The Conditionalist Faith of Our Fathers, vol. 1

II. Basic Features of Philo’s Teaching Concerning Man

1. “REVELATION” THE DISTINGUISHING PRINCIPLE OF NEOPLATONISM

When the intellectual center of Hellenism was shifted from Athens to Alexandria, Jewry was established there also. The postulates of Hellenism were based solely upon intellectual investigation, research, and analysis. On the contrary, the tenets of Judaism were based upon divine revelation. When, therefore, two such intellectual forces as Hellenism and Judaism met—representing Grecian philosophy and the Jewish religion—there was bound to be an encounter that would inevitably result in new alignments. CFF1 720.2

This conflict between Hellenism and Judaism was basically a spiritual struggle, and eventuated in a definite change of thought and belief on the part of a large segment of Jewry. How to reconcile their fundamental differences was the question confronting Philo. The figurative interpretation of revelation provided the needed bridge. So the antagonisms were reconciled by the ingenious but compromising device of allegorizing the Scriptures to bring about essential accord with Platonic philosophy. CFF1 720.3

Picture 1: Philo:
Philo Did More Than Any Other Jewish Leader of His Day in Setting Aside the Teachings of Holy Writ on the Nature and Destiny of the Soul.
Page 721

It was this that laid the foundation of Neoplatonism—a philosophy involving in its formative period the syncretism of Alexandrian-Jewish and Hellenistic-Platonic philosophy. It was distinguished from that of pure Platonic philosophy by the adding of the principle of revelation contained in the new philosophy, both in its early Jewish and later Christian forms. And the originator and pre-eminent representative of this new syncretism was Philo. CFF1 721.1

He held to the inspired character of the Old Testament and the truth of the Jewish religion. But, as stated, while so doing he also introduced and sustained his philosophical concepts by allegorizing his Jewish beliefs. Thus the theology of Philo was clearly a blend of Platonism and Judaism. CFF1 721.2

2. PHILO’S CONCEPT OF GOD WAS A SYNTHESIS

Philo held fast to the personality of God—incorporeal, invisible, eternal, self-existent, universal, omniscient, omnipotent, perfect, and self-determining. The world is His creation, and He is surrounded by ministering spirits. But, in accordance with the Platonic idea of transcendence and the Stoic concept of divine imminence, Philo regarded God as exalted above all contact with matter, which he held to be essentially evil. He sought to bridge this gap with creative and regulatory powers and provisions, combining Jewish angelology with the Stoic Logos concept and Platonic ideas—such as the view that God’s breath is that which gives life. CFF1 722.1

Combining Neoplatonism, Neo-Pythagoreanism, and old Egyptian philosophy with Jewish concepts, Philo thus exalted the Supreme Being above all contact with the visible world. And he explained all passages of the Old Testament that seemed inconsistent with such exaltation as referring not to the Supreme Being but to a derived being, or Logos. CFF1 722.2

To Philo, God stands apart from the world in ineffable and ultimate perfection, connected with mundane affairs only by a series of lesser intelligible forms or powers—sometimes as in Platonic concepts, sometimes akin to Jewish angelology, and sometimes as an emanation from God’s nature. This concept has its consummation in Philo’s doctrine of the Logos—the mediator of God’s revelation of Himself. CFF1 722.3

3. GREEK AND HEBREW THOUGHT BLENDED BY ALLEGORIZATION

Philo sought to blend his honored Jewish inheritance with his newly acquired Hellenistic culture, so as to reconcile and retain the “treasures” of both Platonic philosophy and Jewish faith. He therefore sought to fuse the best of Greek philosophy with the leading concepts of the Old Testament, as well as current Rabbinism. To this end he adapted and adopted Greek philosophical thought. Most conspicuously he accepted, in accommodated form, the Platonic concept of relationship between God, the world, and man. As mentioned, he bridged the gulf with his Logos philosophy and accomplished the synthesis by his allegorical method of interpretation. CFF1 722.4

Under this scheme all Scripture became figurative and symbolic. In this way a passage could mean almost anything, according to the fancy of the interpreter. Thus allegorization became the universal solvent for every perplexity and cared for everything opposed to his new philosophical concepts. He still believed the law to be the way to goodness, and faith in Jehovah the entrance to eternal life—but all in accommodated form and readjusted setting and phrasing. He considered that in Babylon and Jerusalem the Jews were largely worshiping the past; in Alexandria they faced the future. CFF1 723.1

Philo’s was a systematic attempt to show the inner harmony between Plato and Moses; that is, between Jewish religious thought and Greek philosophy. In discovering this “higher sense” of Scripture, Philo believed he had penetrated the outer shell to get the inner kernel of what he conceived to be fundamental philosophic truth. He even declared that those who held to the literal interpretation of Scripture were unworthy and superstitious. The celebrated German Hellenist professor of the University of Gottingen, Karl Otto Müller, long ago stated the facts succinctly: CFF1 723.2

“The object of Philo ... is to harmonize the philosophy of religion, which he had derived from a study of Plato, Aristotle, and other eminent heathen writers, with the letter of the books attributed to Moses. And he effects this reconciliation by an unlimited use of allegory.” ⁴ CFF1 723.3

4. STRANGE CONFLICTING CONCEPTS OF LOGOS

In Philo’s Logos doctrine, as in the countless aeons of the later Christian Gnostics, ⁵ we see attempts to mediate between the Supreme God and those aspects of the material world that were considered unworthy of contact with Him. Philo’s Logos was the highest of the divine forces, the soul of the world, the interpreter and revealer of God. His doctrine of the Logos combined Jewish, Platonic, and Stoic concepts. CFF1 723.4

His Logos was the vicegerent of God, the mediator between the Eternal, the material, and the ephemeral. It embodied the Platonic idea of good, the Stoic World-Soul, and the Jewish Shekinah and eternal High Priest. It was at once the Angel of the Lord, Eternal Wisdom, the Mind of God, the Shadow of God, the First-born, Captain, Supplicator—but not a person, as such. Its involvements are confusing and difficult to grasp, but they are essential to his view. CFF1 724.1

And Philo’s Logos is baffling because he employs the term in so many different senses—as a divine faculty of thought; as thinking and creative activity; as the result of thinking; the ideal world itself; and the active, divine principle, potency, or agency in the visible world. His very obscurity and ambiguity created endless speculation. ⁶ CFF1 724.2

Just as Philo equated Logos with the mind in the intelligible world, so he came to use it as the equivalent of the mind that is in man. Moreover, in Plato, whom Philo followed, Logos is used as an equivalent of the “immortal soul” (Timaeus 46d, 69d-e), the “supreme form of soul within us” (Timaeus 90a), and the “rational” soul part of us (Republic iv. 439d). So the Logos within is part of the pre-existent Logos—thus “the mind with and the mind above us” (Heres 236). ⁷ Such was Philo’s subtle and conflicting concept of the Logos. Now we come to the soul question. CFF1 724.3

5. FLASH PICTURES OF PHILO’S IMMORTAL-SOULISM

We now note in general terms ⁸ the highest points in Philo’s teaching, in order to get an over-all view of his concepts in the aggregate. The documented particulars will follow in Section III. CFF1 724.4

Man, according to Philo, has both an irrational (or animal) soul and a rational soul. The first is had in common with all living creatures; the second is not possessed by animals. The multitude of pre-existent, unbodied souls in the heavens include the angels. But rational souls descend from their eternal dwelling place and enter human bodies that are under the dominance of the irrational souls. An inevitable battle of the two souls ensues, man’s free will deciding the outcome for eternity. And Philo defines immortality as eternal persistence, or existence. CFF1 725.1

Philo held that the breath of life is nothing less than the breath of God, and that the rational soul of man is uncreated. Deity and matter, he taught, are existent from all eternity. Thus he believed that while man’s body, formed from the ground, is mortal, his uncreated rational soul is immortal. Virtue is the tree of immortal life. And as salt—symbol of the perpetuity of all things—is a preservative, so is the soul as relates to man. CFF1 725.2

But sin changed a happy and immortal life into a wretched and mortal one for the body. The death threatened was twofold—of the man, and of the soul. The death of man, he states, is the separation of the soul from the body; and the death of the soul is its seduction by evil and corruption. To die is actually to live—in a doomed relationship. But the original Genesis episode of the Garden of Eden was an allegory, according to Philo. CFF1 725.3

The ethereal heavens are the fatherland of all the rational souls. And upon the death of the body the rational soul returns to the realm of the unbodied, among the stars, which also are or have souls. As to the punishment of the wicked, Philo is sometimes hazy and sometimes contradictory. But man’s free will and personal choice justifies any due punishment. CFF1 725.4

According to Philo, there is (1) no formal general judgment, (2) no resurrection of the body, but (3) everlasting punishment of the wicked. Such are the three summarizing conclusions concerning Philo, according to R. H. Charles. ⁹ CFF1 725.5

To Philo the body is the source of evil—the corpse, the coffin, the tomb of the soul. But, as noted, the unbodied soul does not die. It returns to the heavens, among the stars, whence it came. It is inextinguishable and deathless. The ladder of Jacob’s dream, reaching from earth to Heaven, is the airway extending from earth to Heaven for these immortal souls—some of whom descended to earth to dwell in mortal bodies. Such a concept is, of course, definite pre-existence of a sort. CFF1 726.1

Philo believed in appointed, contrasting localities (“above” and “below”) as the abode of the disembodied spirits of good and wicked men. The good dwell in the heavenly regions; the bad are banished to the nethermost part of Hades, with the incurably evil to Tartarus. Philo is at times contradictory in this area, but he clearly indicates that death is not the end of punishment—it is only the beginning. CFF1 726.2

6. PHILO’S RESPONSIBILITY IN THE GREAT DEPARTURE

Philo’s bold but subtle allegorical expositions were impressed not only upon his own age but upon succeeding centuries. His influence upon the Alexandrian Christian school of theology was profound. Clement of Alexandria, and particularly Origen, as well as other Latin Fathers, cited him freely and approvingly. And his allegorical principle of interpretation of Scripture soon became an accepted form of Biblical exegesis in a large segment of the Christian Church. Philo did for Jewry what Origen did later for Christianity. CFF1 726.3

Philo’s actual perversion of Bible truth through this allegorical method is sensed only as one sees how he cast away the true witness of the Inspired Word by vitiating its true meaning through adoption of the philosophical vagaries of Plato, not only in accommodated form but in the actual superseding of the verities of Holy Scripture. Despite his brilliance, his learning, and his tremendous influence, Philo unquestionably did more than any other single individual of the Hebrew race to set aside the original teachings of Holy Writ on the origin, nature, and destiny of man. One can only add, fearful will be his responsibility. CFF1 726.4

But only as we get back to the premises upon which Philo postulated his conclusions are we in a position to evaluate the soundness—or the unscripturalness—of his conclusions. Only as we examine his foundations are we able to judge the trustworthiness of the superstructure he built thereupon. And this we must now do because of the tremendous influence Philo exerted, first upon his own people and then upon the beliefs of a large segment of the early Christian Church. And even beyond these his influence was felt upon the teachings of Islam. ¹⁰ CFF1 727.1