Complete Works of Philo Judaeus (Vol. 6)

...exhausted into it; and ageless and free from disease, since bodies susceptible to diseases and old age are strongly overturned by heat, cold, and other opposing forces attacking from the outside. No power, having escaped, encircles and attacks it, as there is no part missing, with all things being integrated within. But if there is anything outside, it would entirely be a void, or the passionless nature, which is impossible to affect or be affected by. Furthermore, it will not be dissolved by any cause within it. Firstly, because the part would be larger and stronger than the whole, which is most absurd. 492 M. For the world, employing insurmountable power, leads all its parts while being led by none of them. Secondly, because since there are two causes of corruption, one internal and one external, whatever is thought to undergo one is necessarily receptive to the other. A sign of this is that the ox, the horse, the human, and similar animals are by nature susceptible to being destroyed by iron and will die by disease. For it is difficult, or rather impossible, to say what, being by nature susceptible to an external intelligible cause, will be immune to corruption, to have existed by itself when the world was not. For what does not exist does not move, and time has been shown to be the interval of cosmic motion. It is necessary, therefore, that both have existed from eternity, not having taken a beginning of generation, but being those that are not subject to corruption. Perhaps some Stoic a school of Hellenistic philosophy who loves to split hairs will say that time is defined as the interval of the world's motion, not only of the one currently adorned, but also of the one conceived during the ekpyrosis conflagration. To him one must say,

"You, noble sir, by shifting the names, are calling disorder a world. For if this one which we see is rightly and most fittingly called a world, being ordered and adorned through the perfection of human art, one would duly call its change into fire a disorder."
943 P.