This is his
"burden of the word of the Lord" to the worldly-wise and the
materialists of civilized Alexandria--and to Jews of other lands.
From the positive side Philo stands for the spiritual significance of
the religion. Judaism, which lays stress upon the law, the ceremonial,
and the customs of our forefathers, is threatened at times with the
neglect of the inward religion and the hardness of legalism. Not that
the law, when it is understood, kills the spirit or fetters the
feelings, but a formal observance and an unenlightened insistence upon
the letter may crush the soul which good habits should nurture.
Religion at its highest must be the expression of the individual soul
within, not the acceptance of a law from without. Although Philo's
estimate of the Torah is from the historical and philological
standpoint uncritical, in the religious sense it is finely critical
inasmuch as it searches out true values. Philo looks in every
ordinance of the Bible for the spiritual light and conceives the law
as an inspiration of spiritual truth and the guide to God, or, as he
puts it sometimes, "the mystagogue to divine ecstasy." For the crown
of life to him is the saint's union with God. In mysticism religion
and philosophy blend, for mysticism is the philosophical form of
faith. Just as the Torah to Philo has an outward and an inward
meaning, so, too, has the religion of the Torah; and the outward
Judaism is the symbol, the necessary bodily expression of the inward,
even as the words of Moses are the symbol, the suggestive expression
of the deeper truth behind them.
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