 Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the Leverhulme Trust, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, To the Lighthouse, Philo of Alexandria. Here's the story of a man named Noah, who was busy with three boys of his own. They were four men, living all together, but they were not alone. In fact, they were surrounded by an extended family and two of every creature that crawls upon the earth and flies in the sky, having delivered them from certain destruction in an arc that had been built to precise specifications. After making landfall, Noah showed where his priorities lay by immediately planting vines, turning the grapes into wine, and getting drunk. The youngest of his sons saw him in this sorry state and fetched the other two, who respectively covered up their naked father. Once Noah sobered up and awoke, he was furious with the youngest son who had seen him so exposed. He cursed this son's son, his own grandson, Canaan, condemning him and his descendants to servitude. As you know, this rather sorry tale appears in the Bible, in fact almost at the very beginning of the Bible, in the ninth chapter of Genesis. Whether you are a believer or not, you have to wonder what is it doing there? Why would the Bible tell us that Noah, savior of mankind and animal kind to boot, got senselessly drunk and was shamefully exposed in front of his sons? It's a problem not unlike one we've seen before. You'll remember that some ancient readers were shocked by stories in which colorful misdeeds were ascribed to the Greek gods. Some, like Xenophanes and Plato, rejected these stories. Others assumed that the myths had a less obvious and more instructive meaning. Giving the awkward bits a less awkward interpretation was sometimes called theropaia muthon, the healing of myths. By the time of the middle Platonists, interpretive healing had frequently been applied to Homer and other revered texts of the Hellenic tradition. In the mid-first century A.D., an author named Cornutus set down a compilation of such readings. He drew especially from the Stoics, who used allegory and etymology to uncover the messages that lay hidden in sacred tales of the gods. You may recall that, in his dialogue The Cratylus, Plato too used etymology to extract a philosophical meaning from the names of gods. Inspired partially by this Platonic precedent, later ancient Platonists were eager to see philosophical content in Homer and Hesiod and would use any means necessary to find it. Nor did they ignore the Jewish scriptures. We are told that one of the greatest Platonists of the early Empire, Numenius, asked, what is Plato but Moses, speaking in Attic Greek? Later Platonists like Porphyry, who had nothing but disdain and hostility for the Christians, showed considerable interest in Judaism, treating the ancient faith and its ancient scriptures with respect. But to see allegorical interpretation in full sail, being applied not only to the Ark and to Noah's being four sheets to the wind, but to the Jewish Bible in general, we need to turn to the subject of today's episode. He hailed from Alexandria, the city founded by Alexander the Great and made it into a leading center for philosophy and science by the Ptolemies of Egypt. His name was Philo, not to be confused with the new academic skeptic Philo of Larissa. This Philo of Alexandria is sometimes called Philo Judaeus because he was a Jew. His works consist mostly of exegesis of the first five books of the Bible, the Pentateuch or Torah, which were taken to be the writings of Moses himself. Philo's approach to this sacred text was inspired in part by philosophical allegories like the ones I've just mentioned and in part by previous Jewish commentary. But Philo's handling of the Mosaic teaching is unprecedented. He was not out simply to heal the text by explaining away potentially embarrassing episodes, nor was philosophy just a tool to be used occasionally in reading scripture. Rather, he took Moses to be the source of all true philosophy. Pythagoras was a follower of Moses and Plato a follower of Pythagoras, so that Platonism was a key to unlock the message of Moses. This gave Philo license to go further than Stoic or Platonist interpreters had gone with Homer or any other text. He saw every passage in the Torah as conveying philosophical instruction, usually detectable only by means of allegory. Philo's approach would live on as a powerful tool for doing philosophy within the context of revealed religion. The idea that a text like the Bible or Quran can implicitly contain philosophical teachings is common to the Jewish Philo, the Christian Augustine, and the Muslim of Aroes. We're at the start of something big here. But let's not get distracted from telling the history of Philo without any gaps. He was born towards the end of the first century BC and died in approximately 45 AD, making him a contemporary of Seneca and of Jesus. In Philo, we find a marriage of Hellenistic philosophy and the Jewish faith, and there was no more appropriate place to hold the wedding than Alexandria, on the northern coast of Egypt. It boasted not only the library founded by the Ptolemies and a lighthouse that was literally a wonder of the ancient world, but also the largest Jewish population in Egypt. This community was part of the Hellenistic diaspora, that is, the relocation of many Jews to lands other than Israel and within the Greek-speaking Mediterranean. To understand how Philo's community came to be here, we need to take a brief look at the history of the Jewish people. The primary evidence for their early history is, of course, the Hebrew Bible itself. It tells us that Moses led the Jews out of persecution in Egypt and that they settled in the land once promised to Abraham around the city of King David, Jerusalem. It was here that David's son Solomon built the first temple in the mid-10th century BC. The temple was understood to be the house of God. Within this house was the Holy of Holies, a chamber that remained empty apart from the ark containing the tablets upon which were inscribed God's covenant with the Jewish people. The Bible tells us of Moses, David, and Solomon, and then continues the story with the books of the prophets like Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel who lived in the 8th to 6th centuries BC. They bring us up to the time of the earliest pre-Socratic philosophers, and also of a traumatic event in the history of Judaism, an invasion by the Babylonians who deported many Jews and destroyed the first temple of Jerusalem in 586 BC. The period of Judaism in which Philo lived is sometimes called Second Temple Judaism. It is the age beginning with the rebuilding of the temple in 515 BC and ending in 70 AD, a generation after Philo's death, when it was destroyed by the Romans amidst a massacre of rebellious Jews. Both temples were the locus of sacrificial rites, the home of the high priest, and ultimately, as I've said, the house of God. It would not be too dramatic to describe it as the center of the Jewish world. Jews of the diaspora like Philo faced the difficult question of what it meant to be a Jew in a foreign land, without access to the temple. After the second temple was destroyed, all Jews would face the same question no matter where they lived. Even before then, the fortunes of the temple and the Jews more generally were usually determined by more powerful political actors. The second temple could be built only once the Persians defeated the Babylonians and ushered in an age of relative peace for the Jews living in and around Jerusalem. But this situation, along with pretty much every other situation, was changed by Alexander the Great. He conquered the Near East in 332 BC, ten years before his death. At first tossed back and forth between two of the empires that arose following Alexander's death, the region eventually fell under the sway of the Ptolemaic dynasty of Egypt. This meant that Jerusalem was governed by the same power as the city of Alexandria, a magnet for people of numerous cultures. Hence, the large Jewish population in Philo's time, when control over Egypt had been seized by Rome. A dynamic of cultural confrontation and cooperation between Greeks, Jews, and Egyptians continued as before, except that now the political prize to be won was above all the favor of the Romans. Philo is a perfect example. He tells us that he went on an embassy to plead the case of the Jews of Alexandria before the Emperor Caligula in the late 30s AD. The mission was a reaction to anti-Jewish violence that had erupted in the city among the Hellenic citizens who considered themselves to be the true Alexandrians. We should not be misled by this. The Jewish community may have had strained relations with their Hellenic neighbors, but Philo himself wrote in Greek and even read his Bible in Greek. His version of the Bible is called the Seventy, in Latin Septuagint, an allusion to the 72 scholars who were held to have translated it into Greek. These scholars were said to be divinely inspired, so that Philo assumed his Greek Bible could be read as the Word of God and not a second-hand version of that word in a new language. Indeed, he invoked the inspiration of the translators in claiming that every passage had been translated with fidelity to the individual words, the surface meaning, and the inner meaning of the Hebrew text. If you've ever tried to translate from one language to another, you'll agree that divine intervention is the least that would be required to explain such a feat. The Septuagint is in fact not quite the same as the Hebrew Bible, differing in order and including additional material. In fact, it is closer to what the Christians would come to call the Old Testament. But for Philo, the Bible was, in any case, above all the five books of the Torah, and his philosophy is mostly presented as an exegesis of the revelation of Moses. He wrote three series of works expounding the Torah. One set out problems about the text with suggested solutions. Another provided a verse-by-verse commentary on Genesis, explaining both the superficial and allegorical meaning of each verse. A third expounded a more thematic exposition of the law. At the head of this three-fold series is one of his most philosophically interesting treatises, On the Creation of the World, which deals with the opening sections of Genesis. Here, Philo takes on the task of squaring the biblical creation story with Plato's Timaeus, the dialogue in which Plato set out his own creation story. To some extent, Philo's task is an easy one. When he sums up the principal doctrines underlying the Genesis account, his list could apply to Plato with equal plausibility. God exists, God is one, He created the world, this world too is only one, and God exercises providence over it. Plato says all these things explicitly in the Timaeus, albeit that he describes the divine Maker as a craftsman, or demiurge, who employs helpers called younger gods. But, a closer look reveals tensions in Philo's attempt to reconcile Plato with Moses. Like Plato's Timaeus, Philo compares the creator to a human designer, specifically an architect who builds a city in accordance with pre-existing plans. These plans are, of course, the Platonic forms. But Plato says that the demiurge looks to the forms and builds the world as an image of those forms. Philo draws a different message from the opening of Genesis. He takes it to refer to a creation of an intelligible world of forms, this is the creation of the first day, with the physical world being fashioned only later in the Genesis story. As if he is aware that readers will suspect that philosophy is being sneakily imported into scripture here, Philo remarks defensively, this is the doctrine of Moses, not mine. With this seemingly subtle shift, Philo has made a dramatic move in the direction of reconciling Plato with Judaism. Whereas Plato seems to suppose that the demiurge is an eternal principle distinct from the forms, Philo asserts the utter primacy of the single creator and locates the forms as ideas in this creator's mind. We'll find a similar position in Plotinus, who explicitly rejected the idea that forms are outside the divine intellect and that this intellect looks towards them like a pre-existing cosmic blueprint. In another anticipation of later Platonic doctrine, Philo uses the Greek word logos to describe the forms insofar as they serve as God's instruments in making the world. Logos is one of the most difficult terms to translate in ancient Greek philosophy, but here it means something like rational principle. Philo is taking a leaf not just from Plato, but from the Stoics, who likewise use the word logos for a divine providential order that pervades the cosmos. The difference is that for the Stoics, the logos was simply identical to God. For Philo, it is God's ideas, which God creates as a first step towards creating the physical universe that will exist by the end of the six days. That mention of six days would make any self-respecting middle Platonist sit up and take notice. As you'll remember from last time, Platonists of this era fused the teachings of the dialogues with the number theories of Pythagoreanism, and Philo is certainly no exception. He does not see the six days of creation as a literal reference to time. Rather, the numbers assigned to each day have an allegorical or symbolic value. For instance, animals are said to be created on the fifth day because sensation is the distinctive feature of animals, and there are five senses. The whole creation is said to take six days in order to convey the perfection of this creation. This is because six is a perfect number—that is, a number equal to the sum of its divisors apart from itself, in this case one, two, and three. The next perfect number, in case you're curious, is 28, and after that you need to wait a while for the third one to come along. We might find it preposterous that this sort of numerology could be a key for understanding the Bible. Philo would respond that it would be truly preposterous to imagine God literally spending six days creating the universe. Surely God created all things at once. Nonetheless, Philo did accept that the physical universe came into existence at some definite time. He wrote another treatise on the topic of the universe's eternity, summarizing arguments for and against that eternity in what may be an echo of the strategy the academic skeptics had used to reach suspension of judgment. In our version of the text, only the pro-eternity arguments survive, which is ironic given that Philo would have ultimately sided with the anti-eternity camp. So, in Genesis, Philo finds metaphysical doctrines about issues like God's creative act and the status of the forms. Yet he places at least equal weight on questions of ethics. For him, the Torah exhorts us to turn away from the pleasures of the body and towards virtue, which for Philo means faithfulness to God. Moses, as the source of all philosophy, was the greatest teacher of this message, but he was not its only teacher. Indeed, precisely because Moses was the source of all philosophy, Hellenic philosophers can be treated as collaborators in the task of interpreting Moses. In particular, Philo admires the Hellenic philosophers who champion rationality and virtue over pleasure. He would agree with Cicero and Antiochus that the heroes of Greek ethical thought are Plato and the thinkers taken to be his followers, namely Aristotle and the Stoics. Philo's discussions of ethics would thus give any faithful podcast listener a strong sense of déjà vu. He reproduces Stoic lists of the virtues, Aristotle's doctrine of the mean, even the imagery of Plato's Phaedrus in which the soul must grow wings to return to its heavenly home. The difference is, of course, that Philo weaves these ideas into an exegesis of the Bible. The Paradise of Adam and Eve signifies virtue, and their fall is surrendered to pleasure, represented by the serpent. Philo understands Eve, too, as a symbol of seductive pleasure, a negative and reductive view of women that is partially compensated by more positive allegories of other women in the Pentateuch. Philo's focus on ethics continues past the stories of creation and the Garden of Eden to include episodes such as Noah's Drunkenness. Philo takes that passage as an opportunity to produce another set of arguments for and against a philosophical thesis, in this case the Stoic-sounding question of whether the wise man would ever get drunk. Predictably, he sees the story as a warning against indulging in the pleasures of the body, but he has a more arresting and less Stoic point to make, that there is a higher intellectual kind of intoxication as well. Those who attain wisdom and knowledge of God may seem drunk to the uninitiated because they are transported out of themselves. Although I have been talking, as if metaphysics and ethics represent two distinct themes in Philo's exegetical works, in fact he would insist that they are intimately related. The Jewish law itself, which is imposed upon the people of God in order to bring them away from the lures of pleasure and to their Lord, is a kind of mirror image of the providential law that governs the cosmos. For instance, the dietary laws of Judaism are intended to induce self-control. Their aim is not just ritual purity, but also ethical purity. Our goal is to regain what was lost in the fall from paradise, namely perfect participation in God's ideas. Philo's Platonism is again on display in his thinking about the fall. The physical creation is by its very nature subject to change and flux, so that the fall is seen as a metaphysical necessity. But as a Jew, he understands the fall and journey towards redemption in a more historical context, with Moses showing his people the way back to God through his leadership of the Jews and of course, through the Torah itself. Philo is then more than just another Platonist who happened to be Jewish. Certainly he gives us an invaluable insight into the way that Platonism was being practiced in Alexandria at that time. He fills out an otherwise sketchy picture based mostly on our indirect knowledge of Eudorus of Alexandria, who was only a little earlier than Philo. This is, after all, why I've put Philo here alongside other episodes on Middle Platonism. But Philo is no less significant for the history of Judaism and even Christianity. His works were read enthusiastically by Christian church fathers, who preserved and engaged with Philo's allegorical expositions of the Bible. It is fitting that his ideas had such an ecumenical reception. He showed a way towards resolving the interpretive, metaphysical, and ethical dilemmas posed by every revealed text, whether Torah, Bible, or Quran. These dilemmas will become increasingly crucial as late antiquity wears on and Christianity supplants traditional Greek and Roman religion. For now, though, we're only in the early days of the Empire, and pagan Platonism still has a lot of life left in it. Next time, we'll be looking at an author who, like Philo, often presented his philosophy in the form of an interpretation of religious symbols and beliefs. But he was neither Jew nor Christian. In fact, he was a priest at the Temple of Apollo at Delphi. You know yourself that you should join me to hear about Plutarch, next time on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps. you