But even this, which is the highest stage for many men, is not an adequate conception.  Above it is the contemplation of God, apart from all manifestations in the perceptible world, in His ideal nature, the Logos, which at once transcends and comprehends the universe.  And the attitude of this man can be best expressed perhaps by Spinoza’s phrase, “the intellectual love of God,” amor intellectualis Dei.  The worshipper of the Logos has grasped and has harmonized all the manifestations of the Deity; he sees and honors all things in God; he comprehends the universe as the perfect manifestation of one good Being.

Is this the highest point which man can reach?  Many religious philosophers have held that it is, but Philo, the mystic, yearning to track out God “beyond the utmost bound of human thought,” imagines one higher condition.  The Logos is only the image or the shadow of the Godhead.[229] Above it is the one perfect reality, the transcendent Essence.  Now, man cannot by any intellectual effort attain knowledge of the Infinite as He truly is, for this is above thought.  But to a few blessed mortals God of His grace vouchsafes a mystic vision of His nature.  Thus Moses, the perfect hierophant, had this perfect apprehension, and passed from intellectual love to holy adoration.  And the true philosopher has as the goal of his aspirations the heaven-sent ecstasy, in which he sees God no longer through His effects, or in the modes of His activity, but through Himself in His own essence.  The philosopher, when he receives this vision ([Greek:  epopteia]) is possessed by the Shekinah,[230] and, losing consciousness of his individuality, becomes at one with God.

So much for Philo’s theory of man’s upward progress.  We may add a word about his treatment of the problem which troubled thinkers in that age, and which has harassed theologians ever since, viz., to show how punishment and evil could be derived from a God who was all-powerful and all-good.  The Gnostics were driven by the difficulty to imagine an evil world-power, which was in incessant conflict with the Good God:  and popular belief had conjured up a legion of subordinate powers, who took part in the work of creation and the government of the world.  When Philo is speaking popularly, he accepts this current theology and speaks also of a punitive power of God[231] ([Greek:  dunamis kolastike]); but not when he is the philosopher.  For then, in perfect faith, he denies the absolute existence of evil.  “It is neither in Paradise nor indeed anywhere whatsoever."[232] Man, however, by his free will causes evil in the human sphere; and when God formed in man a rational nature capable of choosing for itself, moral evil became the necessary contrary of good.[233] Moreover, the punitive activity of God, though it seems to cause suffering and misery, is in truth a good, simulating evil, and if men judged the universal process as a whole, they would find it all good.  The existence of evil involves no derogation from the perfect unity of God.