Section I. Alexandria
1. The Greek Egypt. The kingdom of the Ptolemies in Egypt was the most remarkable result of the conquests of Alexander. This capital was worthy to bear his name: so much of the Greek wisdom which he sought to make supreme in the world was gathered there; so much of the wisdom of other people of the earth came thither to do it homage. There Indian sages perceived the connection between their faith and the old Egyptian mysteries. There the Persian, who had once waged war against those mysteries, might declare his own belief in the conflict of good and evil powers. Thither came the members of a nation which had had a much older connection with Egypt. A powerful Jewish colony established itself in Egypt; in Egypt the Jews had even a temple. At the command of an Egyptian monarch the Jewish scriptures were translated into Greek.
2. Confluence of thoughts there. Thus the country in which we find the first beginnings of civilization, and perhaps also of speculation, was appointed to receive into itself different streams of thought, which had been running, in various directions, during all the period between the birth of Moses and the birth of our Lord. Was it possible that these streams should really mingle? Could it be at all ascertained which had descended from the highest ground? To what river the rest were tributary?
3. Feebleness of each The Gymnosophist or Brahmin was a subject of curious speculation to the observers and geographers of Greece; but, except in the case of Pyrrho, there is no instance of any effect upon Greek thought and speculation proceeding from him. The dualism of the Persians had actually entered largely and practically into the thoughts of Socrates and his great disciple. Neither in its own native form, nor in any other, was it likely to affect the minds of men who had ceased to feel there was a conflict in themselves—who merely discoursed and criticised. The Egyptian animal worship had become too gross for any symbolism. If symbolism took no form but that, it would only affect Greeks with disgust. None of these different doctrines then could subdue the Greek mind to itself, or even change its direction. And, certainly, the teachers of Alexandria could as little interpret the faith of any people of the East or West. They knew nothing really of Plato or Aristotle; they could comment upon them ably; they had never thought or felt with them at all.
4. The Roman conqueror In time another element was added to those which the patronage of the Ptolemies had collected. The Roman appeared on the Egyptian soil; Egypt became a Roman province. A sufficient proof seemed to be afforded by this fact, that there was something stronger in the world than Greek subtilty.
5. submits to the Greek. Yet here, as elsewhere, the Roman conqueror did homage to the Greek slave. No countryman of Cicero would have dared to express his thoughts or conceptions in an Alexandrian school which the legions of his country protected or overawed. However conscious he might be of a capacity in government, which was utterly unknown to the Greek of any age, he could yet feel that the Greeks of the lowest age had in this department of philosophy a right to be his masters and dictators. Nowhere less than in Egypt were his maxims respecting duty and obedience likely to be heeded. Among all the motley classes which composed the population of Alexandria, there were scarcely any but the Roman soldiers upon whom they would make the slightest impression.
6. The Jew. Among all those who visited the city of the Ptolemies the Jew is perhaps the last in whom men generally would expect to find an expounder or reconciler of the thoughts which had possessed or disturbed the minds of other people. Was he not prevented from his very calling and position from meddling with the words and acts of the uncircumcised? Was he not bound especially to regard their search after wisdom as profane and dangerous? Did not the Divine lore which he had received exclude and condemn all other? We have partly considered these questions already, so far as the principle of them is concerned; we have now to consider what answer facts return to them.
Section II. The Jewish Philosophy
1. Ecclesiasticus and the Wisdom of Solomon. The books which we call apocryphal, with the exception of the two books of Maccabees, contain little that is interesting or valuable as history. The books of Ecclesiasticus and the Wisdom of Solomon are in the strict and formal sense of the word philosophical. Amidst much that seems to most Western readers trivial and inflated, the passages which speak of Wisdom as a teacher, of Wisdom as an object of passionate love, of Wisdom as that for which all things else are to be sacrificed, possess a beauty which every one confesses. The fervour of these passages has been caught in a study of those which belong really to the age of Solomon; they are commentaries upon his writings, but not mere commentaries; the writer was not a book student only or chiefly; he has himself pursued wisdom, and lived under her discipline. There is a devout recognition of the sacredness of Jewish history in these books. The Divine Ruler of the nation is looked upon as the Ruler of the spirit of each individual man; every fact in the revelation is treasured up as needful for the education and meditation of the seeker for wisdom. And yet it is not only the language which separates these books from the Scriptures, and connects them with Greek thought; there is a Platonic character about them, such as we do not meet with in Cicero, or even in Cicero’s great pupil. Philo, born about B.C. 20. Intellectually the son of Sirach, whoever he may have been, was beyond measure inferior to Aristotle or to Cicero, yet we cannot help believing that Plato would have sympathised with him more than with them, and have found him capable of apprehending positions which all their intimate acquaintance with the technical phraseology of the schools could not have enabled them to master.
2. Philo. When these apocryphal books were written, the Jew, however, had probably not claimed his connection with the philosophers of Greece and of the world. About the beginning of the Christian era, a Jew was teaching in Alexandria, who, while he retained the profoundest reverence for the Divine oracles of his country, acknowledged the Indian Gymnosophist, the Greek philosopher, the Egyptian symbolizer, as having received wisdom from the Source of wisdom, as having been led, so far as they were led, out of the pursuit of visible and sensible things, by One who is seeking to bring man’s spirit into communion with Himself.
3. His mental history There are few particulars known respecting the early life of Philo, this Alexandrian Jew. His own narrative of his embassy to Caligula, for the purpose of representing the state of his countrymen in Egypt, is a curious document both for Roman and Jewish history, but it throws no light upon his own life, except so far that it shows that when a very old man he retained his patriotic sympathies, had not destroyed his practical powers by speculation, and possessed to a great degree the confidence of his Jewish fellow-citizens. What else is known of Philo must be gathered from his books; those books which exercised so great an influence over the early Christian church, and which have procured him the name of the Theosopher.
4. An admirer of philosophy. An examination of the meaning of this word will be the best help to the explanation of the writings which have established his claim to it. The word philosopher is of continual recurrence in Philo’s writings. He speaks of the lover and pursuer of wisdom as the spiritual or divine man; who has quitted the downward path, and is seeking his proper object. But the seeker of wisdom is also the seeker of God. Wisdom is not an aggregate of conclusions; it is not the human soul, it is not a something diffused through all things; it is the I Am, who spoke to Moses in the bush—the Instructor and Inspirer of all the prophets—He who gave the law on Sinai.
5. The Divine Word. Philo confessed, as any Jew must, an absolute Being; one dwelling in light which no man hath seen or can see. How such a Being should converse with man, how there could be sympathy between Him and a creature, was the wonder of the Hebrew psalmist and prophet. But he believed while he wondered. Philo saw that such an intercourse was as much implied in all the Hebrew records; as much implied in the nature of God Himself as His self-existence and self-concentration. The two truths could not be reconciled in a theory. A Divine Word, a Logos, speaking to the mind and spirit which was opened to hear the voice, was, Philo thought, the reconciliation. Such a speaker he traced in all the most obvious and minute expressions of the divine book, in all the steps of the Hebrew history.
6. The teacher of men. It is this principle, worked out through all the Scripture narratives, which constitutes the peculiarity of Philo’s writings. This is his philosophy or theosophy. On this ground he can contemplate with interest the Brahminical aspirations after absorption in the divine essence; the struggles of men to know the divine, the beautiful, the good; their eagerness to escape from sensual defilements and the prison-house of the body; their sense of moral obligation; their mythological or natural allegories. The path of sensuality and darkness is that which most men tread; a few have been led along the upward path; a few in all countries and generations have been wisdom-seekers, or seekers of God; they have been so because the Divine Word or Wisdom has looked upon them, choosing them for the knowledge and service of Himself.
7. Philo’s great merits. From the hints which we threw out when we left the Jewish Prophets to enter upon the wide field of Gentile speculation, it may be fancied that we shall gladly rest in Alexandrian theosophy as the end and consummation of our inquiries. We spoke of the Divine Word who had taught the prophets as the one source from which, as they and we believe, all illumination proceeded. Philo, holding that faith, has discovered a standing point, from which he can regard with affectionate sympathy a number of earnest thoughts which have occupied the hearts of men in different ages. He has escaped the temptation of supposing that any general theory or system can unite these thoughts; from the temptation, that is to say, of killing them, that he may harmonise them. He has told us what the philosopher is pursuing, and who is guiding him in the pursuit. But there are several serious questions to be asked before we can give ourselves up to the hopes which the Alexandrian teacher seems to hold out. What has he done to explain the great puzzle of the Bhagavad Gita—how practical life can be reconciled with the life of the Brahminical sage? What link is there between his mysticism and the dry business-like reflections of Khoung-fou-tseu? What one step has he taken towards solving the problem of Plato’s republic? If the Aristotelian “theory” is abundantly honoured in his books, what hint is there which can explain Aristotle’s assertion that politics is the architectonical science, or can bring his reverence for human relationships into consent with the communism of his master? If the Roman sense of duty meets with some respect from the Alexandrian, how can he enable any Roman to understand his feeling, that a divine power had been building up his city for generations; to foretell whether the battle of Actium and the death of the Egyptian queen would be the means of restoring or destroying its order; to guess whether Augustus, or some ruler of quite a different kind, would be the founder of a universal kingdom in which freemen could dwell?
8. Philo’s great deficiencies. On all these points Philo is silent. The meditations of the philosopher or theosopher are everything to him; the condition of the universe, except as it consists of philosophers or theosophers, nothing. He cannot, therefore, satisfy the demands of philosophy, for that in its highest, as well as its humblest form, is occupied with questions, not about itself, nor about the class which professes it, but about nature, man, God. Did this incapacity arise from his adhering too closely to his own records? They speak from first to last of a polity; they describe the gradual growth of one under Divine superintendence, out of a single family. Of this growth Philo sees nothing. The shepherd life of Abraham—the acts of Moses and Joshua—are nothing, except as they suggest divine allegories, from which the theosopher may derive nourishment. Is it not possible, then, that he failed to explain Plato, and the teachers of the old world, precisely because he had not a sufficiently simple apprehension of the books which he studied so profoundly, and admired so earnestly, and in which he thought that he could find the essence of all philosophy?
1. A Jew witnessing for a divine Polity grounded in the Revelation of the Absolute Being. A society arose in the days of Philo which said that it was the expansion and fulfilment of the polity, the beginnings of which are recorded in the Hebrew histories. A teacher who had lately become one of the officers in that society, was accused by a synagogue of the Alexandrians, before the High Priest and Sanhedrim at Jerusalem, of speaking blasphemous words against the temple and the law,—of saying that One was come who would change the customs which Moses had delivered. He defended himself, not by interpreting the story in an allegorical sense, but by showing in a plain narrative how in each period there had been a fresh unfolding of a divine kingdom, through human agents,—how each period assumed and made necessary the manifestation of One who should prove its foundation to be actually divine and actually human. That witness was stoned, as those who spoke like him in former days had been.
2. A Jew connecting the search of Greeks after Wisdom with a divine and human Person. Another Jew, who was present at his death and took part in it, shortly after incurred the hatred of his countrymen by inviting heathen citizens of Corinth, of Ephesus, and of Thessalonica, to become members of the society which had begun in Palestine, and which at first had only included circumcised men. His disciples at Corinth were full of the Greek passion for wisdom; they fancied that he and an Alexandrian teacher were rival sophists, each desirous to palm his own doctrine or theory upon them, and to bind them together in a sect called after their name. He told them that that teacher and himself had come to proclaim a hidden and divine wisdom, but a wisdom which had shone forth in weakness, of which the only perfect manifestation was in a Man who had been crucified. He told them that their fellowship included the weakest, the most ignorant, the most evil; that the members of it formed one body in one Head, and that whoever sought to divide them, or boasted of some wisdom of his own, was their enemy and destroyer. He told the people of the city in which Heraclitus had dwelt, that all spiritual blessings were theirs,—all the mysteries of divine knowledge; and yet that they were composed of all the kindreds and tribes of the earth, the invisible and the visible worlds being reconciled in Him who united divine glory with human nothingness. At Jerusalem he said that this divine society was the flower and consummation of that which their fathers had possessed,—of that which had begun in Abraham’s tent. Finally, to the Jews and Gentiles of Rome he asserted the worth of outward law, because it made men conscious of internal evil,—because it made them realize the opposition between the flesh, which flies from what is right and true, and the spirit, which desires but cannot attain—because it drives man to seek a righteousness above his own, which condemns his evil nature, justifies and satisfies the cravings of his inner man.
3. A Jew the reconciler of the Old and the New. Finally, an aged Galilean fisherman, living in the country where Greek philosophy began, proclaimed the reconciliation of that Revelation which had been from the beginning, with the Light which had shined afresh upon the world, declared that the Word was with God and was God; that in Him was Life, and the Life was the Light of men; uttered a divine Name which expressed The Being and The Unity; saw a city descending out of heaven, of which this Unity was the centre and the ground.
4. There are some readers who fancy that ancient and modern history are divided by the so-called fall of the Western Empire. The historian of philosophy cannot adopt their arrangement. The point at which we arrived is the one at which the curtain falls on the speculations of the old world. When it rises again we shall find a set of new actors, occupied with questions closely connected with all which we have been considering, but in many important respects different from them. A new element we shall find has been infused into the minds of Pagans and Jews, as well as of Christians. If we agree with Philo that the speculations of men in the ages before Christ were under the guidance of a Teacher who knew what was in man, we need not fear to enter upon the more complicated and embarrassing inquiries of the later time.