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people of the book
[ 43 ]
contrast, God alone is eternal. Philo, thus, modified the Platonic account by
allowing Forms, which he called Logos
(Greek, for word, reason, or plan), to
exist from eternity only as ideas in the mind of God. In his modification of the
Platonic view, Philo invented a story of a two-stage creation. First, God created
both the Forms, as real beings external to his mind, and unformed matter.
Then, God used the Forms and unformed matter to fashion the world as we
know it, in the process locating Forms in the thinking part of the human soul,
which the Greeks had called nous.
Philo accepted Plato’s distinction between rational souls, which are created at
the beginning of the world, prior to the creation of bodies, and irrational souls,
which are created together with bodies, both of humans and animals. In this
account, some rational souls remain bodiless. Philo identifies these with the
angels of Scripture. Other rational souls are placed in human newborns, whose
bodies are already endowed with irrational souls. When the people these new-
borns become eventually die, their irrational souls die with their bodies, but their
rational souls go on. In Plato, the rational soul is indestructible because of the
sort of thing it is, that is, “by nature.” In Philo, it is indestructible not by nature
but by the grace of God.
Although the main influence on Philo’s philosophy was Plato, particularly his
views in the Symposium
and the Timaeus, Philo was also influenced by other
Greek thinkers. From Aristotle, he drew ideas about cosmology and ethics, from
neo-Pythagoreans, ideas about the mystic significance of numbers, especially the
number seven, and about the importance of self-discipline in preparation for
immortality. But Philo did not just borrow and modify. He was also an innova-
tor. Importantly, he was the first to claim that while God’s existence can be
known, his essence cannot. In contrast to the prevailing Greek philosophical
view of a universal Providence subject to unchanging laws of nature, Philo
insisted on God’s ability to suspend the laws of nature. He saw the world itself as
a great chain of being, with Logos just below God and in the role of mediator
between God and the world. Foreshadowing Christianity, he called the Logos
the first-begotten son of God.
An important point of contrast between Philo and Greek thinkers is that the
Greeks, especially the Stoics, tended to view human history as cyclical and
pointless. Philo, by contrast, theorized that cyclical changes in human history
are actually guided by Logos toward a preconceived goal, to be reached in the
course of time. That goal is that “the whole world may become, as it were, one
city,”
4
and enjoy the best form of government, which is democracy. His account
of this goal is in his interpretation of the messianic prophesies in Isaiah and
Micah.
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