3] What such passages
mean is that the separation of the Logos is a stage in man's progress
up to the true idea of God. It is a second-best Deity, so to say,
rather than a second Deity; for those who regard the Logos as God have
no conception at all of the perfect Being of which it is only the
principal attribute.

The theology of Philo is characterized throughout by a tolerant and
philosophical grasp of the difficulty of pure monotheism, and of the
necessity of a long intellectual searching before the goal can be
attained. To declare the Unity of God is simple enough; to have a real
conception of it is a very different and a very difficult thing. And
Philo's theology has a two-fold aim, in which either part complements
the other. It explains, on the one hand, how God is revealed to the
world through His powers or attributes or modes of activity, and, on
the other, how man can ascend to an ecstatic union with the Real Being
through comprehension of those powers. By the ideal ladder which
brings down God to earth, man can climb again to Heaven. The three
chief rungs of the ladder are the attributes of creation, and of
ruling power, and the Logos. The perfect unity of the Godhead is not,
of course, properly the subject of attributes, but the limited mind of
man so conceives it for its own understanding, and speaks of God's
justice, God's goodness, God's wisdom. These are, to use philosophical
terminology, categories of the religious understanding, which are
finally resolved by the perfect sage in "the synthetic apperception of
Unity."

Philo follows what may have been a Hebrew tradition in explaining the
two names of God, "Elohim" and "Jehovah," as connoting His two chief
attributes: (1) the creative or beneficent, (2) the ruling or
judicial, or, as it is sometimes called, the law-giving power.[224]
Names, as we know, were always regarded by Philo as profound symbols,
and naturally the names of God are of vital import; and the twofold
expression for the Hebrew Deity, of which the higher critics have made
much destructive use, was noticed by the earliest commentators, but
made the basis by them of a constructive theology. The ruling and the
creative attributes of God are outlined and contained in the highest
mode of all, the Logos, "the reason of God in every phase and form of
it that is discoverable and realizable by man." For by the Logos, God
is both ruler and good.[225] This is the profound interpretation of
the sto