Nor must it be forgotten that Philo was preaching spiritual monotheism not only to Jews, but also to the Hellenic world, for whom it was a vast bound from their naturalistic polytheism.  Zealous as he was for the pure faith, he realized that mankind could not attain it directly, but must approach it by conceptions of the One God gradually increasing in profundity and truth.  The Greek thinkers had approximated closest to the Hebraic God-idea when they conceived one supreme, immanent reason in the universe; and Philo, in carrying his audiences beyond this to the transcendent-immanent Being, transformed the Greek cosmical concept into a Divine power of the One Being.  For the true believer this is the stepping-stone to the perfect idea.  “The Logos,” he says, “is the God of us imperfect people, but the true sages worship the One Being."[221] And, again, “The imperfect have as their law the holy Logos."[222] And in this sense, it is “intermediate ([Greek:  methorios]) between God and man."[223] What such passages mean is that the separation of the Logos is a stage in man’s progress up to the true idea of God.  It is a second-best Deity, so to say, rather than a second Deity; for those who regard the Logos as God have no conception at all of the perfect Being of which it is only the principal attribute.

The theology of Philo is characterized throughout by a tolerant and philosophical grasp of the difficulty of pure monotheism, and of the necessity of a long intellectual searching before the goal can be attained.  To declare the Unity of God is simple enough; to have a real conception of it is a very different and a very difficult thing.  And Philo’s theology has a two-fold aim, in which either part complements the other.  It explains, on the one hand, how God is revealed to the world through His powers or attributes or modes of activity, and, on the other, how man can ascend to an ecstatic union with the Real Being through comprehension of those powers.  By the ideal ladder which brings down God to earth, man can climb again to Heaven.  The three chief rungs of the ladder are the attributes of creation, and of ruling power, and the Logos.  The perfect unity of the Godhead is not, of course, properly the subject of attributes, but the limited mind of man so conceives it for its own understanding, and speaks of God’s justice, God’s goodness, God’s wisdom.  These are, to use philosophical terminology, categories of the religious understanding, which are finally resolved by the perfect sage in “the synthetic apperception of Unity.”

Philo follows what may have been a Hebrew tradition in explaining the two names of God, “Elohim” and “Jehovah,” as connoting His two chief attributes:  (1) the creative or beneficent, (2) the ruling or judicial, or, as it is sometimes called, the law-giving power.[224] Names, as we know, were always regarded by Philo as profound symbols, and naturally the names of God are of vital import; and the twofold expression for the Hebrew Deity, of which