Ancient Mysteries and Christianity

GA 87 — 8 February 1902, Berlin

14. Philo and the Intellectual Currents of His Time: The Therapeutae and Essenes

Highly Esteemed Attendees!

I tried last time to show how Philo of Alexandria introduced a new influence into Platonic philosophy and how Philo then formed the transition from the Mysteries, from Jewish mysticism to Christianity. And at the end I drew attention to the fact that both Philo and Jesus made use of parables to illustrate the hidden wisdom acquired in the mystery schools.

We have an illustrative example in the explanation Philo gives of the fourteenth chapter of the first book of Moses. There we will see how Philo goes about it. It is the story you are familiar with, which reads: “And it came to pass at that time that Kedor-Laomor king of Elam and the kings of Shinar and Ellasar and the king of the Gentiles fought with the kings of Sodom, Gomorrah, Adama, Zeboim and Bela, whose name is Zoar.” Abraham puts his opponents to flight, rescues Lot and is finally blessed by Melchizedek.

There are five kings with whom Abraham fights against the four other kings. There is a mystical meaning in this. The four kings are four vices: lust, desire, fear and sadness. The other five kings must be understood as the five senses, which are connected to them. Abraham, however, points to the Logos. When he trains his virtues, he conquers those powers victoriously. In the struggle of the five kings against the four others [Philo] sees the struggle of the Logos. He sees the power seizing the five senses. With the help of the five senses, that is wisdom and knowledge, the Logos fights against lust, desire, fear and "sadness. This human process, which can be recognized when we climb into the soul, is exactly the same as when we face the plants. It is the same lawfulness. The regularity of spiritual human creation can also be explained by the fact that man has taken these laws from human nature. The myth is not to be explained in an external way, but by the fact that it underlies the deepest mystical process.

So we see that Philo applied to the Old Testament myth for the first time something that we have come to know from the mystics and Greek popular religion. The Greek mystics certainly imagined it in the same way. We must refrain from what is unscientific in it, or what contradicts precise self-knowledge. Now, it is only a matter of saying what is going on in man. And what happens in man must be understood from the original, human forces. It is not to be understood as if it were an allegorical expression, but one feels it as an objective, spiritual lawfulness, which the spirit uses to produce the myth. One grasps the myth and behaves towards it in the same way as the naturalist behaves towards nature.

In these deepest driving forces in the human soul, which create an external existence for themselves by transforming themselves into myths, by [living out] themselves in the mythological world, so that what deeper forces have been at work in them is no longer visible in the external world, [Philo] sees the Logos, the eternal world spirit, reigning in the human spirit. And this world spirit reigning in the spirit of man, which he calls Logos, which, insofar as it lives itself out in man, is not a merely abstract conceptual world, but something directly alive, this world spirit he designates at the same time with the word “Sophia”—reason I would like to translate it—“the Word” and “the Wisdom”. These are the two components into which general wisdom is transformed into human spirit. This is the deeper truth that underlies the whole Old Testament myth. This is, as I said, what we see expressed by Philo.

So we see that what is distributed in the Greek myth among manifold figures of gods and what the Greek myth could more or less put together in the figure of Dionysus is put together by Philo in this single figure. It is the same thing that was also contained in Judaism. What was previously sought in the diversity of the world, Philo traces back to a single primordial spirit as a single divinity and calls it a “logos”.

In these few words, he says, wisdom was led in deeper souls to that which in Jewish mysticism at the time remained stuck in symbolism. It is what they called the masculine-feminine. For Philo, male logos and female wisdom is the state of consciousness that corresponds to the outer symbol I spoke of the other day. Thus Philo says: Everything that appears as spiritual in the world leads back to the God-man, to the divine in human nature.

We may say—and this is speaking in the Philonic sense, and passages could be cited for this if we delve deeper into the ancient scriptures—that nothing else reveals itself to us but the divine-human.

This is what Philo's philosophy brings to the Western intellectual world as a new component. He was aware that he had not given something of which he was the first author. Philo was aware that he had predecessors. He also gives a description of them, in which he reveals how he had predecessors. He describes not only personalities, but entire sects. From an early age, he knew the 'therapists' as hermits in various parts of Egypt and North Africa. He describes them as hermits who lived in seclusion from the world, withdrawn from all sensuality, from all worldly things, in order to awaken in themselves what Philo refers to as the God-human. They spent a large part of the week, six days, in a purely contemplative life, using the seventh day to come into contact with the world at communal meals.

The therapists practiced scriptural interpretation using Old Testament and Egyptian writings. It was by no means a different one, but the same one that we discovered in Philo as his own. He had already written "On the contemplative life" before he had reached the age of thirty. In the book "On the Contemplative Life" we can see how the therapists searched for the God-man behind every fact. However, they were treated tendentiously in the most diverse ways in Western philosophy.

Here we can see how we are often the father of the thought. First of all, they were hermits, whom the Catholic priests regard as ancestors in the most eminent sense. There has been an interest in seeing in these forerunners of Christian monks in order to be able to say that contemporaries of Jesus had already formed a kind of monasticism. Catholicism saw this writing as proof of how old monasticism was. Protestantism has sought to prove that this writing is spurious and has been foisted on Philo. This view has recently been shown to be completely erroneous. The philological investigation cannot really sort anything out; but from the use of language and from individual phrases it has been proved that it is a Philonic writing.

There can be no doubt that we are dealing with a truly Philonic writing. However, this cannot be proof of the existence of Christian monasticism. There is only talk of hermit-therapists. This way of life was certainly the cause of the development of certain ascetic trends in Christianity. But they must not be regarded as institutions of Christ.

Thus we have become acquainted with an entire sect from which Philo received his inspiration. Just in the writing [by Mead] on the Gnostics, which has now appeared and which contains a translation of the writing "On the Contemplative Life", you can read how this has been proven by English [philology]. But even in Germany there has long been no doubt about the authenticity of this writing. If you read it, you will see that Philo describes a sect in the Therapeutae that comes close to what Philo himself taught.

If we want to clarify the difference between the two, then we can say that Philo is more philosophical and the therapists are more religious. Philo's approach is more geared towards translating the esoteric interpretation of the [Old] Testament into philosophical language. Just as Philo interpreted the first book of Moses, so could a follower of the Therapeutic sect have interpreted it. But Philo goes beyond this by showing that one has a right to resort to such a view. This soul is given power in no other way than by the fact that the God-man is in the human being itself. Thus a second divine is added to the hidden divine, to the deepest part of the spirit of the world in Philo.

We cannot yet say that Plato has a clear awareness of how his world of ideas relates to the divine. In Philo, however, we find precise philosophical thoughts about this. The divine, the infinite in every direction, is that which can never be exhausted. It is that which man can look up to, but which can also completely enter the human soul. But only the God-man, wisdom, can do this. And that is what lives itself out in the human soul, and that is what lived itself out in the content of the Old Testament.

From there, Philo comes to the conclusion that the divine-human is expressed in the human soul, that there are, as it were, two divinities that are accessible to human beings, related to human beings, and that there is, in essence, a hidden, infinite divinity. There he comes to the conclusion that where the appearance of Jehovah is spoken of, it is not the infinite God himself, but the divine-human that he has discovered. Thus he arrives at a kind of personification of the divine where the divine appears to Moses in the form of the burning bush.

If I were to turn the divine-human that appeared to Moses - Philo said to himself - into the unattainable divine, into that which can never be exhausted, I would not be able to comprehend anything, since the deepest knowledge can only be guessed at. In order not to drag it down into the earthly-worldly, in order to leave it the divine, even though it cannot be penetrated, Philo contrasts the highest divine with the divine-human. And he contrasts this divine-human with the "Father as Son". He therefore says: "Wherever the divine appeared in the Old Testament, it was the Son. Wherever God gives help or punishment, for Philo it was the "Son of God who intervened. He is the one who only now becomes comprehensible to man for those who look deeper into the structure of the world.

In the [Logos], according to Philo's view, the Jews understood the mediator between the Father and the world. Now, however, humanity has become spiritually imbued with him. Philo regarded such sects as that of the therapists as the nurturing place of human personalities who wanted to ascend to that elevated human entity in which the God-man within them could come into existence.

So Philo regards the life of the therapists as a preparation for the appearance of the Son of God in human nature. He regards the life that the therapists aspired to as one that accomplishes the immediate influx of the divine nature into the sensual nature.

Something similar happens in another sect. Over in Asia - you can read about it yourself in Philo's writings - you will find the same view among the Essenes as among the therapists. This sect, which Philo visited and, as he himself admits, learned from it the interpretation of Scripture as he practiced it, was just like the sect of the therapists, it endeavored to seek out the divine-human in the Old Testament myth. This Logos, which was destined to do so and which sought to live itself out in the human, was to take shape, to really live in the human spirit. And this teaching lived in the sect of the Essenes two or three centuries before the birth of Christ.

The therapists are doctors of the soul. If we research the origin of the name, we find a sect that derives its name from "healing", and this healing means something like "being a physician of the soul". These therapists were those who wanted to raise the soul to a higher level. They were of the opinion that the sensual is something that leads away from God, something that causes illness, something against which man must undergo a healing process. The therapists were people who wanted to free people from the sensual. It was the same with the Essenes. They had a kind of communist state. There is evidence to see in the Essenes the same thing that the therapists were, and it can be shown that the Chaldean word "Essene" means nothing other than "healer". But that is less important.

According to the allusions in Josephus, Philo and Pliny, however, we can say that the teaching of the Essenes is in fact exactly the same as that of the therapists. Only in their external life did the Therapeutae, the hermits and the Essenes differ. There was a communist state near the Dead Sea. There was a complete community of goods and a strictly regulated, ascetic life. Describing the external form of government has little significance for the course of spiritual life. What is particularly important is that those who wanted to be accepted had to commit themselves through the so-called great vow: firstly, to actually submit to everything that was demanded of the Essenes so that they could ascend to the highest level; secondly, not to betray anything outwardly of that by which the Essenes came to the top.

This great vow makes a person an actual [Nazirite], as they were called in the Essene community. At least two centuries before the birth of Christ, we are dealing with views that we cannot characterize in any other way [...], because Philo would undoubtedly not seek evidence for his doctrine in the teachings of the Essenes. He takes for granted something that the Essenes themselves have from the Old Testament myths. He would not take anything for granted if it were not the case that the Essenes would have had the same basic view as Philo did.

Philo lived around the same time as the life of Jesus of Nazareth. The same teachings, the doctrine of the incarnate Logos, the doctrine of the mediator between God the Father and the world, which Philo himself taught, were also found among the Essenes. They existed among the Essenes for two centuries, undoubtedly more than a century before the birth of Christ. We can assume nothing other than that this teaching came to them in a roundabout way via Egypt. Any other possibility is out of the question. No matter how much effort has been made to establish that such an interpretation of the Scriptures emerged from Judaism, we are actually dealing with nothing other than the transfer of the Greek mystical way of thinking to the consideration of the Old Testament by individual sects when we consider the entire view of the Essenes.

The reason for this is that Greek philosophy arrived there by way of a detour via Platonic philosophy via the School of Alexandria in northern Egypt and that this philosophy led to the extension of Greek methods to the Old Testament. This led to a view that can serve us as confirmation of this process, a view that already prevailed before Philo. They believed that the whole of Greek philosophy was nothing other than a process of development that emerged in particular from Greek-Jewish philosophy. Plato is seen as a disciple of Moses and the prophets. They transformed the myths of the Old Testament into Greek myths; and now Greek philosophy is related to them in such a way that it is nothing but something that is derived from the Old Testament.

This view prevailed in Alexandria. Philo in particular advocated it. The esoteric method was then applied to the Old Testament, in particular to Pythagorean philosophy. Plato also dealt with the latter. They had to go through long trials. This method led to therapists introducing similar methods. The actual [esoteric] content of the Jewish myth was found through the fact that Greek mysticism was led to seek out this content. The actual esoteric core of the Old Testament myth was sought through them. This is why the Essenes are a sect that practises esotericism.

It is the Logos who actually represents God in the world. The Logos is the mediator between the Father and human beings. The Logos is the Son of God. This is Essene doctrine. Philo merely deepened this doctrine. He was the philosopher of this doctrine. He admits that he found this teaching, that it was already there. Among the Essenes and therapists, such views were already commonplace centuries before our era. There must have been someone who was looking for the [divine-human] in the Old Testament. Great teachers lived within the Essene community who taught them this ancient worldview, that the All-Spirit lives itself out in the human Logos. Fulfilling oneself [with the Logos] is what man has to strive for. This was what the Essene sect wanted and what formed the core of the Essene sect's deepest aspirations.

So we must assume from the external testimony a great personality whose name could not have come down to us. He could not have been named because every Essene only reproduced within his Essene community, only within his own brotherhood, what it was all about in the deepest sense. The actual penetration of the deeper core was only practiced in the Essene community. Taking it out into the world held back the vow. We may assume that there was a founder, that he summarized all mystical interpretations of the deepest essence of mythology in a central figure of the God-human Logos, and that he taught that this Logos is that on which all knowledge, all truth depends. It must have been a conviction of the Essene community that all the wisdom of man is worthless if this Logos does not permeate this wisdom.

It is a folly of naturalists and a presumption to want to know God directly. The only way in which man can look at God is this: "I and the Father are one." This realization is the deepest core of the Essene doctrine. This is how we see the deepest spiritual core of esoteric Christianity, roughly outlined, taking shape in the Essene community two centuries before the birth of Christ.

The need for a savior was present within the Jewish community in the most diverse ways. We see that teachers of the Old Testament, alongside this view, alongside this "Greekness", sensed something from the Jewish writers. We therefore find allusions to a Greekization of the Essenes and certain schools. Jewish writers speak of Greekness with shyness and disgust. Individual schools and the Essene community in particular were aware that something foreign had been absorbed. In this Judaism, a lively need developed for a Messiah who could free the Jews from the terrible political situation in which they found themselves. We must imagine that alongside the Essene esotericism, there was also an exoteric interpretation [of the Old Testament] all around, which was understood to mean that a Messiah was to come who would redeem the Jewish people from the weakness and shame into which they had fallen in worldly life. This view ran parallel to that of the Essenes.

If we follow the circumstances closely, we see that all the conditions were present in Judaism for a good reception of such personalities who were able to free the Jews from the situation they had got into. It was easy to turn them into messiahs. The most diverse personalities are seen as such messiahs. There is not enough time to illustrate this relationship with the personality of John the Baptist and other personalities. I only wanted to draw attention to the fact that those who lived within the Essene community were no longer able to uphold this vow when Philo had made this teaching the basis of his philosophy and something of it leaked out. Now it was no longer possible to close oneself off. Now everything was open to those who sought the path in a philosophical way. Now you could no longer be an Essene just by joining the Essene community.

If we want to understand the emergence of Christianity itself, we have to realize that something essentially new was created through the Philonic philosophy, through this act of acceptance. People were equipped with new tongues of fire, so to speak. Now it was possible to speak again as it had been spoken in the ancient Greek mysteries, namely to represent in myth what had presented itself to them as an [inner] experience through [the description of] external sensual facts. They were able to learn this through the currents that developed from Greek philosophy.

Protagoras believed that all people share a sense of virtue, morality and social coexistence, but that only a few people have the ability to ascend to the highest levels. This is why in Platonic times this is represented by the myth that once only gods lived on earth as fire. Animals and humans no longer had the ability to live in fire. Therefore, they had no possibility of life. That is why Prometheus was given the task of implanting life into them. However, Epimetheus transferred everything to the animals, so that nothing was left for humans.

[Prometheus] gave fire to mankind. That means the gift of the arts, the gift of wisdom. I think this legend mythically illustrates an inner process. This shows us the way in which the legend is continued. The abilities are distributed, one has more, the other less. Hermes was sent with the ability to distinguish between good and evil. They all have this in the same way. The Greek philosopher expressed inner human facts of the soul in myths.

The person who considered himself capable of doing this was the apostle John. The most important thing for us is given in his Gospel - despite modern theological research. He gives us - from the standpoint of [Philonic] philosophy according to practical esoteric methods - the life story of the God-man. He translates the inner God-man for us. He himself knows the teachings of the Essenes and he gives us what he learned in the Essene community. What he could not say openly, he gives us in mythical form. He shows us how the Christian idea grew out of the philosophy of Philo, the Therapeutae and the Essene sect. The Gospel of John] has been regarded as the last, as the least certain. But that is not tenable.

We shall see, if we compare it with the other Gospels, that we must say that it presents to us the sacred legend as it must have been formed. But the one who was initiated in the deepest sense into the teaching of the Essene community, who was therefore able to let [the] idea of the God-man grow out of [the] Logos made flesh, who was able to explain this, was John. Therefore it also begins with the words: "In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and a God was the Word" and so on. These are ideas that form the basis of Philonic philosophy. The idea of the Father and what can be associated with it, the Logos made flesh. The words: "The Word became flesh and dwelt among us" cannot be interpreted in any other way than that he had the Essene concept and was aware of the significance of the Essene doctrine.

There are all sorts of external reasons why it can be maintained that [the Gospel of John] is a later product. But basically the whole tenor, the whole presentation of the Gospel, shows that it grew directly out of the deepest conception of Christianity. This is also shown by the very modest way in which John [concludes the Gospel by saying that he was present at these things, that he was, so to speak, an ear and eye witness, but that he is not interested in communicating what he personally experienced, what was apparent, but the deeper core, that is, what was taught in the Essene community. Therefore, we can understand the matter in such a way that we find an esoteric Christianity centuries before Christ and that we have the exoteric interpretation of it in the Gospel of John.

Question answer:

Philo did not know Jesus. There is nothing about it in his writings. Hints can be found in his book Quod omnis probus liber. These allusions say - they are quite clear - that the "what or "how he taught was common practice among the Essenes. Nowhere is there any mention of any personality whom he knew as a contemporary. On the other hand, there is a continuous tradition, apart from internal reasons. This completely different way of explaining the Old Testament. This leads back to certain personalities, with regard to whom it must be conceded that they must have lived before our era. I think there is an ongoing tradition. This is most beautifully developed among the Druze people. They have a peculiar kind of religion, a form of religion that contains all these things that can be described as essential Christianity. - In addition, this people has also absorbed a certain shade of Mohammedanism. - In this sect there is a legend of Christ, who lived at about the time of the [gap in transcript] according to this legend. This is a view of the Druze. But we have no historical basis at all, apart from the well-known passage from Josephus, for the assumption of a Jesus of Nazareth in the years 1 to 33. The Gospel of John cannot be taken in any other way, otherwise it becomes what it has become for fifty years with Protestant theologians, a complete nothing. The first three Gospels then represent only a sacred legend. I would like to elaborate on the origin of the Gospel of John and Philo. One might think that Philo takes a polemical stance against this new worldview. But no, the new doctrine does not appear in such a way that he, as a philosopher, would have felt compelled to fight it. They are based on what later became Christianity. The life of John, Moses' view of the creation of the world, also some elements from Persian, influences from Judaism, his demonology, which is ancient Jewish. Many things can also be traced back to Persian influence.