sm of a Maccabee, if with other weapons, he fought against
the bastard culture, which meant self-indulgence and the excessive
attention to the body, the idol-worship, the degraded ideas of the
Divine power, and the disregard of truth and justice, that were
current in the pagan society about him. The seeking after sensual
pleasure and luxury was the most glaring evil of his city--as the
Talmud says,[107] of ten parts of lust nine were given to
Alexandria--and with every variety of denunciation he returns again
and again to the charge. Epicureanism is detestable not only for its
low idea of human life, but for its godless conception of the
universe. Its theory that the world was a fortuitous concourse of
atoms, which was governed by blind chance, and that the gods lived
apart in complete indifference to men--this was to Philo utter
atheism, and as such the greatest of sins. He attacked paganism not
only in its crude form of idolatry,[108] but in its more seductive
disguise of a pretentious philosophy. Always and entirely he was the
champion of monotheism.

Nearly as godless, and therefore as vile in his eyes as the follower
of Epicurus, is the follower of the Stoic doctrines. It has been shown
that the Jews and the Stoics were continually in conflict at
Alexandria; and the "Allegories of the Laws" are filled with attacks,
overt and hidden, upon the Stoic doctrines. The Stoics, indeed,
believed in one supreme Divine Power, not however in a transcendental
and personal God, but a cosmic, impersonal, fatalistic world-force.[109]
To Philo this conception, with its denial of the Divine will and the
Divine care for the individual, was as atheistic as the Epicurean
"chance." Equally repulsive to his religious standpoint was the Stoic
dogma, that man is, or should be, independent of all help, and that
the human reason is all-powerful and can comprehend the universe by
its own unaided power.[110] Repulsive also were their pride, their
rejection of the emotions, their hard rationalism. The battle of Philo
against the Stoics is the battle of personal monotheism against
impersonal pantheism, of religious faith and revelation against
arrogant rationalism, and of idealism against materialism. Hostile as
he is to the Stoic intellectual dogmatism, Philo is none the less
opposed to its converse, intellectual skepticism and agnosticism. Man,
he is convinced, has a Divine revelation[111] which he may not deny
without ruin. He holds with Pop