Philo of Alexandria

The teaching

Taught from his treatises on the books of Moses, above all On the Creation of the World and the Allegorical Interpretation.

The letter and the soul of scripture

Philo reads the five books of Moses in two ways at once. The letter is the body of the law and the inner meaning is its soul, and both are to be kept. The Therapeutae, he says, read scripture as a living creature whose body is the wording and whose soul is the unseen sense stored in the words.

Some in his own day, having grasped the inner sense, dropped the commandments, and he rebukes them. Circumcision does mean the cutting away of pleasure and every passion, and the Sabbath does teach the power of the Unbegotten and the rest that belongs to the creature; but that is no reason to give up circumcision or to break the Sabbath. As one must care for the body because it is the house of the soul, so one must keep the letter of the laws.

He Who Is

God is He Who Is, the name given to Moses at the bush. He is one and unmixed, needs nothing, and is better than the good, purer than the one and older than the monad. That he exists the mind can know from the order of the world, as one who sees a well-governed city knows it has rulers; what he is, no created mind can grasp. When Moses asks to see him, God answers that his nature is beyond the reach of human beings, but that the powers around him leave their mark on the world, as a seal stamps its image on wax and remains what it is.

The Logos and the city in the architect's mind

God made the world through his Logos, his word and reason. When a king founds a great city, an architect first draws the whole of it in his mind, its temples, markets, harbours and streets, and then builds the city of stone after that picture. So God first conceived the world of ideas, which has no place but the divine Logos, and then made the visible world after its pattern. The Logos is God's image and the seal of all things, his firstborn son, the eldest of the angels and the high priest of the world; it is the cutter that divides all things into their kinds and the bond that holds them together.

From God come two chief powers: the creative power, by which he made all things, called God in scripture, and the kingly power, by which he rules them, called Lord. The two cherubim over the ark are their figures, with the Logos between them. When three men come to Abraham at Mamre, the mind is shown He Who Is in the middle, with his two powers on either side: one God, appearing to a mind not yet wholly pure as three.

Adam, Eve and the serpent

The story of the garden is the story of every soul. There are two men in Genesis: the man made in God's image on the sixth day, bodiless, neither male nor female, an idea grasped by mind; and the man moulded from clay, with a body and senses, who is mortal. Adam is mind, Eve is sense-perception, and the serpent is pleasure. Pleasure cannot reach the mind directly, so it comes to it through the senses, and the mind, deceived through sense, falls. The river that flows out of Eden to water the garden is goodness, the wisdom of God, and its four heads are the four virtues: prudence, courage, self-control and justice.

Six days and the number seven

God needed no stretch of time to make the world, for he does all things at once. The six days stand for order, and order needs number: six is the first perfect number, equal to the sum of its parts, a half, a third and a sixth, and it is made of the first odd and the first even, three and two, male and female.

Seven is the virgin among numbers. Of the numbers within ten it alone neither begets another nor is begotten by one, and so the philosophers liken it to the motherless goddess who sprang from the head of Zeus. It orders the heavens and the body: there are seven planets, the Bear has seven stars, the moon changes its shape every seven days, a human life passes through seven ages, and the face has seven openings. So the seventh day is the birthday of the world, and its rest is a festival not of one people but of all.

The two temples of God

There are two temples of God: one is the whole world, whose high priest is his firstborn Logos; the other is the reasoning soul, whose priest is the true human being. The temple in Jerusalem is made as a picture of the first. Its curtains are woven of four materials, fine linen, blue, purple and scarlet, for earth, air, water and fire. The high priest's long blue robe is the air, its flowers the earth and its pomegranates the water; the two emeralds on his shoulders are the two halves of the heavens, and the twelve stones on his breast, in four rows of three, are the signs of the zodiac in the four seasons.

So when the high priest goes in to pray he takes the whole world in with him, and he prays not for his own people only but for the human race and for every part of nature. The second temple asks the same of each soul. Be eager, Philo tells the soul, to become a house of God, a holy temple and a most beautiful dwelling.

The migration of the soul

The patriarchs are stages of the soul. When God tells Abraham to go out from his land, his kin and his father's house, the land is the body, the kin are the senses and the father's house is speech: the soul is to leave each behind as its home. Abraham comes out of Chaldea, the country of those who take the stars for gods, to Haran, where he learns to know himself, and then to the land God shows him, where he comes to know the maker of the heavens. Abraham is virtue that comes by teaching, Isaac virtue that comes by nature, and Jacob virtue that comes by practice.

Sarah is wisdom, and Hagar, her Egyptian handmaid, is the round of preparatory studies, grammar, geometry, astronomy, music and rhetoric. Wisdom sends the soul first to the handmaid, for no one bears the children of virtue without first going through the schools; but the handmaid is not the mistress, and the studies are to be passed through, not lived in.

Sober drunkenness

The mind's end is the sight of God, and the way up is a kind of rapture. Rising above the earth, the mind travels through the air and the heavens, follows the dances of the planets and the fixed stars, and passes beyond the whole world of sense to the world of ideas. There, seized by a sober drunkenness like the Corybants in their frenzy, it longs to see the Great King himself, and the pure rays of his light pour over it until its eye is dazzled.

Philo knew this from his own work. Sometimes, he says, he came to his writing empty and was suddenly filled, the thoughts falling on him from above like snow, so that he knew neither the place nor those present nor himself; at other times he came full and went away with nothing.