Five treatises of Philo of Alexandria’s allegorical commentary on Genesis stand together as a single sustained meditation on the war within the human soul. Legum Allegoriae, Books I, II, and III, De Cherubim, De Sacrificiis Abelis et Caini, Quod Deterius Potiori Insidiari Soleat, and De Posteritate Caini move in sequence through Genesis 2:1–4:26, tracing the creation of the mind, its seduction by pleasure, its expulsion from Eden, and the birth of two rival dispositions in Cain and Abel. Philo composed these works during a season of acute pressure on the Jewish community of Roman Alexandria, when Greek civic intellectuals mocked Moses as a provincial lawgiver unworthy of philosophical respect. Philo answered by unveiling the Septuagint as a repository of the highest wisdom, reading every clause of Genesis as a coded description of the soul’s movement toward, or away from, God.
The result is a body of exegesis that is by turns brilliant and unsettling. Philo rightly diagnoses the self-love that corrupts human worship. He rightly insists that no creature owns anything it has not received as gift. Yet he does this by dissolving the concrete history of Genesis into an allegory of interior states, so that Cain, Abel, Eden, and exile become mental postures rather than events belonging to a real family in real space and time. This post examines the five treatises in turn, tests Philo’s allegorical harvest against the plain sense of the Old and New Testaments, traces how Justin Martyr, Clement of Alexandria, Origen, Ambrose of Milan, and Augustine received and corrected his method, and asks what a Christian believer today should carry away from this remarkable but ultimately incomplete portrait of the soul.
Literary Backgrounds
Philo’s five treatises belong to a distinct genre: the Alexandrian tradition of textual problems and solutions, ζητήματα καὶ λύσεις, fused with the diatribe style of Hellenistic philosophical instruction. Rather than narrating history, Philo takes the Koine Septuagint text of Genesis as a chain of textual hooks, λήμματα, from which he constructs an interior drama. The commentary unfolds in three literary movements. Legum Allegoriae I–III reads Genesis 2:1–3:19 as the architecture of the soul: the creation of the incorporeal Mind, νοῦς, its formation as an earthly mind from dust and breath, and its collapse when Sense-Perception, αἴσθησις, is beguiled by Pleasure, ἡδονή, embodied in the serpent. De Cherubim and De Sacrificiis shift to Genesis 3:24–4:4 and the birth of two opposing mindsets from the fallen soul: Cain, the self-loving mind, φίλαυτος, who claims ownership of his own thought and success, and Abel, the God-loving mind, φιλόθεος, who refers every good gift back to its true Source. Quod Deterius and De Posteritate complete the arc with Genesis 4:7–26, depicting the inevitable clash between sophistry and truth and Cain’s exile as unending restlessness, σάλος, contrasted with the renewal signified by Seth and Enos.
Philo’s literary voice is that of a commanding spiritual instructor. He interrogates the text with sharp rhetorical questions—asking, for instance, how anyone could go out from the presence of the One who fills all things—forcing the reader away from a literal reading of Cain’s exile toward an allegorical one. He builds sustained arguments on details of the Septuagint that differ from the Hebrew text, most notably Genesis 4:7, where the LXX reads “if you offer rightly but do not divide rightly, have you not sinned,” a phrase Philo treats as a philosophical statement about the moral necessity of rightly distinguishing what belongs to God from what belongs to the self. He also practices etymological allegory throughout: Cain’s name signifies “possession,” Abel’s signifies “one who refers all things to God,” and Seth’s signifies “resuscitation.” Every character becomes a type rather than a historical person, and the entire commentary becomes less a record of Genesis than a manual for the soul’s ascent.
Theological and Ethical Analysis
At the heart of these five treatises lies Philo’s central ethical contrast between self-love, φίλαυτος, and God-love, φιλόθεος. Cain represents the mind that attributes its reasoning, its achievements, and its very existence to itself. Abel represents the mind that recognizes God as the sole Cause of every good thing. Philo dramatizes this contrast unforgettably in De Sacrificiis, where Pleasure appears as a harlot glittering with artificial ornament and false promises of ease, while Virtue appears as a noble, free-born woman attended by modesty, truth, and justice, offering a life of sacred labor rather than hollow indulgence. Philo insists that labor is the root of all virtue and the enemy of laziness, just as light is the coadjutor the eye requires to see.
This ethical insight extends into Philo’s treatment of the two sacrifices. Cain offers ordinary fruits “after some days,” delaying his gratitude and treating God as an afterthought to his own self-sufficiency. Abel offers the firstborn of his flock and their fat, promptly and according to divine order. Philo reads this contrast as proof that true worship begins with the confession that God, not the self, is the origin of every gift—a confession he grounds explicitly in De Sacrificiis 55, where he declares that all things in the cosmos, and the cosmos itself, are the gift and bounty and grace, χάρισμα, of God. This is a genuinely biblical instinct, echoing the Hebrew concept of covenant grace, חֶסֶד.
But Philo’s allegorical method carries a theological cost. In De Cherubim, he interprets the cherubim guarding Eden not as heavenly beings but as symbols of God’s creative and royal powers, and the flaming sword as the unceasing motion of the divine Logos, λόγος—an impersonal, dividing instrument rather than a personal agent. In Legum Allegoriae I, he divides humanity into two races: an incorporeal “heavenly man” made after God’s image and an “earthly man” formed from dust, treating Genesis 1:27 and 2:7 as descriptions of two separate creations rather than two aspects of a single, unified human being. This Middle Platonic dualism, however psychologically suggestive, flattens the goodness Scripture ascribes to embodied, physical existence, and it substitutes the abstraction of “mind ascending toward the incorporeal” for the concrete hope of bodily redemption that the biblical narrative everywhere anticipates.
Old Testament Analysis and Critique
Genesis 2:1–4:26 was given to Israel within the Mosaic covenant to reveal the true origin of the cosmos, the holiness of יהוה, the historical entrance of sin and death into the world, and the necessity of covenant fidelity over against the self-deifying idolatries of the surrounding nations. Read on its own terms, the passage teaches divine sovereignty and goodness in an ordered creation free of moral evil; covenantal responsibility placed on humanity as image-bearers accountable to God’s commands; the unfolding of two seedlines, the line of rebellion typified by Cain and the line of promise typified by Abel, Seth, and Enos; and the grace of a redemptive promise given even in the midst of judgment, when God announces in Genesis 3:15 that the woman’s offspring, זֶרַע, will crush the serpent.
Philo’s allegorical harvest touches real ethical soil here—his exposure of Cain’s self-love and his insistence on divine grace as the fountain of all human virtue are genuine points of contact with the text. But his method departs from Genesis at a fundamental level. Where the Hebrew narrative insists on real events unfolding in real space and time, Philo interiorizes the Fall into a timeless psychological collapse: the serpent becomes Pleasure, Eve becomes Sense-Perception, and Adam becomes Reason, so that the Fall is simply what happens whenever pleasure overpowers reason in any soul, at any time. This eliminates the historical particularity that Genesis insists upon—that a first man and woman, in a real garden, made a real choice with real consequences for their real descendants. The Hebrew text does not offer a symbol for a recurring inner event; it records the entrance of sin into human history through one act of disobedience, an act with unrepeatable, world-altering consequences that only a genuinely historical Redeemer could reverse.
New Testament Analysis and Critique
Philo’s treatises share striking vocabulary with the New Testament—λόγος, χάρις, πίστις, δίκαιος—yet at every point of contact the apostolic witness transforms what Philo leaves abstract into what is historically accomplished. Three points of comparison make this unmistakable.
First, the Logos. In De Cherubim 27–30, Philo’s λόγος is the flaming sword, the dividing power, the cosmic instrument mediating between the transcendent God and the material world—impersonal by nature. John’s Gospel proclaims the opposite: καὶ ὁ λόγος σὰρξ ἐγένετο καὶ ἐσκήνωσεν ἐν ἡμῖν, “and the Word became flesh and tabernacled among us” (John 1:14). The verb ἐγένετο is aorist—perfective aspect, remoteness—presenting the incarnation not as an ongoing philosophical principle but as a single, completed, historically remote event: the Word became flesh, once, decisively. The following verb, ἐσκήνωσεν, likewise aorist, presents the Word’s dwelling among humanity as a whole, bounded historical act, not a perpetual metaphysical arrangement. Philo’s Logos never does this. It divides; it never assumes σάρξ.
Second, the two Adams. In Legum Allegoriae I.31, Philo distinguishes two races of men: the heavenly, incorporeal man made after God’s image, wholly unparticipating in earthly substance, and the earthly man formed from dust—and in Philo’s ordering, the incorporeal archetype has logical and ontological priority. Paul reverses this exact sequence in 1 Corinthians 15:45–47: ἀλλ᾽ οὐ πρῶτον τὸ πνευματικὸν ἀλλὰ τὸ ψυχικόν, ἔπειτα τὸ πνευματικόν, “but the spiritual is not first, but the natural, then the spiritual.” Paul insists that the first man was ἐκ γῆς χοϊκός, “from the earth, made of dust,” and only the second man, the risen Christ, is ἐξ οὐρανοῦ, “from heaven.” Philo’s Platonic ordering places the incorporeal first; Paul’s apostolic correction places the historical, dust-formed Adam first, and reserves “heavenly” for the resurrected Christ who is the ground of a genuinely future hope, not a pre-existent archetype.
Third, Abel’s sacrifice. In De Sacrificiis, Abel’s offering pleases God because his mind intuitively perceives God as the sole Cause of virtue—an internal disposition, φιλόθεος. Hebrews 11:4 grounds Abel’s righteousness differently: Πίστει πλείονα θυσίαν Ἅβελ παρὰ Κάϊν προσήνεγκεν τῷ θεῷ, “By faith Abel offered to God a greater sacrifice than Cain.” The verb προσήνεγκεν is aorist, perfective aspect, remoteness—presenting Abel’s offering as a single, completed, historical act of trust in what God had promised, not an internal recognition available to every reflective mind at every time. The passage continues, δι᾽ ἧς ἔτι λαλεῖ, “through which he still speaks,” using the present tense λαλεῖ, imperfective aspect and proximity, bringing Abel’s ancient testimony into vivid nearness for the reader even now. The contrast between the remote, completed aorist of his historical act of faith and the near, ongoing present of his continuing testimony captures exactly what Philo’s timeless psychology cannot: a real event, once accomplished, whose voice still reaches across history into the present moment.
Benefits of Reading and Implications for Christian Belief and Practice
Philo’s five treatises are not inspired Scripture, but they offer real benefit to the discerning Christian reader. They illuminate the precise intellectual world in which the earliest church proclaimed its message, revealing how Hellenistic Jewish thinkers wrestled with Genesis using the same vocabulary the apostles would later fill with new, historical content. Philo’s diagnosis of self-love, φίλαυτος, functions as a genuine mirror for self-examination, exposing the subtle pride that treats God’s gifts as self-generated achievements. His insistence that no creature can offer God anything God has not first given anchors worship in grace rather than merit. And by contrast, reading Philo sharpens canonical discernment: where he dissolves history into psychology, Scripture insists that creation, the Fall, the incarnation, and the resurrection are concrete events, not recurring metaphors.
The early church understood this balance well. Clement of Alexandria and Origen drew directly on Philo’s psychological reading of Cain and Abel to defend the spiritual coherence of the Old Testament against Gnostic opponents who dismissed the material world as the work of an inferior deity, but both Fathers anchored the divine λόγος not in an abstract cosmic instrument but in the personal, pre-existent Son who truly assumed σάρξ. Ambrose of Milan’s De Cain et Abel borrows extensively from De Sacrificiis and Quod Deterius, retaining Philo’s contrast between self-centered and God-centered offering, but Ambrose redirects that contrast into a pastoral call to faith, πίστις, in Christ, insisting that Abel’s blood pointed typologically toward the blood Christ shed on the cross. Augustine of Hippo, in De Civitate Dei, went furthest of all, explicitly rejecting Philo’s Middle Platonic dualism—the pre-existence of a heavenly man and an earthly man as two separate creations—and reinterpreting Cain and Abel as the historical founders of two cities, earthly and heavenly, locked in a real conflict that runs the length of redemptive history. Justin Martyr, writing earlier still, likewise insisted against the philosophers of his day that the Logos was no abstract principle but the very one who spoke through the prophets and at last became flesh in Jesus Christ. Together these Fathers model exactly the right posture: appreciation for Philo’s moral acuity, joined to an unyielding insistence that allegory must serve, never dissolve, the historical reality of God’s saving acts.
Application to Christian Life Today
Every believer carries within them the temptation Philo names so precisely: the quiet assumption that our discipline, our insight, or our virtue is somehow self-generated rather than received. Cain’s sin was not merely murder; it was the deeper conviction, expressed in his very name, “possession,” that his life, his labor, and his worship belonged to him rather than to God. Examine your own gratitude. Is it prompt, like Abel’s firstfruits offered without delay, or is it, like Cain’s, an afterthought offered “after some days,” once self-interest has already taken its portion? Philo is right that this self-love is real and corrosive. But Philo cannot cure it, because his gospel is finally an invitation to ascend by the strength of your own contemplation, back to an abstract, incorporeal Logos who never touched dust, never bled, and never rose.
The true Logos did more than divide creation from the eye of the mind. He became flesh, ὁ λόγος σὰρξ ἐγένετο, and tabernacled among us. He did not remain a heavenly archetype untouched by dust; he entered dust, bore its curse, and rose bodily as the true Second Man, the firstfruits of a resurrection that Abel’s blood could only foreshadow. If you have never trusted him, know this: your worth was never something you had to possess or achieve, and it never will be. Every good gift, every ounce of grace, every possibility of new life comes from outside yourself, freely given in Jesus Christ, who died for sinners and rose bodily on the third day. Turn from self-reliance, as Philo rightly says you must, but turn all the way—not to the ascent of your own mind, but to the historical Savior who came down, took on flesh, and now, like Abel, still speaks.
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