Quotes About Philo

Philo believed that when we caught a glimpse of the Logos in creation and the Torah, we were taken beyond the reach of discursive reason to a rapturous recognition that God was 'higher than a way of thinking, more precious than anything that is merely thought'.

Money, it has been said, is the cause of good things to a good man, of evil things to a bad man.

The Essenes of Qumran thought Melchizedek was an angel. The philosopher Philo believed he was the divine Logos. The Jewish historian Josephus said he was only a man, but so righteous that he was "by common consent . . . made a priest of God." David saw Melchizedek as a prototype of the promised Messiah who would establish a new order of king-priests (Psalm 110:1–4).

One of these was Philo of Larisa, head of the Academy in Athens, founded by Plato three hundred years before. He inspired Cicero with a passion for philosophy, and in particular for the theories of Skepticism, which asserted that knowledge of the nature of things is in the nature of things unattainable. Such ideas were well judged to appeal to a student of rhetoric who had learned to argue all sides of a case.

But last and least known is its additional purpose as a Kabbalistic meditational device that thus, in one more way, links it to ancient Jewish sources. Within it is a wide array of mystical symbols: spheres of the Tree of Life, the pathways of the soul, the four layers of the universe, and the triangles of Philo of Alexandria.

Philo of Alexandria

God welcomes genuine service, and that is the service of a soul that offers the bare and simple sacrifice of truth; but from false service, the mere display of material wealth, He turns away.

and those that reflect a more overtly Hellenized influence (Philo, but also Josephus). In his extensive analysis of references to the divine Spirit in selected Jewish texts, Levison concluded, "Among the effects of the [divine] spirit prophecy is most pervasive," noting that Philo, Josephus, and Pseudo-Philo even occasionally add references to the divine Spirit in discussions of OT prophets/prophecy,

According to Philo, God gave Moses power over the whole of Nature; all the elements obeyed him as the Lord of Nature. … Jehovah is Israel's consciousness of the sacredness and necessity of his own existence, - a necessity before which the existence of Nature, the existence of other nations, vanishes into nothing.