Philo of Alexandria

English

Both the breath and the light were counted worthy of a privilege: the one he named God's, because breath is the most life-giving thing, and God is the cause of life; and of the light he says that it is surpassingly beautiful (Gen 1:4). For the intelligible is more radiant and more full of brightness than the visible by as much as the sun, I think, is than darkness, and day than night, and the mind, the leader of the whole soul, than the eyes of the body.

Draft English (Claude), awaiting Wilson · cc-by

Greek

Philo, De opificio mundi 30 (Cohn-Wendland i. 9) · first1k-greek

Notes

The question this crux is built on, asked as a question about privilege rather than about identity. Philo notices that of everything in the inventory only two things are given something extra: the breath is called God's and the light is called beautiful. Then he asks why, and the answer for the breath is functional, not personal: pneuma is named God's because breath is the most life-giving of things and God is the cause of life. That is neither the targums' wind from before the Lord nor the Latin bench's third person of the Trinity; it is a reason drawn from what breath does. Augustine at Confessions 13 asks Philo's exact question, why only the Holy Spirit was borne above the waters, and answers from the doctrine of the Trinity. The other half of the sentence belongs to K8: the light of the first day is praised because the intelligible outshines the visible as the mind outshines the eyes, which is the comparison the whole Latin argument about a spiritual light is trying to make and never states this cleanly.

Threads

• → parallel · Augustine
  The same question, seven centuries and one theology apart. Augustine asks why only the Holy Spirit was borne above the waters, and answers from the Trinity and from the weight of love that carries a thing to its place. Philo asks why only the breath and the light were given something extra in the verse, and answers that breath is the most life-giving of things and God is the cause of life. Both are reading the verse's asymmetry as deliberate; neither has read the other; and Philo's answer is available to a reader with no doctrine of persons at all.
• → contests · Targum Onkelos
  Onkelos renders the ruach as a wind from before the Lord, which takes the divine name in the verse as a genitive of origin and removes any question of the spirit's status. Philo keeps the genitive and reads it as a genitive of cause: the breath is called God's because breath gives life and God gives life. Two Jewish readings, four centuries apart, of the same two words, and they go in opposite directions from the same grammatical instinct, that of God is doing work in the sentence.
• → parallel · Bereshit Rabbah
  The midrash makes the hovering spirit the spirit of the Messiah, hovering over the face of the waters by the merit of repentance. Philo makes it the most life-giving thing, named God's for that reason. Both bench readings decline the plain meteorological sense that Onkelos takes, and both do so by asking what pneuma or ruach is for rather than what it is.
• → parallel · Babylonian Talmud
  The Bavli says the light the Holy One created on the first day was such that a man could see from one end of the world to the other, and that seeing what the generations would do he stored it away for the righteous. Philo says the intelligible outshines the visible as the mind outshines the eyes of the body. Both are saying that the first light is out of proportion to any use the world has for it; the Bavli answers by removing it from the world, Philo by putting it in a different order of being.