Jewish Philosophy - Alexander Altmann

Part I

The history of Jewish Philosophy does not commence until after the Biblical period had run its full course, and the essential outline of the Jewish Faith had been clearly fixed. Unlike Indian or Greek Philosophy, it arises not from a free and spontaneous movement of the pure Reason, breaking away from the traditional forms of religion, but as an effort towards harmonizing the tenets of the Jewish Faith with philosophic teachings that held sway at successive periods of Jewish history. It is, therefore, fraught with all the tension inherent in an ambivalent attitude. Its fundamental problem, like that of Islamic and Christian Philosophy, is summed up in the formula "Faith and Reason."

Jewish Philosophy makes its appearance, and is developed, not as a product indigenous to the soil of Palestine, but in communities of the Diaspora. First the Jews living in the cultural sphere of Alexandria came under the spell of the Hellenistic civilization, and felt the need of reconciling their Jewish heritage with the Stoic-Platonic philosophy dominant in that age and environment. From the second century BC until the middle of the first century AD, a literature sprang up in which Biblical concepts became increasingly overlaid with Stoic and Platonic elements of thought. It reached full maturity in Philo of Alexandria (c. 30 BC – AD 40), whose mystical bent drew him irresistibly to the Neoplatonism which had been inaugurated by the great Stoic teacher Posidonius in the first century BC, and seemed to reflect the deepest tendencies of the age. Philo pursued this trend much more resolutely and with infinitely greater success than Posidonius. One may justifiably assert that the decisive factor in his accomplishment was the Jewish component which compelled him to seek the unity of the world in a wholly transcendent principle which was, at the same time, immanent in all being. The Biblical concept of God stresses both the transcendence and the immanence of the Divine Power. Philo could, therefore, accept neither the Platonic notion of God as the Idea of the Good which was the "measure of all things," nor the Stoic concept of Logos as an all-pervading divine principle. Plato’s God was wholly transcendent, the Stoic deity wholly immanent. Posidonius had built up an impressive monistic system by identifying Plato’s Ideas with the Stoic Logos. He saw the universe as a graded totality rising in a hierarchy of beings from stone to plant, animal, man, demons and gods. But his system was essentially pagan and pantheistic. Philo anchored the Posidonian cosmos in the supreme Reality of God who was transcendent and yet "filled the universe." The Platonic Ideas in whose image the world is framed have their reality not outside the Creator’s Mind (as in Plato’s Timaeus), nor are they transformed into immanent principles of a dynamic world process, but become the Ideas of God, the Divine Mind in process of Creation. The Philonic Logos, it must be emphasized, is not a divine principle but merely the first creation of God. It reflects the order of the visible universe, the pattern thereof as created in God’s Mind. The essence of God remains unknown. Philo is anxious to guard the concept of God against all forms of pantheism, and therefore adopts a strictly negative theology. He may have derived it from a passage in Plato’s Parmenides where the One is described as having no name nor being spoken of and defined as inaccessible to knowledge, perception or opinion. But he sought to give it a legitimately Jewish character by reading into it the Biblical statement in which God declares His Name to be "I AM THAT I AM" and which Philo takes to mean "My Nature is to be, not to be spoken." Through Philo, this verse has become a locus classicus for scholastic ontology.

© "History of Philosophy Eastern and Western" by Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, published by George Allen & Unwin Limited, Ruskin House, Museum Street, London.

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