Spirituality
lacking knowledge and allegorism in excess led to this result. In
Philo they are controlled by affection for the Torah, and by a
conviction of the need for national cohesion.
Philo is loyal to the Jewish tradition not only because he had a deep
feeling for what a modern teacher has called the catholic conscience
and the historical continuity of Judaism, but because his philosophy
was based on a conviction that the Jewish religion was the truest
guide to conduct and righteousness and to the love of God. To him, as
to Plato and Aristotle, the law was the outward register of the moral
ideal; the "word-and-deed symbols" of ceremonial and prayer were
emblems indeed of moral principles, but at the same time they had an
intrinsic value, in that they impressed these principles upon the
mind, and brought belief and action into harmony. "Religion is law,
not philosophy," said Hobbes. With Philo, religion is law _and_
philosophy. Thus the love of the Torah is of the essence of his
religious thought. As he puts it in the exhortation to his
fellow-ambassadors before Gaius,[170] "to die in defence of it is a
kind of life." In his philosophical Judaism he sought always for the
universal and the spiritual, but so as always to increase the honor of
the law, and not only of the law but of the customs of his ancestors,
thinking with the Psalmist that "the Torah is a tree of life to those
who keep fast hold of her, and those who support her are blessed.
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