Philo, indeed, viewed from the Jewish standpoint, is the Hellenizer
not only of the law but also of the Cabbalah, the philosophical
adapter of the secret traditional wisdom of his ancestors. He brings
it into close relation with Platonism and purifies it; he clears away
its anthropomorphisms and superstitious fantasies, or rather he raises
them into idealistic conceptions and sublime exaltations of the soul.
By his deep knowledge of the intellectual ideas of Greece he refined
the strange compound of lofty imagination and popular fancy, and
raised it to a higher value. Plato and the Cabbalah represent the same
mystic spirit in different degrees of intellectual sublimity and
religious aspiration; Philo endeavored to unite the two
manifestations. He lived in a markedly non-rational age given over to
mystical speculation; and Alexandria especially, by her cosmopolitan
character, "furnished the soil and seed which formed the mystic
philosophy that knew how to blend the wisdom and folly of the
ages."[341] Through the mass of apocalyptic literature that was poured
forth in the first centuries of the common era, through the later
books of the Apocrypha, through the Sefer Yezirah of the ninth and the
Zohar of the thirteenth century, and through the vast literature
inspired by these books, run the ideas that composed Philo's mystic
theology.
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