The attainment of the highest excellence demands severe discipline, save for those few blessed souls whom God perfects without any effort on their part.  The rest can only secure self-realization by self-renunciation; they must avoid the bodily passions and bodily lusts.[272] At times the Divine enthusiasm causes Philo, like many a Jewish saint and like his master Plato, to scorn all bodily limitations and recommend “insensibility” ([Greek:  apatheia])[273] by which he means that man should crush his physical desires and repress his feelings.  Not that the good life seems to him to imply absence of pleasure.  On the contrary, it is filled with the purest of joy, for when man rises to the love of God “in calm of mind, all passion spent,” then and then alone has he tasted true joyousness.  The symbol of this bliss is Isaac ([Hebrew:  ytshk]), the laughter of the soul.

It was noticed in the second chapter that Philo modified his ethical ideas during his life.  In the earlier period he insists more strongly on the need of ascetic self-denial, and has almost a horror of the world.  Maturer experience, however, taught him that man is made for this world, and that a wise use of its goods was a surer path to happiness and to God than flight from all temptations.  In his later writings, therefore, he exhibits a striking moderation.  He reproaches the ascetics for their “savage enthusiasm,"[274] probably hinting at the extreme sects of the Essenes and the Therapeutae.  “Those who follow a gentler wisdom seek after God, but at the same time do not despise human things.”

“Truth will properly blame those who without discrimination shun all concern with the life of the State, and say that they despise the acquisition of good repute and pleasure.  They are only making grand pretensions, and they do not really despise these things.  They go about in torn raiment and with solemn visage, and live the life of penury and hardship as a bait, to make people believe that they are lovers of good conduct, temperance, and self-control."[275]

Philo’s aphorism, which follows, “Be drunk in a sober manner,” is characteristic.  The Stoic extreme of passionlessness is almost as false as the Epicurean hedonism, and the mean between them is the ideal Jewish life, in which godliness and humanity are blended.

We have now examined the main divisions of Philo’s philosophy, and we see that his metaphysics, cosmology, theory of knowledge, and ethics are all religious in tone, and all determined in their main lines by his Jewish outlook.  His Hebraism is a seal which stamps all that enters his mind from Greek sources, and the Bible, spiritually interpreted, is the canon of all his wisdom.