C. D. Yonge (1812–1891)

Philo Judaeus of Alexandria Egypt was a contemporary of Jesus and Paul and of the three the only one of absolutely certain historicity. The absence of any mention of Jesus or Paul among contemporaries is what raises existential questions about Jesus and Paul.
Philo clearly lived in their world of Hellenistic Judaism, and does not even mention early Christianity. He does utilize the concept of logos. Philo also employees interpretive strategies which parallel those used by Paul as the author of the book of Hebrews. As the leading theologian in the court of Cleopatra and the Ptolemies, Philo sought to reconcile and synthesize the theologies of the Jews and the Greeks. In this work, his deputation to Rome on behalf of the temple and the objection to placing images of Caesar in the temple are included… (mer)

After the death of his daughter, Tullia, who died in childbirth, Cicero, age 62, left behind his public life and retired to his county house and then wrote his Tusculan Disputations. Here Cicero offers us his practical philosophy on the topics of death, pain, grief, mental distress and virtue. I offer a brief commentary on selections from the first two books as a way of highlighting both Cicero the man and Cicero the philosopher.

Cicero is one of the giants of Western literature and his thinking and Latin writing has had an enormous influence on the shaping of Western Civilization. His Tusculan Disputations is worth not only five stars but ten stars. With this in mind, my commentary, with its emphasis at points on how Cicero contrasts sharply with Epicurus, is but one way to view his rich philosophy.

Book 1
Cicero first asks us to consider death according to the schools of philosophy holding death as total annihilation. "In all these opinions, there is nothing to affect any one after death; for all feeling is lost with life, and where there is no sensation, nothing can interfere to affect us." Immediately after this possibility, Cicero wants us to reflect on the Platonic view of the soul, "The opinions of others do indeed bring us hope; if it is any pleasure to you to think that souls, after they leave the body, may go to heaven as to a permanent home."

Cicero argues for the existence of the Gods by appealing to common consent: "And this may further be brought as an irrefragable argument for us to believe that there are Gods--that there never was any nation so barbarous, nor any people in the world so savage, as to be without some notion of Gods. Many have wrong notions of the Gods, for that is the nature and ordinary consequence of bad customs, yet all allow that there is a certain divine nature and energy." We can see here Cicero isn't using sophisticated analytic philosophy to persuade us of our divine nature; rather, as a straight talking Greco-Roman, Cicero appeals to common human wisdom on the topic.

On the topic of grief, one can imagine Cicero writing to another part of himself, the part still grieving over the loss of his beloved daughter, Tullia: "Perhaps we may be sorry, and grieve a little; but that bitter lamentation and those mournful tears have their origin in our apprehensions that he whom we loved is deprived of all the advantages of life, and is sensible of his loss. And we are led to this opinion by nature, without any arguments or any instruction." However, Cicero knows reason and philosophy can help us overcome our emotions and grief: "But as we are led by nature to think there are Gods, and as we discover, by reason, of what description they are, so, by the consent of all nations, we are induced to believe that our souls survive; but where their habitation is, and of what character they eventually are, must be learned from reason."

Again, Cicero being a lover of Platonic philosophy and also the ever-practical Roman citizen writes: "Now, as we are usually incited to all sorts of desires by the stimulus of the body, and the more so as we endeavor to rival those who are in possession of what we long for, we shall certainly be happy when, being emancipated from that body, we at the same time get rid of these desires and this rivalry." Death as a kind of freedom from the bondage of bodily desires. Cicero continues with the goodness of what we experience after we depart from our bodies: "But those persons will in a most especial degree enjoy this philosophy, who, while they were only inhabitants of this world and enveloped in darkness, were still desirous of looking into these things with the eye of their mind."

Cicero uses all of his breathtaking rhetorical skill in appealing to our humanity and innate sense of goodness in expanding on the Platonic philosophy of soul: "And we shall certainly discover these things in a more clear and perfect degree when the soul is disengaged from the body, and has arrived at that goal to which nature leads her; for at present, notwithstanding nature has contrived, with the greatest skill, those channels which lead from the body to the soul, yet are they, in some way or other, stopped up with earthy and concrete bodies; but when we shall be nothing but soul, then nothing will interfere to prevent our seeing everything in its real substance and in its true character." Here we have Cicero at his finest - translating the more theoretical Greek philosophy into a language his fellow Roman citizens could understand and appreciate: death is nothing to be feared or evil; rather, death should be seen as a definite good and a blessing.

Book 2

This subject of this book is bearing pain. I will quote a good number of passages and provide my brief commentary since this is the book where I find Cicero shining through as the anti-Epicurus of the ancient world. Cicero is discussing pain with a young man. The young man first gives us his idea that pain is the greatest evil but then agrees with Cicero that infamy is the greatest evil. (the synonym for infamy here is `dishonor', dishonor being the glaring evil in the Roman world).

"Suppose I ask Epicurus the same question. He will answer that a trifling degree of pain is a greater evil than the greatest infamy; for that there is no evil in infamy itself, unless attended with pain." Here Cicero wants to set up Epicurus so he can deliver a knock-out punch to the Epicurean philosophy of pleasure.

"What pain, then, attends Epicurus, when he says that very thing, that pain is the greatest evil!" In Rome and according to the Stoic Greco-Roman moralists, nothing is a greater evil than dishonor, certainly not pain. Cicero agrees with the Stoics on this point.

"And yet nothing can be a greater disgrace to a philosopher than to talk thus." This is the ultimate dig: an Epicurean philosopher is disgraced by not holding dishonor being the greatest evil.

"Therefore, you allowed enough when you admitted that infamy appeared to you to be a greater evil than pain. And if you abide by this admission, you will see how far pain should be resisted; and that our inquiry should be not so much whether pain be an evil, as how the mind may be fortified for resisting it." In my view, this is Cicero's key psychological trump card, shifting pain from being an evil to a reality of life against which we should strengthen ourselves.

"The Stoics infer from some petty quibbling arguments that it (pain) is no evil, as if the dispute were about a word, and not about the thing itself." Cicero sees the Stoics holding pain to be nothing since pain is not evil. But, according to Cicero, this is a misreading of pain, since for him, although he agrees with the Stoics that pain isn't evil, Cicero sees pain as a reality of life we should steel ourselves against. We shouldn't be indifferent to pain as the Stoics hold (all else being equal, we should avoid pain) but when we have to endure pain for the sake of honor and virtuous action, we should do so.

"For when you deny what appears very dreadful to me to be an evil, I am deceived, and am at a loss to know why that which appears to me to be a most miserable thing should be no evil. The answer is, that nothing is an evil but what is base and vicious." Again, pain isn't the evil; what is evil for Cicero is to be found along the honor/virtue--base/viscous axis.

"You return to your trifling, for you do not remove what made me uneasy. I know that pain is not vice--you need not inform me of that: but show me that it makes no difference to me whether I am in pain or not." Once again, Cicero sees being in pain making a big difference but that does not, by his reasoning, make pain an evil.

"It has never anything to do, say you, with a happy life, for that depends upon virtue alone; but yet pain is to be avoided. If I ask, why? It is disagreeable, against nature, hard to bear, woeful and afflicting". Cicero's restatement of pain - a disagreeable reality not an evil.
… (mer)

From the theology reading program. This was something of a strain; it’s a 1993 reprint of an 1855 translation made by Biblical scholar C.D. Yonge. The original translation was four volumes; it’s reproduced here in a single volume of double-column fine print. As a result, it was hard to work through.

Philo lived in Alexandria (he made a trip to Rome to petition – unsuccessfully – Caligula not to have a statue of himself installed in the Temple in Jerusalem). What he’s trying to do is sell Judaism to Greek philosophers; not necessary with a view toward conversion but at least for understanding. He was well educated in Greek literature, and routinely quotes Homer and various philosophers. (Ironically, based on some of the etymology he uses, it’s thought he didn’t know Hebrew). Although a contemporary of John the Baptist, Jesus and St. Paul, Philo never mentions them (although he does mention the Essenes at some length, with approval).

Most of the work is exegesis of the Torah. Philo is not a Biblical literalist – in fact, for Philo, everything in the Bible is symbolic. The Creation doesn’t actually take six days nor does the world and its life appear in the literal order described in Genesis; instead the six days are symbolic because “six is the most productive of all numbers”. (In fact Philo displays minor outrage over the idea that the “…Creator stood in need of a length of time…”). Thus, everything is created instantaneously by thought – but Moses writes it down as six days for the symbolic value. Similarly the order of appearance of animals, the extraction of Adam’s rib, the naming of the animals, the garden, the talking serpent, the Tree, the murder of Abel, the Ark, the Flood, and so on are all symbolic and do not represent actual animals, ribs, names, gardens, snakes, trees, murders, arks or floods. As with the “six days”, all these things are explainable by gematria. It gets fairly deep sometimes; there are three pages on the symbolism of the dimensions of the Ark and similar elaborations on the numerological meaning of the ages of the various patriarchs; almost every number that appears in the Torah gets divided or multiplied or both so Philo can make some numerological point. Well, I had no idea people thought that way back then, but as you might expect it gets amazingly tedious after a while.

One minor thing that interested me, amidst all the numbers, was a short discussion of circumcision. The Hellenistic world was skeptical, so I expected another symbolic explanation – oddly, though, Philo falls back on health reasons rather than numerology. Of further interest is his comment that contemporary Egyptians circumcise both boys and girls, just before marriage (which is still the practice for girls, unfortunately; and it’s euphemistic to call the practice for women “circumcision” rather than “genital mutilation”). Philo, of course, is talking about Roman era Egyptians. I’ve seen quite a few mummies of Pharaonic era male Egyptians and when the relevant bits were exposed to view they were all circumcised (there’s an Old Kingdom tomb relief of a circumcision which is not only the oldest depiction of a circumcision; it’s the oldest depiction of any surgical operation). Uncircumcised male mummies are known, however. For women it’s more difficult as almost all female mummies are wrapped in a more “modest” position than male mummies; I don’t believe I’ve ever seen one with the genitalia exposed. I don’t remember any Egyptological book, even ones specifically about mummies or mummification, commenting on the existence of the practice. Thus if Philo’s claim is true it would suggest the practice was introduced late in Egyptian history and carried over into Islamic times.

Well, I got this on remainder, but it’s now available online (including, strangely enough, a Latin translation of the Greek original in the Loeb library) so there’s no particular reason to buy one. Can’t really recommend it except to collectors and the OCD’d.… (mer)