3. Philo

chapters of the Timaeus, replete with extensive and detailed discussions of medical and physiological matters, and it only overtly returns in the last paragraphs (if one gets that far!) to important threads pulling the whole treatise together. His purpose, Gregory says as he nears the end, acknowledging that he has 'wandered far from the matters of hand', was to show that 'the seminal cause of our constitution is neither soul without a body nor a body without a soul, but that, from animated and living bodies a being, living and animated from the ﬁrst, is generated, human nature receiving it to be cherished, like a nursling, with her own powers', so that each part grows appropriately and together, and the soul, which initially appears somewhat obscurely, 'by this artistic and scientiﬁc process of formation', gradually 'increases in radiance concurrently with the perfecting of the organism' (De hom. 30.28–9). In a similar manner to the way in which a statue is fashioned, he argues, so too 'the all-contriving nature, taking from the kindred matter within herself the part that comes from the human being, crafts the statue', and, as with the carver and his stone, 'in the carving of the organism the form of the soul, by the analogy, is displayed in the substratum, incompletely in that which is incomplete, and perfectly in that which is perfect; but it would have been perfect from the beginning had nature not been maimed by evil' (De hom. 30.30). What

Gregory understands by evil maiming nature must wait for the examination of his treatise itself, but the analogy with the statue emerging from the stone—in this case, a living embodied soul requiring growth in both body and soul to reach completeness—indicates that we are within the realm of necessity and pedagogy, and, above all, time and the possibilities for transformation that time opens up.

3. Philo With Philo of Alexandria (c.20 –50 ) we see for the ﬁrst time the cosmological reﬂections of the Greek philosophers applied to the opening chapters of Genesis. His work, On the Creation of the Cosmos according to Moses, is of particular interest for understanding the background of Gregory's treatise, as, unlike the later hexaemeral tradition it inspired, Philo deals with both creation accounts (and, indeed, Gen. 3), holding them in tension, yet also providing a unitary account.⁴⁴ As Moses is primarily the lawgiver, the work is not simply a treatise on cosmology and the place of the human being within the cosmos, but is

⁴⁴ Greek text ed. F. H. Colson and G. H. Whitaker, Philo vol. 1, Loeb Classical Library, Philo 1

(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1929); ET David T. Runia, Philo, On the Creation of the Cosmos according to Moses: Introduction, Translation, and Commentary, Philo of Alexandria

Commentary Series 1 (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2001); I have used Runia's translation, modifying it occasionally. On the title, see Runia, Creation, 96–8. For the relation between Philo and the Timaeus, see David T. Runia, Philo of Alexandria and the Timaeus of Plato, Philosophia Antiqua 44

(Leiden: Brill, 1986); and for a survey of his inﬂuence in later Christian writers, see idem, Philo in Early

framed rather in terms of the law. So it begins with Philo pointing out that, unlike all the others who either 'simply drew up unadorned regulations' or 'enclosed their thoughts with a mass of verbiage and so deceived the masses by concealing the truth with mythical ﬁctions' (Opif. 1), Moses did not simply state what was to be done, 'nor did he, since it was necessary to form in advance the minds

[προτυπῶσαι τὰς διανοίας] of those who were to make use of the laws, invent myths or express the approval of those composed by others' (Opif. 2). Moses' account of creation (κοσμοποιίαν) is thus a pedagogy, showing how 'the cosmos is in harmony with the law and the law with the cosmos', so that 'the man [ἀνδρὸς] who observes the law is at once [εὐθὺς] a citizen of the cosmos [κοσμοπολίτου], directing his actions towards the purpose of nature [πρὸς τὸβούλημα τῆς φύσεως], in accordance with which the entire cosmos also is administered' (Opif. 3). And the work concludes, in turn, by drawing out ﬁve lessons that Moses teaches by means of his account of the creation of the cosmos (Opif. 170–2).

Before turning to the opening verses of Genesis, Philo begins, much like Timaeus, by laying out a fundamental distinction. Moses, according to Philo, taught that it is 'absolutely necessary that among existing things there is an activating cause on the one hand, and a passive object on the other [ἐν τοῖς οὖσι τὸμὲν εἶναι δραστήριον αἴτιον, τὸδὲπαθητόν]': 'the activating cause is the absolutely pure and unadulterated Intellect [νοῦς] of the universe superior to excellence and superior to knowledge and even superior to the good and the beautiful itself ' (Opif. 8), while the passive element 'when set in motion and shaped and ensouled by the Intellect [ψυχωθὲν ὑπὸτοῦνοῦ] changes into the most perfect piece of work, this cosmos' (Opif. 9). To deny this and say that the world is ungenerated, according to Philo, would eliminate the most important aid towards piety, which is the idea of providence, for 'reason demands that the Father and Maker of all exercise care for that which has come into being', just as a father does for his children or a craftsman for his work (Opif. 10). Moreover, as the ungenerated 'was of a totally different order' than the visible and 'the entire senseperceptible realm is in a process of genesis and change [ἐν γενέσει καὶμεταβολαῖς] and never remains in the same state, [Moses] assigned eternity to the invisible and intelligible, as being akin and related to it', but to the sense-perceptible 'he ascribed the appropriate name "genesis" [γένεσιν οἰκεῖον ὄνομα ἐπφήμισεν]' (Opif. 12)—the name, of course, of the book under discussion.

Turning to the opening verses of Genesis, Philo emphasizes that although the fashioning of the cosmos is described as taking place over six days, this was not because the maker needed a length of time, 'for God surely did everything simultaneously [ἅμα], not only in giving commands but also in his thinking',

Christian Literature: A Survey, Compendia rerum judaicarum ad Novum Testamentum, Section III,

Jewish Traditions in Early Christian Literature 3 (Assen, Netherlands: Van Gorcum; Minneapolis:

Fortress Press, 1993).

whereas things that come into existence require 'order' (Opif. 13). Noting a distinction in the text between the beginning, designated by the cardinal number

'one' (μία), and the ordinal numbers used for the following days (Opif. 15; Gen.

1:5), Philo emphasizes that 'day one' stands alone, distinct from the following sequence of days. Day one contains innumerable things, preeminent among which is 'the intelligible cosmos [νοητὸν κόσμον]' (Opif. 15). Using similar reasoning to Timaeus, he continues:

For God, because he is God, understood in advance [προλαβὼν] that a beautiful copy [μίμημα καλὸν] would not come into existence apart from a beautiful paradigm, and that none of the objects of sense-perception would be without fault, unless it was modelled on the archetypal and intelligible idea. Therefore when he had decided to construct this visible cosmos, he ﬁrst marked out the intelligible [προεξετύπου τὸν νοητόν], so that he could use it as an incorporeal and most god-like paradigm and so produce the corporeal, a younger likeness of the older [πρεσβυτέρου νεώτερον ἀπεικόνισμα], which would contain as many senseperceptible kinds as there were intelligible ones in that other.

(Opif. 16) It is noteworthy that the intention of God is to create the visible, and thus bodily, cosmos, and it is in order to do this that he ﬁrst marks out the intelligible pattern.

This intelligible paradigm, Philo continues, should not be thought to exist 'in some place' (Opif. 17). It exists, rather, in the way that a plan of a city, ordered to be founded by a king, ﬁrst exists in the head of the architect, who then constructs the city out of stones and timber, all the while 'looking at the model and ensuring that the corporeal objects correspond to each of the incorporeal ideas' (Opif.

17–18). In the same way, when God 'decided to found the great cosmic city, he ﬁrst conceived of its outlines', from which 'he composed the intelligible cosmos, which served him as a model when he completed the sense-perceptible cosmos as well' (Opif. 19). And as the archetype for the city was engraved in the soul of the architect, so also 'the cosmos composed of the ideas would have no other place than the divine Logos who gives these [ideas] their ordered disposition' (Opif. 20); the location of the intelligible cosmos is not in space, nor, as we will see, in time, but rather 'in' or even 'as' the Logos. The analogy with an architect is modiﬁed a few lines later when Philo states that if one wanted to speak more simply, 'one would say that the intelligible cosmos is nothing other than the Logos of God as he is actually making the cosmos'.⁴⁵ While the analogy implies a distinction between the king and the architect, Philo drops that implication thereafter: God alone is the creator—apart from when the plural of Gen. 1:26 and other considerations, as we will see, demand others (although the Logos is not in fact introduced as a ⁴⁵ Opif. 24: οὐδὲν ἂν ἕτερον εἴποι τὸν νοητὸν κόσμον εἶναι ἢθεοῦλόγου ἤδη κοσμοποιοῦντος. For the translation of ἤδη as 'actually', see Runia, Creation, 148.

collaborator in the creation of the human being). The Logos is the 'place' of all the powers of God, especially that 'cosmos-producing power which has as its source that which is truly good' (Opif. 20–1), containing in or as itself the intelligible cosmos as the blueprint for the work being effected. Philo concludes this reﬂection by drawing an analogy from the part to the whole: as the human being is made in the image of God, so too must be the whole, so that 'this entire sense-perceptible cosmos . . . is a representation of the divine image', and as such, 'it is plain that the archetypal seal, which we afﬁrm to be the intelligible cosmos, would itself be the model and archetypal idea of the ideas, the Logos of God' (Opif. 25). As Runia observes, Philo seems to be deliberately rejecting any attempt to introduce subordinate deities: 'the intelligible world and the Logos—as object and subject of thought, respectively—may be identiﬁed because they are both intrinsically tied to God's creative activity'.⁴⁶ Turning to the reason why the universe was constructed, Philo again follows

Plato, 'one of the ancients', to afﬁrm that as 'the Father and Maker was good', 'he did not begrudge a share of his own excellent nature to an existence [οὐσίᾳ] which did not possess any beauty of its own but was able to become all things' (Opif. 21).

However, although the distinction between the active cause and passive object is bridged through God's creative activity, that which has come into being is nevertheless too weak to be able to receive 'the unstinting riches of his beneﬁcence' in their own inﬁnite measure. God thus conferred his blessings 'in proportion to the capacities of those who receive them, . . . dispensing with ﬁne tuning to each thing its allotted portion' (Opif. 23), a proportional measuring out presumably effected through the Logos.

Only now does Philo turn to the full phrase of Gen. 1:1: 'In the beginning God made heaven and earth.' Regarding the term 'beginning', Philo is emphatic that this should not be taken in a temporal sense: 'for there was no time before the cosmos, but rather it either came into existence together with the cosmos or after it', and thus time is 'the extension [διάστημα] of the movement of the cosmos'

(Opif. 26). While all things were made 'simultaneously' (ἅμα), what comes into 'beautiful existence', however, possesses 'order' (τάξιν), 'for there is no beauty in disorder' (Opif. 28). At this stage of the Genesis account and Philo's exposition, we are still in the realm of the intelligible cosmos, for the earth is 'invisible and unformed' (Gen. 1:2: ἀόρατος καὶἀκατασκεύαστος), and the heaven is likewise, according to Philo, 'bodiless' (Opif. 29). In this 'one day', God also made 'a form

[ἰδέαν] of air and of void', which is the 'darkness' and the 'abyss', respectively, and also 'the incorporeal being of water and of spirit, and as seventh and last of all light', the latter being the 'intelligible model' of the sun and the stars which would be placed in the heavens (Opif. 29). The 'invisible and intelligible light', moreover,

⁴⁶ Cf. Runia, Creation, 154.

'has come into being as an image of the divine Logos which communicated its genesis' (Opif. 31), so that when the light appeared, 'its rival darkness proceeded to withdraw', and God built a wall between them to keep them separate, thus establishing morning and evening, which are thus also intelligible realities (Opif.

33–4). All this is contained in 'day one', which 'was named in this way because of the aloneness of the intelligible cosmos which has the nature of the unit' (Opif. 35).

With the intelligible cosmos thus 'completed and established in the divine Logos', 'the sense-perceptible cosmos was ripe for birth, with respect to the model of the incorporeal'.⁴⁷ That what follows is 'sense-perceptible' is implied by the ﬁrst thing made after 'day one', that is, the 'ﬁrmament', called 'heaven' by the Creator (Opif. 36; Gen. 1:6–8): the word στερέωμα is related to στερέος, meaning 'ﬁrm', 'solid', with three dimensions. With the earth created on the third day (Opif. 38–44), Philo then catches himself, in a similar manner to the way in which Timaeus does when noting that he has spoken about the body before the soul, to afﬁrm that their priority is in fact the other way round. Philo argues that although it is only once the earth is ﬁnished that God sets about adorning the heavens, this is 'not because he placed it after the earth in rank . . . but rather in order to give a very clear demonstration of the might of his sovereignty' (Opif. 45).

However, Philo's explanation of this demonstration involves him anticipating further the course of his exposition. The creator, he continues, 'understood in advance what the humans who had not yet come into existence would be like in their thinking', that is, that 'they would focus their aim on what is likely and convincing and contains much that is reasonable, but not on the unadulterated truth, and they would put their trust in appearances rather than on God, thereby showing admiration for sophistry rather than wisdom' (Opif. 45). Anticipating that by looking at the revolutions of the sun and the moon, and deducing that they cause the seasons, humans would conclude that they were also the 'ﬁrst causes' for created beings, God said (to whom is not speciﬁed): 'Let them turn back in their minds to the ﬁrst genesis of the universe', for such reﬂection, he continues, should lead them to God and his providence (Opif. 46–7). In other words, the rationality, as it were, of the cosmos and the order of its production is already that of providing a suitable pedagogy and correction to human beings.

Philo blurs somewhat the distinction between the ﬁfth and the sixth day, so as to set apart the creation of the human being.⁴⁸ After describing the creation of the animals that inhabit the waters, the air, and the land, God, then, 'to crown all proceeded to "make the human being"' (Opif. 65). However, before turning directly to this, Philo makes an observation about Moses' account of these days that would be picked up by Gregory: Moses 'employed a truly excellent sequence

⁴⁷ Opif. 36: Ὁμὲν οὖν ἀσώματος κόσμος ἤδη πέρας εἶχεν ἱδρυθεὶς ἐν τῷθείῳλόγῳ, ὁδ᾽αἰσθητὸς πρὸς παράδιεγμα τούτου ἐτελειογονεῖτο.

⁴⁸ Cf. Runia, Creation, 211, 222.

of succession in describing the birth of the animal realm', beginning with 'the most sluggish and least delineated type of soul', that which is found in ﬁshes, and ending with 'the most developed and in every respect best type [which] has been assigned to the kind of the human beings' (Opif. 65). For all living beings, he points out, 'seed is the starting-point of genesis', but it is only when deposited in the womb that it obtains movement and natural growth, the latter being superior to seed 'since movement is superior to quiescence in created things [ἐν γενητοῖς]'

(Opif. 67). Philo compares 'nature' to a craftsman, or, better, 'an irreproachable art' (ἀνεπίληπτος τέχνη) which 'moulds living beings' (ζῳοπλαστεῖ), distributing the moist substance to the limbs and organs of the body and 'the life-giving substance' or 'air' to the faculties of the soul (τὴν δὲπνευματικὴν εἰς τὰς τῆς ψυχῆς δυνάμεις), that is, 'nourishment and sense-perception' (Opif. 67): beginning with seed, nature thus 'ended with what is most precious, the structure of an animal and a human being' (Opif. 68: τὴν ζῴου καὶἀνθρώπου κατασκευήν). This ordering is also exempliﬁed in the coming into existence of the universe: when the creator decided to form living beings, he did so in an ordered sequence, beginning with 'insigniﬁcant' animals and ending with 'the best, human beings' (Opif. 68).

Returning to the question of how God made the human being, Philo focuses on three aspects of the description given in Gen. 1:26–7: the dimension of image and likeness; the plurality of the verb; and the speciﬁcation that the result of this work, the human being, is also male and female. Regarding the ﬁrst point, Philo comments:

After all these other creatures, as has been stated, he says that the 'human being' has come into existence 'in accordance with God's image and in accordance with his likeness'. This is most excellently said, for nothing earthborn bears a closer resemblance to God than the human being [ἐμφερέστερον γὰρ οὐδὲν γηγενὲς ἀνθρώπου θεῷ]. But no one should infer this likeness from the characteristics of the body, for God does not have a human shape and the human body is not Godlike. The term 'image' has been used here with regard to the director of the soul, the intellect.

(Opif. 69) It is noteworthy that although Philo has not yet turned to Genesis 2 and the moulding of the human being from the earth described there, and although his point here is that it is possession of intellect that marks the human being as 'in accordance with the image and likeness', the human being that he speaks about is

'earthborn'—that is, embodied in a material body. This is particularly striking given that later on (Opif. 134), as we will see, Philo distinguishes Gen. 1:26–7 and 2:7 in terms of the 'vast difference' between the human being made 'after the image' and the human being 'moulded from the earth'.

What exactly this 'intellect' is, by virtue of which the human being is said to be

'after the image and likeness', is described by Philo in the paragraphs that follow:

'On that single intellect of the universe, as on an archetype, the intellect in each individual human being was modelled. In a sense it is a god of the person who carries it and bears it around as a divine image.' As such, the human intellect has the same position in the human being that God has in the cosmos: it is invisible, yet it sees all; its own nature is unclear, yet it comprehends the nature of other things (Opif. 69). In line with the ordering of creation in terms of human pedagogy, seen above, Philo continues here by setting before the intellect the path of growing in knowledge: by the arts and sciences, the intellect comes to know all aspects of the earthly creation, and then it is led to the revolutions of the heavens and their 'perfect music', and then, attaining to the intelligible realm, where it becomes 'possessed by sober drunkenness', and stimulated by 'a higher form of desire, . . . it thinks it is heading to the Great King himself ', yet ﬁnds itself overwhelmed by brightness and suffering from vertigo (Opif. 70–1).

Regarding the question why the human was not created by God alone, Philo offers an answer 'through a likely conjecture' (δ᾽εἰκότι στοχασμῷ, Opif. 72).

Noting that plants and animals without reason do not share in goodness or evil, he concludes that 'intellect and reason [νοῦς καὶλόγος] may be regarded as the home where goodness and evil naturally reside' (Opif. 73). As such, he surmises, creatures with a 'mixed nature', capable of both these opposite characteristics, must have been created with the assistance 'of other collaborators' in order that their good decisions can be attributed to God, while the opposite cases can be attributed to 'the others who are subordinate to him' (Opif. 75). Although Philo introduced the Logos when he touched upon Gen. 1:26–7 in Opif. 25 (discussed above), it is striking that Philo does not do the same, as one might have expected to him to do, when discussing here the plurality of Gen. 1:26.

Finally, regarding the creation of the human being as male and female, Philo simply observes that 'even though individual members had not yet taken shape'

(μήπω τῶν ἐν μέρει μορφὴν λαβόντων), 'after he had called the genus "human being", he separated its species and stated that it was created "male and female"'

(Opif. 76). This is, he says, 'because the most proximate of the species are present in the genus and become apparent as if in a mirror to observers with sharp vision'.

As with the ﬁrst point regarding this scriptural verse, where the term 'image' refers to the intellect, distinguishing human beings from other 'earthborn' creatures as the one most resembling God (even though Gen. 2:7 has not yet been discussed), so here, in reverse, while the focus is on the genus 'human being' prior to particular individuals, nevertheless the species, male and female, found in the particular individuals, are already accounted for in the intelligible realm. Given the scriptural verse before him, he could not reasonably have concluded, as Timaeus did, that women are reincarnated males with moral failings; nor could he, as we will see Gregory do, take the analysis a step further, on the ground that in Christ, the archetype, there is 'neither male and female' (Gal. 3:28).

Following his analysis of Gen. 1:26–7, Philo gives four reasons why the human being was created last, several of which are picked up by Gregory. The ﬁrst of these is that 'the Director of the universe, like an organizer of games and a holder of a banquet, when he was about to invite the human being to a lavish feast and a spectacle', made all the necessary preparations ﬁrst, 'so that, when the human being entered the cosmos, he would immediately encounter both a festive meal and a most sacred theatre' (Opif. 77–8). The second is that the human being would ﬁnd all the means needed for living, without toil or trouble, as shown in 'the example of the original ancestor of their race', but which will become a present reality 'when unreasoning pleasures fail to gain the upper hand by constructing gluttony and lust as battle stations in the soul'. The 'present time', however, is one in which 'all these vices ﬂourish and human beings have unconditionally surrendered themselves to the passions', the punishment for which is that 'the necessities of life are difﬁcult to obtain'; what lies before us is thus the acquisition of selfcontrol, in the hope that God 'will cause the good things of life to be supplied to the race spontaneously and ready for consumption' (Opif. 79–81).

The third reason given by Philo is that 'God, having reasoned that the beginning and end of creation should be harmonized together in a necessary and loving relationship, proceeded to make heaven as its beginning [ἀρχὴν] and the human being as its end [τέλος], the former as the most perfect of immortal beings in the sense-perceptible realm, the latter as the best of earthborn and mortal creatures'

(Opif. 82); it is again already the earthborn mortal being that he has in mind as the end of creation. In this way, the human being is 'a miniature heaven who carries around in himself numerous star-like beings as divine images'. The fourth and ﬁnal reason, the only one said to be 'necessary', is that the human being had to appear last so as to instil astonishment in all other creatures, rendering them tame and demonstrating his kingly rule, despite his lack of armour or weapons

(Opif. 83–8).

Following the text of the LXX, which has God completing his works on the sixth day, rather than the seventh (Gen. 2:2), Philo concludes his exposition of the ﬁrst creation account by describing the seventh day, which alone is called 'holy'

(Gen. 2:3), as a universal festival, 'the birthday of the cosmos' (Opif. 89). Although

Philo concedes that 'I do not know whether anyone can give sufﬁcient praise to the nature of the seven; it is superior to every form of speech' (Opif. 90), he continues to sing the praises of the hebdomad for many pages, drawing in all sorts of numerological reﬂections.

Reaching Gen. 2:4–5 (LXX), Philo notes a particularity in the text: 'this is the book of the genesis of heaven and earth when it came to be on the day that God made heaven and earth and all the green of the ﬁeld before it came to be upon the earth and all the grass of the ﬁeld before it sprang up'. As this verse speaks of God having 'made heaven and earth' as an action already accomplished, Philo takes it as a 'summarizing statement' uttered by Moses reﬂecting upon his account of the

creation of the cosmos.⁴⁹ The 'book of the genesis of heaven and earth' mentioned in Gen. 2:4 thus refers to the preceding verses.⁵⁰ But, although Philo had previously described the creation that begins on the second day as 'sense-perceptible'

(Opif. 36), if Scripture at this point says that God has 'made' (past tense) all the 'green' and 'grass' of ﬁeld 'before it came to be upon the earth', the vegetation mentioned earlier (Gen. 1:11–12) must, Philo now concludes, refer to 'the incorporeal and intelligible ideas, which are in fact the seals of the completed products perceived by the senses'. Moreover, although Moses in his brevity did not say more, this is a principle which holds for all things: 'It should be understood that for each of the other things which the senses judge, anterior forms and measures also pre-existed [τὰπρεσβύτερα εἴδη καὶμέτρα . . . προϋπῆρχε], by means of which the things that come into being are given form and measured', so that 'the nature of the whole of reality' is such that nothing among sense-perceptible things is brought to completion without an incorporeal paradigm (Opif. 130).

This observation enables Philo, as he continues his exposition, to contrast the creation account thus far, as intelligible and incorporeal, with what follows.

The account in Genesis 2 clearly centres upon the creation of human beings from the earth. The only item to be mentioned before the human being is the spring of water rising up to water the earth (Gen. 2:6), which Philo explains, using the procreative imagery we have already seen him use, by the idea that 'moist substance has to be part of the earth which gives birth to all things', so that 'the earth too is a mother' (Opif. 132–3). Only now do we get to the formation of actual, material human beings:

After this, he says that God 'moulded the human being taking clay from the earth and he inbreathed onto his face the breath of life.' By means of this text too he shows in the clearest fashion that there is a vast difference between the human being 'who has been moulded' and the one who previously came into being 'in accordance with the image of God'. For the one 'moulded' is sense-perceptible, already participating in quality, consisting of body and soul, either man or woman, by nature mortal; the one 'in accordance with the image' is a kind of idea or genus or seal, intelligible, incorporeal, neither male nor female, by nature immortal.⁵¹ ⁴⁹ Opif. 129: Ἐπιλογιζόμενος δὲτὴν κοσμοποιίαν κεφαλαιώδει τύπῳφησιν . . .

⁵⁰ Opif. 129. On the difference between the LXX and the Hebrew text, and the way in which Philo treats this verse in comparison to modern scholarship, see Runia, Creation, 309.

⁵¹ Opif. 134: Μετὰδὲταῦτα φυσιν ὅτι "ἔπλασεν ὁθεός τὸν ἄνθρωπον χοῦν λαβὼν ἀπὸτῆς γῆς, καὶ ἐνεφύσησεν εἰς τὸπρόσωπον αὐτοῦπνοὴν ζωῆς". ἐναργέστατα καὶδιὰτούτου παρίστησιν ὅτι διαφορὰ παμμεγέθης ἐστὶτοῦτε νῦν πλασθέντος ἀνθρώπου καὶτοῦκατὰτὴν εἰκόνα θεοῦγεγονότος πρότερον· ὁ μὲν γὰρ διαπλασθεὶς αἰσθητὸς ἤδη μετέχων ποιότηος, ἐκ σώματος καὶψυχῆς συνεστώς, ἀνὴρ ἢγυνή, φύσει θνητός· ὁδὲκατὰτὴν εἰκόνα ἰδέα τις ἢγένος ἢσφαγίς, νοητός, ἀσώματος, οὔτ᾽ἄρρεν οὔτε θῆλυ, ἄφθαρτος φύσει.

The contrast between the human being of Gen. 1:26–7 and 2:7 is clear, but what is the meaning of the designation of the difference between them as 'previously'? As we have already noted, when describing the human being who has come into being 'after the image', Philo was already speaking about the 'earthborn': it was the possession of intellect that distinguished the human being from all other earthborn creatures, giving the human a 'closer resemblance to God' than any other

(Opif. 69), making them 'the best of earthborn and mortal creatures' (Opif. 82).

The 'species' male and female are also present in the intellectual realm, although at that point there were no concrete individual humans. The two accounts, though distinct, are thus also interwoven with each other.⁵² That they cannot be separated too sharply is further underscored by Philo's emphasis that God does everything

'simultaneously' (ἅμα), even though things come to be in sequence and order, and that God's primary intention is in fact to make the visible, bodily cosmos, with the intelligible cosmos being the 'prior' design for this, or, better, the intelligible cosmos 'is nothing other than the Logos of God actually making the cosmos'

(Opif. 24). The 'previously' is thus not temporal: time measures the sequence of days measuring the emergence of things within creation, not the relationship between the intellectual world (in itself in day one) and the material world. It also takes time to narrate the unfolding of God's simultaneous action; that Genesis 1 necessarily comes before Genesis 2 does not mitigate the fact that, as Runia puts it,

Philo takes 'the creation account as a uniﬁed whole'.⁵³ There nevertheless does remain a fundamental priority of elements within this uniﬁed account, in that it is the possession of intellect—incorporeal, neither male nor female, immortal—that renders the earthborn, moulded human 'in accordance with the image and likeness' of God. Finally, it must also be recalled that Philo reads Moses' account as a pedagogy, 'preparing minds' so that human beings can be 'citizens of the cosmos'.⁵⁴ Rather than a 'double creation' as such, Philo's interest is thus, as becomes clear in what immediately follows, on 'the composite structure [τὴν κατασκευὴν σύνθετον] of the sense-perceptible and individual human being, composed of earthly substance and divine spirit' (Opif. 135). In this composite, the body came to be 'when the Craftsman took clay and moulded a human shape out of ⁵² For full discussion of the scholarly positions regarding the relation between 'the one in accordance with the image' in Gen. 1 and 'the one moulded from the earth' in Gen. 2, see Runia, Creation, 321–3.

I would concur with Runia that 'the human being after the image' of Gen. 1:27 should not be taken as the 'idea of the human being', in a technical sense, and that the intellect spoken of in Opif. 69–71 should not be too readily equated with the divine part inbreathed into the composite human being of Gen. 2:7, but rather, in Runia's words (Creation, 323), that 'the former is an idealization, i.e. the "true human being" such as he should and can be when the cares of the body and earthly life have entirely fallen away

. . . an idealization of human nature in terms of the intellect'.

⁵³ Runia, Creation, 309.

⁵⁴ Runia, Creation, 224: 'Philo is answering a speciﬁc question raised by the biblical text. For this reason, perhaps, he is not concerned to give a full anthropology. His doctrine is that humankind is above all characterized by its intellectual powers is signiﬁcant enough.'

it', while, on the other hand, 'the soul obtained its origin from nothing which has come into existence at all', but comes from the Father and Director of all things, when he breathed into its face the divine spirit, 'which has emigrated here from that blessed and ﬂourishing nature for the assistance of our kind'. As such, while the composite human being is mortal in its visible part, 'it would be immortalized

[ἀθανατίζεται] with regard to its invisible part' (Opif. 135). The human being thus

'is the borderline [εἶναι μεθόριον] between mortal and immortal nature, sharing in both to the extent necessary, he has come into existence as a creature which is mortal and at the same time immortal, mortal in respect of the body, immortal in respect of the mind' (Opif. 135).

The ﬁrst human born of earth, Philo further asserts, excelled those who followed in both body and soul. Philo gives three reasons why this was the case for the body: ﬁrst, that the earth was new and so 'unmixed and undeﬁled and pure as well as receptive and easy to work with' (Opif. 136); second, because God took

'from pure matter the purest and utmost reﬁned part' (Opif. 137); and third, as the creator excelled in knowledge, the proportions were carefully fashioned to be harmonious (Opif. 137). Regarding the excellence of the soul, Philo introduces again the Logos of God:

For it is ﬁtting that for his construction God used no other model belonging to the realm of becoming, but only, as I said, his own Logos. For this reason, he says that the human being has come into existence as its likeness and representation

[ἀπεικόνισμα καὶμίμημα] by being inbreathed into the face, which is the location of the senses. . . . The representation of a splendid model must be splendid itself.

The Logos of God is even superior to the beauty which is beauty as it occurs in nature. It is not adorned with beauty, but, if the truth be told, it is itself beauty's preeminent adornment.

(Opif. 139) It is again striking that Philo did not introduce the Logos in his examination of Gen. 1:26–7 in Opif. 69, when his claim that the image relates to the human possession of intellect and the plurality of the verb might have invited him to do so, but does so here, in consideration of how the moulded human of Gen. 2:7, by being 'inbreathed', is the likeness and imitation of the Logos. Concluding his discussion of Gen. 2:7, Philo puts the matter thus: 'every human being, as far as his mind is concerned, is akin to the divine Logos and has come into being as a casting or fragment or effulgence of the blessed nature, but in the structure of his body he is related to the entire cosmos' (Opif. 146).

Regarding the formation of the woman, this turns out to be, for Philo, a mixed blessing. Although, as we have seen, the 'species' male and female are present in the intelligible realm, Philo begins his treatment of the appearance of the woman in Genesis 2 with the statement: 'But, since nothing is stable in the world of genesis and mortal beings necessarily [ἀναγκαίως] undergo reversals and changes, the ﬁrst

human being had to enjoy some ill fortune [ἐχρῆν . . . ἀπολαῦσαί τινος κακοπραγίας]', and this is woman, who is 'for him the starting-point of a blameworthy life' (Opif. 151). He continues: 'As long as he was single, he resembled God and the cosmos in his solitariness, receiving the delineations of both natures in his soul, not all of them, but as many as a mortal constitution could contain.' When the woman was moulded, seeing in her 'a sisterly form and a kindred ﬁgure', he rejoiced at the sight and greeted her; she, in turn, seeing that he resembled herself more than any other living creature, was also glad and responded modestly (Opif.

151–2). Echoing Aristophanes' speech in Plato's Symposium, Philo continues:

'Love [ἔρως] ensues bringing together the two separate halves of a single living being as it were, and joins them together into unity, thereby establishing in both a desire [πόθον] for union with the other in order to produce a being similar to themselves.' But as this is also the desire which begets bodily pleasure, which is the starting point of wickedness, they thereby 'exchange the life of immortality and well-being for the life of mortality and misfortune' (Opif. 152).

Finally, Philo notes that as 'the garden of delights' was planted by God while the man was still solitary, these delights bear no resemblance to pleasures we experience; the garden instead 'hints at the ruling part of the soul', while the tree of life hints at the most important of virtues, reverence for God (Opif. 153–4). But when the ﬁrst couple had their attention caught by that which was 'highly attractive to behold', offered by the serpent, they passed by the tree of immortal life, 'through which they could have enjoyed the fruits of an age-long life of well-being', and chose instead 'that ephemeral and mortal existence, not a life but a time span full of misfortune', suffering the punishments that the outraged Father determined ﬁt

(Opif. 156).

Philo has, thus, given us a multi-layered account of creation and the human being, which also seems to shift as he works his way through the scriptural text:

'day one' is distinct from the sequence of days that follow, for it contains 'the intelligible cosmos', while the others describe the successive appearances of senseperceptible creation; but then, from Gen. 2:4–5 onwards, the ﬁrst account becomes the creation of the intelligible paradigm, while the second account is of that which is moulded from the earth. In both cases, however, the accounts are thoroughly interwoven: it is as the best of earthborn creatures that the human being mentioned in Gen. 1:26–7 is, by virtue of the intellect, 'in accordance with the image', and the species of that human being, male and female, is already accounted for in the intelligible realm, even though, when particular earthborn individuals, men and women, are created (or, at least, when their creation is narrated), it is made clear that being male and female is on a different level than their common possession of intellect, and the appearance of the woman, for Philo, disrupts the solitary (godlike) existence of the man. Holding these interweavings together is the fact that, for Philo, God's act is 'simultaneous', encompassing his thinking and doing, while those things which come into being have their own

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