Analysis part 2. God is not completely detached from creation We saw in the previous section that Xxxxx’x main problem with the people who held the material world to be uncreated was that they eliminated God’s providence. To understand Xxxxx’x arguments in support of the createdness of the world, we need to know the following: who were the people of whom Xxxxx thought? Several scholars have proposed that Xxxxx refuted the Aristotelian position in Opif. 6b–12.181 Others have come to the conclusion that Xxxxx had the Stoics in mind.182 However, Xxxxx appears to address two kinds of opponents instead of just one, for he offers two clues regarding the people he wants to counter. The first clue is that they allegedly underestimate God, presenting him as inactive; the second is that they overestimate the world, assigning to it more splendour than it deserves.183 p. 434) and according to him, both Xxxxx and the Stoics held that God’s freedom is limited because he is bound to the laws of nature, which excludes individual providence (ibid., vol. 2, p. 283). However, as the paraphrase of sections from the Laws shows, Xxxxx intended to prove that the gods are good and held care on both a general and an individual level to be an essential element of that goodness.
Analysis part 2. God and the intelligible world are intertwined In the previous section, I explored Philo’s qualification of the intelligible world as ἀγένητος and we saw how this qualification meant for Philo that God and the intelligible world are closely related to each other. They both belong to the category of true being, opposite to the material world of becoming. The current section describes how Philo regarded God and the intelligible world as so closely related to each other that neither can easily be distinguished from the other. We will see how the distinction between God and the intelligible world 224 The timelessness of the intelligible world also explains the close relation that Philo expresses in Opif. 12 between the conceptual, the invisible, the not-becoming and everlastingness. 225 See pp. 61–67. 226 Philo qualified both God and the intelligible world as ἀγένητος. Philo uses ἀγένητος for God in Migr. 91; Mut. 22; Som. I, 77; Dec. 60; Virt. 213. Philo expresses the thought that time does not apply to God in Deus 32 (see further note 230). The doctrine that the ideas are that which truly exist is formulated as a Platonic tenet by Seneca in Ep. 58 (see Dillon, Middle Platonists, p. 136). Wolfson claimed that Philo qualifies the ideas as ἀγένητος to indicate that they were not created out of matter (Wolfson, Philo vol. 1, p. 222). 227 This idea is comparable to Dillon’s explanation that Philo used the term ἀσώματος to express that something has qualities opposite to those of σῶμα (especially decay and change) (see Dillon, ‘Angels’, p. 203). — Philo’s doctrine of God — becomes vague when we explore the following question: where did Philo believe the intelligible world exists? In Opif. 16–25, Philo explains that if in any sense the intelligible world can be said to exist in a place, this place must be divine reason: God’s mind.228 Philo problematises this statement in Opif. 17. Here, he writes that it is not appropriate to say that the intelligible world exists in a place, because a ‘place’ is something belonging to the material world. In Opif. 24, Philo bypasses this terminological problem by identifying the intelligible world with divine reason itself, instead of saying that it exists within it. He writes: ‘one would say the intelligible world to be nothing else than the reason of God already creating the world.’229 In this sentence, ‘already’ is used as translation of ἤδη, but we should bear in mind that this ‘already’ cannot imply a temporal sense for Philo...
