Complete Works of Philo Judaeus, Vol. 1

§. 6. God used no helper—for who else was there?—but only himself, and knew it was necessary to bestow benefits with ungrudging and rich gifts upon a nature that, without divine grace, was unable to obtain any good from itself. But he does not bestow benefits according to the magnitude of his own gifts—for they are indescribable and endless—but according to the capacities of those receiving the benefits. For it is not the case that the created being is capable of receiving benefits in the same way as it is in the nature of God to do good; for His powers are transcendent. The weaker being, being unable to receive their magnitude, would have failed if He had not measured out and weighed fittingly what was appropriate for each. If someone should wish to use more naked terms, he would say that the intelligible world is nothing other than the Logos Word/Reason of God already creating the world. For the intelligible city is nothing other than the reasoning of the architect, who is already planning to build the sensible city with the intelligible one as his model. This is the doctrine of Moses, not mine. Indeed, when recording the creation of man, he confesses explicitly in the following sections that he was fashioned after the image of God. If the part is an image of an image, clearly the whole form, this entire sensible world, is a copy of the divine image that is greater than the human one. It is clear that the archetypal seal, which we call the intelligible world, would itself be the archetypal model, the idea of ideas, the Logos Word/Reason of God.