Philo of Alexandria. Jean Danielou
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the Christian affirmation that race is not important and that entrance into the community depends only of free choice. Accordingly, the difference between the Apology and Quod Probus pose a curious problem whose most satisfactory explanation is that there is a reference to Christianity.
With this we have not yet finished with the question posed by the comparison of the information from Philo and the Qumran manuscripts. Indeed, if they describe a community, they at least equally testify to the presence of an eschatological tendency. God sent the Master of Justice to announce that the end of time, foretold by the prophets, had begun. The community left for the desert to prepare itself for the imminent last judgment. The coming of the Messiahs of Aaron and Israel would be its first sign. Then the pagans would be annihilated and the people of God exalted. Now all this—the eschatological expectation, theology of history, messianic tendencies, national exaltation—are totally absent from Philo’s information. The practices described are the same, but the spirit is totally different. How are we to admit that Philo could have modified things to this degree?
Yet, this is the solution that imposes itself on us for various reasons. First, there are reasons of prudence. Philo speaks about the Essenes in apologetic writings directed to pagans. He wants to present the Jews in an attractive manner. It is clear that the Zadokite apocalyptic spirit would disconcert and perturb the pagans. Besides, partisan of the Roman Empire that he is, Philo has no sympathy for this facet of the Zadokites. He detests their nationalism. He is not unaware of the notion of an eschatological judgment, but it is foreign to his thought: his ideal is inner. Consequently, it must be admitted that here Philo deliberately sets aside the whole eschatological component of the Zadokite community to retain only its moral characteristics.
One last question remains. Does the rest of Philo’s work testify to knowledge of Essene doctrines? We know that the most characteristic Essene doctrine is that of the two spirits, of truth and of iniquity created by God at the beginning and presiding over all human history (Manual of Discipline, III, 18–19, IV, 15). These two spirits are mingled in each human. According to whether a person follows one or the other, he places himself in the army of light or of darkness. Here we are not merely dealing with the idea of inner struggle that sets the tendencies of good and evil against each other in the human heart. This last doctrine is that of the two yeser, which is found in Judaism before the Essenes. But what seems peculiar to them is attaching each yeser to a spiritual power and attributing to God the establishment of the latter from the beginning. On this point it is difficult to avoid seeing an influence of Iranian magi on the Essenes.
This doctrine is foreign to the totality of Philo’s work. As we will see, his angelology is not dualist. It is most unusual to find a text in his work where there is such pronounced dualism. The question arises of knowing whether the text is an allusion to Essene doctrine.47 It is found in Quaestiones in Exodum (I, 23). “Into every soul at its very birth, there enter two powers [δυνάμεις], the salutary [σοτερία] and the destructive [φθοροποιός]. If the salutary one is victorious and prevails, the opposite one is too weak to see. And if the latter prevails, no profit at all or little is obtained from the salutary one.”48 This first part affirms the presence from the start of two opposite powers put by God in man’s heart. This doctrine may be Essene. It is found again in Christian works influenced by the Essenes like the Shepherd of Hermes.
But the continuation is still more odd:
Through these powers [δυνάμεις] the world too was created. People call them by other names: the salutary (power) they call powerful [potens?] and beneficent [εὐργετικός];49 the opposite one (they call) unbounded [immensa?] and destructive [κολαστική]. Thus the sun and moon, the appropriate positions of the other stars and their ordered functions, and whole heaven together come into being and exist through the two (powers). And they are created in accordance with the better part of these, namely when the salutary and beneficent (power) brings to an end the unbounded and destructive [κολαστική] nature. Wherefore also to those who have attained such a state and a nature similar to this is immortality given. But the nature is a mixture of both (these powers), from which the heavens and the entire world as a whole have received this mixture. Now sometimes the evil becomes greater in this mixture and hence (all creatures) live in torment, harm, ignominy, contention, battle, and bodily illness together with all the other things in human life, as in the whole world, so in man.50
In any case, this difficult text affirms parallelism between the action of two hostile powers in the cosmos and their action in man. Here two problems must be distinguished. The idea of the two powers established by God at the beginning recalls the Manual of Discipline. We observe that Philo seems to assimilate this doctrine to that of the powers who surround God that is familiar to him. We can connect this to Quaestiones in Exodum, II, 68, where Philo teaches that the favorable power whose proper name is Benevolent (εὐεργετικός) is subordinated to the creative power and that the legislative (νομοθετική) power is joined to the royal (βασιλική) power. See also De Sacrificiis Abelis et Caini, 38, 131–33. These similarities assure the passage’s Philonic authenticity. But the doctrine of powers in our text still has a dualistic character foreign to Philo’s overall work.
Moreover, the action of the two opposing powers not only in human souls and in history but also in the cosmos has no equivalence in Essene doctrine. By contrast, it has striking similarity to the doctrine we find in Plutarch, a pagan author slightly posterior to Philo. In De Iside et Osiride Plutarch explains: “nothing that is in nature is free from mixture and everything comes to us from two opposed principles” (45). He shows this is common to several traditions. He mentions Iranian dualism, the benevolent and malevolent influence of the stars in the Chaldeans, the different Greek dualisms, the two souls in Plato’s Laws. Then he adds, “I will devote myself to reconciling the theology of the Egyptians and Plato’s teaching” (De Iside et Osiride, 48). He then interprets Osiris as the source of all that “the earth, wind, water, sky, and stars is orderly, constant, and salutary, and Typho with all that is perishable and harmful in the body of the universe, irregularities and seasonal bad weather, solar eclipses, the occultation of the moon” (De Iside et Osiride, 49).
It is not that Plutarch is the source of our passage. By contrast, it is very plausible that Philο and he applied the same procedure, one to the exegesis of the Bible and the other to the exegesis of Egyptian myths, and that they used lecture notes where different dualist interpretations of philosophers and religious traditions were brought together. Indeed, several characteristics of Philo’s text recall that of Plutarch. One of the titles of the harmful power is immensa, which seems to translate ἄπειρος. Now, Philo’s text says that for Anaxagoras and Pythagoras the source of evils is the ἄπειρον (48). The reference to heavenly disorders with the mention of solar eclipses (κρύψεις), occultation of the moon (ἀφανισμοί), seasonal bad weather (ἀωρίαι) is met again amid textbook arguments against Providence in De Providentia II, 71, another of Philo’s works about which we will speak below. It certainly seems that Philo alludes to Greek philosophical doctrines here.
The continuation confirms it: “This mixture [μῖξις] is in both the wicked and the wise man, but not in the same way. For the souls of foolish men have the unbounded and destructive rather than the powerful and salutary (power), and it is full of misery when it dwells with earthly creatures. But the prudent and noble (soul) rather receives the powerful and salutary (power) and, on the contrary, possesses in itself good fortune and happiness, being carried around with the heaven [μετεωροπορῶν], because of kinship [συγγένεια] with it.”51 These last expressions allude to Plato’s Phaedrus and are frequent in Philo. But here again, he evidently uses a source alien to his thought. The idea of the family relationship of the soul with the heavens, likewise the idea that destinies are determined by the proportion of good and evil in the soul are foreign to Philo’s thought—and also to Essene doctrine.
By contrast, the conclusion brings us back to the introduction: “The force which is the cause of destruction strives, as it were, to enter the soul, but is prevented by the divine beneficences [θέιαι εὐεργεσίαι], from striking (it), for these are salutary. But those from whom the favors and gifts of God [αἱ