deeper one, and the deeper one is philosophical. Where the text says something unworthy of God, that is the signal to read allegorically.

What it held

Philo lived in the largest Jewish community outside Judaea, in a Greek-speaking city with the best library in the world, and he wanted to show that the Torah and Greek philosophy were saying the same thing. His method was allegory, and he used it systematically.

The Logos is his central construction. It is God's reason, the pattern by which the world was made, and the intermediary between an utterly transcendent God and a material world — described by Philo as God's firstborn, as a second God, and as an archangel, in different places. It is neither clearly a person nor clearly an abstraction, and that ambiguity is what made it so usable later.

He was also a working political leader. He led the Jewish delegation to Caligula after the Alexandrian pogrom of 38 CE, and his account of the audience — the emperor wandering through a building giving orders about window glazing while they pleaded — is one of the sharpest pieces of political writing to survive from antiquity.

Judaism did not preserve him. Christianity did, entirely, because the Logos was too useful to lose.

How it argued

Allegorical exegesis with rules: where the literal sense is unworthy of God or plainly impossible, a deeper meaning is intended, and Greek philosophy supplies the vocabulary for it.

What it was arguing against

Both literalists who ignored the deeper sense and extreme allegorists who abandoned observance — Philo insisted the practices must still be kept.

Where it disagreed with itself

Whether the Logos is a distinct being or a way of speaking about God's activity, which he never settles. Whether he knew Hebrew — the evidence suggests he worked from the Greek.

Common misconceptions

That he hellenised Judaism. He believed the influence ran the other way and that Plato had learned from Moses. The claim is wrong but it is the opposite of what he is usually accused of.

How it began

A wealthy Alexandrian family — his nephew became a Roman prefect — and a city where being Jewish and being Greek-educated were not alternatives.

What became of it

Forgotten in Judaism for over a millennium and preserved by Christian copyists. Rabbinic literature does not mention him.

Lasting influence

The Christian doctrine of the Logos passes through him. Clement, Origen and Ambrose read him closely. Every allegorical reading of scripture in Latin Christendom descends from his method.

Why it still matters

He is the founding case for a permanent question: what happens to a religious text when it is read by people trained in a philosophy it was not written in.

Put another way

A man translating one language into another and convinced the second had borrowed from the first.

Where to start

On the Creation. It shows the whole programme in one book.

The surprising bit

The tradition he wrote for lost him completely; the tradition he never joined copied everything. Eusebius even reports a legend that he met Peter in Rome.

In their own words

Connections

Answers

Middle Platonism

Influenced

Patristics, Jewish Neoplatonism

The verdict

The first philosopher of scripture, remembered by the wrong religion.

Sources

• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy