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Philo's short treatise on "Nobility" is an eloquent plea for the equal treatment of the stranger who joins the true faith; and the author finds in the Bible narratives support for his thesis, that not good birth but the virtue of the individual is the true test of merit.
Moses wrote not only to relate historical facts, but to represent pictorially the paths which the soul must travel if it would find God. All this, in Philo's conception of the universe, is enacted within the human soul. Man experiences within himself what God has experienced in the universe. The word of God, the Logos, becomes an event in the soul.
If the only demonstrative argument for the existence of a Deity, which Hume advances, thus, literally, "goes to water" in the solvent of his philosophy, the reasoning from the evidence of design does not fare much better. If Hume really knew of any valid reply to Philo's arguments in the following passages of the Dialogues, he has dealt unfairly by the leader in concealing it:
For on the same day and hour that Curio conducted him down, the clouds gathered in a clear sky, and there came down a great quantity of rain and filled the citadel with water. Not long after, Sylla won the Piraeus, and burnt most of it; amongst the rest, Philo's arsenal, a work very greatly admired.
Of Philo's life we know one incident in very full detail, the rest we can only reconstruct from stray hints in his writings, and a few short notices of the commentators. From that incident also, which we know to have taken place in the year 40 C.E., we can fix the general chronology of his life and works.
One of Philo's contemporaries is said to have written over one thousand treatises, and in one of his rare touches of satire Philo relates how bands of sophists talked to eager crowds of men and women day and night about virtue being the only good, and the blessedness of life according to nature, all without producing the slightest effect, save noise.
To a great extent this is due to the spirit of his age, for in the Middle Ages not only was the matter of thought, but also its form, accepted on authority, and Aristotle ruled the one as imperiously as the Bible ruled the other. The differences of form and substance do not, however, obscure the essential likeness with Philo's interpretation of Judaism.
Very suggestive is Philo's homily, by which he develops the Bible narrative, that the function of the statesman is to expound dreams; because his task is to interpret the life of man, which is one long dream of changing scenes, wherein we forget what has gone before, as the fleeting shadow leads us from childhood to youth, from youth to manhood, from manhood to old age.
The Talmud, indeed, records certain ideas about the powers of God and His relation to the universe in the names of the great masters; and in these ideas there are striking resemblances to Philo's conceptions.
Sir Philo's smile as he took the hand of the princess was obviously forced, but no one noticed because Jennifrella was now bawling so spectacularly that the crowd, though not at all wishing to be unkind, found it, frankly, entertaining. As it does for us all, time passed and life went on.
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