between letter and spirit, faith and works, is in truth a false one; and wherever the significance of Judaism has been fully comprehended, the two aspects of the law have been inextricably intertwined.  As Philo understood the Jewish mission, it was not merely to diffuse the Jewish God-idea, but quite as much to diffuse the Jewish attitude to God, the way of life.  Abstract ideas, however lofty, can never be the bond of a religious community, nor can they be a safeguard for moral conduct.  Sooner or later congregations must submit themselves to some law, be it a law of dogma, or be it a law of conduct.  Antinomianism, the opposition to the law, to which Paul later gave powerful, even fanatical, expression, was a strong movement at Alexandria in Philo’s day.  Preparatory to the spread of Christianity, numerous sects sprang up there which purported to follow a spiritual Judaism wherein the law was abrogated because, forsooth, its symbolism was understood!  In the extreme allegorists, whom Philo attacks for their shallowness, one may discern the prototypes of the Cainites, Ophites, Melchizedecians, and the rest of the heretical parties that produced the religious chaos of the next centuries.  From that welter of opinions there at last emerged dogmatic Christianity.  The Christian reformers came to free man from the yoke of the law; but their successors imposed on the mind the fetters of dogma, and, in order to check the passions of the body, advocated renunciation and asceticism.  So that not only Judaism as a system of belief, but Judaism as a system of life was lost in their handiwork.  Spirituality lacking knowledge and allegorism in excess led to this result.  In Philo they are controlled by affection for the Torah, and by a conviction of the need for national cohesion.

Philo is loyal to the Jewish tradition not only because he had a deep feeling for what a modern teacher has called the catholic conscience and the historical continuity of Judaism, but because his philosophy was based on a conviction that the Jewish religion was the truest guide to conduct and righteousness and to the love of God.  To him, as to Plato and Aristotle, the law was the outward register of the moral ideal; the “word-and-deed symbols” of ceremonial and prayer were emblems indeed of moral principles, but at the same time they had an intrinsic value, in that they impressed these principles upon the mind, and brought belief and action into harmony.  “Religion is law, not philosophy,” said Hobbes.  With Philo, religion is law and philosophy.  Thus the love of the Torah is of the essence of his religious thought.  As he puts it in the exhortation to his fellow-ambassadors before Gaius,[170] “to die in defence of it is a kind of life.”  In his philosophical Judaism he sought always for the universal and the spiritual, but so as always to increase the honor of the law, and not only of the law but of the customs of his ancestors, thinking with the Psalmist that “the Torah is a tree of life to those who keep fast hold of her, and those who support her are blessed.”