Epicurean. If the
Epicureans taught that there probably is a God, but that the world is of
no concern to Him, so among the Jews of the first century gnostic ideas
prevailed, according to which not the highest but a subordinate God
created and ruled the world. The task of creation seemed unworthy of the
supreme God. Philo therefore seized the Stoic idea of the Logos or Logoi
in order to bring his transcendental God again into relation with the
visible world. The most important attributes and powers of God were
hypostatised as beings who participated in the creation and government of
the world. Philo's God first of all creates or possesses within himself a
world that is conceived, an invisible world,(12) which is also called the
world of ideas(13) or the idea of ideas.(14) These ideas are the types(15)
of all things, and the power by which God created them is often called
_Sophia_ or _Episteme_, wisdom or knowledge.(16) This world of ideas in
its entirety corresponds, as is readily seen, to the Greek Logos, the
separate types to the Platonic ideas or the Stoic Logoi.

The entire Logos, or the sum of Ideas, is called by Philo, entirely
independent of Christianity, the true Son of God, while the realised world
of Christian teaching passes as the second Son. If the first Logos is
occasionally called the image or shadow of God, the world of sense is the
image of the image, the shadow of the shadow. More logically expressed,
God would be the _causa efficiens_, matter the _causa materialis_, the
Logos the _causa instrumentalis_, while the goodness of God is sometimes
added as the _causa finalis_. At the same time we also see here the
difference between the working of the Jewish and Greek minds. In the Old
Testament and in Philo, the Sophia or wisdom of God becomes a half
mythological being, a goddess who is called the mother, and even the
nurse,(17) of all beings. She bore with much labour out of the seed of
God,(18) as Philo says, the only and beloved visible Son, that is to say,
this Cosmos. This Cosmos is called by him the Son of God,(19) the only
begotten,(20) while the first Logos is the first-born,(21) and as such
often coincides with the Sophia and its activity.(22) He is also called
the elder son,(23) and as such is distinguished from a younger son,(24)
from the real, visible world. But this divine Sophia may not, according to
Philo, any more than God Himself, come into direct contact with impure
matter. According to hi