But it must be clearly
understood that he shared still more the spirit of Hillel, whose maxim
was "to love thy fellow-creatures and draw them near to the Torah,"
and that he would have been fundamentally opposed to the new
missionary attitude of Paul. The doctrines of the Epistle to the
Romans, or the Epistle to the Ephesians, are absolutely antipathetic
to the ideal of the "Allegories of the Laws." Paul is allied in
spirit--though his expression is that of the fanatic rather than of
the philosopher--to the extreme allegorist section of philosophical
Jews at Alexandria, attacked by Philo for their shallowness in the
famous passage, quoted from _De Migratione Abrahami_ (ch. 16[358]),
who, because they recognized the spiritual meaning of the law,
rejected its literal commands; because they saw that circumcision
symbolized the abandonment of the sensual life, no longer observed the
ceremony. The same antinomian spirit is shown in the Epistle to the
Galatians by the allegory of the children whom Abraham had by Hagar
the bondwoman and Sarah the free wife: "For there are the two
covenants, the one from the mount of Sinai which gendereth to bondage,
which is Hagar.... But we, brethren, as Isaac was, are the children of
promise." To Philo the law and the observance of the letter were the
high-road to freedom and the Divine spirit, and, remaining loyal to
the Jewish conception of religion, for all his philosophical outlook,
he said: "The rejection of the [Greek: Nomos] will produce chaos in
our lives.
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