yS PHILO'S POLITICSas a whole, including God, the rule was a monarchy. God's rule ex
pressed itself in giving off the great Stream of Logos-Law, whose effect
upon the material substrata was to produce the phenomenal world. In
relation to God the phenomena were subject to a monarchy: in relation
to each other there existed a great democracy in which no individual
was so important as the body politic of Logos and matter as a whole,
and no individual had any more permanent importance than the others.
It is unfortunate that Philo has not developed the notion at greater
length, but the reason for his failure to do so seems to me not far to
seek. It has already appeared that Philo is very cautious indeed in his
references to politics. In view of that general wariness, the absence of
Rome from the roll of powers takes on significance. If Philo had devel
oped his theory, he must inevitably have concluded that Roman rule
would suffer sooner or later the same decline as the others. The only
way in which the eternal flux of Logos would or could cease represent
ing itself in the rise and fall of empires would be by the assertion of the
monarchy of God in a more direct way, the erection of a Kingdom of
God to rule the world in place of the succession of human kingdoms.
That is, the logical outcome of Philo's remarks leads us directly to a
Greek formulation and justification of the Jewish messianic hope, a
hope which we have found veiled but strongly present in Philo's writ
ings. Whether Philo went privately all the way with this reasoning or
not, certainly his remarks about the succession of empires must have
suggested to a contemporary reader what it has suggested to us, that the
rule of Rome itself was something to be taken and endured for the
time, since like all others it must be transitory.^68
A state is thus the direct product of the Logos: for that reason it
ought to conform to the Logos. This it can and should do primarily in
68, This theory of the flux of the Logos has very considerable possibilities philosophically.
Aside from the reconciliation of the notion with the rule of God, the Logos in the Heraclitean
sense is as good a term as any of the modern ones to describe the material-immaterial substrate
of phenomena toward which modern science is tending. The theory that this becomes tempo
rarily concentrated in different spots and periods of humanity is quite the most plausible one I
know to account not only for the rise and fall of empires and civilization, but also for the amaz
ing concentrations of other types of genius than the military and political. Why the Periclean
Age, or Fifteenth Century Tuscany, or Elizabethan England? Economic interpretations utterly
fail to account for the concentration of supreme genius represented by these terms. Its sudden dis
appearance is just as unaccountable. Of course the "cycles of the Logos" is a theory which, for
us as for Philo and Heraclitus, is a myth, but no more mythical than modern attempts to con
struct a whole out of the scattered hints of modern physics, and of all these myths this one
seems best to deserve being called 6 efotoag nvfrog.