Section I. Alexandria
1. The kingdom of the Ptolemies in Egypt was the most remarkable result of Alexander’s conquests. Its capital was worthy of his name. Much of the Greek wisdom he wanted to make supreme in the world was gathered there, and much of the wisdom of other peoples came there to pay it homage. Indian sages saw the connection between their faith and the old Egyptian mysteries. The Persian, whose people had once made war on those mysteries, could declare his belief in the conflict of good and evil powers. The Jews, whose connection with Egypt was much older, came too. A powerful Jewish colony settled there and even had a temple, and at an Egyptian king’s command the Jewish scriptures were translated into Greek.
2. So the country where we find the first beginnings of civilization, and perhaps of speculation, was appointed to receive streams of thought that had been running in different directions from the birth of Moses to the birth of our Lord. Could these streams really mingle? Could we tell which had come down from the highest ground, and to which river the rest were tributary?
3. The Gymnosophist, or Brahmin, was a curious subject for Greek observers and geographers. But apart from Pyrrho, no Greek thought was ever affected by him. The dualism of the Persians had entered deeply and practically into the thoughts of Socrates and his great disciple. But neither in its native form nor in any other was it likely to affect men who no longer felt a conflict within themselves, and who only discoursed and criticised. Egyptian animal worship had become too gross for any symbolism, and if symbolism took no other form, it would only disgust the Greeks. So none of these doctrines could subdue the Greek mind or even change its direction. Nor could the teachers of Alexandria interpret the faith of any people of East or West. They knew nothing really of Plato or Aristotle. They could comment on them ably, but had never thought or felt with them.
4. In time another element was added to those the Ptolemies had gathered. The Roman appeared on Egyptian soil, and Egypt became a Roman province. This seemed proof that something in the world was stronger than Greek subtlety.
5. Yet here, as elsewhere, the Roman conqueror did homage to the Greek slave. No countryman of Cicero would have dared to voice his own thoughts in an Alexandrian school that his country’s legions protected or overawed. He might be conscious of a talent for government unknown to any Greek, yet he felt that even the Greeks of the lowest age had a right to be his masters in philosophy. Nowhere were his maxims of duty and obedience less likely to be heeded than in Egypt. Among all the motley classes of Alexandria’s population, scarcely any but the Roman soldiers would be at all impressed by them.
6. Of all who visited the city of the Ptolemies, the Jew is perhaps the last in whom people would expect to find an expounder or reconciler of other peoples’ thoughts. Did not his calling and position forbid him to meddle with the words and acts of the uncircumcised? Was he not bound to regard their search after wisdom as profane and dangerous? Did not the divine lore he had received exclude and condemn all other? We have partly considered the principle behind these questions already. Now we have to see what answer the facts give.
Section II. The Jewish Philosophy
1. The apocryphal books, except the two books of Maccabees, hold little of interest or value as history. Ecclesiasticus and the Wisdom of Solomon are philosophical in the strict, formal sense. Much in them seems trivial and inflated to most Western readers. But the passages that speak of Wisdom as a teacher, as an object of passionate love, and as that for which everything else is to be sacrificed have a beauty everyone admits. Their fervour was caught from studying writings that truly belong to Solomon’s age. The books are commentaries on his work, but more than commentaries. The writer was not chiefly a book student; he had himself pursued wisdom and lived under her discipline. The books devoutly recognize the sacredness of Jewish history. The Divine Ruler of the nation is seen as the Ruler of each individual’s spirit, and every fact of the revelation is treasured as needed for the education and meditation of the seeker of wisdom. Yet it is not only language that separates these books from the Scriptures and connects them with Greek thought. They have a Platonic character that we do not find in Cicero or even in Cicero’s great pupil. Intellectually the son of Sirach, whoever he was, was far inferior to Aristotle or Cicero. Still, we cannot help believing that Plato would have sympathised with him more than with them. Plato would have found him able to grasp positions that all their familiarity with the technical language of the schools could not have enabled them to master.
2. When these books were written, the Jew had probably not yet 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 kept the profoundest reverence for his country’s divine oracles. Yet he acknowledged that the Indian Gymnosophist, the Greek philosopher, and the Egyptian symbolizer had received wisdom from the Source of wisdom. So far as they were led out of the pursuit of visible and sensible things, he held, they were led by One who seeks to bring man’s spirit into communion with Himself.
3. Few particulars are known of the early life of this Alexandrian Jew, Philo. His own account of his embassy to Caligula, made to represent the state of his countrymen in Egypt, is a curious document for Roman and Jewish history. It tells us little about his life, except that as a very old man he kept his patriotic sympathies, had not destroyed his practical powers by speculation, and had the confidence of his fellow Jews. Anything else must be gathered from his books. Those books had great influence on the early Christian church and won him the name of the Theosopher.
4. Examining this word will best explain the writings that earned it. The word philosopher constantly recurs in Philo. He speaks of the lover and pursuer of wisdom as the spiritual or divine man, who has left 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, not the human soul, not 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. Philo confessed, as any Jew must, an absolute Being, dwelling in light which no man has seen or can see. How such a Being could converse with man, and 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 intercourse was as much implied in all the Hebrew records, and 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 opened to hear the voice, was in Philo’s view the reconciliation. He traced such a speaker in every expression of the divine book, the obvious and the minute, and in every step of Hebrew history.
6. This principle, worked out through all the Scripture narratives, is the peculiarity of Philo’s writings, and is his philosophy or theosophy. On this ground he can look with interest at the Brahminical aspiration after absorption in the divine essence. He can look as well at men’s struggles to know the divine, the beautiful, the good; their eagerness to escape sensual defilement and the prison-house of the body; their sense of moral obligation; and their mythological or natural allegories. Most men tread the path of sensuality and darkness. A few, in all countries and generations, have been led along the upward path as wisdom-seekers or seekers of God. They have been so because the Divine Word or Wisdom looked upon them and chose them for the knowledge and service of Himself.
7. From the hints we threw out when we left the Jewish Prophets for the wide field of Gentile speculation, it may be fancied that we shall gladly rest in Alexandrian theosophy as the end of our inquiries. We spoke of the Divine Word who taught the prophets as the one source from which, as they and we believe, all illumination proceeded. Philo, holding that faith, has found a standing point from which he can regard with affectionate sympathy many earnest thoughts that have occupied men’s hearts in different ages. He has escaped the temptation to suppose that any general theory or system can unite these thoughts, that is, the temptation to kill them in order to harmonise them. He has told us what the philosopher is pursuing and who guides him. But serious questions must be asked before we give ourselves up to the hopes this 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, businesslike reflections of Khoung-fou-tseu? What step has he taken toward solving the problem of Plato’s republic? His books abundantly honour the Aristotelian “theory.” But what hint do they give to explain Aristotle’s assertion that politics is the architectonic science, or to bring his reverence for human relationships into agreement with his master’s communism? The Alexandrian shows some respect for the Roman sense of duty. But how can he help any Roman understand his feeling that a divine power had been building up his city for generations? How can he foretell whether the battle of Actium and the death of the Egyptian queen would restore or destroy its order? How can he guess whether Augustus, or a ruler of quite a different kind, would found a universal kingdom in which freemen could dwell?
8. On all these points Philo is silent. The meditations of the philosopher or theosopher are everything to him, and the condition of the universe, except as it consists of philosophers or theosophers, is nothing. So he cannot satisfy the demands of philosophy. In its highest as in its humblest form, philosophy is occupied with questions not about itself or the class that professes it, but about nature, man, and God. Did this incapacity come from clinging too closely to his own records? They speak from first to last of a polity, and describe its gradual growth out of a single family under Divine superintendence. Philo sees nothing of this growth. The shepherd life of Abraham and the acts of Moses and Joshua are nothing to him, except as they suggest divine allegories from which the theosopher may draw nourishment. Is it not possible, then, that he failed to explain Plato and the teachers of the old world precisely because he did not take simply enough the books he studied so profoundly and admired so earnestly, and in which he thought he could find the essence of all philosophy?
1. In the days of Philo a society arose which said it was the expansion and fulfilment of the polity whose beginnings are recorded in the Hebrew histories. A teacher who had lately become one of its officers was accused by a synagogue of the Alexandrians before the High Priest and Sanhedrim at Jerusalem. The charge was speaking blasphemous words against the temple and the law, and saying that One was come who would change the customs Moses had delivered. He defended himself not by interpreting the story allegorically, but by a plain narrative. He showed how in each period there had been a fresh unfolding of a divine kingdom through human agents, and how each period assumed and required 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. Another Jew, who was present at his death and took part in it, soon incurred his countrymen’s hatred. He invited heathen citizens of Corinth, Ephesus, and Thessalonica to join the society that began in Palestine and at first included only circumcised men. His disciples at Corinth, full of the Greek passion for wisdom, fancied that he and an Alexandrian teacher were rival sophists, each wanting to palm off his own doctrine and bind them into a sect called by his name. He told them that that teacher and he had come to proclaim a hidden, divine wisdom. But it was a wisdom that had shone forth in weakness, and its only perfect manifestation was in a Man who had been crucified. He told them their fellowship included the weakest, the most ignorant, the most evil. Its members formed one body in one Head, and 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 where Heraclitus had dwelt that all spiritual blessings were theirs, all the mysteries of divine knowledge. Yet they were made up of all the kindreds and tribes of the earth, the invisible and 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 what their fathers had possessed, what began in Abraham’s tent. Finally, to the Jews and Gentiles of Rome he asserted the worth of outward law. It made men conscious of internal evil. 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. And it drives man to seek a righteousness above his own, one that condemns his evil nature and justifies and satisfies the cravings of his inner man.
3. Finally, an aged Galilean fisherman, living in the country where Greek philosophy began, proclaimed the reconciliation of the Revelation that had been from the beginning with the Light that had shined afresh upon the world. He declared that the Word was with God and was God, that in Him was Life, and that the Life was the Light of men. He uttered a divine Name that expressed The Being and The Unity. He saw a city descending out of heaven, with this Unity as its centre and ground.
4. Some readers 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 we have reached is where the curtain falls on the speculations of the old world. When it rises again we shall find new actors, occupied with questions closely connected with all we have considered but in many important respects different. A new element 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 before Christ were guided by a Teacher who knew what was in man, we need not fear to enter the more complicated and embarrassing inquiries of the later time.