Biblical Texts Engaged
Philo of Alexandria (c. 20 BCE - 50 CE) devoted his philosophical career to demonstrating that the Hebrew Bible, read allegorically, contains the deepest wisdom of Greek philosophy. His primary texts were the Pentateuch -- above all Genesis 1-3, the six days of creation -- which he read as a philosophical account of the relationship between the eternal divine mind, the intelligible world, and the sensory world of human experience.
Genesis 1:1 -- 'In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth' -- prompted Philo's central philosophical question: how does the utterly transcendent God, who is pure being beyond all categories, relate to the material world? His answer was the Logos -- the divine reason or word -- which he found encoded throughout the Pentateuch. In the Septuagint (the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible), the word logos appears throughout the Wisdom literature, and Philo identified the Logos with the divine Wisdom of Proverbs 8:22-31: 'The LORD possessed me at the beginning of his work... I was beside him, like a master workman, and I was daily his delight.' The Logos is the divine mind, the pattern of all creation, the intermediary between the utterly transcendent God and the created order.
Proverbs 8, with its personified Wisdom present at creation, and Genesis 1, with its repeated 'And God said' (the divine word as the instrument of creation), were Philo's key texts for articulating the Logos concept. He also drew on Exodus 3:14 -- God's self-identification as 'I AM WHO I AM' -- as evidence of God's radical ontological transcendence, the pure being that no human category can contain.
Core Argument
Philo's philosophical system sought to answer a fundamental problem of Platonic philosophy: the relationship between the utterly transcendent One (the ultimate reality) and the sensory world of multiplicity and change. Plato had posited a world of eternal Forms or Ideas, of which the sensory world is a copy. But he left the relationship between the transcendent One and the Forms unclear, and the problem of how transcendent being could create or relate to material reality was a persistent puzzle in Platonism and Stoicism.
Philo's solution was the Logos -- a concept that combined the Stoic notion of logos (the rational principle immanent in the universe) with the Platonic concept of the World of Forms and the biblical concept of divine Wisdom and Word. The Logos is the mind of God, containing all the archetypal Forms. It is the instrument through which God created the world -- 'God said' in Genesis means that the Logos, the divine word, was the agent of creation. The Logos is also the intermediary between God and the human soul, the divine reason that human beings can access through the exercise of their rational faculty.
Philo used allegory as his primary interpretive method, arguing that the literal narratives of the Pentateuch -- the creation, the fall, the lives of the patriarchs -- are philosophical allegories whose true meaning is accessible only to the educated reader. Abraham's journey from Ur to Canaan, for instance, is an allegory of the philosophical journey from sensory attachment to rational transcendence. Moses is the perfect philosopher-king whose soul, purified by contemplation, ascended to direct encounter with the divine Logos.
The system combined Platonic cosmology (the Logos as the world of Forms, the material world as its copy), Stoic physics (the Logos as the rational principle ordering the cosmos), and biblical theology (God as creator, the Logos as his instrument and Word). Philo was the first thinker to synthesise these traditions systematically, creating the template for subsequent Jewish-Greek-Christian philosophical theology.
Legacy
Philo's influence on the subsequent development of Christian theology was enormous, though indirect. The prologue of John's Gospel -- 'In the beginning was the Logos, and the Logos was with God, and the Logos was God... And the Logos became flesh and dwelt among us' (John 1:1, 14) -- is widely regarded as a conscious appropriation of Philonic Logos theology, with the radical addition that the Logos was personally identified with Jesus of Nazareth. John did not simply borrow Philo's concept; he transformed it by insisting that the Logos became incarnate -- something no Platonic philosopher could accept.
Justin Martyr (c. 100-165), the first major Christian apologist, drew extensively on Philonic Logos theology to argue that the Greek philosophical tradition had been preparing the world for the revelation of the Logos in Christ. Clement of Alexandria and Origen built elaborate systems of Christian Platonism on Philonic foundations, using his allegorical method to interpret both the Old Testament and the philosophical tradition. The fourth-century Trinitarian debates -- which produced the Nicene Creed -- engaged directly with the question of the Logos's relationship to the Father, a question first raised in its precise form by Philo.
In Jewish philosophy, Philo's influence was paradoxically limited -- his work was preserved not by the Jewish community but by the Christian Church, which found him indispensable for its philosophical theology. Medieval Jewish philosophers including Maimonides drew on the broader tradition of Jewish-Platonic synthesis, but Philo's specific influence was mediated primarily through Christian appropriation. His importance for the history of philosophy lies in establishing that biblical revelation and Greek philosophy are not simply opposed but engage in a profound and productive dialogue -- a claim that has animated Jewish, Christian, and Islamic philosophy ever since.
Philo and the Problem of Divine Transcendence
Philo's Logos theology addressed a problem that remains central to philosophical theology: how can the utterly transcendent God -- who is beyond all categories, unknowable in his essence, infinite and incomprehensible -- act in the finite world and be known by finite minds? Philo's solution is the Logos as intermediary: God himself remains transcendent and unknowable, but the Logos -- which is 'the image of God' (eikon theou), the second God (deuteros theos) in some of Philo's more daring formulations -- is the intelligible face of the divine, accessible to purified human reason.
This is not a successful solution by the standards of later Trinitarian orthodoxy, which rejected the identification of the Logos with a 'second God' as subordinationism. But it posed the problem in terms that proved enormously fruitful for subsequent theology. The question of how God can be both utterly transcendent and genuinely present to creation -- genuinely knowable without being reducible to human concepts -- is the question that drove the development of the doctrine of the Trinity, the apophatic theology of Pseudo-Dionysius and Gregory of Nyssa, and the contemporary theology of divine mystery in figures like Karl Barth and Herbert McCabe. Philo did not solve the problem, but he identified it with unparalleled precision, and his identification of the Logos as the key concept set the agenda for nearly two millennia of philosophical theology.