It is best to contemplate God in silence, since we can compare Him to nothing that we know.  All our knowledge of God is really God dwelling in us.  He has breathed into us something of His nature, and is thus the archetype of what is highest in ourselves.  He who is truly inspired “may with good reason be called God.”  This blessed state may, however, be prepared for by such mediating agencies as the study of God’s laws in nature; and it is only the highest class of saints—­the souls “born of God”—­that are exalted above the need of symbols.  It would be easy to show how Philo wavers between two conceptions of the Divine nature—­God as simply transcendent, and God as immanent.  But this is one of the things that make him most interesting.  His Judaism will not allow him really to believe in a God “without qualities.”

The Logos dwells with God as His Wisdom (or sometimes he calls Wisdom, figuratively, the mother of the Logos).  He is the “second God,” the “Idea of Ideas”; the other Ideas or Powers are the forces which he controls—­“the Angels,” as he adds, suddenly remembering his Judaism.  The Logos is also the mind of God expressing itself in act:  the Ideas, therefore, are the content of the mind of God.  Here he anticipates Plotinus; but he does not reduce God to a logical point.  His God is self-conscious, and reasons.  By the agency of the Logos the worlds were made:  the intelligible world, the [Greek:  kosmos noetos], is the Logos acting as Creator.  Indeed, Philo calls the intelligible universe “the only and beloved Son of God”; just as Erigena says, “Be assured that the Word is the Nature of all things.”  The Son represents the world before God as High Priest, Intercessor, and Paraclete.  He is the “divine Angel” that guides us; He is the “bread of God,” the “dew of the soul,” the “convincer of sin”:  no evil can touch the soul in which He dwells:  He is the eternal image of the Father, and we, who are not yet fit to be called sons of God, may call ourselves His sons.

Philo’s ethical system is that of the later contemplative Mysticism.  Knowledge and virtue can be obtained only by renunciation of self.  Contemplation is a higher state than activity.  “The soul should cut off its right hand.”  “It should shun the whirlpool of life, and not even touch it with the tip of a finger.”  The highest stage is when a man leaves behind his finite self-consciousness, and sees God face to face, standing in Him from henceforward, and knowing Him not by reason, but by clear certainty.  Philo makes no attempt to identify the Logos with the Jewish Messiah, and leaves no room for an Incarnation.

This remarkable system anticipates the greater part of Christian and Pagan Neoplatonism.  The astonishing thing is that Philo’s work exercised so little influence on the philosophy of the second century.  It was probably regarded as an attempt to evolve Platonism out of the Pentateuch, and, as such, interesting only to the Jews, who were at this period becoming more and more unpopular.[115] The same prejudice may possibly have impaired the influence of Numenius, another semi-mystical thinker, who in the age of the Antonines evolved a kind of Trinity, consisting of God, whom he also calls Mind; the Son, the maker of the world, whom he does not call the Logos; and the world, the “grandson,” as he calls it.  His Jewish affinities are shown by his calling Plato “an Atticising Moses.”