## 1. The Man and His Work


### 1.1 Philo Alexandrinus



It is impossible to give precise dates for Philo's birth. The
consensus is that he lived between the end of the first century BCE
and the middle of the first century CE, during a period of acute
agitation and interethnic tensions in Alexandria. The Romans, with
their universal ambitions, had replaced the Macedonians, leaving to
the Greeks only the pride of their identity and some fiscal
advantages. The Greeks in turn pretended to be the only citizens of
the city of Alexandria, refusing citizenship to the Jews with very few
exceptions, among which was Alexander the Alabarch (tax collector),
Philo's brother (Bloch 2021, Siegert 2021). Alexander's
son, in turn, became one of the famous apostates in the history of
Judaism, becoming prefect of Egypt in 66-69 CE and serving as
Emperor Titus' second-in-command at the siege of Jerusalem in 70
CE. The history of the apostate within his family was certainly a
problem for Philo, who tried to raise the issue with his nephew in the
(*De providentia* 2 and in the *De animalibus*. Though
he never specified his own political status, Philo was likely a
citizen of this prestigious city. Finally, the native Egyptians were
despised by both Greeks and Jews. The Egyptians didn't all
remain passive, however; Manetho (Stern 1974, texts n.19-21), an
Egyptian priest, wrote a parody of the Exodus, transforming the
liberation of Israel into the ignominious expulsion of a disabled and
dishonest people. This *topos* won great favor among Greek
intellectuals like Philo's contemporary, Apion, against whom
Flavius Josephus wrote his famous apology of the Jewish people. This
tension erupted into the Alexandria riots of 38 CE, the first major
pogrom in the history of Jewish people, leading in turn to the
installation of a ghetto, murders, tortures, humiliations, and
mockeries of Agrippa I, the king of Judaea (van der Horst 2003). We
must keep all this in mind in order not to imagine Philo merely as a
scholar burrowed away in the Great Library, nor as a rabbi lecturing
peacefully in the synagogues. In *Spec.* 3.1, he wistfully
remembers a time when he could devote himself to study and
contemplation, probably before the disasters of 38 CE: 



> 
> 
> There was a time when I had leisure for philosophy and for the
> contemplation of the universe and its contents, when I made its spirit
> my own in all its beauty and loveliness and true blessedness, when my
> constant companions were divine themes and verities, when I rejoiced
> with a joy that never cloyed or sated. 
> 
> 
> 



But just after, he evokes the violent envy of those who plunged him
"in[to] the ocean of civil cares", likely an allusion to
the many difficulties created by the hostility of Greeks and Egyptians
(*Spec.* 3.1). Even before this violence, however, the
environment he faced was a hostile and resentful one. Philo considered
the Egyptians, his "ultimate other" (Niehoff 2001), the
most disgusting of polytheists because of their zoolatry. He was full
of reverence and fear toward the Romans, or at least pretends as such
in his two books on the pogrom of 38 CE: the *In Flaccum*,
which is against the Roman prefect in Alexandria at the moment of the
pogrom, and the *Legatio* (Smallwood 1961) in which he narrates
his own experience of the embassy sent to the Emperor Caligula by the
Jews of Alexandria after the riot. Recently Niehoff stressed the idea
that Roman culture had become an important element of Philo's
identity (Niehoff 2018). Nevertheless, he was first and foremost a Jew
of the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Bible (*ca* 270
BCE). That is to say, however distinctive his views, he was a
sincerely pious Jew. He knew very little Hebrew, though he went to
Jerusalem to pray and offer sacrifices in the Temple (*Prov.*
2.107), and he thought that the Bible written in Greek was perfectly
equivalent to the Hebrew one (*Mos.* 2.40). His
*paideia* or Greek education was excellent, both in philosophy
and the liberal arts, as he says in *Congr.* 79-80: 



> 
> 
> For instance when first I was incited by the goads of philosophy to
> desire her I consorted in early youth with one of her handmaids,
> Grammar, and all that I begat by her, writing, reading and study of
> the writings of the poets, I dedicated to her mistress.
> 
> 
> 



By this period in Alexandria, the spirit of mutual comprehension that
marked the beginning of the Ptolemaic epoch (*ca* 332
BCE-30 BCE) had faded away. In his own person, Philo brought
together two elements that the Greek elite now held to be
incompatible: *paideia,* Greek education, and Judaism. He
studied and commented on the Bible in the synagogues, which he
describes as "schools of virtue". His understanding of
rhetoric was not merely theoretical. He was probably a great orator.
The addressees of his treatises were foremost the Jews, both believers
and unbelievers. He may have had a second, much more hypothetical,
audience in mind as well: Greek philosophers and intellectuals more
generally. However, to the best of our knowledge, this latter group
paid scant attention to Philo's writings. In the fragments of
Greek and Roman writers carefully collected by Menahem Stern (1974),
we find two kinds of Greek reactions towards Judaism. In the earlier
period, they received some sympathy from philosophers; Theophrastus,
the main disciple of Aristotle, writes in a famous fragment that Jews
are "philosophers by race", saying about them: 



> 
> 
> they converse with each other about the deity, and at night-time they
> make observations of the stars, gazing at them and calling on God by
> prayer. (quoted in Diodorus Siculus, *Bibliotheca Historica*,
> 40.3.1-3) 
> 
> 
> 



From the end of the second century BCE, however, many philosophers
were active propagandists for
 antisemitism.[1]
 One might have expected that Stoicism, with its cosmopolitism and
rational humanism, would have avoided this kind of attitude. In fact,
as we can see in Posidonius, Seneca, or Chaeremon, Stoic antisemitism
was a product not of racism, but of an erroneous understanding of
rationalism and universalism. For these men, the Jews were a very
superstitious nation, blemished by strange habits and strong animosity
towards foreigners. Except for the case of Varro, the Roman scholar of
the first century BCE who appreciated Jews for their refusal of images
(Lehmann 1997), it would be impossible to give an example of a Greek
or Latin text of this period showing sympathy or even interest toward
the Jews. This was a condition of which Philo could not have been
ignorant. In the background of his life and of his work lay an
antisemitism growing more and more violent. In contrast to Flavius,
who decades later wrote the *Against Apion* in order to refute
Greek antisemitism, Philo seems to have preferred to extol the virtues
of Judaism than to fight against the adversaries of Jews, as we can
see in the extant fragments of his *Hypotetica*.


### 1.2 His works



Philo's work does not form a well-organized corpus. During
Philo's time, the work was larger than the corpus we now have.
The relation of Philo to the Hebrew exegetical traditions of his time
is an important and controversial question. One of the major paradoxes
for his posterity is that his work was ignored by Jews and saved by
Christians, some of whom thought that he was himself a Christian
(Runia 2009). In 233 CE the entire corpus was brought to Caesarea, a
city that became the main center of its transmission, though some
papyri suggest the circulation of at least some of his treatises in
Egypt. The more or less generally accepted classification is that of
Massebiau (1889), completed by Cohn (1899). It is divided into five
principal categories:


* Allegorical commentaries (39 treatises)
* Twelve treatises of exposition of the law (12 treatises)
* Questions and answers on *Genesis* and *Exodus* (6
treatises)
* Four historical and apologetic treatises (4 treatises)
* Five philosophical treatises



No definite chronology of the works was established until the very
recent book of Niehoff (2018). Philo gives very few hints regarding
his process of composition, offering only a few remarks about the
structure and divisions of his treatises. Regarding the strange fact
that these Greek treatises bear Latin titles, Monique Alexandre (1997)
conducted a complete study in which she examines a complex
philological process from Antiquity to the nineteenth century through
the humanists of the Renaissance and their immediate successors.


## 2. Philosophy, Philosophers, and Rhetoric


### 2.1 Philosophical works



On the meaning of philosophy for Philo, see see the supplement on
 The Meanings of Philosophy in Philo of Alexandria.
 His five philosophical works are *De providentia* 1 and 2,
*De animalibus*, *De aeternitate* and *Quod omnis
probus*. The two latter works are the only ones for which we have
Greek texts. With the exception of a few rare references to the Bible,
these texts could well have been written by a pagan philosopher. This
is why some scholars thought they were products of Philo's
*paideia*, his classical Greek education. Today, there is a
tendency to believe that Philo's extant texts were written near
the end of his life. If this is the case, the reason for writing, in
the atmosphere of great cultural and political rivalry of the epoch,
could have been to demonstrate that a Jew was as able to compose a
philosophy as "pure" as any Greek. In any case, the most
discussed problem today is the skepticism regarding the authenticity
of the *De aeternitate*, the treatise in which we find the most
explicit references to philosophy and philosophers. Since
Runia's seminal article in 1981, a majority of scholars seems to
have distanced themselves from thinking the text is inauthentic. For
Runia, there is no contradiction in the fact that Philo goes against
the biblical tradition and defends the eternity of the world not only
in the future but also in the past. The second part of Philo's
treatise, now lost, would have contained the refutation of this
unorthodox--at least from a Jewish point of view--thesis. It
is probable that Philo, who seems to have had good knowledge of
skeptical methods, was trained to argue both *pro* and
*contra* of a thesis, a dialectical technique of which the
*De aeternitate* is probably the best illustration. We will
return to the question of the authenticity in the supplemenary
document
 About the *De aeternitate* and the *De providentia*.


### 2.2 Philosophers


#### 2.2.1 Jewish philosophers



We have little information about Jewish intellectuals in the
Hellenistic epoch. One of our main sources is the *Sentences*
of Pseudo-Phocylides (Barclay 2007), most likely written in Alexandria
by a Jew. They show an interesting mix of Jewish and Greek elements:
an absence of attacks against polytheism, some popular Stoic themes,
and a rather soft affirmation of the monotheistic faith. It is not
easy, however, to date these *Sentences*. The most probable
date would be somewhere between 30 BCE and 40 CE, but other dates are
possible. Regardless, the *Sentences* provides an image of what
could have been a Jewish openness towards pagan culture if relations
were calmer. According to a well-attested tradition, some Jews posited
that Plato had taken his inspiration from Moses, an idea that seems to
have been popularized by Aristobulus of Paneas, a Jewish philosopher
who lived in the first half of second century BCE. Philo, who lived in
a more unstable period, employs this kind of assertion with prudence
(*Spec.* 2.164-167). He himself sometimes alludes to his
immediate predecessors, which is the topic of Goulet's book
(1987). Goulet's central thesis is that the primary source of
Philo's allegories was a Jewish commentary that used Stoic
methods of interpretation to attempt a wholly rationalist exegesis of
the Bible devoid of any notion of transcendence. In fact, there is
only one clear allusion to these *phusiologoi*, i.e.,
rationalist allegorists. It is likely that in Alexandria there were
Jews who attempted to interpret the Bible as the Stoics had
interpreted Homer (Niehoff 2011). It is unclear whether their
interpretation was integrated into a comprehensive system of
rationalism. The allegoric interpretation did not prevent Stoics from
defending divination, a practice that was considered absurd by their
opponents. One could add that this evolution towards a more religious
cast of mind was not a distinctive characteristic of Philo, but rather
a hallmark of the Middle-Platonist period as a whole.


#### 2.2.2 Greek philosophers



Named references to philosophers in Philo's work are rather
rare, and often the cited names are not those that one would expect.
For example, he never mentions Posidonius, one of the greatest names
of Stoicism, who was the first to attempt a reconciliation of at least
some Stoic and Platonic themes. There are reasons to think Philo read
this Rhodian philosopher, but he is silent about Posidonius. One could
surmise that his clearly anti-Jewish position was one possible reason
for Philo's silence. However, Philo is also silent regarding
thinkers of the New Academy, Arcesilas and Carneades. He was clearly
acquainted with these Academics, since there are some rather clear
allusions in his work to their brand of skepticism. It is therefore
curious that he gives the first version of the Skeptical tropes
without any allusion to Aenesidemus, who developed them a century
before. Leaving aside the contested *De aeternitate*, we notice
that Philo fails to mention Aristotle even once. While Stoicism plays
a leading though complex role in most Philonian treatises, we only
find four allusions to Zeno, the founder of the doctrine. They are all
in the *Probus*, a treatise with strong Stoic features. There
is only a single mention of Epicurus, in *Post.* 2. Plato is
mentioned twice each in the *De opificio* and the *De uita
contemplativa*, and once in the *Probus*. Only three
mentions of Socrates are found, but surprisingly, the presocratic
thinkers are quoted much more than one would have thought: fourteen
references to Pythagoras (with some uncertainties, since some of them
are to be found in fragments), six to Heraclitus, and one each to
Anaxagoras and Democritus. The *De aeternitate* is striking
because Aristotle is mentioned four times. In this treatise, Philo
cites a book written by the Pythagorean Ocellos of Lucania, who
established the eternity of the world in a way that Philo seems to
find satisfactory. This, notably, is the only time when he mentions a
specific text and explicitly affirms having read it.



One might wonder whether there is a logic to Philo's explicit
references to philosophers.



Several elements point us toward a more complete understanding. First,
Philo evidently prefers indirect allusions to direct citations.
Philosophical concepts are necessary to the elaboration of exegesis,
but too many precise mentions of philosophers would have presented
Philo himself as subordinate not to the Word of God but to the
doctrines of philosophers. He is still more silent about the great
rabbis he would have certainly met in Alexandria and perhaps in
Jerusalem. In his philosophical references, it is clear that he
prefers to evoke the presocratic thinkers and the classical period of
philosophy than the Hellenistic one. This is paradoxical since he was
deeply marked by Hellenistic philosophy, which was the natural
environment of his education. It must be added that his prose is also
generally classical, reluctant to admit neologisms and technical
vocabulary. He certainly wanted to appear in all areas a man of
tradition.


#### 2.2.3 "Barbarian" philosophers



Did Philo think that philosophy was a Greek monopoly, only shared with
some Jews?



In recent years, the temptation has been great among some scholars to
imagine that he had at least some knowledge of non-Greek thinkers such
as Cicero and Seneca (Levy 2021). The problem remains that we
have no evidence of this hypothesis. Philo never evoked Roman
philosophers, so we cannot pass beyond statements of probability. More
generally, what can be said about Philo's attitude towards
"barbarian" wisdom can be summarized in three points:


* Jewish wisdom surpasses all other wisdom, both Greek and barbarian,
because it is the only one inspired by God. In *Mos.* 2.12,
Philo makes no attempt to hide that when the Bible was first
translated into Greek, the Word of God was considered by many an
expression of barbarian wisdom. The Septuagint is implicitly presented
as proof that the distinction between Greek and barbarian could be
abolished, though for Greek civilization this distinction had great
ontological weight.
* Even Greek education, despite its exceptional prestige, is unable to
provide access to the truth. A learned man according to the criterion
of the *paideia* is no more able than anyone else to say what
the world truly is.
* Philo did not deny that barbarians were able to create sophisticated
forms of sciences and culture. Despite his own contempt for the
Egyptians, he stresses that Moses himself received an education in
which Egyptian sciences were included. Furthermore, he argues that
many barbarians, though untutored in philosophy, have a natural
intuition of how to live in agreement with virtue. In *Somn.*
2.56, the Indian ascetics ("gymnosophists") appear as the
barbarian form of the Cynic life, lacking any form of luxury or
material comfort, and in *Probus* 96, the letter of the ascetic
Calanos to Alexander [now known to be fake] provides the best evidence
that some barbarians could practice a perfectly philosophical life
without ever having received a Greek education.


#### 2.2.4 Philosophy and rhetoric



Through the many studies Manuel Alexandre Jr (1999) devoted to
Philo's rhetoric, we can more precisely gauge Philo's
position in this central debate within Greek culture: the conflict
between philosophy and rhetoric, or better, between philosophers and
rhetors. Philo displays a sound knowledge of rhetoric. His affinity
with Platonism impelled him to address very harsh critics of the
"lesser" rhetoric, that of sophists, who represent the
opposite pole of his own thought (Filler 2016). *Sophisteia*,
sophistry, is in Philo a frequent concept attached to a range of
negative meanings. But, as in Plato (where Socrates opposes the idea
of a greater rhetoric to Gorgias' lesser rhetoric in the
*Phaedrus*), in Philo we see the possibility of a positive use
of rhetoric. For Philo, rhetoric is neither an activity nor an
abstract ideal but a human reality, the nature of which is laid out in
the Bible. Moses is the man who saw God in the Sinai, but he by
himself would have been unable to speak to Pharaoh and persuade him to
let his people go. Moses needed the presence of Aaron in order to
obtain what he sought. Moses represents the metaphysical truth, Aaron
its implementation in reality, akin to the two faces of
*logos*: while the *logos prophorikos* is that of
communication, the *logos endiathetos* is the internal world of
thoughts, and each is impossible without the other. It can be added
that Abraham is said by Philo (*Mut.* 66) to have been the
"father of the sounds", a strange expression that,
alongside many similar allusions to music, shows that Philo was not
the philosopher of sight alone. Another path of research is that of
*parresia*, a complex term of political origin that
appeared in the context of the Athenian democracy. In literary and
philosophical texts, it means freedom of speech, frankness, and
honesty. For Philo, however, *parresia* is neither a
political ideal nor an individual achievement, but something given by
God; and it must be used without harming relatives or friends.


## 3. Philo and Philosophical Schools



For us it is clear that Philo never had a philosophical affiliation.
To say that he was a Pythagorean, a Platonist, or a Stoic would have
been for him to admit that he sought truth in spaces outside the
Bible. Was he an Eclectic (Mansfeld 1988)? The concept of eclecticism
is a complicated one. If it means that Philo used different
philosophers as sources of inspiration and expression in order to
elaborate his work, this cannot be denied. On the other hand, if one
means that he built a specific philosophical identity for himself by
associating with different doctrines, that seems far from the truth.
It would mean that he was in search of an autonomous *ego*, a
perspective at odds with his denial of the possibility for an
individual to exist truly on his own, i.e., without God's help.
More exactly, if Philo asserted his own individuality, it was in the
free modification and criticism of all philosophical doctrines around
him, sometimes using them as their creators would never have imagined
possible.


### 3.1 Philo and Aristotelianism



As Roskam (2011: 35) underscored, 



> 
> 
> the period of Middle Platonism is particularly interesting because it
> is in this period that Aristotle begins to receive more and more
> attention in the circles of a systematised Platonism. 
> 
> 
> 



This does not mean that the rivalry between Platonists and
Aristotelians was over, but rather that Aristotle, who seems to have
been largely ignored by Neo-Academic philosophers during the
Hellenistic period (but Weische 1961), emerged again as a reference
and a point of discussion. Philo is full of praise towards the
Stagirite in the *De aeternitate*, a puzzling text. He was
himself a Creationist while Aristotle asserted the eternity of the
world. This does not mean that his admiration was unbounded,
especially if the original treatise had been in the form of an
antilogy, a *disputatio in utramque partem.* Today, some
scholars try to demonstrate that Aristotle, more than Plato, lay at
the core of Philo's thought (Bos 2009). It can be objected that
the dogmatic Academic Antiochus of Ascalon (*ca*
140/130-60 BCE), a philosopher that Philo certainly had read,
did much to intertwine Platonic, Stoic, and Aristotelian ideas (Sedley
2012). The influence of Antiochus on the Alexandrian philosophical
milieu is a controversial question. Despite the efforts of Andronicus
of Rhodes (first editor of the Aristotelian corpus) to organize the
corpus, some of the texts used Aristotelian elements in a spirit quite
different from what we now understand by Aristotelianism. This can
shed light on our understanding of Philo's Aristotelianism and
on the comparison of his Aristotelian passages with the
pseudo-Aristotelian ones, a point on which many have commented.
Antiochus was not the only one to shift the borders between these
doctrines. The Stoic Posidonius also played a role in Philo's
elaboration of an unorthodox form of Aristotelianism.



Even if one is persuaded of the authenticity of Philo's
Aristotelianism in the *De aeternitate mundi*, the compliments
towards Aristotle at the beginning of the treatise are surprising and
do not exactly fit within the traditional frame of a *disputatio
pro* and *contra*. The most probable thesis was put in
second position, as we can see in the Ciceronian antilogy on justice
in the third book of the *De re publica*. Another ambiguity is
that Aristotle is praised here for having referred to the visible God,
while Philo says many times elsewhere that God is invisible. Of this
oddity two contradictory interpretations may be given: either Philo
means that Aristotle as a philosopher is what Israel is among the
nations, the one able to see God, an etymology of which Philo is fond;
or the reference to the "visible God", without any
reference to His essence, means that Aristotle is only able to see the
visible aspects of Him. This would be an implicit criticism of the
Stagirite's incapacity to perceive God's transcendental
and divine Nature.



The above is but one example of the difficulties inherent to the
interpretation of Aristotelian elements in Philo's corpus, at
least regarding cosmological and metaphysical problems. Things are
perhaps clearer concerning Aristotle's influence on
Philo's ethics. The term *mesotes* (middle way),
which has special importance in Aristotelian ethics, is used by Philo
once, in *Migr.* 147. In this passage, the Alexandrine argues
that the "royal road" is the middle way. But this
assertion is not an unrestricted sign of approval of Aristotle's
ethics. In the desert, there is no way at all--and the desert was
the exact place where Israel received the Revelation and achieved its
liberty. The middle way may play a positive role in reining in
debauchery, but for Philo, it has no absolute value. In *Leg.*
3.20, Laban asks Jacob why he fled instead of remaining faithful to
the doctrine that recognizes the goods of the body and external
possessions. Here is evidence of Philo's refusal to accept
Aristotle's doctrine of the three kinds of goods. In
*Det.* 8, it is said that corporeal and external goods are
assets in name only, and in *Somn.* 2.9, he criticizes those
who upheld the tripartition of human goods and contrasts them with
those for whom virtue was the only good. To summarize, Philo could
occasionally borrow some elements of Peripatetic doctrine, but he
never believed them to be an expression of higher truth. He reveals a
particular sort of coherence with regard to Aristotelianism: it
consists in demonstrating through exegesis that Aristotle's
prudent philosophy could not entirely coincide with the Bible's
spiritual wisdom.


### 3.2 Stoicism



Philo was probably the non-Stoic thinker who most frequently drew upon
both Stoic themes and vocabulary. Many scholars have noticed the
strong influence of Stoicism on Philo, and he is described frequently
as a Platonizing Stoic. However, matters are a bit more complex. Given
his Jewish faith, he couldn't refuse the Stoic conception of a
perfectly organized world in which mankind had a privileged status
among all other living creatures. One can add that the specific
vocabulary of Stoicism had become a kind of *lingua franca* of
intellectual discourse*,* used even by those who had no special
affinity with the Stoics. At the same time, Philo was aware that the
Stoic refusal of transcendence created an unbridgeable gap between his
own spiritual identity and Stoicism. There is a huge debt of Philo
towards Stoicism, but at the same time, he could claim to have repaid
this debt by bringing Stoicism in the direction of truth. Philo never
says exactly the same things as the Stoics. Despite their apparent
similarities, there always remains a difference-sometimes barely
perceptible, but always highly significant--between his doctrines
and those of the Stoics. These differences can be distributed into
four categories:


* *Doctrinal differences*: for the Stoics, *logos* was
equally reason (individual and universal), nature, and God, while for
Philo, *logos* is not ultimate reality but merely what we can
see and understand of God, who is Himself very far from human
comprehension (Calabi 2008). In Stoicism, *logos* is God; in
Philo it corresponds to his specific doctrine of the
*dunameis*, the powers of God who created the world and governs
it.
* *An inverse relation between the individual and the universal*:
for Stoic philosophers, natural law is the *logos* in its
function of commanding what must be done or avoided. No particular
human law corresponds with the natural law, though Cicero tried to
demonstrate that Roman religious law could coincide at least partly
with the law of nature. In Philo's thought, the Torah is
described as containing many elements of natural law, and its claims
to universality were concretized in the Greek of the
Septuagint.
* *The refusal of essential Stoic concepts*: Philo only uses the
word *sunkatathesis* twice in his entire corpus, a key term
defining the human ability to accept or refuse information given by
the senses and the capacity to transform decisions into action. He
uses sometimes *oikeiosis*, another Stoic keyword, but
never with the meaning the Stoics lent to this concept. In brief,
Stoic *oikeiosis* expresses the idea that Nature gives to
every living being from birth an indication of what its supreme
purpose in life will be. In the case of mankind, things are a little
more complex. The first impulse is, as in the case of all animals, the
impulse to survive, but after this comes the impulse toward a rational
life, a privilege that human beings alone share with God. All this was
unacceptable to Philo, both the idea that human beings could at their
birth be submitted to the same law as animals, and the definition of
*telos*, the supreme human good (Besnier 1999), as the capacity
of making choices in accordance with nature. It must be added that
Philo only uses the term "prokopton" (a progressing in ethics)
as an exegetic tool. This absence can be interpreted as an argument
against the thesis of a late conversion to stoIcism (Levy 2021
vs Niehoff 2018).
* *Substitutions and additions*: It has been correctly observed
that psychology, and especially psychology of the passions (Weisser
2021), is one of the fields in which Stoic influence is most visible
in the Philonian corpus (Reydams Schils 2008). It is perfectly true
that he employs many Stoic elements in his psychological commentaries,
but in contrast to Chrysippean monistic doctrine, Philo never insists
that the soul could be exclusively rational. Philo's own stance
is to invoke a Platonic dualism when arguing that the soul is exiled
in the body and consequently in the world, and invoke Stoic
psychological descriptions when describing the multiplicity of mental
activities. Because he used these two levels--one metaphysical
and ethical, the other descriptive and functionalist--he could
give the impression of having avoided the contradictions between the
two doctrines.


### 3.3 From Scepticism to Pythagorean Platonism



Brehier, a great French name in Philonian studies, wrote that
Philo's thoughts aligned much closer to Platonism than to
Skepticism (Brehier 1908 [1925: 214]). That assertion is
characteristic of an epoch in which these two doctrines were
considered to be radically different. More recent studies have
demonstrated that things are much more complex. Middle Platonist
philosophers like Plutarch, Favorinus, or Alcinoos integrated many
elements of Skepticism to their dogmas (Bonazzi 2007), especially in
order to undermine Hellenistic naturalism and redirect attention to an
idea of transcendence. Philo himself knew the existence of two kinds
of Skepticism: New Academic and Neopyrrhonian (Levy 2008). The
former school seems to have disappeared as a structured institution by
his lifetime. The latter came to prominence in the middle of the first
century BCE, with Enesidemus criticizing New Academic philosophers,
and especially those of his age, on the grounds that they had conceded
far too much to Stoic dogma. Philo seems to have paid little attention
to New Academic sceptics, but was acquainted at least with some of
their principal doctrines. By contrast, he is the first to have used
the tropes, i.e., the system of Sceptic arguments, elaborated by
Enesidemus, which remained for centuries a kind of manifesto of
Skepticism. At the beginning of the twentieth century and for many
years after, scholars paid great attention to the passage of the
*De ebrietate* where Philo uses these tropes. Today, however,
it is commonplace to say that the connection was a weak one, and that
Philo had his own interests instead. Of course he did, but Sextus
Empircus himself, now considered the most reliable source, had his own
interests as well as being a physician, and it is rash at least to
neglect the Philonian testimony, closer to Enesidemus from both a
geographical and chronological point of view. Philo uses Sceptic
methods to demonstrate that even with the aid of education, the
*paideia* of which he was so proud, human beings are unable to
find the truth. Skepticism thus appears as the best means to awaken
mankind to its *oudeneia* and to open the path toward
transcendence.



"Was Philo a Middle Platonist?" is the title David Runia
gave to one of his articles (1993). There is at least one point of
consensus among the scholars, i.e., that Philo's Platonism
accurately reflected the Platonist interpretations circulating in
Alexandria at the time. Very useful comparisons have been made with
Eudorus, a contemporary and compatriot, and with Plutarch. It is most
probable that Pythagoreanism played a great role in Philo's
development of negative theology; it certainly did so in his doctrine
of the first principle. At the same time, Philo makes extensive use of
Plato as well despite the difficulty of reconciling this doctrine with
more classical Platonic themes. The presence of the *Timaeus*
in the *De opificio mundi* is massive, as demonstrated by Runia
(2001). Philo's many allusions to the theme of
"assimilation to God" prove how conscious he was of the
difference between Stoic immanence and Platonic transcendence. At the
core of Stoic ethics lay the concept of *oikeiosis*,
which required both adaptation to Nature and absolute obedience to her
guidance. The word *oikeiosis* derives from
*oikos*, meaning house. The goal of a Stoic's life was to
know every hidden recess of "Nature's house" and to
dwell respectfully therein. On the contrary, for Middle Platonists who
were readers and commentators of the *Theaetetus*, the goal was
to depart from nature, a dwelling of sensations and injustice, in
order to become as similar as possible to God. Another major theme
that Philo shares with other Middle Platonists is that of Ideas as
divine thoughts, one of the features of Imperial Platonism (Dillon
1996). Unlike Plato in the *Timaeus*, Philo does not assert
that the Ideas are exterior to the Creator. For him God is, through
his *logos*, the only active cause. The world of the Ideas, the
*noetos kosmos*, is that of God's thoughts.
Despite many nuances, variations, and even contradictions, there is in
Philo the same triple structure common to many Middle Platonic texts:
the God/Demiurge, the first principle; the Ideas and powers by which
God acts on matter; and matter itself. However, it must be added that
in Philo everything is both similar and different. His God is not the
Demiurge; he does not define powers and Ideas with reference to
mathematical principles, though arithmology is quite present in his
commentaries; and his conception of matter, despite many allusions to
the philosophical doctrine of the dyad (the formless and unlimited
base), has deep Biblical roots. 



It may be useful at this point to address the question of Pythagorean
influence on Philo. In *Probus* 2, he speaks of the
"holiest sect" of the Pythagoreans, a highly admiring
expression. In fact, the quite numerous mentions of this
"sect" in his treatises are a confirmation of his
fascination for it. He admires Pythagorean elitism (*Probus*
2), and sees in the ban against pronouncing their Master's name
something akin to the Jewish idea of divine ineffability (*QG*
1.99). He explicitly mentions twice Pythagorean sources: in
*Aet.* 2, where he says, as we have seen, that he read a
treatise of Ocellus; and in *Opif.* 100, there is a complex
passage about the number seven, likened by the Pythagoreans to Zeus,
the "Director and Ruler of all things". In *QG*
2.12, arithmology is explicitly evoked as a Pythagorean science.
Nevertheless, his allusions to Pythagorean themes are often vague and
merit further analysis. As an example, Philo is often willing to use
adjectives by which Pythagoreans characterized the dyad but reluctant
to use the word itself. And when he does so, he clarifies in a very
personal manner that "the monad is the *image* of the
first Cause" and the dyad that of "the matter passive and
indivisible" (*Spec.* 3.180). Monad and dyad serve Philo
as exegetical tools, not actual substitutes for the narrative of
Creation in the Bible. It is as if the imperative not to coincide
exactly with Greek philosophical doctrine was for Philo an obligation
of identity.


### 3.4 Epicureanism



Evidently, Philo felt no sympathy towards Epicureanism (Levy,
Ranocchia 2008), an exclusively materialistic doctrine which denied
the existence of Providence and defined pleasure both as the first
motivator of human actions and as the supreme good. As if this was not
enough, Epicureans also described gods as taking human form, which was
for Philo an indisputable case of idolatry. Nevertheless, his attitude
towards Epicureanism is at times more complex than one might expect.
In the first instance, his condemnation of Epicureanism is clear. In
the same sentence at *Post.* 2, he castigates Epicurean impiety
alongside Egyptian atheism. In *De providentia* as well we find
strong elements of a refutation of Epicurean denial of Providence. And
in *Aet.* 6-8, he draws a clear contrast between
Epicureans who believe in the genesis and dissolution of worlds
created by the chance of atomic collisions, and the Stoics, who
despite being materialists themselves, claim that the world is single
and governed by Reason. In addition, atomism becomes an allegorical
instrument in the splendid exegesis of Moses killing the Egyptian
(*Fug.* 148), where this episode becomes the symbol of the
confrontation between the doctrines of unity and of extreme
fragmentation. The Egyptian, who symbolizes pleasure, is buried in the
sand, symbol of atoms. Nothing in all this is truly unexpected. More
surprising, however, is the inclusion of the most complete exposition
of the Epicurean version of *oikeiosis* in *Opif.*
161, the doctrine of first adaptation to nature, probably of Stoic
origin but also adopted by other schools. Moreover, despite many
appearances, Philo does not consider pleasure an absolute evil. For
him, it has a place in the divine program of Creation since it plays
an essential role in procreation. The error lay with those who would
transform a relative good into a perfect one.


## 4. Major Philosophical Themes and Methods in Philo


### 4.1 Allegory



Philo's name has almost become a byword for allegory (Sellin
2011). There are many arguments to defend this association, but it
would be an error to affirm that he was merely an allegorist. In many
passages he defines with precision what can be called his methodology
of allegory. In *Praem.* 61-65, he says that there are
secret meanings, reachable only with God's help. He
distinguishes three cases by which a secret meaning may be
ascertained: (a) directly by divine illumination, or (b1) indirectly
in the shadow of literal interpretation, and/or (b2) by allegorical
interpretation. It must be added that he not only uses the word
*allegoria*, but also *uponoia*, a Platonic term which
by this time may have been somewhat archaic. The two terms are not
exactly synonymous for him. In *Opif.* 157, he posits that
Biblical tales are not the kind of myths in which poets and sophists
rejoice but are in fact "indications of character types which
invite allegorical interpretation through the explanation of hidden
meanings". Nevertheless, according to Philo, it is an error to
exclude literal meanings. As he notes in *Migr.* 89-93,




> 
> 
> there are some who, regarding laws in their literal sense in the light
> of symbols of matters belonging to the intellect, are over punctilious
> about the latter, while treating the former with easy-going neglect.
> Such men I for my part should blame for handling the matter in too
> easy and off-hand a manner: they ought to have given careful attention
> to both aims, to a more full and exact investigations of what is not
> seen and in what is seen to be stewards without reproach. 
> 
> 
> 



For him, allegory assumes importance when literal interpretation
encounters difficulty, for example, when it suggests conclusions in
contradiction with God's absolute perfection. In *Leg.*
2.19, he does not hesitate to say that the creation of Eve from one of
Adam's ribs was a most improbable myth, if taken literally. It
becomes likely only if one understands that "ribs" are in
fact the powers of Adam's mind. It has been amply demonstrated
that Philo's use of allegory was not born *ex nihilo*.
For example, an allegorical interpretation of the garment of the high
priest (*Mos.* 2.117) as a microcosmic reproduction of the
universe is found in Wisdom of Solomon 18:24, probably written at the
end of the first century BCE. This suggests a Jewish source. On the
other hand, many examples evince Philo's perfect knowledge of
Greek allegories in the interpretation of Homeric and Hesiodic myths.
He does not hesitate to evoke some of these by name. For example,
speaking about the earth in *Aet.* 63, he says that she was
rightly called Pandora, since she gives to living things all that is
useful. In Greek *doron* means a present. The allegorical
interpretation is here based on etymology, as are those of the
greatest Stoic allegorist of the imperial period, Cornutus.
Researchers have recently shown great interest in Philo's
linguistic remarks. Most of the time, however, he adapts classical
allegorical interpretations to a Jewish context. For example, in
*Conf.* 170 he quotes Homer, *Iliad* 2.204-205,
two verses in which the poet praises the power of a single man. Philo
denies that this should be interpreted as a general principle of
politics; under his own interpretation, it is instead a poetic
reference to almighty God. In one of his most famous passages, Philo
interprets the tale of Mambre, in Genesis 18:1-15, where Abraham
receives three men he initially believed to be foreigners. The author
reminds his readers (*QG* 4.2) that Homer, who in recounting
Odysseus' homecoming, says that gods often disguise themselves
in order not to be immediately recognized by humans (*Odyssey*
17.483-487).



A central problem in Philo's use of allegory is the nature of
the debt he owes to those he calls *fusikoi*. Since he evokes
them regarding the interpretation of some Biblical difficulties, they
were most likely Jewish exegetes using Stoic methods in which, at
least at that time, etymology played a strong role. For Long (1992),
there is a big difference between Stoic "allegory", based
on etymological and, more generally, linguistic bases, and the
allegories of Philo. Stoic allegoresis, he says, 



> 
> 
> was not an attempt like [Philo's], to distinguish figurative
> from literal meaning, but an effort to normalize language and remove
> ambiguity according to their own understanding of the empirical world.
> (1992 [1996: 210]) 
> 
> 
> 



In fact, the problem of the exact nature of Stoic allegoresis is
controversial. It can be remarked that Philo's allegory is not
merely symbolic. Especially when mentioning the *fusikoi*, he
himself draws upon etymology, for example, about Sara whose name in
the Chaldean language (i.e., in Hebrew) means "the ruler"
(*Abr.* 99), and for whom nothing is more dominant than virtue
(80). If it is probable that in Alexandria at this time there were a
great variety of allegorists blending literary, philosophical, and
spiritual currents, then we can say that Philo was very skillful in
drawing upon each of these. To this observation, let us add a
Philonian conception of allegory that appears not to have interested
later scholars: in his interpretation of one of Joseph's dreams
in *Somn.* 2.8, Philo states that he will follow the method of
allegory which he calls a "wise architect". This
expression is a "hapax", i.e., an isolated case. The best
way to understand the meaning of this phrase is given by Plutarch when
he says that Alexander, seeking the proper place for the Egyptian city
destined to bear his name, had a vision (*Life of Alexander*
26). In it, Homer recites two verses for him in which he mentioned the
island of Paros (*Odyssey* 4.354-55). Alexander declares
to his friends that he will follow Homer's advice since he was
the wisest architect--an already well-known story in Alexandria
to which Philo alludes in his own way. The difference between
Philo's reference to Alexander and Plutarch's is itself
interesting. In the latter case, Homer is not only the greatest poet
but also the father of all science. In the former, it is not the poet
but the exegete that unveils the meanings of dreams. And dreams sent
by God always reveal something about the truth of the world.


### 4.2 Negative theology and Providence



Philo is also considered the founder of negative theology in the
history of monotheistic faith. Given the association of his faith with
contemporary forms of Skepticism, he was also the founder of at least
a kind of fideism, i.e., a doctrine in which faith is the foundation
of all essential truths. His apparent versatility in exegesis can give
the impression that his only purpose is to make philosophical themes
and words coincide with the text of Bible. However, though Philo is
not as systematic as Plotinus, there is much more coherence in his
physics and metaphysics than one might think. Even John Dillon, hardly
an unconditional admirer of Philo, argues that "he follows a
system in which the supreme principle is the One", meaning not
the God of philosophers but the personal God of Judaism (1977: 155).
The problem of possible philosophical antecedents to Philo's
conception of an unknowable and ineffable God is a complex one. Such a
hypothesis cannot be dismissed, but there is no clear evidence of its
truth. In any case, negativity is, *par excellence*, the manner
of speaking in the best way possible about God. It is not the only
one; there is also the possibility of declaring His perfection and
infinite glory. And metaphors, like those of monarchy, the sower, and
the sun, are still different. But the *uiae negationis,
eminentiae* (all that is good has its origin in God), and
*analogiae* (there is a kind of analogy of being between
Creator and creature), though perfectly compatible with each other,
are only poor human means to suggest Him who can't be seen,
named, nor known. Nevertheless, one of the most interesting
comparative means to evoke man's relation to God is the
vocabulary of mysteries, for example when Philo says in *Cher.*
49: 



> 
> 
> I myself was initiated under Moses the God-beloved into his great
> mysteries, yet when I saw the prophet Jeremiah and knew him to be not
> only himself enlightened, but a worthy minister of the holy secrets, I
> was not slow to become his disciple. 
> 
> 
> 



The comparison with the Eleusinian mysteries is so precise that Moses
is often called "*hierophantos*", initiated in the
Sinai to mysteries most obscure. As it had held in Eleusis, Philo
speaks of "little mysteries" and "great
mysteries", the former leading to liberation from passions, the
latter from sensations. Many other elements, especially those of the
sacred banquet, resonate with the theme of the mysteries. Many
scholars suggested that Philo situated himself in the Platonic
tradition of philosophically transposing the Eleusinian mysteries. In
this perspective, the mystery is *the allegoric method itself*.
However, one could object to this interpretation that the meaning of a
metaphor is not monolithic. It depends in great part on the identity
of the addressee, about which we know little. Indeed, there was at
least one ambiguity: did Philo want to prove to hypothetic Greek
readers that Eleusinian mysteries were shadowy images of the only true
mysteries, the Jewish ones? Was he using a kind of spiritual
*lingua franca* elaborated during the pluralistic honeymoon at
the beginning of the Ptolemaic period? Still, no element of the
mysteries' lexicon could trace a shift with regard to the theme
of the impossibility of knowing God.



Even the man who was the closest to God, Moses, could not see Him in
the Sinai. God is "ineffable, inconceivable and
incomprehensible" (*Mut.* 15). This means that without
Revelation, it would be impossible to say anything about Him that bore
relation with truth. At the same time, the absolute transcendence of
God, as theorized by Philo, could have implied His perfect
indifference to the world of matter, time, and sensibility. Yet,
through His providence, God is present in the world He created. From a
philosophical point of view, the problem of what Radice calls
"the antinomy of transcendence and providence" played a
great role even in the period before Middle Platonism (2009: 128). The
return to Platonic transcendence was the major philosophical
characteristic of Philo's age. It is highly improbable, however,
that philosophy had a determining role in shaping his faith and
beliefs. More probable is that he perceived himself in the tradition
of biblical translators, the Septuagint being so highly praised by him
in the *Vita Mosis*. In a time when Egypt was Ptolemaic, these
translations had both political and cultural purposes. In
Philo's time, the main center of Greek power was cultural. To
comment upon the Bible with philosophical concepts was, in a certain
way, to translate it into the language of the new cultural elite, the
Roman as well as Greek. Regardless, the central idea was that the word
of God had to be mediated to become accessible outside of Israel. From
this point of view, mediation was a central Philonian concept, not
only linguistically and culturally, but also ontologically: in
*Somn.* 1.62, he says that God fulfilled His Word with His
incorporeal powers.


### 4.3 Powers of God and *logos*



One of the main Philonian concepts, power, is all the more complex
given the varieties in Philo's prose when discussing it (Termini
2000). These variations were probably a means to avoid the implication
that these powers had an ontological autonomy. Their nature, rather,
is merely linguistic and functionalist. The number of God's
power is not fixed and their relation to the *logos* is evoked
vaguely or not at all. From a philosophical point of view, the
genealogy of *dunamis* is incredibly rich since each great
Greek philosopher used it with his own semantic specificity. In the
Bible, God is omnipotent but there is no systematic presentation of
His powers. Just before the apparition of Middle Platonism,
*dunamis* was present in Stoic doctrine, but with a more
reduced range of meaning. The question of Philo's source(s) on
this point is very controversial, but the general structure is quite
clear. His two main powers are the "creative power"
(*theos*) and "regal power" (*kyrios*)
(*Cher.* 27-8). The beneficent and the legislative powers
are subordinated to them, but in *Spec.* 1.45, Philo uses a
Platonic metaphor to assert that God is surrounded by a great number
of powers who are like His bodyguards. Before trying to specify the
relation between these powers and the *logos*, it is necessary
to add that *dunamis* is not only a metaphysical term. It bears
a psychological meaning as well, for example at *Opif.* 67 when
Philo evokes the division of the soul in a context both Aristotelian
and Stoic. In *Leg.* 1.11, the division is more clearly Stoic,
with its seven traditional parts (the five senses, reproduction and
speech) but at the same time, Philo seems to adopt a dualistic
position, distinguishing a rational and irrational part of the soul.
The main problem, in human psychology as with the divine powers, lies
in their relation to the *logos*.



It seems that Philo did his utmost to make the relation between God
and the *logos* as complex as possible (Calabi 2008). As an
example of these difficulties, in *Leg.* 2.86, God is said to
be the supreme *genus* and His *logos* the second one.
Other things, Philo adds, only exist in speech and sometimes amount to
mere nothingness. In the third book of the same treatise
(*Leg.* 3.175-6), the *logos* is defined as the
"*ti*", i.e., the all-encompassing genus in the
Stoic system. To explain this definition, Philo specifies that
God's *logos* is the supreme genus of everything that was
born. From a philosophical point of view, if somebody remains in the
world of immanence, he can refer to the universal *logos*, and
only to him. But to see the *logos* as the ultimate expression
of the absolute is for Philo an absolute impiety. In fact, the
*logos* is only God's shadow, His image, the instrument
by which He created the world, or in a more anthropomorphic way, His
"first-born son" or His deputy (*Agr.* 51). In
*Fug.* 109, the *logos* is said to be "the Son of
God and Sophia". The Pythagorean-Platonic model of Creation
acting on undefined matter is thus both preserved and richly
transformed.



God is unity, and only unity. It is the *logos* which carries
in itself the principle of contraries, mixing good and evil. This
leads in turn to a distinction between ontology and methodology.
Anyone who divinizes the world, seeing it as the most perfect
expression of the *logos*, is deeply wrong, since he omits God,
the truly supreme genus and the only one not to have been created. At
the same time, the exegete of God's word can occasionally lead
to his commentary focusing on the *logos*, creating a false
resemblance to Stoicism. However, the theologian is, *mutatis
mutandis*, like the biologist who today chooses some cells to
place under his microscope. This act, of course, does not imply that
the biologist forgets the tissue of which these cells are a part.
Similarly, Philo's focus on *logos* should never suggest
that he feels a temptation toward Stoicism. Themes and language of
immanence are for him only a means to better understand the world
created by God. When he praises the philosophers who recommend
"living according to nature", he uses a famous Stoic
formula, but immediately after explains that this means "to
follow God" (*Migr.* 128). For a Stoic, the two formulae
were strictly synonymous. In Philo's thought, the former is
valid only if it is followed by a reference to God, who is
transcendent by definition.



The intermediary status of the *logos* and the many nuances in
the expression of its nature do not prevent Philo from providing a
more or less systematic framework.



The *logos*, God's *organon* in the creation of
the world, is described in *Opif.* 20 as "the place of
the Ideas", a metaphoric expression since for Philo the
intelligible world could not be contained in a place. While the
demiurge contemplates the Ideas in order to create the World in the
*Timaeus*, in the *De opificio*, God not only creates
the Ideas but organizes them into an intelligible world. In
*Her.* 119, the divine *logos* is said to be both sower
and creator. The former word refers to a Stoic concept, that of
*spermatikoi logoi*, defined as the rational patterns inherent
in the principles of organization of the world, but which Philo
preferred not to use with precision. The *Quis heres* is
probably the treatise in which Philo's reflection on the
*logos'* way of action is most complete, through the
concept of *logos* divider (*tomeus*). In Stoicism, one
of the main functions of the *logos* is to establish the
principle of the *idios poion*, that is to say, the
absolute specificity of each being in the world. In the *Quis
heres*, perhaps under the influence of a Stoicized interpretation
of the *Timaeus*, Philo explains how God created the four
elements from undifferentiated matter, then individual beings, by
mixing these elements together.



As was said rightly by Radice, the 



> 
> 
> philosophical doctrine of the powers... allowed Philo to maintain
> both the oneness of God despite His many names and epithets, and the
> transcendence of God despite His action on the world. (2009: 136)
> 
> 
> 


### 4.4 The Law of Nature



The relation between the *logos* and the law of Nature is an
interesting topic since it shows the different perspectives of
Philo's thought and Stoic doctrine despite their many
similarities (Najman 1999). For the Stoics, the *logos* and the
law of Nature are perfectly synonymous. In their definition, the law
of Nature is the command of the *logos* as to what must be done
and what avoided. Philo's thought of the law is different. In
*Opif.* 143, Philo alludes to man's original ancestor as
living in a world governed by a constitution, i.e., "the right
reason of nature", which is named with more appropriate title
"ordinance", a divine law according to which obligations
and rights have been distributed to each creature. The vocabulary is
Stoic, but with an interesting nuance: Philo speaks about "the
right reason of nature" instead of "the law of
nature". This is perhaps more than a stylistic variation;
instead, it may have served to reveal a distance with regard to the
canonical doctrine of the law of Nature. This distance appears to be
essential, despite many variations and occasional contradictions.
First of all, while Stoic natural law is affirmed by Cicero to be
"the same in Athens and in Rome", but without any precise
formulation, the Torah, specific law of the people of Israel, is
posited by Philo to be unique, since it is both concrete and eternal.
The law of Moses thus has an ambiguous status, since it is sometimes
said to be the Natural Law itself, and sometimes an image,
*eikon*, of it. It is a controversial point whether the
term "image" means an ontological degradation or a perfect
identity of one with the other. Last but not least, Philo emphasizes
the fact that before the Torah, the patriarchs were unwritten
incarnations of the law of Nature. Admittedly, his task bordered on
the impossible. He had to take into account both the historicity of
the Torah and its eternity, its universality, and its institutional
status as law of Israel. It is not impossible that he had in mind a
model similar to the translation of the Torah into Greek. In the
*Vita Mosis*, he emphasizes the fact that the Greek translation
and the Hebrew (he says "Chaldean") original are perfectly
identical and equivalent. There is a plasticity of the law of Nature,
at first incarnated by the patriarchs, then written; and a plasticity
of the Torah, first in Hebrew, then in Greek. At the same time, their
underlying function is always the same: defining a principle of
ethical responsibility not exclusively from the rationality of the
world but by reference to a personal God who chose Israel to incarnate
and bear witness to this principle in its different forms.


### 4.5 Creation and anthropology



The *De opificio* was often defined as a Jewish version of the
*Timaeus* (Sterling 1993). In this treatise, Philo proclaims,
against Aristotelianism and Stoicism, that God is the unique Creator
both of the models for the world and of the world itself. That does
not prevent him from drawing upon patterns elaborated in the somewhat
confused but rich period at the end of the first century BCE. The
evaluation of the most common model of cosmological creation in the
*De opificio*, that of an active power acting on unqualified
matter, is difficult since Philo seems to affirm that God created the
world *ex nihilo* in some passages. It is probable that there
was no significant difference between unqualified matter and pure void
for him. God's first task--though Philo refuses to admit
the historicity of Creation (Runia 2001: 156-162)--was
acting as architect to elaborate His project, i.e., to structure the
intelligible world, conceived as the model of the corporeal one and
established in the *logos*. The chief contents of the
incorporeal cosmos were heaven, an invisible earth, air and void,
water, spirit, and light. After the creation of the firmament and of
the earth, on the fourth day God proceeded to order the heaven and to
adorn it with splendid heavenly bodies. The explanation of this fourth
day is especially interesting given the following elements:


* God has absolute liberty, and creates the less-important earth before
the more-important celestial bodies.
* He knows what the then non-existent human beings will think and wants
to prevent them from thinking that the movement of the celestial
bodies is the cause of everything. This could be called the Chaldean
temptation, not without similarities to Stoicism, and is an obsessive
fear of Philo's.
* At this point he begins an extensive section on Pythagorean
arithmology, including a meditation on the perfection of the number
four.



On the fifth day, God creates the living beings according to a
*scala naturae* replete with Platonic, Aristotelian, and Stoic
echoes. As has been remarked, there is a crucial difference between
Plato and Philo on this point (Runia 2001: 213). While "the
creational sequence" is descending in the former, in the
Alexandrian exegetes--who aim to defend the Biblical
account--it ascends. Between the fishes, which are the first
created, and man, crown of Creation, are birds and land animals. The
creation of man, on the sixth day, is for Philo an occasion to develop
some of his main themes: the resemblance of the human being to God,
based on the Platonic and Stoic idea that the intellect holds the same
position in the human being that the Great Creator holds in the
cosmos; the concept of the powers of God, introduced with his exegesis
of the words, "let us make a human being after our image and
likeness". In fact, argues Philo, God needed no one to create
the human being, but preferred that human sins not be attributed to
Him. In addition, he cites the Platonic idea of contemplation leading
to philosophy, a risky idea since it could lead to such a fascination
with worldly things that the Creator would be forgotten and denied, as
was the case with the Chaldeans. After a long arithmologic meditation
on the hebdomad, the seventh day or Shabbat, Philo arrives at original
sin. It is said that the first man (the name Adam is never evoked) was
most excellent in his body as well as his soul. He lived in perfect
harmony with nature, homeless, but the cosmos was his home and city,
where he resided with complete safety. God ascribed to the first man
the imposition of names, a philosophical theme with strong Platonic
connotations. In the following paragraphs Philo explains his descent
into wickedness by the creation of woman. The sentence "woman
becomes for him the starting point of a blameworthy life" has
aroused many criticisms of misogyny on Philo's part. It would be
absurd to deny that there are many offensive assertions regarding
women in his work. Woman is the symbol of sensation, man that of
reason. These problems are essential in that they deal with sexuality,
ethics and ontology alike. Without trying to defend Philo
systematically, one must however emphasize the first sentence of
*Opif.* 151: 



> 
> 
> But since nothing is stable in the world of becoming, mortal beings
> necessarily undergo reverses and changes, the first human being too
> had to enjoy some ill fortune. 
> 
> 
> 



The word "necessarily" means that human responsibility is
much more relative than absolute. The first man could not eternally
have a perfect life in a world which was not the intelligible one. In
Stoic doctrine, the similarity between the sage and God is a permanent
one. Philo is much more cautious when saying at *Opif.* 151:




> 
> 
> As long as he was single, he resembled God and the cosmos in his
> solitariness, receiving the delineations of his soul, not all of them
> but as many as a mortal constitution could contain. 
> 
> 
> 



Eve's role was inscribed in Adam's ontological
instability. In Philo's allegorical interpretation, defined not
as a certainty but a conjecture, the serpent is the symbol of
pleasure. It cannot be said, however, that pleasure is an absolute
evil in Philo's thought. It is necessary in the created world
and it is said in *Leg.* 2.17 that the new born child makes use
of it. The defenders of pleasure are not absolutely wrong when they
say that offspring feel an affinity with it. Their error is not in
defending pleasure but in transforming its auxiliary role into the
alpha and omega of ethics. The moment of humankind's fall is
neither the triumph of evil, nor a victory of individual perversity,
but rather the appearance of a contrast between the first man in his
initial perfection and a world which, being created on the basis of
the intelligible one, could not itself be perfect.


### 4.6 Soul and body



In a huge catalogue of philosophical opinions, which is of
considerable interest, Philo begins by demonstrating how little we
know about heaven, then arrives at the human being about whom he says
that he/she has four parts: body, sensibility, speech, intellect
(*nous*) (*Somn.* 1.25). He exposes all that we know
about the first three, for example, that body has three dimensions and
six ways of moving. But about the intellect, he says that it is
absolutely unintelligible. Nothing is known about its nature, its way
of arriving in the body, or its place. As with the place of heaven in
the world, we are unable to say anything about it. But in contrast
with this scientific and philosophical ignorance, the Bible gives its
reader true information. The intellect is a divine emanation
(*Somn.* 1.34, Genesis 2:7), and the human being is the one who
received the privilege of worshipping God, the One Being. There are
grounding elements of the problem: what must the human being do in the
face of such problems? Philo's answer is both philosophical and
theological. She must, like Socrates or like Terah (father of Abraham)
in the Torah, make a constant effort to have better self-knowledge.
Socrates is the man who had no other philosophy than to know himself,
while Terah is the very idea of knowing oneself. What does it mean to
know oneself? Essentially, to have a clearer idea of one's
position with respect to God and His powers in order to have the means
of becoming wiser, and therefore better. The human being has no other
personal good than reason. The paradoxical aim of reason is to
perceive the distance between God and His creation (*Somn.*
1.66) and so to understand how far He is from human comprehension.



To know oneself does not mean to have a perfect science of what a soul
is. Philo knows all the suppositions elaborated by philosophers and he
uses many of them, but without ever saying that he is in possession of
knowledge of the soul. It has been rightly said that his purpose was
not to build a scientific but a "religious psychology". In
this kind of psychology, it was not essential to know if a soul has
seven components besides reason, as it is said by the Stoics, or
three, like in the Platonic division, or if it contains, besides
reason, nutritive and sensitive parts like in Aristotelianism. Here
I'll give a few examples of his varieties of uses. In
*Opif.* 117, soul is compared to a puppet show, the seven
puppets being manipulated by the *hegemonikon*, the
central rational element. This metaphor strongly reminds us of the
Stoic comparison with the octopus, but is also very different from
this image. The octopus is a living unity, while the puppet master is
essentially different from his puppets. The Stoic metaphor of the
octopus is a monist one, but the Philonian image, inspired from Plato
(*Laws* 644d), is strongly dualistic. The puppets are not even
irrational beings as they are mere objects. But it is true that in
*Leg.* 1.28, the image of the source and the stream could have
been used by the most orthodox of the Stoics if separated from its
context. In 1.29, Philo says that the intellect (*nous*, note
that he does not use the Stoic word *logos*) is like a source
going to the senses. There is, however, no contradiction in all this.
In 1.30, Philo uses a strictly Stoic definition: the living being is
characterized by representation and impulse. But when he arrives to
the human being at 1.31, Stoicism is completed by a Biblical quotation
(Genesis 2:7). A Stoic image is a good way to speak about living
beings, but it is not enough when the narrative is about humans. That
is why Philo often uses the distinction between rational and
irrational beings with an opposition between the
*hegemonikon*, unique and rational, and the other parts
of soul, divided in seven and irrational. However, it must be added
that in Philo, dualistic images do not imply the division of the soul.
In *Leg.* 2.8, he asserts that sensation and passions are like
parts and products of a unified soul. Such are the multi-layered
levels of language Philo is capable of using at every page. For him,
it is impossible to know what a human soul is, but it is not necessary
to have this kind of knowledge in order to try to understand what the
meaning of the word of the Lord is. To be conscious of her ignorance
in the field of psychology, far from being an obstacle, actually helps
to have a better perception of the limitations inherent to human
nature. But this consciousness itself necessarily rises from the
confrontation of the philosophical doctrines.



It would be an error to affirm that Philo despises and hates the body.
Even if he is often very harsh towards it, he never forgets that when
God created the first human being, He made him not only spiritually
perfect, but also physically beautiful. He does not see any
inconvenience in emphasizing the perfection of sensation or sexuality.
It is said in *Opif.* 136 that the first human being was truly
and really *kalos kagathos*, beautiful and good. It is strange
to find in a Jewish biblical commentator the explicit expression of
this Greek ideal of humanity. At the same time, it could mean that for
Philo the Greek conception of this expression was an erroneous one,
since it did not imply an immediate link with divine transcendence.
God, Philo says, was a good *technites*, both of the
body and the soul. The beauty of the body is in *Opif.* 138
explained in specific Greek terms, symmetry, beauty of the flesh, and
color. All these concepts can be found in Plato, Aristotle, and the
Stoics, but it does not mean that Philo uses them in the same way. In
Philo, the body is not a principle of evil, though it can be used as
an instrument of perversion when the human being focuses more on
himself than on the powers of God. We find in *Leg.* 3.71,
however, the assertion that the body is bad by nature,
*poneron fusei.* The meaning of the expression is
perfectly clear, but it is also necessary to remember the context.
Philo is commenting on Genesis 38:7, where it is said that God killed
Er without any justified reason. According to Philo, "ER"
means in Hebrew the flesh, the body which is a threat for the soul.
But at the same time Philo specifies that to create the best things,
God had to create less good things. This can lead to the conclusion
that the *poneron fusei* means not absolute but relative
perversion since the body is necessary to demonstrate, by contrast,
the beauty of soul. Creation is good by nature (*fusei*) and
the body is an element of the Creation. The example of Issachar in
*Leg.* 1.83 shows how necessary the body is for ethical
progress. But at the same time, the knowledge of the body can be only
phenomenological, while real research is ontological. This can explain
Philo's violent attacks on the body: it is a tomb (following the
Platonic play on words comparing the body to a tomb), a
*nosema* (disease), a vase unable to contain its desire,
and most frequently a burden of flesh. But all this verbal violence is
addressed more to human error on the value of the body than to the
body itself created by God.


## 5. Transcendental Ethics


### 5.1 From *oikeiosis* to *omoiosis*



One major intellectual revolution in the passage from the Hellenistic
period to Middle Platonism was a relative abandoning of the concept of
*oikeiosis* (natural kinship) which, originating with the
Stoics, became a foundation of ethics not only in Stoicism but also in
Epicureanism and the late Aristotelianism of Antiochus of Ascalon. The
Hellenistic period was that of a naturalism that only the sceptic
Academy undertook to fight it. The great change brought by Middle
Platonism was the irruption of transcendence which seemed to have been
forgotten for at least two centuries. And in the case of Philo,
transcendence was not only philosophical, but also religious, mainly
that of the God of the Bible. Philo sometimes uses the term
*oikeiosis*, but never in the Stoic meaning, always with
semantic transformations. He could not accept the idea, central in the
dogma of *oikeiosis*, that children as well as animals
are the image of nature. His own description of the world of childhood
is a frightening one, a description Sigmund Freud would not have
spurned. For him the main ethical purpose is to become closer and
closer to God, and so to be in a spiritual kinship with Him. At this
point, Philonian *oikeiosis* is not different from the
Platonic *omoiosis.* It is not, as in Stoicism, an
initial impulse, indicating the path of nature, but the result of a
pious asceticism, getting rid of desire and passionate impulses. It
has been suggested that the resemblance to God did not have in Philo
any concrete social or ethical consequences, but things are much more
complex. He says in *Decalogo* 133 that murder is forbidden
because of the common resemblance (*omoiosis*) of all men
to God, but it is true that he does not develop extensively the
consequences of this *omoiosis*. In Stoicism, there is a
kind of family relationship between human beings, since they alone
(among animals) share reason in a world which is itself exclusively
rational. Philo puts great weight on the specific status of Israel as
the only people able to see God, an etymology of which he is very
fond. In Alexandria, anti-Semitic propagandists accused Jews of being
a group unified through their hatred of other nations, and today in
the scholarship, the problem of universalism in Philo is much
discussed (Berthelot 2003). However, it is necessary to distinguish
between the ontological level and the ethical level. Because of its
specific relation with God, Israel is the priest of the Nations, for
whom it prays and offers sacrifices (*Abr.* 98; *Somn.*
2.163; *Mos.* 2.133-135). At the same time, Philo never
denied that non-Jews could reach wisdom. For him, as well as Jews,
Greeks and Barbarians could be ascetics of wisdom. Jewish superiority
lies in the unique capacity to articulate the three levels: human
individual perfection, with the examples of the patriarchs and Moses;
social perfection, that of a society ruled by the laws of Moses; and
ontological specificity, due to a deep kinship with God.


### 5.2 From passions to virtue



Philo's general vision of mankind is often pessimistic. In
*Ios.* 30, he uses the Stoic metaphor of the world as a huge
city, but a city ruled by violence and hatred. The main cause of this
disaster is the reign of passion, a theme very often evoked in the
philosophy of his time. In his exegesis of the Biblical passages
relating to human errors, Philo uses many philosophical terms and
metaphors. Sometimes, he uses a Platonizing description of passion,
recalling the description of the winged team of horses in
*Phaedrus* 253 c-e. At the same time, in many texts, he
refers to the Stoic division of passions, with four bad passions
(*pathe*): desire, fear, sadness, and pleasure, and three
good passions, joy, caution, and will. But his use of this Stoic
division is not strictly faithful to the original. In his allegorical
interpretation of *Det.* 119-120, Philo contrasts bad and
good passions, but he introduces hope and repentance, biblical
virtues, among the latter. It was not simply a terminological change,
but the sign of a deep ontological change. In Stoic doctrine, only the
present exists. To be a sage means to understand that the past and the
future have no real existence, but are mainly spaces of projection for
passions. By introducing hope and repentance among good passions,
Philo, without renouncing a complete, or at least as complete as
possible, control of bad passions, opened a path going from psychology
to transcendentalist ethics. 



Philo, without giving a precise and irreversible definition of the
nature of soul, recommends the radical excision of passions in
*Leg.* 3.129, arguing that no moderation of them could be
satisfactory. The model is a medical one of major surgery, which will
also be used by Seneca. In the fight against passions,
*enkrateia* (self-control) and *karteria* (endurance)
play a decisive role. However, only the sage can live without any
passion in Stoicism, and everyone knows that the Stoic sage is
extremely rare in the history of mankind. It was impossible for Philo
to admit that a human being could be perfect. However, it is said in
*Deus* 67 that Moses aimed at the disappearance of the
passions, but did he succeed in it? There are many similarities
between Philo's attitude towards passions and that of the
Stoics, but there is also a fundamental difference. For him it is
impossible to become free from passion without divine Grace. That does
not mean that one has to become passive and wait for God's
intervention. *Enkrateia* and *karteria* are individual
qualities that are encouraged by the rules of life included in the
laws of Moses. However, even before the Law was given to Moses, faith
was the condition *sine qua non* to escape the process of
passion. When Abraham received the order to sacrifice his son, he
obeyed without any emotion. "He admitted no swerving of body nor
mind" (*Abr.* 175). His faith was so absolute that at no
moment did he try to revolt. But there is yet another difference with
Stoicism. In this doctrine, the sage cannot lose his perfection, and
he remains always in his *apatheia* (perfect serenity) even if
he has reflex reactions (*propatheiai*) of which his judgment
is not responsible. On the contrary, at the death of Sarah, Abraham
avoids the two attitudes considered erroneous by Philo. He did not
grieve over-bitterly nor did he assume indifference
(*apatheia*) as if nothing painful had occurred. On this
occasion, the patriarch chose the *metriopatheia*, the middle
way, which, in philosophy, corresponds to Aristotelian doctrine.
Unlike the Stoics, Philo does not try to present *apatheia* as
a kind of ethical heroism. Unlike the Peripatetics, he does not think
that ethics always requires reasonable aims. He considers the human
being able to transform bad passions into good ones and affirms that
there are no natural limits to his perfectibility when he accepts to
submit himself to the power of God.


### 5.3 Virtues, the paths to perfection



Most philosophical themes related to virtue are present in the
Philonian treatises. The four traditional virtues (*phronesis*
[prudence], *sophrosyne* [temperance],
*andreia* [courage], *dikaiosune* [justice]) are
completed through *enkrateia* which pertains more specifically
to the Cynic-Stoic tradition as the science of that which appears in
line with right reason. In *Spec.* 4.135, we find a different
definition of the four cardinal virtues: *eusebeia* (piety,
sanctity) is defined as "the queen of virtues", and
wisdom, temperance, and justice following. In the treatise *De
virtutibus*, *metanoia* (repentance) and *eugeneia*
(nobility) have special importance (Wilson 2010). The first concept,
considered an unhappy passion by the Stoics, is the equivalent of the
Jewish concept of *teshuva.* In Philo, it expresses the strong
connection between theological and moral reflection. *Eugeneia*
has nothing of a racist concept, since all those who are temperate and
just are truly noble (*Virt.* 189). Abraham, son of a Chaldean
astrologist, becomes the symbol of true nobility when he emigrated
from polytheism to monotheism.



One of the most interesting elements in the Philonian presentation of
virtues is the understanding of matriarchs as allegorical symbols of
virtues. Gender differences are a complex and interesting aspect of
the Alexandrine's thought. One cannot deny his misogyny, which,
however, is not common since it is expressed through rather
sophisticated semantic webs. Virtue is, on his view, masculine in its
essence, since it is powerful and active. The realm of reason is
masculine, "for nature is the law of men, and to follow nature
is the mark of a strong and truly masculine reason"
(*Ebr.* 54-5). Why, then, are women, the matriarchs,
chosen as symbols of virtues? The answer given in *Fug.* 51 is
that God used a feminine appearance so that even the most perfect
human qualities would be imperfect. Each matriarch has her allegorical
peculiarities. Sarah, for example, is said to have nothing to do with
the world of women and to be born, like Athena, from the father of
everything (*Ebr.* 60-1). At the same time, she unites
with Abraham to give birth to Isaac, who is the allegory of joy, one
of the three Stoic good passions (*eupatheiai*) which also
include will (*boulesis*) and caution
(*eulabeia*).



In Stoicism, virtue, or human perfection, is the natural end
(*telos*) of the programming of mankind by Providence. In
Philo, things are more complex because of Original Sin. For the
Stoics, there was no ontologisation of evil in a world which was
entirely rational, and to become as perfect as God was not an absurd
project. Philo lived in a period when most philosophers chose a more
modest purpose: to become like God as far as possible by flying from
the earthly sphere to the heavenly realm (Plato, *Theaetetus*
176 a-b). To live in the least imperfect way was the goal, a
goal which had some similarities with the Stoic figure of the
*prokopton*, the person making moral progress. Philo knew
the different aspects of this figure and gave his own interpretation
of it in *Agr.* 15. The striving towards a lesser imperfection
could take three forms, a division with Platonic/Pythagorean origin
but embodied by the example of the patriarchs. Abraham embodies the
effort to know, in traveling from astrology to real comprehension of
nature, then from the comprehension of nature to "the maker and
father of the world"; Isaac symbolizes the happy nature,
"the new race, superior to reason and truly divine"
(*Fug.* 168); and Jacob, the struggle against senses and
passions. Philo stresses the fact that each of these three types is
present in the other two (*Abr.* 52-53). From a formal
point of view, the relation among the three types is not fundamentally
different from that of the virtues in the Stoic system which aims to
reconcile the unity of the whole and the specificity of each
element.

On the specificities of the character of Joseph in
Hellenistic philosophy, see Niehoff (1992)


There is an element which differentiates Philo from his contemporary
philosophers and rabbis: the absence of a master. It is impossible to
find in his vast corpus the name of someone who initiated him to
philosophy or to Biblical exegesis. Why this silence about his
masters? One possible explanation is that for Philo, transmission is
greater than the transmitters. He is consistent regarding this
position when he speaks very little of himself. His main idea is that
"the only good that is infallible and firm is faith in
God" (*Abr.* 268). The human being can improve herself,
and she can have a clear conscience (*suneidesis* is a
key word of Philo's ethical vocabulary) of the ethical issues,
but this does not allow her to assert her real existence.


### 5.4 Politics and contemplation



Almost all the details that we know of Philo's life are in
relation to his political activity. Though he himself has a clear
preference for theoretical and mystical life, he played an important
role in the Jewish community of Alexandria. This is one of the great
paradoxes of his life. He thought that it was necessary to engage in
political affairs before attempting the contemplative life, but the
tragic situation of the Alexandrine community obliged him to commit to
public life in order to defend his coreligionists. Nevertheless, he
never considered politics a field without interest. His treatises are
full of remarks about the origin of society, or about the functioning
of human society. *Stasis*, violent sedition in the city, was
one of his main concerns, certainly based on his own experience. He
was perfectly aware of the Stoic doctrine of the social
*oikeiosis*, which affirmed that the whole of mankind was
a natural community, arranged in concentric circles (family, nation,
humankind as a whole). He did not deny the existence of kinship among
human beings, even if "malignant covetousness" is always a
source of hatred. He tried to give a concrete shape to the natural
link by encouraging philanthropy and demanding humane treatment of
slaves. He did not hesitate in advocating their emancipation. He even
asserts that their emancipation "granted freedom to him who is
naturally free" (*Spec.* 2.84). At the same time, he
describes mankind as being deeply divided by passions, wars, and all
kinds of violence. He has the same optimistic vision of human nature,
at least in principle, as the Stoics, while he also adopted the
pessimistic view of the Neo-Academic Carneades in his critique of
Stoicism. One of his most original ideas to transcend this duality was
that individual political regimes were "additions to the one
natural regime" (*Ios.* 28-31). The dispersion of
humanity and the strength of the passions have as consequence that
harmonious coexistence of nations, though theoretically possible, is
in reality impossible. Because there is, in politics, a permanent
antagonism between individual passions and natural reason, the figure
of the politician is himself varied and contradictory. Moses is not a
politician, but at once the figure of the philosopher-king, the sage,
the priest, and the prophet. Even before receiving the Law, he is the
incarnation of the law (*nomos empsychos*), as were the
patriarchs (*Abr.* 3-5). Joseph, the best politician, is
not a constant object of Philo's admiration. Even though a
recent paper (Frazier 2002) tried to give evidence of a greater
coherence between the two treatises, in the *De Iosepho* Joseph
is described as a responsible and courageous man, while in the *De
somniis* he is said to be mainly desperate for glory. For Philo,
monotheism would imply the superiority of monarchy, but with the
exception of Moses, most human beings are too weak and inconsistent to
ensure stable monarchy. In fact, his political thought is profoundly
influenced by the Hellenistic idea of *anacyclosis*, the
natural instability of the three elementary constitutions (monarchy,
aristocracy, and democracy). The Greek historian Polybius had thought
that a mixed constitution would be the guarantee against this
instability, and he saw in the Roman constitution the paradigm of this
stability. In a certain sense, for Philo, the city of Moses is the
model of a new kind of constitution: it associates transcendence with
law of nature, particularism and universalism, monarchy, aristocracy
and democracy. Was it for him, as it said by Carlier (2008: 433)
"un modele concurrentiel a la *civitas
romana*" (i.e., a competitive model to Rome)? Certainly it
was for him a model of a different kind, a radically different kind of
exemplarity. In this perspective, the famous and controversial passage
about the Essenians (*Probus* 75-92) can be read as the
demonstration that this model was not a utopian one.



For Cicero, who has many common points with Philo despite fundamental
differences, the problem of the choice of life (theoretical,
political, or mixed) is one of the most frequent themes of his
philosophical reflection. For him, it was essentially a matter of
personal choice. In the case of Philo, as it was underlined by Calabi
(2011, 2013: 87), the commandment to observe the Sabbath establishes a
structural organization of time, which must include at least a part of
theoretical life. Philo stresses the fact that in all the Jewish
communities Sabbath was a day for praying and also for devoting
oneself to philosophy (*Spec.* 2.62), that is, the study of the
Torah. Does the *De uita contemplativa*, with its long
description of the life of the Therapeuts of Alexandria, mean that the
theoretical life was for Philo the best kind of life, or only a
philosopher's dream? There are many declarations of Philo
asserting the superiority of the theoretical life. At the same time,
he does not imagine this life as an isolated one. To live in the
desert does not necessarily mean to live alone. In fact, the desert is
the place where the double aspect of virtue appears most clearly,
which is reflection and action at the same time. This duality is once
again a common point between Philo and the Stoics, but also an element
of difference, because no Stoic showed the slightest interest for kind
of life of the Therapeuts.


### 5.5 The sage, the divine man



The *Quod omnis probus* is one of the most puzzling Philonian
treatises. Despite the fact that Eusebius included it in his catalogue
of the works of Philo, the question of its authenticity was often
discussed from the middle of the 19th century. The main
arguments against its authenticity were the massive presence of
Stoicism and the lack of any allegoric commentary. Biblical references
are rare, only five quotations used for an apologetic purpose. From a
philosophical point of view, it is not easy to understand how Philo,
who was a major user of Stoic *topoi*, but always showing
distance towards them, seems to have fully adopted the paradox of the
perfect liberty of the sage, even when he is in a situation of
slavery. Did Philo adopt the Stoic view that the sage embodies the
perfection of human nature? And how could he reconcile this with the
Jewish conception of a human being marked by Original Sin? More
generally, between Stoicism affirming that the wise man is the equal
of God and Plato proposing that man assimilate to God to the furthest
extent possible, where did Philo stand? The first remark is that Philo
does not consider Stoicism an autonomous thought in the
*Probus*. According to Philo--if he really was the author
of the treatise--Zeno, the creator of the Stoa, most likely found
his doctrine of human liberty in the Bible, more precisely in Genesis
27:40, the story of two brothers, one moderate, the other shameless.
Their father wanted the shameless to be the slave of the moderate one
in order to improve the shameless one. The perfection of the sage in
the *Probus* is always subordinated to that of God, who is
infinitely superior. In Stoic doctrine, God is the *logos*, and
that means that He and the human being have the same nature, perfect
in the first case, perfectible in the second one. In Philo's
interpretation of the Bible, the distance between the two is infinite.
Even if man is created in the image of God, the Philonian negative
theology affirms that we know nothing about Him. Philo says in the
*Probus* 20 that only he who has no other master than God is
free. He adds that this man is also the master of other human beings,
the deadly vicar of a Grand Immortal King. In Stoic doctrine, the Sage
is the King and the next best human beings are his ministers. There is
no mention of a mightier king. But how can Philo say that a human
being is divine?



Litwa (2014) focuses on the deification of Moses. In conclusion, Litwa
affirms that "Moses is deified by participating in the
*logos*, the Mind of God, and Philo's 'second
God'" (2014: 27). God is the King and God of gods, while
Moses is only a god with regard to mankind. It can only be added that
if the Sage embodies the exceptional fulfillment of the human nature
in Stoicism, in *Somn.* 2.234, the perfect man is said to be
neither of an ungenerated nature nor a mortal one. Not only the
context of Middle Platonism but also the beginning of the deification
of the *princeps* in the Roman empire can help understand why
Philo so easily expressed the idea of the man-god, which seemed to be
far from his own convictions. 


## 6. Conclusion



Another long article would be necessary to address the Christian
reception of Philo. Many books and articles provide precious
information on this point (Van den Hoek 1988; Runia 1993, 2009;
Sterling 1998). Philo's thought was used by the Christian
fathers in many different ways. Their attitude towards him ranged from
the passionate interest of Origen to the accurate attention of Clemens
to the somewhat stubborn and hostile attitude of Ambrose, who in many
places plagiarizes Philo. Today, Philo is included in the modern
categories of "Middle Platonism" and, still more recent,
"Middle Judaism". In his case these expressions are
meaningful. He spent his life "in the middle of"
antagonistic cultures, violent conflicts, and contrasting
philosophical and religious theories. His main legacy in philosophy
was the idea that in the face of many harsh human attitudes, there
were two complementary ways of remaining free and lucid. The main
model was for him, as it was constantly asserted by Nikiprowetzky, the
flight, not exactly the Platonic flight of the *Theaetetus*,
but that of Exodus, both a spatial, historical, and vertical flight,
the most perfect example of the presence of Transcendence in the
world. While the cause of Abraham's flight was his rejection of
idolatry, Moses' project was far more ambitious: not only to
escape from Egypt, but to build a nation by giving it the Word of God
as a constitution. But it must be added that there was for Philo also
a kind of Exodus of words. He gathers concepts and themes of
philosophy to free them, i.e., to bring them into the light of the God
of the Torah. Like Moses who knew all the foreign sciences, Philo
learned almost everything of philosophy, not in order to be a
professional philosopher, but to demonstrate that the truth the Greeks
looked for was where they did not imagine it to be. Philo's
conception of *oudeneia,* the human nothingness, had nothing to
do with nihilism. It was the affirmation of the centrality of God
instead of the centrality of the self. One could say that this was
theology much more than philosophy. But, at the same time, it would be
an error to say that philosophy remained the same before and after
Philo. 


## Supplementary Documents


* The Meanings of Philosophy in Philo of Alexandria
* About the *De aeternitate* and the *De providentia*
* Abbreviations of the Philonian treatises (*Studia Philonica Annual*)