Philo's conception of the nature of these mediating Forces was self-contradictory. On the one hand they are nothing else than Ideas of individual things conceived in the mind of God, and as such ought to have no other reality than that of immanent existence in God, and so Philo says expressly that the totality of Ideas, the
vonros, is simply the Reason of God as Creator (Oak Xbyos 116n
Yet, on the other hand, they are represented as daemons or angels, hypostases distinct from God, individual entities existing independently and apart from Him. This vacillation, however, as Zeller and others have justly remarked, is necessarily involved in Philo's premises, for, on the one hand, it is God who works in the world through His Ideas, and therefore they must be identical with God ; but, on the other hand, God is not to come into direct contact with the world, and therefore the Forces through which He works must be distinct from Him. The same inevitable amphiboly dominates in what is taught as to the supreme Idea or Logos. Philo regards all individual Ideas as comprehended in one highest and most general Idea or Force—the unity of the individual Ideas—which he calls the Logos or Reason of God, and which is again regarded as opera tive Reason. The Logos, therefore, is the highest mediator between God and the world, the firstborn son of God, the archangel who is the vehicle of all revelation, and the high priest who stands be fore God on behalf of the world. Through him the world was created, and so he is identified with the creative Word of God in Genesis (the Greek X6-yos meaning both "reason" and "word"). Here again, we see, the philosopher is unable to escape from the difficulty that the Logos is at once the immanent Reason of God, and yet also an hypostasis standing between God and the world. The whole doctrine of this mediatorial hypostasis is a strange intertwining of very dissimilar threads; on one side the way was prepared for it by the older Jewish distinction between the Wis dom of God and God Himself, of which we find the beginnings even in the Old Testament (Job xxviii. 12 seq.; Prov. viii., ix.), and the fuller development in the books of Ecclesiasticus and Wis dom, the latter of which comes very near to Philo's ideas if we substitute for the term "wisdom" that of (divine) "Reason." In Greek philosophy, again, Philo, as we have seen, chiefly follows the Platonic doctrines of Ideas and the Soul of the World, and the Stoic doctrine of God as the
or Reason operative in the world. In its Stoic form the latter doctrine was pantheistic, but Philo could adapt it to his purpose simply by drawing a sharper distinction between the Logos and the world.
in Philo's doctrine, rest on the pre supposition of an absolute metaphysical contrast between God and the world. The world can be ascribed to God only in so far as it is a cosmos or orderly world ; its material substratum is not even indirectly referable to God. Matter
or, as the Stoics said, oivia) is a second principle, but in itself an empty one, its essence being a mere negation of all true being. It is a lifeless, unmoved, shapeless mass, out of which God formed the actual world by means of the Logos and divine Forces. Strictly, the world is only formed, not created, since matter did not originate with God.
is also strictly dualistic, and is mainly derived from Plato. Man is a twofold being, with a higher and a lower origin. Of th,, pure souls which fill airy space, those nearest the earth are attracted by the sensible and descend into sensible bodies ; these souls are the Godward side of man. But on
his other side man is a creature of sense, and so has in him a foun tain of sin and all evil. The body, therefore, is a prison, a coffin, or a grave for the soul which seeks to rise again to God. The highest maxim of Philo's ethics is therefore deliverance from the world of sense and the mortification of all the impulses of sense. In carrying out this thought, Philo differs from the Stoics. The Stoics cast man upon his own resources; Philo points him to the assistance of God, without whom man, a captive to sense, could never rise to true wisdom and virtue. Even in this life the truly wise and virtuous is lifted above his sensible existence, and enjoys in ecstasy the vision of God, his own consciousness sinking and disappearing in the Divine light. Beyond this ecstasy there lies but one further step, viz., entire liberation from the body of sense and the return of the soul to its original condition; it came from God and must rise to Him again. But natural death brings this consummation only to those who, while they lived on earth, kept themselves free from attachment to the things of sense; all others must at death pass into another body; transmigration of souls is in fact the necessary consequence of Philo's premises.
The titles of the numerous extant writings of Philo present at first sight a most confusing multiplicity. More than three-fourths of them, however, are really mere sections of a small number of larger works. Three such great works on the Penta teuch can be distinguished.
I. The smallest of these is the ZorhAara KaiVaets (Quaestiones et solutiones), a short exposition of Genesis and Exodus, in the form of question and answer. The work is cited under this title by Eusebius (H.E. iii. 18, 1, 5; Praep. Ev. vii. 13), and by later writers, but the Greek text is now almost wholly lost, and only about one-half preserved in an Armenian translation. Genesis seems to have occupied six books. Eusebius tells us that Exodus filled five books. In the Armenian translation, first published by the learned Mechitarist, J. Bapt. Aucher, in 1826, are preserved four books on Genesis and two on Exodus, but with lacunae. A Latin fragment, about half of the fourth book on Genesis (Phil. Jud. Cll. quaestt. . . . super Gen.), was first printed at Paris in 152o. Of the Greek we have numerous but short fragments in various Florilegia. The interpretations in this work are partly literal and partly allegorical.
II. Philo's most important work is the 1\161.1,cop lepc7v CLXXnyoptat (Euseb. H.E. ii. 18, 1; Phot. Bibl. Cod. 103), a vast and copious allegorical commentary on Genesis, dealing with chaps. ii.–iv., verse by verse, and with select passages in the later chapters. The readers in view are mainly Jews, for the form is modelled on the rabbinic Midrash. The main idea is that the characters which appear in Genesis are properly allegories of states of the soul (rpOroc Ti Vivxiis). All persons and actions being interpreted in this sense, the work as a whole is a very extensive body of psychol ogy and ethics. It begins with Gen. ii. 1, for the De mundi opificio, which treats of the creation according to Gen. i., ii., does not belong to this series of allegorical commentaries, but deals with the actual history of creation, and that under a quite different literary form. With this exception, however, the NOkuov aXXnyopicc in cludes all the treatises in the first volume of Mangey's edition.