Justified True Belief

(●) Philo of Alexandria was a Hellenistic Jewish philosopher who lived in the city of Alexandria, Egypt. Born into a wealthy diaspora family and educated in both Jewish Scripture and Greek paideia, he developed a distinctive synthesis of Jewish scriptural exegesis with Greek philosophical traditions, especially Platonism and Stoicism, chiefly through allegorical interpretation of the Pentateuch. Philo treated the narratives of the Torah as veils for universal truths about God, the soul, and virtue, insisting that Moses is the “summit of philosophy” and that Greek philosophers only glimpsed what the Law reveals more fully. Central to his thought is the doctrine of the divine Logos: the Logos is God’s Word, Wisdom, and mediating power, the intelligible pattern of creation and the bridge between the utterly transcendent God and the created order. His use of Logos language, his account of an utterly transcendent yet provident God, and his attempt to show the rationality of biblical faith later provided early Christian theologians with categories for articulating the doctrine of the Logos.

(Q) "For God, being one, has many powers; and the chief of them all is the Logos, by whom the whole world was fashioned." + Source: Philo, On the Confusion of Tongues 146–147 (summarizing his description of the Logos as God’s chief power and instrument of creation).

(Q) "Let us learn that there is one world, one God, one providence, and one law, the common reason of all intellectual and rational beings." + Source: Philo, On the Creation of the World 3–4 and related passages, where he stresses the unity of God, world, and rational law (logos) imprinted on creation.

(Q) "The Logos is the image of God, by whom the whole universe was formed." + Source: Philo, On the Creation of the World 25–27 (paraphrasing his teaching that the visible cosmos is made after the intelligible pattern in the divine Logos, the image of God).

(Q) "The soul that loves God desires to flee from the body and the senses, and to dwell with Him alone who is incorporeal and invisible, apprehended only by the pure mind." + Source: Philo, On the Migration of Abraham 10–12 and related allegorical passages on the soul’s journey from sense to contemplation of God through the Logos.