The leader of the Jewish delegation to Caligula was the philosopher Philo, brother of the arabarch, or manager of the Jewish export trade in Alexandria. Eusebius describes him as belonging to an ancient priestly family.13 We know hardly anything else of his life; but his pious and generous character stands out in the many works that he wrote to expound Judaism to the Greek world. Brought up in a sacerdotal atmosphere, intensely loyal to his people, and yet fascinated by Greek philosophy, he made it the aim of his life to reconcile the Scriptures and customs of the Jews with Greek ideas and above all with the philosophy of “the most holy” Plato. He adopted for his purpose the principle that all events, characters, doctrines, and laws in the Old Testament have an allegorical as well as a literal meaning and symbolize certain moral or psychological truths; by this method he was able to prove anything. He wrote indifferently in Hebrew, but so well in Greek that his admirers said, “Plato writes like Philo.”14
He was a theologian rather than a philosopher, a mystic whose intense piety presaged Plotinus and the medieval mind. God, in Philo, is the essential being of the world, incorporeal, eternal, indescribable; reason can know his existence, but can ascribe no quality to him, since every quality is a limitation. To conceive him as having human form is a concession to the sensuous imagination of men. God is everywhere; “what place can a man find where God is not?”15 But he is not everything: matter is also eternal and increate; however, it has no life, motion, or form until infused with the divine force. To create the world by giving form to matter, and to establish relations with man, God used a host of intermediary beings, called angels by the Jews, daimones by the Greeks, and Ideas by Plato. These, says Philo, may popularly be conceived as persons, though really they exist only in the Divine Mind, as the thoughts and powers of God.16 Together these powers constitute what the Stoics called the Logos, or Divine Reason creating and guiding the world. Fluctuating between philosophy and theology, between ideas and personifications, Philo sometimes thinks of the Logos as a person; in a poetic moment he calls the Logos “the first-begotten of God,”17 son of God by the virgin Wisdom,18 and says that through the Logos God has revealed himself to man. Since the soul is part of God, it can through reason rise to a mystic vision not quite of God, but of the Logos. Perhaps, if we could free ourselves from the taint of matter and sense, and by ascetic exercises and long contemplation become for a moment pure spirit, we might for an ecstatic moment see God himself.19
Philo’s Logos was one of the most influential ideas in the history of thought. Its antecedents in Heracleitus, Plato, and the Stoics are obvious; presumably he knew the recent Jewish literature that had made a distinct person of the Wisdom of God as creator of the world; and he must have been impressed by those lines in Proverbs (VIII, 22) where Wisdom says, “The Lord possessed me in the beginning of his way, before his works of old. I was set up from everlasting … or ever the earth was.” Philo was a contemporary of Christ; he apparently never heard of him; but he shared unknowingly in forming Christian theology. The rabbis frowned upon his allegorical interpretations as likely to be used as an excuse for neglecting literal obedience to the Law; they suspected the Logos doctrine as a retreat from monotheism; and they saw in Philo’s passion for Greek philosophy a threat of cultural assimilation, racial dilution, and consequent disappearance, of the dispersed Jews. But the Fathers of the Church admired the Jew’s contemplative devotion, made abundant use of his allegorical principles to answer the critics of the Hebrew Scriptures, and joined with Gnostics and Neo-Platonists in accepting the mystical vision of God as the crown of human enterprise. Philo had tried to mediate between Hellenism and Judaism. From the Judaic point of view he had failed; from the historical point of view he had succeeded; and the result was the first chapter of the Gospel of John.