flourished in Egypt
under the Ptolemies, criticism, on both ethical and scientific grounds,
took a new departure.

In the hands of the Alexandrian Jews, as represented by Philo, the
fundamental axiom of later Jewish, as of Christian monotheism, that the
Deity is infinitely perfect and infinitely good, worked itself out into
its logical consequence--agnostic theism. Philo will allow of no point
of contact between God and a world in which evil exists. For him God has
no relation to space or to time, and, as infinite, suffers no predicate
beyond that of existence. It is therefore absurd to ascribe to Him
mental faculties and affections comparable in the remotest degree to
those of men; He is in no way an object of cognition; He is [Greek] and
[Greek] [33]--without quality and incomprehensible. That is to say the
Alexandrian Jew of the first century had anticipated the reasonings
of Hamilton and Mansell in the nineteenth, and, for him, God is the
Unknowable in the sense in which that term is used by Mr. Herbert
Spencer. Moreover, Philo's definition of the Supreme Being would not be
inconsistent with that "substantia constans infinitis attributis, quorum
unumquodque aeternam et infinitam essentiam exprimit," given by another
great Israelite, were it not that Spinoza's doctrine of the immanence of
the Deity in the world puts him, at any rate formally, at the antipodes
of theological speculation. But the conception of the essential
incognoscibility of the Deity is the same in each case. However, Philo
was too thorough an Israelite and too much the child of his time to be
content with this agnostic position. With the help of the Platonic
and Stoic philosophy, he constructed an apprehensible, if not
comprehensible, quasi-deity out of the Logos; while other more or less
personified divine powers, or attributes, bridged over the interval
between God and man; between the sacred existence, too pure to be called
by any name which implied a conceivable quality, and the gross and evil
world of matter. In order to get over the ethical difficulties presented
by the naive naturalism of many parts of those Scriptures, in the divine
authority of which he firmly believed, Philo borrowed from the Stoics
(who had been in like straits in respect of Greek mythology), that
great Excalibur which they had forged with infinite pains and skill--the
method of allegorical interpretation. This mighty "two-handed engine at
the door" of the theologian is