I started The Cambridge Companion to Philo. Philo was a
Hellenistic Jewish philosopher in Alexandria, Egypt during the first
century C.E. In this post, I'll comment on what stood out to me in each
essay that I have read so far in this book.
1. The first essay
was Daniel Schwartz's "Philo, His Family, and His Times". Philo's
family was prominent and wealthy, and that's probably what gave Philo
the time and the resources to write. (Philo never mentions a patron.)
His brother Alexander was a tax official, had an import-export business,
and administered the Egyptian property of the daughter of Mark Antony
and the mother of Claudius. Regarding Philo's family, Philo interacts
with the views of a nephew when he writes about the notions that animals
have souls and that there is no divine providence (and I conclude from a
later essay in the book that Philo disagreed with these ideas). Philo
represented Alexandrian Jews before the Roman emperor, Gaius Caligula,
after Gaius put a statue in the Jerusalem Temple in retaliation against
Jews who tore down an altar that had been built to Gaius in Jamnia. According
to Schwartz, Philo tended to downplay the importance of Israel as a
holy place----seeing Judaism as a matter of the heart and mind rather
than location----and yet Philo displayed loyalty to his people and
Jerusalem before Gaius.
2. The second essay was James Royse's "The Works of Philo". On
page 62, Royse says that "Jewish culture in Alexandria was virtually
extinguished after the revolt of 115-117 CE." And yet, Christians
preserved and transmitted Philo's writings. As Royse notes, some
Christians even believed that Philo was one of their own!
3.
The third essay was Adam Kamesar's "Biblical Interpretation in Philo".
I would probably have to read the essay again to see where Philo
differed from pagan exegesis. What I got in my latest reading, however,
was that Philo had a rather eclectic approach to the Scriptures. Philo
did not regard the Torah as myth, in the sense of being a fictional
epic, for he saw it as a didactic document. And yet, Theodore of
Mopsuestia thought that Philo was treating the Torah as myth because
Philo allegorized----Philo held that the Scriptures symbolized Greek
philosophical truths----like pagan exegetes who held that there was more
to Homer than meets the eye. Did Philo disregard the literal sense of
the Scriptures? On the one hand, there were times when Philo
maintained that there had to be a deeper spiritual meaning to the text
because the literal meaning did not make sense, and that may imply that Philo sometimes viewed the literal meaning as something to disregard. On
the other hand, there were also times when Philo upheld the literal
meaning in addition to the allegorical meaning, and Philo also regarded
the characters in the biblical stories as moral or spiritual
examples----which coincides with a respect for the literal level of the
text.
4. I did not finish the fourth essay, Cristina
Termini's "Philo's Thought within the Context of Middle Judaism". I'll
finish it soon! But I did read some of her insights on Philo's view of
the divine. In blogging through Goodenough's By Light, Light and other books and articles, I have wondered: Did
Philo regard the parts of God (if you will)----the Logos, justice,
etc.----as beings in their own right, or rather as ways to describe the
actions of only one being, God. My impression was that Goodenough
somewhat contradicted himself on this issue----sometimes Goodenough
appeared to deny that they were beings in their own right in Philo's
thought, whereas other times he presented them as angels.
Termini mentions apparent inconsistencies in how Philo portrays the
relationship between the Logos and Sophia (wisdom)----Sophia generates
the Logos in union with God, Sophia is the Logos, Sophia is from the
Logos----and she states on page 100: "The fluidity of these
schemes reveals the metaphorical orientation of the terminology employed
to designate personified Wisdom more than it indicates inconsistency in
Philo's theology."