Redemption begins with the spirit reflecting on its own
condition; it advances by a knowledge of the world and of the Logos, and
it is perfected, after complete asceticism, by mystic ecstatic
contemplation in which a man loses himself, but in return is entirely
filled and moved by God.[116] In this condition man has a foretaste of
the blessedness which shall be given him when the soul, freed from the
body, will be restored to its true existence as a heavenly being.

This system, notwithstanding its appeal to revelation, has, in the
strict sense of the word, no place for Messianic hopes, of which nothing
but very insignificant rudiments are found in Philo. But he was really
animated by the hope of a glorious time to come for Judaism. The
synthesis of the Messiah and the Logos did not lie within his
horizon.[117]

3. Neither Philo's philosophy of religion, nor the mode of thought from
which it springs, exercised any appreciable influence on the first
generation of believers in Christ.[118] But its practical
ground-thoughts, though in different degrees, must have found admission
very early into the Jewish Christian circles of the Diaspora, and
through them to Gentile Christian circles also. Philo's philosophy of
religion became operative among Christian teachers from the beginning of
the second century,[119] and at a later period actually obtained the
significance of a standard of Christian theology, Philo gaining a place
among Christian writers. The systems of Valentinus and Origen presuppose
that of Philo. It can no longer, however, be shewn with certainty how
far the direct influence of Philo reached, as the development of
religious ideas in the second century took a direction which necessarily
led to views similar to those which Philo had anticipated (see Sec. 6, and
the whole following account).

_Supplement._--The hermeneutic principles (the "Biblicalalchemy"), above
all, became of the utmost importance for the following period. These
were partly invented by Philo himself, partly traditional,--the Haggadic
rules of exposition and the hermeneutic principles of the Stoics having
already at an earlier period been united in Alexandria. They fall into
two main classes; "first, those according to which the literal sense is
excluded, and the allegoric proved to be the only possible one, and
then, those according to which the allegoric sense is discovered as
standing beside and above the literal sense."[120] That these rul