inspiration.  Giving a Greek coloring to the Hebrew notion of prophecy, “My soul,” he says, “is wont to be affected with a Divine trance and to prophesy about things of which it has no knowledge"[67]....  “Many a time have I come with the intention of writing, and knowing exactly what I ought to set down, but I have found my mind barren and fruitless, and I have gone away with nothing done, but at times I have come empty, and suddenly been full, for ideas were invisibly rained down upon me from above, so that I was seized by a Divine frenzy, and was lost to everything, place, people, self, speech, and thought.  I had gotten a stream of interpretation, a gift of light, a clear survey of things, the clearest that eye can give."[68]

In his “Guide of the Perplexed,"[69] Maimonides describes the various degrees of the [Hebrew:  rua hkdsh], or what we call religious “genius,” with which man may be blessed.  He distinguishes between the man who possesses it only for his own exaltation, and the man who feels himself compelled to impart it to others for their happiness.  To this higher order of genius Philo advanced in his maturity.  He consciously regarded himself as a follower of Moses, who was the perfect interpreter of God’s thought.  So he, though in a lesser degree, was an inspired interpreter, a hierophant (as he expressed it in the language of the Greek mystics) who expounded the Divine Word to his own generation by the gift of the Divine wisdom.  When he had fled from Alexandria, to secure virtue by contemplation, he had as his final goal the attainment of the true knowledge of God, and as he advanced in age, he advanced in decision and authority.  He was conscious of his philosophic grasp of the Torah, and the diffidence with which he allegorized in his early works gave place to a serene confidence that he had a lesson for his own and for future generations.  Hoping for the time when Judaism should be a world-religion, he spoke his message for Jew and Gentile.  We can imagine him preaching on Sabbaths to the great congregation which filled the synagogue at Alexandria, and on other days of the week expounding his philosophical ideas to a smaller circle which he collected around him.

Essentially, then, he was a philosopher and a teacher, but he was called upon to play a part in the world of action.  Following the passage already quoted, wherein Philo speaks of the blessings of the life of contemplation that he had led in the past,[70] he goes on to relate how that “envy, the most grievous of all evils, attacked me, and threw me into the vast sea of public affairs, in which I am still tossed about without being able to make my way out.”  A French scholar[71] conjectures that this is only a metaphorical way of saying that he was forced into some public office, probably, a seat in the Alexandrian Sanhedrin; and he ascribes the language to the bitter disappointment of one who was devoted to philosophical pursuits and found himself diverted from them.