the Deity.  “The mind is the cause of nothing, but rather the Deity, who is prior to mind, generates thought."[266] The Greek philosopher had ascribed the final synthesis of knowledge to a superhuman force.  Philo ascribes to God all the intermediate steps from sense-perception.  It may be admitted that his passive notion of philosophy involves the abandonment of the Greek ideal, the eager searching of Plato after truth.  He lived in an age in which, through loss of intellectual power, man had come to despair of the attainment of knowledge by human effort, and to rely entirely upon supernatural means, Divine revelations, visions, and the like.  It is consistent with his whole position that the crown of life is represented, not as an intellectual state, but as a superhuman ecstasy of the Nous, wherein it is freed not only from the body but from the rest of the soul, and is, so to say, led out of itself.[267] He comments on the verse, “And the sun went down and a deep sleep fell on Abraham” (Gen. xv. 12).  “When the Divine light,” he says, “shines upon the mortal soul, the mortal light sinks, and our reason is driven out at the approach of the Divine spirit."[268] This is the Alexandrian interpretation of [Hebrew:  shkina] and [Hebrew:  nboah], and though it is much affected by Greek mystical ideas, yet at the same time it is broadly true to the spirit of Jewish mysticism, as we see it presented in writers of all ages, and as the Psalmist expressed it, “to abide under the shadow of the Almighty.”

Philo’s ethics, like the rest of his philosophy, exhibits the transfusion of Greek ideas with his Hebrew spirit.  The Greek philosophers had evolved a rational plan of life, while the Jewish teachers were impregnated with burning ardor for the living God; and Philo brings the two things together, making ethics dependent on religion.  The Stoics, who were the most powerful school of his day, regarded as the ideal of goodness life according to unbending reason and in complete independence of God or man.  Philo understands God as a personal power making for righteousness, and man’s excellence, accordingly, which is likeness to God, is piety and charity.[269] Above all he insists upon Faith ([Greek:  pistis]) and he defines virtue as a condition of soul which fixes its hopes upon the truly Existent God.  The Stoics also professed to honor faith or confidence above all things, but the virtue which they meant was reliance upon man’s own powers.  Philo’s virtue is almost the converse of this.  Man must feel completely dependent upon God, and his proper attitude is humility and resignation.  So only can he receive within his soul the seed of goodness, and finally the Divine Logos.[270] Yet at the same time Philo remains loyal to the Jewish ideal of conduct:  faith without works is empty, and, as he puts it, “The true-born goods are faith and consistency of word and action."[271]