The Jewish-Alexandrian Logos mystic Steiner reads as the bridge from Greek mystery wisdom to Johannine Christianity, an initiation philosophy awaiting the deed that Christ enacts.
Philo of Alexandria (about 20 BC to 50 AD) was a Hellenistic Jewish thinker whose writings fuse Platonic philosophy, the Greek Mysteries, and the Hebrew scriptures into one doctrine of the Logos. Steiner places him at the precise historical hinge where mystery wisdom, held inwardly for centuries, prepares to become the public deed of Christianity through the Gospel of John and the Mystery of Golgotha.
In Steiner's Own Words
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.
What it Means Today
Steiner's reading of Philo as the seam between the Mysteries and the Gospel of John has a precise counterpart in modern scholarship. The Dutch classicist David T. Runia, who founded The Studia Philonica Annual in 1989 and wrote Philo in Early Christian Literature: A Survey (Van Gorcum and Fortress Press, 1993), documented exactly the transmission Steiner describes: how Philo's Logos doctrine, set aside by rabbinic Judaism, was preserved and read forward by Clement of Alexandria, Origen, and the wider Alexandrian church. Where Runia traces the textual lineage page by page, Steiner asks the inner question that Runia's method leaves open, why the Logos passes from Philo's contemplative philosophy into a historical religion centred on a single life.
Thalira synthesis: Philo names the God-man as a possibility latent in every awakened soul, while the Prologue of John names the same Logos as a deed done once in time, so Philo stands as the last initiate to describe the Word without yet beholding it become flesh. For a contemporary reader, this turns Philo from a footnote in the history of philosophy into a working test of a Steinerian distinction, the difference between wisdom that is contemplated and wisdom that is enacted. Reading Philo beside John, with Runia's survey as the documentary spine, lets that distinction be examined rather than only asserted.
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