than before on all
who worshipped the God of the Jews.[110]

The Judaism just portrayed, developed itself, under the influence of the
Greek culture with which it came in contact, into a kind of
Cosmopolitanism. It divested itself, as religion, of all national forms,
and exhibited itself as the most perfect expression of that "natural"
religion which the stoics had disclosed. But in proportion as it was
enlarged and spiritualised to a universal religion for humanity, it
abandoned what was most peculiar to it, and could not compensate for
that loss by the assertion of the thesis that the Old Testament is the
oldest and most reliable source of that natural religion, which in the
traditions of the Greeks had only witnesses of the second rank. The
vigour and immediateness of the religious feeling was flattened down to
a moralism, the barrenness of which drove some Jews even into Gnosis,
mysticism and asceticism.[111]

2. The Jewish Alexandrian philosophy of religion, of which Philo gives
us the clearest conception,[112] is the scientific theory which
corresponded to this religious conception. The theological system which
Philo, in accordance with the example of others, gave out as the Mosaic
system revealed by God, and proved from the Old Testament by means of
the allegoric exegetic method, is essentially identical with the system
of Stoicism, which had been mixed with Platonic elements and had lost
its Pantheistic materialistic impress. The fundamental idea from which
Philo starts is a Platonic one; the dualism of God and the world, spirit
and matter. The idea of God itself is therefore abstractly and
negatively conceived (God, the real substance which is not finite), and
has nothing more in common with the Old Testament conception. The
possibility, however, of being able to represent God as acting on
matter, which as the finite is the non-existent, and therefore the evil,
is reached, with the help of the Stoic [Greek: logos] as working powers
and of the Platonic doctrine of archetypal ideas, and in outward
connection with the Jewish doctrine of angels and the Greek doctrine of
demons, by the introduction of intermediate spiritual beings which, as
personal and impersonal powers proceeding from God, are to be thought of
as operative causes and as Archetypes. All these beings are, as it were,
comprehended in the Logos. By the Logos Philo understands the operative
reason of God, and consequently also the power of God. The Log