Life After Death_ A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion - Alan Segal [225]
Philo did not so much demonstrate that the soul was immortal as assume it. It is implicit in his anthropology, which is quite consistent throughout. Man is made of flesh and spirit: the body is dust, though it is animated by divine spirit, which is not created but originates directly from the Lord, the Father and Ruler of the Universe. The body is created mutable and impermanent. The soul is immutable, immortal, and permanant. Our lives are created because God directed our souls to be placed within our bodies. This “spirit” or “soul,” He breathed into humanity, making him a composite, mutable, and dying creature who, because of his immortal soul, is also an immortal creature. So Philo called humanity the border between mortality and immortality.17
Philo would rather cede some of the LORD’S power as creator than cede any of His immutability. Anything that the LORD directly created would imply change (and therefore imperfection) in Him; hence the soul, like all the ideas, must be uncreated, while the material creation is the product of an artisan angel, the demiurge (artisan, literally: people’s worker). The mind is the soul of the soul (Opif. 66, Her. 55). In so doing, Philo indicated that the center of consciousness, the part that survives death, is the mind and thus valorized it as the transcendent part of humanity, a quite notable innovation on the biblical conception of the “soul.” Philo’s philosophical terms seem for the first time in Judaism to clearly designate the center of the personality, the personal and individual aspects of spiritual life. For Philo they must do so, as he believed strictly in individual reward and punishment for individual moral decisions. Thus, he tried to demonstrate that some of Plato’s notions were not the full truth.
Philo was also the first philosopher to describe the world of ideas, the sum total of all ideas in the universe, with the name kosmos noētos, the intelligible world. This conception allowed him to clarify an important aspect of God’s divinity (though its full nature is hidden from us). Philo identified this intelligible world with a hypostasis (separate manifestation) of God, which he called the logos, the rational pattern of the world. The Gospel of John 1:1 translates logos as “Word” but it never means “Word” in any lexical sense. It is this rational hypostasis of God which the Gospel of John proclaims as the creative agent in the world (1:3) and is incarnated in the person of Jesus (1:14). Philo would have agreed with the first statement but found the second illogical and impossible. This term already had a long history and a technical meaning in Stoicism but Philo found it advantageous for his own mixture of Stoicism and Platonism, so he developed new meanings and uses for it.
The stoic logos, which means rational principle or blueprint, not only functions like the platonic nous, reason or divine mind, it is also used by Philo to describe the way in which God acts in this world. Every place where an angel is mentioned in Scripture, Philo understood that the logos was present. He also used the word logos to refer to YHWH, the tetragrammaton (four-lettered) name of God. This is the name of God that is translated as “LORD” in English Bibles. In Greek, YHWH was already being pronounced ’Adonay translated as Kyrios (meaning “Lord”) in Philo’s own time. Philo understood logos and kyrios to denote a divine presence, God’s principal angel messenger to the world. Philo understood that God made the world through the logos, which in this context is probably best understood as a “blueprint,” and