God the ownership of his powers. Pride of intellect is
therefore a deadly sin, because it involves a false, incomplete idea
of God, and true knowledge involves reverence. The ideal of the Greek
sage, the independent reason, is a godless thing, and those in whom a
knowledge of Greek philosophy produces intellectual pride are not
disciples of Divine Wisdom. In a fine passage Philo charges with
hypocrisy those who talk in high-sounding language about the
all-powerful Deity, and yet declare that by their own intellect they
can comprehend the world.[193] This was the attitude not only of the
proud Stoic, but of certain kindred Jewish sects, which were subject
to Greek influences, such as the Gnostics and the Cainites. And upon
them Philo appears to be pouring his wrath when he exclaims: "How have
you the effrontery to go on making and listening to fine professions
about piety and the honor of God, when you have within you, forsooth,
the mind equal to God that comprehends all human things, and can
combine good and evil portions, giving to some a mixed, to others an
unmixed lot? And when anybody accuses you of impiety, you brazenly
declare that you belong to the school of that noble guide and teacher
Cain (_i.e._ insolent reason), who bade you pay honor to the secondary
rather than the primary cause."

Philo has often been reproached with intellectualism, and excessive
regard to acquired wisdom, and it may be urged that by his allegorical
method he tried to find in the Bible the sanction of two degrees of
religious faith, the higher for the philosopher and the lower for the
ordinary man. At the same time, however, before his God he retains the
childlike simplicity of the most un-Hellenic rabbi, and the perfect
humility of the Hasid. His conviction of the dependence of all upon
God's grace is the perfect corrective of his intellectual
exclusiveness. The idea of God as the unity which comprehends
everything and causes everything is the great Jewish contribution to
thought, and binds our literature together in all its manifestations.
It characterizes and unites the poetical utterance of the Bible
prophets, the pious wisdom of the rabbis, the philosophical systems of
Philo and Maimonides.

The more sublime and exalted the conception of God, the more
imperative became the need for the thinking Jew to explain how the
perfect infinite Being came into relation with the imperfect finite
world of man and matter. How can the incorporea