dom,
wisdom is seen, for wisdom sees itself." "Through God, God is known,
for He is His own light."[265]

Thus all knowledge is intuition, and man's function is not so much to
reason as to lead a life of piety and contemplate the Divine work in
the hope of being blessed with inspiration. It would be a mistake,
however, to take Philo's words quite literally. He does not deny the
need of human effort and striving for knowledge; for the Divine
influence is not vouchsafed till we have prepared for it and
consecrated all our faculties to God. But, devout mystic as he is,
he ascribes every consummation to the direct help of the Deity. "The
mind is the cause of nothing, but rather the Deity, who is prior to
mind, generates thought."[266] The Greek philosopher had ascribed the
final synthesis of knowledge to a superhuman force. Philo ascribes to
God all the intermediate steps from sense-perception. It may be
admitted that his passive notion of philosophy involves the
abandonment of the Greek ideal, the eager searching of Plato after
truth. He lived in an age in which, through loss of intellectual
power, man had come to despair of the attainment of knowledge by human
effort, and to rely entirely upon supernatural means, Divine
revelations, visions, and the like. It is consistent with his whole
position that the crown of life is represented, not as an intellectual
state, but as a superhuman ecstasy of the Nous, wherein it is freed
not only from the body but from the rest of the soul, and is, so to
say, led out of itself.[267] He comments on the verse, "And the sun
went down and a deep sleep fell on Abraham" (Gen. xv. 12). "When the
Divine light," he says, "shines upon the mortal soul, the mortal light
sinks, and our reason is driven out at the approach of the Divine
spirit."[268] This is the Alexandrian interpretation of [Hebrew: shkina]
and [Hebrew: nboah], and though it is much affected by Greek mystical
ideas, yet at the same time it is broadly true to the spirit of Jewish
mysticism, as we see it presented in writers of all ages, and as the
Psalmist expressed it, "to abide under the shadow of the Almighty."

Philo's ethics, like the rest of his philosophy, exhibits the
transfusion of Greek ideas with his Hebrew spirit. The Greek
philosophers had evolved a rational plan of life, while the Jewish
teachers were impregnated with burning ardor for the living God; and
Philo brings the two things together, making ethics dependent o