Chapter 10 - Philo of Alexandria

Summary

Philo, the Hellenised Jew from Alexandria (c. 20 bc – ad 50), illustrates well the tendency of Post-Hellenistic philosophy, noted in the introduction, to draw on external sources of authority. The bulk of his writings are commentaries on biblical books that attempt to reconcile them with his generally Platonist philosophical allegiance. Philo's unique position and the frictions and tensions in his own work are determined by the fact that his chosen source of authority falls outside the shared cultural heritage of the Graeco-Roman world. Although Judaism had been in intensive contact with the Greek and then Roman world for centuries, it was perceived, and considered itself, as standing outside the framework of Graeco-Roman culture or, at least, as being profoundly unique. Philo thus limps on two legs, Greek philosophy and the Jewish Bible, and can be found doing violence to both.

Philo is also of importance for the reconstruction of the two discourses I have analysed so far, for two reasons. His work was produced in the gap of roughly a century between the philosophical output of the Late Republic (Varro and Cicero), which informs us on the philosophical changes possibly brought about by Posidonius, and the fairly copious works by Plutarch and others from the end of the first century ad onwards, in which we find a much more developed form of some of the ideas adumbrated by these earlier philosophers. In showing clear awareness of the two discourses discussed in this book, Philo provides important evidence that the changes of Late Hellenistic philosophy did not go unnoticed for over a century before they surfaced in philosophical works of the late first century ad. Their disappearance from our sight is rather due to lack of evidence for the philosophical production between, roughly, Cicero and Cornutus. But chronology is not the only reason for Philo's importance: because of his strong allegiance to the Jewish tradition, he also offers a critical view on the themes that, as I have argued, were central in philosophical readings of religion in the early Roman Empire. Indeed, the discourses about ancient wisdom and ideal hierarchy essentially locate truth in Graeco-Roman religious tradition and in polytheism. In the case of the former, the assumption is that traditional religions of the Mediterranean (Greek, Roman, Egyptian and others) were created by wise ancients and thus full of reflections of philosophical knowledge. Regarding the latter, once the divine kingdom is reordered in a strict hierarchy, polytheism is salvaged: the hierarchy of a highest god and lower gods and demons is not an accidental representation of the divine world but the paradigm of political and cosmological order. Both ideas were repugnant to Philo as a Jew: he refuses to give primacy to any other tradition over Judaism and he explicitly attacks polytheism as a force of disorder. At the same time, however, Philo does not abandon the mode of thought of his contemporaries: he propounds Moses as the source of wisdom and philosophical knowledge and, also, he sees Mosaic Law and its monotheism as setting out what the natural order really is. Studying three interlocking topics, namely Philo's view of mystery cults, his polemical use of the likening of the divine to the Persian Great King and his satraps, and his depiction of the patriarch Joseph as the embodiment of the natural ruler, this chapter shows how Philo accepts the argumentative framework of the two discourses studied earlier but rejects their cultural presuppositions.