of God, are only the bodyguard, subordinate instruments, and inferior modes of the Divine part.[250] So Philo explains that all our faculties are derived from the Divine principle, and he draws the moral lesson that our true function is to bend them all to the Divine service, so as to foster our noblest part.  The aim of the good man is to bring the god within him into union with the God without, and to this end he must avoid the life of the senses,[251] which mars the Divine Nous, and may entirely crush it.  The Divine soul, as it had a life before birth, so also has a life after death; for what is Divine cannot perish.  Immortality is man’s most splendid hope.  If the Divine Presence fills him with a mystic ecstasy, he has, indeed, attained it upon this earth, but this bliss is only for the very blessed sage; and he, too, looks forward to the more lasting union with the Godhead after this terrestrial life is over.[252] True at once to the principles of Platonism and Judaism, Philo admits no anthropomorphic conception of Heaven or of Hell.  He is convinced that there is a life hereafter, and finds in the story of Enoch the Biblical symbol thereof,[253] but he does not speculate about the nature of the Divine reward.  The pious are taken up to God, he says, and live forever,[254] communing alone with the Alone.[255] The unrighteous souls, Philo sometimes suggests, in accordance with current Pythagorean ideas, are reincarnated according to a system of transmigration within the human species ([Greek:  palengenesia]).[256] Yet the sinner suffers his full doom on earth.  The true Hades is the life of the wicked man who has not repented, exposed to vengeance, with uncleansed guilt, obnoxious to every curse.[257] And the Divine punishment is to live always dying, to endure death deathless and unending, the death of the soul.[258]

The Divine Nous constitutes the true nature of man; Philo, however, insists with almost wearisome repetition, that the god within us has no power in itself, and depends entirely on the grace and inspiration of God without for knowledge, virtue, and happiness.[259] The Stoic dogma, that the wise man is perfectly independent and self-contained ([Greek:  autarches]) appears to him as a wicked blasphemy.  “Those who make God the indirect, and the mind the direct cause are guilty of impiety, for we are the instruments through which particular activities are developed, but He who gives the impulse to the powers of the body and the soul is the Creator by whom all things are moved."[260] All thought-functions, memory, reasoning, intuition, are referred directly to Divine inspiration, which is in Platonic terminology the illumination of the mind by the ideas.  Thus, finally, all human activity is referred back to God.