Cito Roberto Radice, “Philo’s Theology and Theory of Creation”, em The Cambridge Companion to Philo, editado por Adam Kamesar, Cambridge University Press, 2009, pp. 144-145:
“What kind of creation did Philo have in mind when he was reading and interpreting the Bible?… Did Philo believe in creation ex nihilo or in a kind of demiurgic creation, even if more advanced than that described by Plato? Although the positions scholars have taken on this question are anything but unambiguous, I believe Philo must have had in mind a mixed type of creation. There was a direct and ex nihilo creation of the constructive principles of the world, that is, of the noetic cosmos, of man, and of morals. These, as realities of the realm of Ideas, come into being in the moment they are conceived, and are therefore created ex nihilo. On the other hand, there was an indirect and demiurgic creation of the physical cosmos, namely, a molding and formation of matter by means of the powers.
“It must be noted, hoever, that when Philo thinks in terms of Ideas versus matter, goog versus evil, virtue versus sin, he is always under the influence of a Platonic vision, according to which matter and the evil connected with it are non-being and only the Ideas and the sphere of the Ideas are true being. In this sense Philo could have understood creation as an ex nihilo creation of all being, or of all true being, because whatever was not created ex nihilo was non-being. Oddly enough, however, one almost never finds in Philo a negative conception of the material cosmos, as one finds in Plato. To the contrary, despite its material components, the cosmos appears to Philo to be the greatest, most perfect, most holy and most beautiful of created things. It is not far from the divine, but rather close to it, and would most properly have a reverential posture toward it. In the words of Philo himself: ‘The life-work that befits the world consists in rendering thanks continually and without cessation to its father and creator, and in almost reducing itself to its elemental form, in order to show that it reserves nothing for itself, but gives itself as an offering, in its entirety, to God its creator’ (Her. 200).”