some Platonists, who might have been happy to admit the possibility of knowledge, regarded the proposed alliance between Plato and Aristotle with
some distaste. The best known of the 'opposition' were Plutarch and Atticus. But beyond the fact that in these two respects Antiochus betrayed his
immediate predecessors it is hard to be at all clear precisely what he taught.
Ironically enough, the clearest and most copious witness to the views of the Middle Platonists, as they are now called, is the Alexandrian Jewish writer
Philo (c.25 BC-c.45 A.D.). From his lengthy allegorical commentary on the first five books of the Bible it is possible to extract a system which closely
resembles the sort of picture which emerges from Plutarch and Albinus. It must, however, be remembered that, useful though he is for our purposes,
Philo was a Jew and was thoroughly influenced by biblical ideas and images. Even so, in the first book of his commentary he provides us with a
structured hierarchy of reality, beginning with the supreme God and ending with matter, like that which characterizes Middle Platonism. The question
which the structure seeks to answer is 'How is it possible to derive the multiplicity which we see from the absolute unity which we believe to lie at the
summit of the world?'
The Bible, in common with all the great transcendental philosophers of classical antiquity, had assumed that above all there was a single indivisible self-
sufficient principle; and although they might call it (him) sometimes God, sometimes Monad (Pythagorean), sometimes Absolute Beauty or the Idea of
the Good (Plato's Phaedrus and Republic), sometimes the Unmoved Mover or Self-thinking Thought (Aristotle's Metaphysics), they were all agreed that
it was single. The derivation of or relation to the One of the All was the problem. The theory of forms and the account of the making of the world in the
Timaeus represent attempts at a solution. But Plato, Aristotle, and arguably the account of creation in the first chapter of Genesis, all tend to assume the
eternity of matter as the condition of the possibility of the making of the world. Philo was perhaps the first to take the bold and interesting step of trying
to present a picture of the making of the world which took into account all these insights. For him the maker of the world is the only one who is eternal in
both senses of the word. That is, he held that God is both without beginning and without end (= durationally eternal) and also absolutely timeless. 'For
God is the maker of time also, for he is the father of time's father. ... Thus time stands to God in the relation of a grandson. ... To the elder son, the
intelligible universe, He assigned the place of the first-born.' This passage gives us in a nutshell the Philonic system. Beneath the first God and Father of
all, who is incomprehensible and eternal, there comes a second God or Logos, who is described sometimes as the mind of God, sometimes as the place of
the ideas or the intelligible world, sometimes as the first-born, sometimes as the agent in creation. Beneath him is the world of sense, created through the
agency and on the model of the Logos. This last is less perfect and more multiple than is the world of forms.
It is clear what Philo is aiming at:
(a) He has replaced the confusing picture of three independent principles in the Timaeus with a neatly ordered pattern.
(b) He has achieved this by welding together rather disparate elements which he assumes enjoy a basic coherence.
Above all, the second principle draws together into one the creative word of Psalm 33:6, the Stoic Logos (though it is raised above and not identical with
the material universe), the Platonic world of forms, and the Aristotelian self-thinking thought. On occasion he even calls the Logos 'God' and
distinguishes him from the first God by the simple device of dropping the definite article. This distinction within the realms of the divine, which suggests
the possibility of introducing degrees within the concept of God, was subsequently employed with considerable fruit and frequency by most of the later
Middle Platonists and some of the Neoplatonist writers, notably by Albinus, Numenius, Plotinus, and the Christian Origen.
Plutarch was by birth a Greek and came from Chaeronea in Boeotia. He studied philosophy in Athens and at a later date went to Rome, where he taught
for a period, and then returned home. He spent the last thirty years of his life a priest at Delphi. He died c. 120 A.D. at about the age of seventy-five.