88 SCOTT HAFEMANN that “guides people into reasonable and virtuous lives”, so that, as its corollary, Philo is the first extant Greek writer to speak so often of the νόµος fusewj 29. Philo can therefore say that the Mosaic law guiding , human behavior expresses the law of nature (cf. Ebr. 37; Spec. 2.129; 3.137). Conversely, the true life of serving the “God that is,” who is the oldest cause of all things, is “inscribed on the tablets of nature” (Spec. 1.31: ἐν ταῖς τῆς φύσεως στήλαις ἀναγέγραπται). In short, the goal of life taught by philosophers was also taught by Moses (cf., e.g., Migr. 128). The unwritten truths in the law of nature lead to the same virtues written down in the law of Moses (Mos. 2.216) 30. In this manner Philo combines the philosophical concept of “na- ture” found in both the Stoicism and Middle Platonism of his day with the biblical view of God as the transcendent creator and ruler of nature itself. Nevertheless, although Philo’s use of the language of lo,goj and φύσις for God’s operation in the cosmos recalls Stoic theology, “Stoic ideas on pantheism and God’s corporeal nature are so obviously false that Philo hardly ever bothers to polemicize against them” 31. From Philo’s own use of φύσις as part of his inte- gration project, it is clear that Stoicism’s “emphasis on divine om- nipresence and the divine activity of nature (φύσις) in the cosmos Philo finds deserving of incorporation in his own theological de- scriptions, provided they are understood as applying at the level of the divine Logos” 32. Philo’s adaptation of the philosophical views MARTENS, One God, 75. 29 Cf. MARTENS, One God, 21, 22, 28, 29, 84, 90, 91: on the one hand, in 30 Stoicism the “law of nature” was viewed as inherent within nature and known only to the perfected reason of the sage (cf. Epictetus, Diatr. 4.7,34; Cicero, Off. 1.100; Leg. 2.11), and so was never equated with written laws (Cicero, Leg. 1.17, 42, 44; 2.13; Off. 3.69; Rep. 3.18; Seneca, Ep. 30; Epictetus, Diatr. 1.26.1-2; 4.3.11-12). On the other hand, Philo’s unique move, due to his com- mitment to the Torah, was to equate virtue with the unwritten law of nature (Leg. 3.245; Post. 185; Abr. 16), which is equated with reason, which is equated with Logos, which is equated with the law of God (Spec. 2.37), which is equated with the living law (νόµος emyucoj) embodied in the king (Abr. 5). ; RUNIA, Philo, 434. 31 RUNIA, Philo, 482-483. When it comes to the meaning of “nature” in a 32 theological context, the function of the Logos, “representing the immanent presence of the divine in the cosmos, certainly corresponds to that of the cos- mic soul in the Timaeus, now ‘modernized’ by the Stoic concept” (483, fol- lowing Dillon). © Gregorian Biblical Press 2012 - Tutti i diritti riservati