Complete Works of Philo Judaeus (Vol. 6)

Therefore Plato also says well: "For nothing departed, nor did anything approach it from anywhere; for there was nothing. For it has been made by art, providing its own decay as food for itself, and suffering and acting upon all things within itself and by itself. For he who composed it judged that it would be better being self-sufficient than in need of other things."

§. 13. That argument, however, is most demonstrative, for which I know thousands are puffed up, as if it were precise and completely irrefutable. For they inquire: for the sake of what does God destroy the world? Either for the sake of no longer creating a world, or for the sake of constructing another one. The former is foreign to God, for one must change disorder into order, not order into disorder; furthermore, because he would also accept repentance, which is a passion and disease of the soul. For he ought not to have created the world at all, or, judging the work suitable for himself, to rejoice in what has been brought into being. The second case is worthy of no small investigation. For if he constructs another in place of the one now existing, the one that comes into being will certainly be produced as either worse, or similar, or better—each of which is blameworthy. For if the world is worse, the creator is also worse; but the works of God are beyond reproach, irrefutable, and incorrigible, having been created by the most perfect art and knowledge.

For "not even a woman," they say, "is so lacking in noble sense,
As to choose worse things instead of better ones" ——. A variation of an Iliad fragment (16.48-49).

It is fitting for God to form the formless, and to clothe the most unsightly things with marvelous beauties. But if it is similar, the craftsman is a vain laborer, differing not at all from completely young children who often playing by the shores build mounds of sand, and then, taking them away, demolish them again with their hands. For it is much better than constructing a similar one—neither taking away, nor adding, nor again changing to better or worse—to leave the one that once came into being from the beginning in its place.