models, it is true on the
other hand that the spirit which pervades them is essentially Jewish,
and that by the new force which he breathed into it he reformed and
gave a new direction to the Greek philosophy of his age.

Philo's philosophy is certainly eclectic in some degree, and we find
in it ideas taken from the schools of Plato, Aristotle, Pythagoras,
and the Stoics. Its fixed point was his theology, and wherever he
finds anything to support this he adapts it to his purpose. He
approached philosophy from a position opposed to that of the Greeks:
they brought a questioning and free mind to the problems of the
universe; he comes full of religious preconceptions. Yet in this lies
his strength as well as his limitation, for he gains thus a point of
certainty and a clear end, which other eclectic systems of the day did
not possess. He welds together all the different elements of his
thought in the heat of his passion for God. His cosmology and his
ontology are a philosophical exposition of the Jewish conception of
God's relation to the universe, his ethics and his psychology of the
Jewish conception of man's relation to God.

The religious preconceptions of Philo drew him to Plato above all
other philosophers, so that his thought is essentially a religious
development of Platonism. It is not too much to say that Philo's work
has a double function, to interpret the Bible according to Platonic
philosophy and to interpret Plato in the spirit of the Bible. The
agreement was not the artificial production of the commentator, for in
truth Plato was in sympathy with the religious conscience as a whole.
The contrast between Hellenism and Hebraism is true, if we restrict it
to the average mind of the two races. The one is intent on things
secular, the other on God. But the greatest genius of the Hellenic
race, influenced perhaps by contact with Oriental peoples, possessed,
in a remarkable degree, the Hebraic spirit, which is zealous for God
and makes for righteousness. Plato was not only a great philosopher,
but also a great theologian, a great religious reformer, and a great
prophet, the most perfectly developed mind which the world, ancient or
modern, has known. His "Ideas," which are the archetypes of sensible
things, were not only logical concepts but also a kingdom of Heaven
connected with the human individual by the Divine soul. And as he grew
older so his religious feeling intensified, and he translated his
philosophy i