Philo has often been reproached with intellectualism, and excessive regard to acquired wisdom, and it may be urged that by his allegorical method he tried to find in the Bible the sanction of two degrees of religious faith, the higher for the philosopher and the lower for the ordinary man.  At the same time, however, before his God he retains the childlike simplicity of the most un-Hellenic rabbi, and the perfect humility of the Hasid.  His conviction of the dependence of all upon God’s grace is the perfect corrective of his intellectual exclusiveness.  The idea of God as the unity which comprehends everything and causes everything is the great Jewish contribution to thought, and binds our literature together in all its manifestations.  It characterizes and unites the poetical utterance of the Bible prophets, the pious wisdom of the rabbis, the philosophical systems of Philo and Maimonides.

The more sublime and exalted the conception of God, the more imperative became the need for the thinking Jew to explain how the perfect infinite Being came into relation with the imperfect finite world of man and matter.  How can the incorporeal God be the founder of the material universe?  How can the infinite mind be present in the finite thought of man?  How can the all-good Power be the creator of the evil which we see in the material world and of the wickedness that flourisheth among men?  These questions presented themselves to the Israelite after he had consummated his marvellous religious intuition, and became the starting-point of a theology which is nascent in the Wisdom literature of the Bible.  Theology is the reasoning about God which follows always in the footsteps of religious certitude.  First, man by his intuitive reason rises to some idea of the Godhead satisfying to his emotion; next, by his discursive reason, he endeavors to justify that idea to his experience in analyzing God’s operations.  Renan, disposing sweepingly of a great question, declares that the Jewish monotheism excluded any true theology.  But, in fact, in Palestine, and still more in Alexandria from the third century B.C.E., Jewish thought had as one of its constant aims to develop a theory of the operations of the one God in the world of material plurality.  When the Jews came in contact with the cosmological mythology of Babylon, their God seemed to soar beyond the reach of men, and they looked to powers nearer them to bridge the widening gulf.  To some extent this aim engendered a modification in the religious monotheism, and led to the interposition of intermediate conceptions between the Inconceivable and man.  “The whole angelology,” says Deutsch,[194] “so strikingly simple before the Captivity and so wonderfully complex after it, owes its quick development in Babylonian soil to some awe-stricken desire which grows with growing culture, removing the inconceivable Being further and further from human touch or knowledge.”  Speaking generally, it may be said that reflection about God’s