Nearly as godless, and therefore as vile in his eyes as the follower of Epicurus, is the follower of the Stoic doctrines.  It has been shown that the Jews and the Stoics were continually in conflict at Alexandria; and the “Allegories of the Laws” are filled with attacks, overt and hidden, upon the Stoic doctrines.  The Stoics, indeed, believed in one supreme Divine Power, not however in a transcendental and personal God, but a cosmic, impersonal, fatalistic world-force.[109] To Philo this conception, with its denial of the Divine will and the Divine care for the individual, was as atheistic as the Epicurean “chance.”  Equally repulsive to his religious standpoint was the Stoic dogma, that man is, or should be, independent of all help, and that the human reason is all-powerful and can comprehend the universe by its own unaided power.[110] Repulsive also were their pride, their rejection of the emotions, their hard rationalism.  The battle of Philo against the Stoics is the battle of personal monotheism against impersonal pantheism, of religious faith and revelation against arrogant rationalism, and of idealism against materialism.  Hostile as he is to the Stoic intellectual dogmatism, Philo is none the less opposed to its converse, intellectual skepticism and agnosticism.  Man, he is convinced, has a Divine revelation[111] which he may not deny without ruin.  He holds with Pope that we have

  “Too much of knowledge for the Skeptic side,
  Too much of weakness for the Stoic’s pride,”

and he attacks the Skeptics of the day who devoted their minds to destructive dialectical quibbling and sophistry[112] instead of seeking for God and the human good.  They are the Ishmaels of philosophy.

Philo’s polemic is directed less against the Greek schools in themselves than against the Jewish followers of the Greek schools.  He saw the danger to Judaism in the teachings of these anti-religious philosophers, and deeply as he loved Greek culture, he loved more deeply his religion.  He wanted to reveal a philosophy in the Bible which should win back to Judaism the men who had been captivated by foreign thought.  In one aspect, therefore, his master-work is a plea for unity.  The community at Alexandria was a very heterogeneous body; not only were the sects which had appeared in Palestine, the Sadducees, Samaritans, Pharisees, and Essenes, represented there too, but in addition there were parties who attached themselves to one or other of the Greek schools, the Pythagoreans, Skeptics, and the like, and lastly Gnostic groups, who cultivated an esoteric doctrine of the Godhead, and were lax in their observance of the law, which they held to be purely symbolical and of no account in its literal meaning.  The mental activity which this growth of sects exemplified was in some respects a healthy sign, but it contained seeds of religious chaos, which bore their fruit in the next century.  Men started by thinking out a philosophical Judaism for themselves; they ended