" Both men show the
pursuit of righteousness raised to philosophical grandeur.
In his early days the way to virtue and happiness appeared to Philo to
lie in the solitary and ascetic life. He was possessed by a noble
pessimism, that the world was an evil place,[57] and the worldly life
an evil thing for a man's soul, that man must die to live, and
renounce the pleasures not only of the body but also of society in
order to know God. The idea was a common one of the age, and was the
outcome of the mingling of Greek ethics and psychology and the Jewish
love of righteousness. For the Greek thinkers taught a psychological
dualism, by which the body and the senses were treated as antagonistic
to the higher intellectual soul, which was immortal, and linked man
with the principle of creation. The most remarkable and enduring
effect of Hellenic influence in Palestine was the rise of the sect of
Essenes,[58] Jewish mystics, who eschewed private property and the
general social life, and forming themselves into communistic
congregations which were a sort of social Utopia, devoted their lives
to the cult of piety and saintliness. It cannot be doubted that their
manner of life was to some degree an imitation of the Pythagorean
brotherhoods, which ever since the sixth century had spread a sort of
monasticism through the Greek world.
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