PHILO, often called PHILO JUDAEUS, Jewish philosopher, appears to have spent his whole life at Alexandria, where he was probably born c. 20-10 B.C. His father Alexander was alabarch or arabarch (that is, probably, chief farmer of taxes on the Arabic side of the Nile), from which it may be concluded that the family was influential and wealthy (Jos., Ant. xviii. 8, I). The only event of his life which can be actually dated belongs to A.D. 4o, when Philo, then a man of advanced years, went from Alexandria to Rome, to persuade the emperor Gaius to abstain from claim ing Divine honour of the Jews. Of this embassy Philo has left a full account (De legatione ad Gaium).
The Hellenistic Jew.—Philo is the most important representa tive of Hellenistic Judaism, and his writings give us the clearest view of what this development of Judaism in the diaspora was and aimed at.
to have been the greatest of all the Jewish phil osophers of the Alexandrian school. On one side he is quite a Greek, on the other quite a Jew. His language is formed on the best classical models, especially Plato. He knows and often cites the great Greek poets, but his chief studies had been in Greek philosophy. His system was eclectic, but the borrowed elements are combined into a new unity with so much originality that he may fairly be regarded as representing a philosophy of his own, which has for its characteristic feature the constant prominence of a fundamental religious idea. Philo's closest affinities are with Plato, the later Pythagoreans and the Stoics. Yet with all this Philo remained a Jew, and a great part of his writings is expressly directed to recommend Judaism to the respect and, if possible, the acceptance of the Greeks. He was not a stranger to the specifically Jewish culture that prevailed in Palestine ; in Hebrew he was not proficient, but he had evidently made some study of that language. His method of exegesis is identical in form with that of the Pales tinian scribes, and there are coincidences in matter. Philo recog nized the Mosaic Scriptures of the Pentateuch as of absolute Divine authority and as containing all truth. The other Jewish Scriptures are also recognized as prophetic, i.e., as the writings of inspired men, but he does not place them on the same lines with the law. Everything that is right and good in the doctrines of the Greek philosophers had already been quite as well, or even better, taught by Moses. Thus, since Philo had been deeply influenced by
the teachings of Greek philosophy he actually finds in the Penta teuch everything which Iv; had learned from the Greeks. From these premises he assumes as requiring no proof that the Greek philosophers must in some way have drawn from Moses, a view indeed which is already expressed by Aristobulus. These presup positions were maintained by an allegorical interpretation of Scrip ture. With its aid he discovers indications of the profoundest doctrines of philosophy in the simplest stories of the Pentateuch.
starts from the idea that God is a Being absolutely bare of quality. All quality in finite beings has limita tion, and no limitation can be predicated of God, who is eternal, unchangeable, simple substance, free, self-sufficient, better than the good and the beautiful. To predicate any quality (roeorfs) of God would be to reduce Him to the sphere of finite existence. Of Him we can say only that He is, not what He is, and such purely negative predications as to His being appear to Philo, as to the later Pythagoreans and the Neoplatonists, the only way of securing His absolute elevation above the world. At bottom, no doubt, the meaning of these negations is that God is the most per fect being ; and so, conversely, we are told that God contains all perfection, that He fills and encompasses all things with His being.
A consistent application of Philo's abstract conception of God would exclude the possibility of any active relation of God to the world, and therefore of religion, for a Being absolutely without quality and movement cannot be conceived as actively concerned with the multiplicity of individual things. And so in fact Philo does teach that the absolute perfection, purity and loftiness of God would be violated by direct contact with imperfect, impure and finite things. But the possibility of a connection between God and the world is reached through a distinction which forms the most important point in his theology and cosmology; the proper Being of God is distinguished from the infinite multiplicity of divine Ideas or Forces: God himself is without quality, but He disposes of an infinite variety of Divine Forces, through whose mediation an active relation of God to the world is brought about.