derived from a God who was all-powerful
and all-good. The Gnostics were driven by the difficulty to imagine an
evil world-power, which was in incessant conflict with the Good God:
and popular belief had conjured up a legion of subordinate powers, who
took part in the work of creation and the government of the world.
When Philo is speaking popularly, he accepts this current theology and
speaks also of a punitive power of God[231] ([Greek: dunamis
kolastike]); but not when he is the philosopher. For then, in
perfect faith, he denies the absolute existence of evil. "It is
neither in Paradise nor indeed anywhere whatsoever."[232] Man,
however, by his free will causes evil in the human sphere; and when
God formed in man a rational nature capable of choosing for itself,
moral evil became the necessary contrary of good.[233] Moreover, the
punitive activity of God, though it seems to cause suffering and
misery, is in truth a good, simulating evil, and if men judged the
universal process as a whole, they would find it all good. The
existence of evil involves no derogation from the perfect unity of
God.

If we have understood correctly Philo's theology, neither Logos, nor
subordinate powers, nor angels, nor demons have an objective
existence; they are mere imaginings of varying incompleteness which
the limited minds of men, "moving in worlds not realized," make for
themselves of the one and only true God. Philo's theology is the
philosophical treatment of Jewish tradition, just as Philo's legal
exegesis is the philosophical treatment of the Torah. While
maintaining and striving to deepen the conception of God's unity, he
aims at expounding to the reason how, on the one hand, that unity is
revealed in the world about us, and how, on the other, we may advance
to its true comprehension. It was, however, unfortunate that Philo
expressed his theology in the current language, which was vague and
inexact, and adapted certain foreign theosophical ideas to Judaism;
hence succeeding generations, paying regard to the pictorial
representation rather than to the principles of his thought, sought
and found in him evidence of theories of Divine government to which
Judaism was pre-eminently opposed. The first chapter of the Fourth
Gospel shows that gradual process of thought which finally made the
Logos doctrine the antithesis of Judaism. In the first verse we have a
thought which might well have been written by Philo himself: "In the
beginnin