The Politics of Philo Judaeus: Practice and Theory, with a General Bibliography of Philo

74 PHILO'S POLITICS

cerely sympathized with the incipient eremitic urge which was already

driving men of his day to the desert; yet, more usually, he agreed with

the attitude later expressed in the letter of James, for he felt that phi­

losophy, or contemplation, must fructify in social manifestation and

benefit. I say that the latter was his more usual feeling since he himself

tells us that he had often tried the ascetic life but had not what the

Church came later to call the "gift" which would enable him to prac­

tice the life with success.^50 His own ideal had to be the living of his life

in the crowd, in the course of which he must keep his inner citadel de­

tached from men and filled with divine thoughts, but always with the

end in view that only so could he be ready to direct the private and

public affairs of his fellows.^51 Indeed Philo is to be distinguished from

the other writers of his period in that he has personally and passionately

tried both sorts of life: his vacillation about the value of social life is not

merely an echo of current literary forms, but comes out of the experi­

ences of his own soul.

And Philo is further to be distinguished from other writers of his age

in his sincere attempt to account for the value of the two types of life,

and to offer a picture of their ideal reconciliation. He does so in one of

his most elaborate allegories. By clever manipulation of scriptural texts,

into which we need not go, he justifies the statement that men are the

children of two parents. The father is the "right reason" (6p9oc Aoyoc)

of nature, or natural law;^52 the mother is the encyclical course of

studies, those based upon human observation and inference. The father

commands us to follow and obey nature, and to pursue naked and bare

truth; the mother demands obedience to "the things made just by stat­

ute" (T<2 Seoet SiKaia), "which the ancients who preferred appearance
to truth established in cities, races, and regions."^53 The children of
these parents, that is mankind, are of four kinds. The first class are

obedient to both parents, the second are obedient to neither, while the
other two sorts are half-perfect (yiMnxA/jc), for they obey the commands
only of one or the other of the parents. Of these four the first class, the

one which obeys both parents, is incomparably the best; the second,
obeying neither, is utterly depraved, while those who obey the father
exclusively are superior to those who obey the mother exclusively.^54

50. LA, ii, 85. 51. Virt., 3.


51. See my By Light, Light, 388 f. 53. Ebr., 34.


52. Ibid., 35.