os is to
him the thought of God and at the same time the product of his thought,
therefore both idea and power. But further, the Logos is God himself on
that side of him which is turned to the world, as also the ideal of the
world and the unity of the spiritual forces which produce the world and
rule in it. He can therefore be put beside God and in opposition to the
world; but he can also, so far as the spiritual contents of the world
are comprehended in him, be put with the world in contrast with God. The
Logos accordingly appears as the Son of God, the foremost creature, the
representative, Viceroy, High Priest, and Messenger of God; and again as
principle of the world, spirit of the world, nay, as the world itself.
He appears as a power and as a person, as a function of God and as an
active divine being. Had Philo cancelled the contradiction which lies in
this whole conception of the Logos, his system would have been
demolished; for that system with its hard antithesis of God and the
world, needed a mediator who was, and yet was not God, as well as world.
From this contrast, however, it further followed that we can only think
of a world-formation by the Logos, not of a world-creation.[113] Within
this world man is regarded as a microcosm, that is, as a being of Divine
nature according to his spirit, who belongs to the heavenly world, while
the adhering body is a prison which holds men captive in the fetters of
sense, that is, of sin.

The Stoic and Platonic ideals and rules of conduct (also the
Neo-pythagorean) were united by Philo in the religious Ethic as well as
in the Cosmology. Rationalistic moralism is surmounted by the injunction
to strive after a higher good lying above virtue. But here, at the same
time, is the point at which Philo decidedly goes beyond Platonism, and
introduces a new thought into Greek Ethics, and also in correspondence
therewith into theoretic philosophy. This thought, which indeed lay
altogether in the line of the development of Greek philosophy, was not,
however, pursued by Philo into all its consequences, though it was the
expression of a new frame of mind. While the highest good is resolved by
Plato and his successors into knowledge of truth, which truth, together
with the idea of God, lies in a sphere really accessible to the
intellectual powers of the human spirit, the highest good, the Divine
original being, is considered by Philo, though not invariably, to be
above reason, and the