At The Anxious Bench, eminent historian Dr. Philip Jenkins has a nice basic summary of Philo’s merging of Platonic theology with that of the Hebrew Bible. This summary fits nicely with the one I quoted towards the end of episode 76 of the trinities podcast.
Dr. Jenkins says, in part:
Having excluded God from the world, though, Philo used a Stoic concept to bring him back (and he often ran into serious contradictions in the process). God was transcendent, but also thoroughly immanent, a constant creative force in all things. As a would-be Platonist, Philo explained creation as the work not of a God separated from the world, but of divine powers or attributes.
“Powers” could mean the capabilities of a thing (the owner of the powers) but in these contexts it often means a being, a being with powers, i.e. thing of God’s Wisdom as a being who can do things, as a him or her.
The most important of these powers that lay between perfect Form and imperfect matter was the Logos, Reason, God’s “first-born,” which is equivalent to Plato’s creative Demiurge.
That is, the “Craftsman” who figures in the complicated creation-myth in Plato’s famous dialogue called the Timaeus.
Click here to read the whole thing.
