know from Philo himself that in his time in Egypt, on the shores of Lake Mareotis [Mariut], there was a community of Jewish monks, the Therapeutae. The picture that he gives of their life is remarkable. It is a valuable document about contemporary Jewish mysticism.
The houses of the society thus collected are exceedingly simple . . . They are neither near together . . . nor yet at a great distance . . . In each house there is a consecrated room which is called a sanctuary or closet [μοναστήριον], and closeted in this they are initiated into the mysteries of the sanctified life . . . They keep the memory of God alive and never forget it . . . Twice every day they pray, at dawn and at eventide; at sunrise they pray for a fine bright day, fine and bright in the true sense of the heavenly daylight which they pray may fill their minds. At sunset they ask that the soul may be wholly relieved from the press of the senses and the object of sense, and sitting where she is consistory and council chamber to herself, pursue the quest of truth. The interval between early morning and evening is spent entirely in spiritual exercise. They read the Holy Scriptures and seek wisdom from their ancestral philosophy by taking it as an allegory, since they think that the words of the literal text are symbols of something whose hidden nature is revealed by studying the underlying meaning. They have also writings of men of old, the founders of their way of thinking, who left many memorials of the form used in allegorical interpretation, and these they take as a kind of archetype and imitate . . . (De Vita Contemplativa, 24–29).9
The account of their celebration of the Passover eve, which is the night before (προέορτος) the great feast, that is to say of the seven weeks of Pentecost (De Vita Contemplativa, 65) is quite remarkable.
So then they assemble, white-robed and with faces in which cheerfulness is combined with the outmost seriousness, but before they recline, at a signal from a member of the Rota, which is the name commonly given to those who perform these services . . . Their eyes and hands lifted up to Heaven . . . they pray to God that their feasting may be acceptable and proceed as He would have it. After the prayers the seniors recline according to the order of their admission . . . The feast is shared by women also, most of them aged virgins, who have kept their chastity . . . of their own free will in their ardent yearning for wisdom. The order of reclining is so apportioned that the men sit by themselves on the right and the women by themselves on the left . . . [The couches] are plank beds of the common kinds of wood, covered with quite cheap strewings of native papyrus . . . In this sacred banquet there is, as I have said, no slave, but the services are rendered by free men who perform their tasks as attendants . . . No wine is brought during those days but only water of the brightest and the clearest . . . The table too is kept pure from the flesh of animals; the food laid on it is loaves of bread with salt as a seasoning . . . (De Vita Contemplativa, 66–71, 73).10
Moreover, this is their ordinary sustenance. They only take it after sundown, having fasted all day (De Vita Contemplativa 34). There is no Passover lamb, because they never touch meat.
The President of the company, when a general silence is established . . . discusses some question arising in the Holy Scriptures or solves one that has been propounded by someone else . . . His audience listens with ears pricked up and eyes fixed on him always in exactly the same posture, signifying . . . difficulty by a gentle movement of the head and by pointing with a fingertip of the right hand. . . . Then the President rises and sings a hymn [ὑμνός] composed as an address to God, either a new one of his own composition or an old one by poets of an earlier day who have left behind them hymns in many measures and melodies . . . After him all the others take their turn as they are arranged . . . When everyone has finished his hymn, the young men bring in the tables mentioned a little above on which is set the truly purified meal . . . After the supper they hold the sacred vigil [παννυχίς] . . . They rise up all together and standing in the middle of the refectory form themselves first into two choirs, one of men and one of women . . . sometimes chanting together, sometimes taking up the harmony antiphonally [ἀντιφώνοι], hands and feet keeping time in accompaniment, . . . and rapt with enthusiasm reproduce . . . sometimes the wheeling and counter-wheeling of a choric dance . . . Thus they continue until dawn drunk with the drunkenness in which there is no shame . . . (De Vita Contemplativa, 80, 81, 83–84, see also 29, 88).11
Philo sees in that “a copy of the choir set up of old beside the Red Sea in honor of the wonders there wrought . . . so filled with ecstasy both men and women, that forming a single choir they sang hymns of thanksgiving to God their Savior, the men led by the prophet Moses and the women by the prophetess Miriam” (De Vita Contemplativa, 85, 87).12 This connection perhaps clarifies the somewhat disconcerting Passover dances. Indeed we know by the Mishnah and already by Jeremiah 31: 3–5 that young Jews dressed in white, danced on the two great feasts of Passover and Tabernacles. Philo’s narrative gives us a form of those Passover dances, surely inspired by the choruses of Greek tragedy.
All these details show that Philo had direct knowledge of the Therapeutae. But a wonderful confidence confirms this:
For many a time I have forsaken [καταλιπών] friends and kinsfolk and country and come into a wilderness [ἐρημία], to give my attention to some subject demanding contemplation, and deriving no advantage from doing so, but my mind, scattered or bitten by passion has gone off to matters of the contrary kind. Sometimes, on the other hand, amid a vast throng I have a collected mind. God has dispersed the crowd that besets the soul and taught me that a favorable and unfavorable condition are not brought about by difference of place, but by God who moves and leads the car of the soul in whatever way He pleases (Legum Allegoriae, II, 85).13
I set aside the testimony about spiritual experience these lines contain. Two things appear in them beyond doubt. The first is that Philo did not ordinarily live away from crowds, and thus that his life ran its course in the midst of them in Alexandria. The second is that he sometimes withdrew into “solitude.” Now he describes this solitude in the same terms as that of the Therapeutae. “They flee without a backward glance and leave their brothers, their children, their wives, their parents, the wide circle of their kinsfolk, the groups of friends around them, the fatherlands in which they were born and reared . . . And they do not migrate into another city . . . Instead of this they pass their days outside the walls pursuing solitude (ἐρημία)” (De Vita Contemplativa, 18–20).14 Accordingly, it seems quite plausible that Philo spent periods of time among the monks of Lake Mareotis. The exact details that he provides about the Therapeutae confirm that.
While these stays may have been prolonged during his youth, Philo later returned only from time to time. He could not absent himself from the tasks imposed by his position within the Jewish Community at Alexandria. On the one hand, his whole output demonstrates that his life was devoted to commenting on the books of Moses, the Law. The custom of interpreting the Law every Sabbath first developed in Palestine itself. The Gospels give us examples. These commentaries were the origin of the first Christian preaching. This practice spread to Alexandria. Philo alludes to these weekly homilies on several occasions.15
As Wolfson has noted, it is quite plausible that Philo gave such lessons: “. . . his writings have the form of sermons or homilies on verses or topics selected from Scripture.”16 The oratorical character of certain passages is evident. Later, St. Ambrose writes homilies inspired by Philo’s that are subsequently assembled in continuous treatises. In particular, the collection of Philo’s works constituting Legum Allegoriae can be included in this the literary genre.17 They belong to the Haggadic type of moral homily
