laying them up in your hearts, guard them as a most excellent treasure in which the noblest of possessions is stored, the knowledge, namely, of the First Cause and of virtue, and moreover of what they generate."[338] These mysteries, it is not unlikely, represent according to some scholars the [Hebrew:  sod] of the Talmudical rabbis, which was elaborately developed in the Zohar and kindred writings.  Be this as it may, Philo’s religious intensity expresses the spirit of the Cabbalists, his mystic soaring is the prototype of their theosophical ecstasies; his persistent declaration that God encloses the universe, but is Himself not enclosed by anything, contains the root of their conception of the En Sof ([Hebrew:  ’yn sof]),[339] his Logos-idealism, with its Divine effluences, which are the true causes of all changes, physical and mental, is companion to their system of [Hebrew:  ’olmim] and [Hebrew:  sfirot], emanations and spheres.  His fancies about sex and the struggle between a male and female principle in all things[340] are a constant theme of their teachers, and form a special section of their wisdom, [Hebrew:  sof htsrog], the mystery of generation.  His conception of the Logos as the heavenly archetype of the human race, the “Man-himself,” is the Platonic counterpart of their [Hebrew:  adm kdmon], or “primal man,” who is known in the ancient allegorizing of the Song of Songs.  His number-mysticism and his speech-idealism reappear more crudely, but not obscurely, in their ideas of creative letters, of which the cosmogony by the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet in the Sefer Yezirah is typical.  Finally, his teachings of ecstasy and Divine possession are repeated in divers ways in their descriptions of the pious life ([Hebrew:  hnanot]).

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.  Philo himself was unknown, but his religious interpretation of Platonism had entered into the world’s thought, and inspired the mystics of his own race as well as of the Christian world.