Philosopher · Antiquity
Philo of Alexandria
c. 20 BC–c. 50 AD · Hellenistic Judaism; allegorical exegesis; Middle Platonism
A Jewish philosopher of Alexandria who died before any Christian writing had reached him, preserved by the Church rather than the synagogue: Clement, Origen, Ambrose and Eusebius read him as nearly one of their own, and Jerome listed him among the ecclesiastical writers.
Philo led the Jewish embassy to Caligula in 39–40 (Embassy to Gaius) and wrote some forty treatises expounding the Pentateuch in the language of Plato and the Stoa. God is one, utterly transcendent, known to exist from His works but unknowable in essence; He creates and governs through His Logos, the first-born and image of God in whom the intelligible world of the Ideas is held (On the Creation), and through the Powers. The literal Law is to be kept, but its deeper sense is allegorical: Abraham, Isaac and Jacob are the soul's progress by teaching, nature and practice, and the end of the soul is to see God, as the name Israel means. The Mosaic Law is the law of nature written down, the soul is immortal and the body its tomb, the passions are to be cut out, and the Therapeutae of On the Contemplative Life show the contemplative life as the highest.
Why he matters: The Fathers' doctrine of the Logos, their allegorical reading of the Old Testament, their negative theology and much of their ascetic vocabulary pass through him: Origen's and Ambrose's commentaries borrow him page by page, and Daniélou's study made him a Catholic subject again. He shows what Judaism and Platonism had already built before the Prologue of John was written.
Where to be careful
His Logos is a mediating power below God rather than God from God (Nicaea), his body-as-tomb and his treatment of the passions go beyond the Church's teaching on the body's goodness (Lateran IV; CCC 364), and his allegory, taken alone, loosens Scripture from history in a way that Dei Verbum 12 does not allow. His doctrine of God's transcendence and providence, his natural law, his immortality of the soul and his vision of God as man's end are what Christians found in him and kept.
Reading
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On the Creation of the Cosmos according to MosesPhilo of Alexandria (trans. David T. Runia) · The Logos, the Ideas and the six days; his cosmology in one treatise.
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The Embassy to GaiusPhilo of Alexandria · His stand against the emperor's statue in the Temple; aniconism and the Jewish polity.
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Philo of AlexandriaJean Daniélou · The Jesuit cardinal's study of Philo as the bridge between Judaism and the Fathers.
Documented positions
Where this thinker stands on each dispute the test covers.