Philo of Alexandria Quotes on God
Philo of Alexandria (c. 25 BC – c. 50 AD), the Hellenistic Jewish philosopher whose extensive corpus of Greek allegorical commentaries on the Pentateuch and philosophical treatises supplies the most extensive surviving witness to the Alexandrian Jewish synthesis of biblical revelation with Greek philosophy, gave Western religious thought one of its founding philosophical theologies. The framework treats the biblical God as ineffable in himself but approachable through the divine Logos — the first and most exact image of God in which the intelligible cosmos is articulated and through which the created world is in turn brought into being — supplying the conceptual infrastructure on which both subsequent Christian and subsequent philosophical Jewish theology would draw.
Quotes
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Attributed to Philo of Alexandria:
“He who runs from God in the morning will have him for his companion before night.”
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Attributed to Philo of Alexandria:
“Take pains to know that nothing arose by chance, and that everything in the world came into existence through the providence of God.”
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“It would be a sign of great simplicity to think that the world was created in six days, or indeed at all in time; [...] Time is a thing posterior to the world. Therefore it would be correctly said that the world was not created in time, but that time had its existence in consequence of the world. For it is the motion of the heaven that has displayed the nature of time.”
Allegories of the Sacred Laws ( Legum allegoriae ), Book I, §2; tr. C. D. Yonge, The works of Philo Judaeus (1854), Vol. 1, pp. 52–53. -
“Moses … denied to the members of the sacred commonwealth unrestricted liberty to use and partake of the other kinds of food. All the animals of land, sea or air whose flesh is the finest and fattest, thus titillating and exciting the malignant foe pleasure, he sternly forbade them to eat, knowing that they set a trap for the most slavish of the senses, the taste, and produce gluttony, an evil very dangerous both to soul and body.”
69. -
“The holy Moses … discarded passion in general and detesting it, as most vile in itself and in its effects, denounced especially desire as a battery of destruction to the soul, which must be done away with or brought into obedience to the governance of reason, and then all things will be permeated through and through with peace and good order, those perfect forms of the good which bring the full perfection of happy living.”
75-77. -
“There is no sweeter delight than that the soul should be charged through and through with justice, exercising itself in her eternal principles and doctrines and leaving no vacant place into which injustice can make its way.”
On the Special Laws | 97. -
“The legislator of the Jews in a bolder spirit went to a further extreme and in the practice of his “naked” philosophy, as they call it, ventured to speak of him who was possessed by love of the divine.”
Every Good Man is Free | 43. -
“He who has God alone for his leader, he alone is free.”
Every Good Man is Free | 20. -
“The good man … has learnt to set at naught the injunctions laid upon him by those most lawless rulers of the soul, inspired as he is by his ardent yearning for the freedom whose peculiar heritage it is that it obeys no orders and works no will but its own.”
Every Good Man is Free | 22. -
“The majority, who through the blindness of their reason do not discern the damages which the soul has sustained, only feel the pain of external injuries, because the faculty of judgment, which alone can enable them to apprehend the damage to the mind, is taken from them.”
Every Good Man is Free | 55.