PREFACE

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THOUGH it is in compass the least, yet, if it be judged by the attention which in all ages it has excited, the treatise of Philo on the Contemplative Life is the most important of all his voluminous works. Eusebius identified the ascetic I use the term ascetic in its conventional sense. It should however be remarked that by ἄσκησις diligent study (in 475. 35) Philo means a diligent study of books, in which sense Dionysius of Halicarnassus and other first century writers used the word. It only came to mean mortification of the flesh in the ecclesiastical writers of a later age; Philo's term for that is ἐγκράτεια self-control/continence (476. 35). group defined therein with the earliest Christian Church of Alexandria; and this view, passing unquestioned for twelve centuries, contributed in no small degree to shape the conceptions of primitive Christianity entertained by mediaeval thinkers. In the sixteenth century it was at last challenged, but then only because it was made by the Papal party one of their chief arguments for the antiquity of monkery. For two hundred years a controversy raged on the point between Protestants and Latin Catholics; and was only stilled at the close of the last century by the practically universal acceptance of the critical views first broached by Chemnitius, Scaliger, and the Magdeburg Centuriators.