L. Treitel, Philonische Studicn,

1915, is of limited scope. H. Windisch, Die Frommigkeit Philos u>id ihrc Bcdeutung filr das Christcntutn, 1909. * The genuineness of this trea- tise, denied by Graetz and Lucius in the mid-nineteenth century, was amply demonstrated by L. Mas- sebieau, Revue de I'Histoire des Religions, XVI (1887), 170-98, 284-319; Conybeare, Philo about the Contemplative Life, Oxford, 1895 ; and P. Wendland, Die Thcrapeuten und die Philonische Schrift vom Bcschaulichen Leben, in Jahrb. f. Class. Philologie, Band 22 (1896), 693-770. In St. John's College Library, Oxford, in a manuscript of the early eleventh century (MS 128, fol. 215 fif) with Dionysius the Areopagite on the ecclesiastical hierarchy, is, Philonis de excir- cumcisione credentibus in Aegyp- to Christianis simul et monachis ex suprascripto ab eo sermone de vita theorica aut de orantibus.
350 MAGIC AND EXPERIMENTAL SCIENCE chap.
which was to gain such a hold upon Christian imagination.^ After the Stoics he proclaims the doctrine of the law of nature, holds that the institution of human slavery is abso- lutely contrary to it, and writes "a treatise to prove that every virtuous man is free" and that to be virtuous is to live in conformity to nature.^ He had previously written another treatise designed to show that "every wicked man "was a slave," ^ and he held a theory which we met in the Enoch literature and shall meet again in a number of subse- quent writers that sin was punished naturally by forces of nature such as floods and thunderbolts. He did not orig- inate the practice of allegorical interpretation of the Bible but he is our first great extant example thereof. He even went so far as to regard the tree of life and the story of the serpent tempting Eve as purely symbolical, an attitude which found little favor with Christian writers.* His effort by means of the allegorical method to find in the books of the Pentateuch all the attractive concepts and theories which he had learned from the Greeks became later in the Christian apologists an assertion that Plato and Pythagoras had borrowed their doctrines from Abraham and Moses. His doctrine of the logos had a powerful influence upon the writers of the New Testament and the theology of the early church,^ Yet Philo afflrms that no more perfect good than philosophy exists in human life and in both literary style and erudition he is a Hellene to his very finger tips. The recent tendency, seen especially in German scholarship, to deny the writers of the Roman Empire any capacity for original thought and to trace back their ideas to unextant authors of a supposedly much more productive Hellenistic age has perhaps been carried too far. But if we may not regard Philo as a great originator, and it is evident that he borrowed many of his ideas, he was at any rate a great
^ De mundi opificio, caps. 49 is not extant,
and 50. * De mundi opiAcio, caps. 54
' On the Contemplative Life, and 55.