nto theology and positive religion. Platonism, it has been
well said, is a temper as much as a doctrine; it is the spirit that
turns from the earth to Heaven, from creation to God. In his last
work, "The Laws," wherein he designs a theocratic state, which has
striking points of resemblance with the Jewish polity, he says: "The
conclusion of the matter is this, which is the fairest and truest of
all sayings, that for the good man to sacrifice and hold converse with
the Deity by means of prayers and service of every kind is the noblest
thing of all and the most conducive to a happy life, and above all
things fitting."[235]

This is typical of Plato's attitude towards life in his old age; and
further, his metaphysical system of monistic idealism is the most
remarkable approach to Hebrew monotheism which the Greek world made.
The Patristic writers in the first centuries of the Christian era were
so struck by this Hebraism in the Greek thinker, that they attributed
it to direct borrowing. Aristobulus had written of a translation of
the Pentateuch older than the Septuagint, which Plato was supposed to
have studied. Clement called him the Hebrew philosopher, Origen and
Augustine comment on his agreement with Genesis, and think that when
he was in Egypt he listened to Jeremiah.[236] Eusebius worked out in
detail his correspondences with the Bible. Some early neo-Platonist,
perhaps Numenius, declared that Plato was only the Attic Moses; and in
more modern times the Cambridge Platonists of the sixteenth century
harbored similar ideas, and Nietzsche spoke bitterly of the day when
"Plato went to school with the Jews in Egypt."

Of Philo, then, we may say, as Montaigne said of himself, that he was
a Platonist before he knew who Plato was. Yet he was the first
Hellenistic Jew who perceived the fundamental harmony between the
philosopher's idealism and Jewish monotheism, and he was the first
important commentator of Plato who developed the religious teaching of
his master into a powerful spiritual force.

It is true that the seeds of neo-Platonism, _i.e._, the religious
re-interpretation of Platonism under the influence of Eastern thought,
had been sown already; and Philo must have received from his
environment to some extent the mystical version of the master's
system, with its goal of ecstatic union with God, and its tendency to
asceticism as a means thereto. But the earlier products of the
movement had been crude, and had lacked