The praise of God known as the [Hebrew: ktr mlkot] by
Ibn Gabirol is a splendid example of the Hebraizing of neo-Platonic
doctrines, which, though probably quite independent of his teaching,
recalls constantly the ideas of Philo.

By his place at the head of the neo-Platonic school Philo enters the
broad stream of the world's philosophical development, but his more
lasting influence was exercised over the religious philosophy of
Christianity. He was the direct master of what is known as the
Patristic school, which sought to combine the intellectual conceptions
of Plato with the religious ideas of the Gospels. Its most celebrated
teachers were Clement and Origen, both of Alexandria, who flourished
in the second century. They resorted largely to allegorical
interpretation, learning from Philo to trace in the Bible principles
of universal thought and profound philosophy; but they used his method
and his lessons to support notions of God and the Logos which were
alien to his spirit. He had possessed pre-eminently the soaring
imagination of poetry, which is the crown of the intellectual and of
the religious mind, and unites them in their highest excellence; but
they bounded their philosophy within the narrow limits of dogma, and
thereby destroyed the harmony between Hebraism and Hellenism which he
had contrived to effect. The controversy of Origen and Celsus began
again the battle between reason and faith, "which was to destroy for
centuries the independence of philosophy and to break the continuity
of civilization." Had Philo really been ploughing the sand, and was an
agreement between faith and reason, between religion and philosophy,
impossible? Can the two finest creations of the mind only be combined
on the terms that one is subordinate, or rather servile, to the other?
In Judaism, if anywhere, the combination should be possible, for
Judaism has as its basis an intuitional conception of God, which is in
harmony with the philosophical conception of the universe, and it has
little dogma besides. The neo-Platonists and the Church Fathers failed
to carry on the ideal of Philo, but it was to be expected that among
his own people, the nation of philosophers, as he had called them, he
would have found true successors. Yet the use made of his work by the
Christians compelled his people to regard him as a betrayer of the law
and to avoid his goal as a treacherous snare. For centuries Greek
philosophy was banned from Jewish thou