These intervening powers he at times calls angels and at times ideas. He uses a Greek word logos meaning Reason. Whence comes this logos which we are to think of partly as a spirit and again as a thought? It is a product; or as he expresses it in a Greek idiom, a child of divine intelligence. By means of this logos, the perfect spiritual divinity creates the world.
This sounds unfamiliar, but the eighth chapter of Proverbs and some of the books of the Apocrypha speak of Wisdom as though it were a kind of being and that with it God laid the world's foundation. Of course, this is only figurative. But later the fathers of the Church put a new and startling construction upon Philo's Logos and read into it a literalness he never intended. They changed the logos into an actual human being. Unlike Philo they did not call it a child of divine intelligence in the Greek idiomatic sense, but a "son of God" in an actual and physical sense. It was then but a step for the Church to declare that Jesus, its Messiah, was the Logos! He was therefore a species of divinity too. It was not till Christianity's second stage that Jesus of Nazareth was in this way raised from a real man into an imaginary divinity. Thus the link with Judaism was broken in the rejection of its fundamental principle of monotheism—the belief in one indivisible God.
Philo is, of course, only unconsciously the cause of this doctrinal change, for he did not come in contact with the new sect of Christians and never mentions it, and this idea developed after his day. In fact, the divinity of Jesus had already been adopted, and Philo's writings were later construed to fit it.
His Ethics.
A word on his ethics. Evil is a necessary consequence of our free will. Without it there could not be the contrast of good. Evil is associated with the body which he depicts as the opponent of the soul. The soul emanates from God like the logos, but attracted by sensuous matter it descends into mortal bodies. This earthly body then is the cause of evil. But Philo was too wise to infer from that the duty of asceticism. He did not teach that man must suppress his desires and passions and earthly longings, but that he should suppress them. For this, man needs the help of God. The wise and virtuous are uplifted out of themselves to a closer knowledge of God, and God's spirit dwells in them. This is highest happiness. While we cannot quite accept his theories, his conclusions ring true with all the inspiring elements of lofty religion.
Notes and References.
The Logos:
The Greek logos also means Word. Just as Proverbs personifies wisdom, so the Targum (Aramaic translation of the Bible) identifies the "word of God" with the divine presence. Here again the Christian mystic goes a step further and changes a metaphor into a fact. "The Word of God became flesh; Jesus is that Word!" (Gospel of St John.)
In his popular but exhaustive work on Philo-Judaeus, (J. P. S. A. 1910) Norman Bentwich writes:
"It is idle to try and formulate a single definite notion of Philo's Logos. For it is the expression of God in His multiple and manifold activity, the instrument of creation, the seat of ideas, the world of thought, which God first established as the model of the visible universe, the guiding providence, the sower of virtue, the fount of wisdom, described sometimes in religious ecstacy, sometimes in philosophical metaphysics sometimes in the spirit of the mystical poet."