Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-lj6df Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-13T06:21:23.307Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Philo on Immortality

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  31 August 2011

Erwin R. Goodenough
Erwin R. Goodenough
Affiliation:
Yale University
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

The writings of mystics always seem nonsense to the non-mystical, and apparently nothing will ever explain the one to the other. The chief difficulty is, perhaps, the freedom with which the mystic contradicts himself, and this he does largely for three reasons. First, the mystic despairs of language as an expression of his ideas, and often treats words and figures of speech loosely just because they mean little to him themselves, since he apprehends most completely in silence. Yet sometimes, in the second place, the inconsistency is studied, and the mystic is trying to suggest an a-verbal idea, doing so by a process which may be compared to the “resultant” of stresses in physics: for by two pulls at an angle to each other one may move an object between them in a direction different from either pull. Or, the same figure, one may make a wind blow a sail-boat in a path directly against itself by going off on a sufficient number of mutually correcting tacks. In the same way the mystic often feels that one of the best devices he can use to express himself is to build up verbal inconsistencies. So he declares that he goes to glory through humiliation, loses himself in order to find himself, dies in order to live, and in these statements creates an impression different from the literal meaning of any single word he uses. In art he similarly makes a monogram of cross and crown.

Type
Research Article
Information
Harvard Theological Review , Volume 39 , Issue 2 , April 1946 , pp. 85 - 108
Copyright
Copyright © President and Fellows of Harvard College 1946

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 See below n. 68.

2 Cumont, F., After Life in Roman Paganism, 1922, 9–12Google Scholar, quotes these two and many others of the sort.

3 Abr. 55: άνθρώπων φθαρτὴ φύσις. Philo's works are here abbreviated according to the scheme in my By Light, Light, 1935, pp. xiii f.

4 Mut. 210: ἀθανασίαν καὶ ἀφθαρσίαν εὐχόμενος, ἀνθρώπῳ πρᾶγμα ἀδύνατον.

5 Philo says this twice, Abr. 64 and 230. He contradicts it in the same treatise, 258 f., where he says that at death the soul returns to God.

6 Suetonius, Divus Julius 14, reports how Caesar insisted that exile rather than death should be the punishment of Catiline and his followers. Cicero, In Catil. IV, iv, 7, 8, gives as the reason that Caesar “felt that death was appointed by the immortal gods not for the sake of punishment, but rather as a necessity of nature, or as a release from toils and wretchedness. Therefore wise men have never met it unwillingly, and the brave have often met it with joy. But imprisonment, especially perpetual imprisonment, was invented certainly for the special punishment of nefarious wickedness.… He would leave only life to nefarious men. If he took that away he would have relieved them at a single stroke of many sorrows of soul and body, and of all the punishment of their crimes.” Cicero goes on to say that it was to prevent exactly this that the ancients devised punishment in the next world, since otherwise death would seem a light punishment. My colleague Mr. Bellinger kindly recalled this Catilinian parallel to me.

7 Cherub. 2; cf. 78.

8 Praem. 69.

9 Som. i, 151 f.; cf. Heres 78.

10 QE ii, 40.

11 Congr. 56f.

12 Posterit. 39.

13 Immut. 48.

14 Opif. 146; LA iii, 161; Det. 90; Mut. 223. This is sometimes soul, sometimes mind, etc. According to Josephus, BJ II, 154, the Essenes likewise thought that souls were made out of the aether.

15 Heres 282f. Cf. QG iv, III, where a rhetorical question is asked: utrum datur nobis locus vel spatium apud patrem tuum in aethere caeloque atque magis superius apud rectorem istorum verbum divinum.

16 Immut. 46.

17 See his notes at III, 485; IV, 575.

18 Von Arnim, Stoic. Vet. Frag. I, nos. 115, 116, 120. Cf. Chrysippus ap. ibid. II, 527.

19 The Stoics used the word, if we may believe Eusebius and others, from Zeno on (von Arnim, op. cit., I, 36); Diog. La. VII, 143, ascribes it to Chrysippus and others.

20 Ed. Zeller's account of this still seems to me the clearest and best: Philosophic der Griechen, II, ii, 479 f., especially the long footnote 4 on pp. 483–486 (Eng. Trans. Aristotle II, 1 ff., the footnote 2 beginning on p. 6). He shows in this note that in a very few passages Aristotle comes near to calling aether the substance of the soul, but does not do so because the conception is quite foreign to his usual thinking.

21 Zeller seems to me definitely wrong when he quotes Origen as saying that the Stoics denied the fifth element altogether, with reference to Contra Celsum iv, 56 (Philos. der Gr. III, i, 189, n. 4; Engl. Tr., Stoics, Epicureans, and Skeptics 201, n. 5). Origen appears rather to say that the Stoics denied that aether is immaterial. Cicero does say that the Stoics denied a fifth element, and it may be that they did not like this term: but they certainly taught the fact.

22 QE ii, 40. Translating Aucher's Latin. In QG iii, 11, Philo says that Abraham's departure to his “fathers” is “according to the opinion of many commentators,” the return to “all the elements into which the mortal man when he dies is resolved.” Philo does not like this, makes it the return to the incorporeal substance (in Platonic sense), or to the angels (in popular Jewish terms). The point disputed seems not the allegorization of the verse but the doctrine of future life implied in each allegorization. There are abundant other traces in Philo that other Jews were much more Stoic than he.

23 Symposium 202E; quoted by Colson, II, 502.

24 R. Heinze, Xenocrates 78–123, has the best history of this notion, and on p. 92 he concludes about Plato just the opposite of the above. He says that Plato invented the demons as mediators between gods and men, and deliberately misrepresented them as having long popularly functioned in that capacity. I find Heinze's arguments throughout as artificial as his material is valuable. References to the demons by writers before Plato show clearly that they did not sharply distinguish the two, and that often, as with Thales, the gods and demons were completely synonymous. But this by no means precludes a popular tendency to make the demons the divine forces in the air, in the half-formed animistic sense which they manifest in all the later material Heinze cites, including material from Philo himself. See also Nilsson, in Harvard Theological Review XXXVI (1943), 263Google Scholarf.

25 Gig. 6–31.

26 Som. i, 133–152.

27 Conf. 174–177; the argument properly begins at § 168.

28 Plant. 1–27, esp. 14. Heinze considers these on his pages 112f. In other statements of Philo the angels are unbodied souls: Sacr. 5, Spec, i, 66; they function as God's emissaries to men in Som. i, 190, Conf. 181; the theory of angels-demons clearly lies behind casual references in Abr. 113, 115, LA iii, 177, 178, Virt. 74. Other explanations appear when the angels are “rays” of God, Som. i, 115; theophanies of God, Som. i, 232, 238; representations of the Logos, Sobr. 65.

29 Gig. 16: ψυχὰς καὶ δαίμονας καὶ ἀγγέλους ὀνόματα μὲν διαφέροντα, ἓν δὲ καὶ ταὐτὸν ὑποκείμενον.

30 Gig. 13–15, 31.

31 Gig. 13; Som. i, 147. Colson notes that this echoes Plato's Timaeus 43A.

32 Colson notes the Platonic parallels: Phaedo 64A, 67E; and even Heinze sees the influence of the Phaedrus in the souls which become incarnate.

33 Gig. 19–31, commenting upon Gen. vi, 3.

34 Som. i, 151, 152.

35 LA i, 31–42.

36 In § 32 he says that this mind is γεώδης τῷ ὄντι καὶ φθαρτός, in § 33 that it is γηγενῆς καὶ φιλοσώματος.

37 Heres 55.

38 τὸ ἠγεμονικὸν αὐτῆς μέρος, an obvious echo of Stoicism again. For mind as the ἠγεμονικόν in greater Stoic detail see Agr. 29f.

39 Opif. 69–71. Coomaraswamy called my attention to the similarities of this passage, especially in the description of the mystic height, with Phaedrus 247B.

40 In Spec. iv, 123, blood is the οὐσία of the soul, not of the νοερά and λογική soul, but of the αἰσθητική, that is, the soul which gives such life as we have in common with the animals. Philo is on good Hebraic grounds (Gen. ix, 4, 5) in identifying the blood with the life, or soul, whether in man or beast, but he could have quoted Empedocles for the same (widely held) identification: E. Rohde, Psyche (English Transl.), 1925, 380; cf. 402, n. 68.

41 Immut. 46. Colson notes that this is the aether, but that carries Philo's figures farther than Philo does himself. I am not sure that Philo did not mean here the πνεῦμα in the sense of the “spirit” of Genesis rather than in any Stoic sense.

42 Ebr. 99–103.

43 Ibid.

44 LA i, 107, 108; cf. QG iv, 152.

45 LA iii, 69; cf. 72, 74.

46 Ibid. 71:τὰ τοῦ κυρίου μυστηρία μυῆται.

47 Ibid. 74: θάνατον καταψηφίζεται τοῦ νεκροῦ σώματος, literally to condemn it to death.

48 Colson capitalizes “mind” throughout this passage, but seems to me to confuse Philo's meaning in doing so.

49 See my The Politics of Philo Judaeus, 1938, Chapters II and III.

50 Migr. 17–24.

51 Paed. I, 42, 2–43, 4; 46, 1, abbreviated.

52 Conf. 78; cf. 77–82 and Cher. 120.

53 Mos. i, 27.

54 QG iv, 234.

55 Jos. 264; Gig. 31.

56 Det. 141.

57 Abr. 258.

58 Cher. 113–118, following Colson's text.

59 Heres 69–74.

60 Ibid. 85; cf. LA iii, 41.

61 LA iii, 42–44.

62 Fug. 78.

63 Det. 75; cf. Mut. 79, 80.

64 Ibid. 76.

65 QG i, 86; cf. Mut. 38.

66 QG iii, 53.

67 QG iii, 11; cf. ii, 8. The “divine substance” of this passage is apparently what God gives to the pious according to ii, 10. See also Sacr. 5; Heres 276–283, esp. 280, where Philo says that “some” teach that the return to the “fathers” is return to the archetypal Forms, with which the mind of the Sage is a μέτοικος (μετοικἰζεσθαι). To be a μέτοικος with living or dead is found in Sophocles, Antig. 852.

68 Cumont, usually our best single guide in this field, breaks down when he comes to mystical allegory. He says that the speeches of Julian, in which Julian similarly tries to read Platonic metaphysic and immortality into the myths and rites of paganism, are “destitute of all critical and even of all common sense” (After Life in Roman Paganism 42). I wonder, when we better understand the primitive mythopaeic phenomena, whether we may not come to feel that there is often more understanding of myths in such allegory than in modern rationalistic condescension to them.

69 Gig. 61. When the righteous are transformed into ἀθάνατα γένη in Post. 43 Philo probably means the Forms also. Certainly it is something very impersonal he has in mind.

70 Mos. ii, 108; cf. Gig. 31.

71 Det. 159. On the Powers see my By Light, Light, esp. 23 ff. (but see Index s.v.).

72 Praem. 166, with the note by Colson; QG i, 70.

73 Sacr. 5–7. Actually in this passage, as Bréhier, Les idées philosophiques et religieuses de Philon, 1908, 240, noted, Philo engages in a fanciful exegesis by which he sends Abraham and Jacob to the angels, i.e. the Forms (εἲδη) in the sense of species; Isaac to some γένος ἄφθαρτον καὶ τελεώτατον which would presumably be Plato's Form of the Good; and Moses to God himself. I find it hard to take this passage seriously in its details.

74 Virt. 76–79. Philo echoes here Plato, Phaedrus 250c. On this transformation of Moses see By Light, Light, 195 ff. On Moses and Aaron as suppliants for men see Ibid. 231 f.

75 Mos. ii, 288. This, rather than the Sinai scene to which it is traditionally referred, seems the prototype of the story of Jesus' transfiguration, for the change of body is present in both this account and the story of Jesus.

76 Republic 508. That Plato made the mind of man especially akin to the Forms was noted by J. Maguire in an essay which I hope will soon be published, “Plato's Theory of Natural Law.” See Phaedo 76D, 80B, 75E; Rep. ix, 585C; vi, 490B, 508D; x, 611E; Epist. vii, 342D.

77 QE ii, 46 (Harris, Fragments, 61).

78 See above n. 73.

79 Sacr. 8–10.

80 Fug. 78.

81 Sacr. 8: τὸν τέλειον (= Moses) ἀπὸ τῶν περιγεἰων ἀνάγων ὡς ἑαυτόν Colson translates the ὡς as though it were an εἰς, “to Himself.”

82 See QG i, 75; iv, 46, 66.

83 LA i, 105–108.

84 Gig. 13, 14. Colson properly recalls Phaedo 64A, 67E.

85 In this Philo is more philosophic and less popular than other hellenistic Jewish sources. So Sap. Solom. viii, 19–ix, 18, as well as the Essenes according to Josephus BJ, 154–158, have the same “Orphic” conception of life and death, but lack Philo's and Plato's immaterialism.

86 After Life in Roman Paganism 26.

87 Fragment, ap. Harris, Fragments 72a:Ἐὰν δὲ ἀποθάνῃ μέν τις τὀν θνητὀν βίον,ζἡσῃ δὲ ἀντιλαβὼν τὀν ἀθάνατον, ἴσως δ μηδέποτε εἶδεν ὄψεται.

88 A quite different view of immortality, for example, is found in IV Maccabees, where Greek elements in general are almost as pronounced as in Philo, but where the expectation of immortality is definitely Jewish in the sense that it is strongly personal.

89 On the Logos-River: Fug. 97.