A Teacher
Philo of Alexandria
The Logos as divine intermediary
The transmission
Philo of Alexandria (c. 20 BCE – c. 50 CE) was a Hellenistic Jewish philosopher of the great cosmopolitan city of Alexandria, where the Greek and Hebrew worlds met.
A member of a prominent and wealthy Jewish family, he was learned in Greek philosophy and in the Scriptures of his people, and in 39–40 CE led an embassy to the emperor Caligula on behalf of the Alexandrian Jews. His large body of writing—mostly allegorical commentary on the books of Moses—survives because it was preserved and prized by later Christian writers rather than within the Jewish tradition itself.
For the mind-power lineage, Philo’s central achievement is the fusion of Greek philosophy with Hebrew revelation, above all through his doctrine of the Logos. He conceived a transcendent, ineffable God who creates and governs the world through the Logos—the divine Reason, the “place” of the intelligible Forms, the archetypal pattern of creation, and the mediator between the infinite God and the material cosmos.
Drawing on Middle Platonic themes of a transcendent One, intelligible archetypes, and the soul’s ascent, he read the Scriptures allegorically, treating their narratives as symbolic expressions of metaphysical and psychological truth.
This bridge—a supreme Mind that creates through an intermediary Reason holding the patterns of all things—shaped the Logos theology of early Christianity and fed forward into Neoplatonism, Christian mysticism, and the broader tradition of a Universal Mind behind the visible world.
What they gave
The Logos as creative Mind: Develops the Logos as divine Reason holding the archetypal Forms and mediating creation, a powerful ancestor of “Universal Mind” and the creative Word.
- Intelligible archetypes behind creation: Locates the Platonic Forms within the mind of God, framing the material world as the out-picturing of a prior mental pattern.
- Allegorical reading: Treats sacred texts as symbolic maps of inner and metaphysical reality, a method central to mysticism and esoteric interpretation.
- The soul’s ascent to God: Inherits and transmits the Platonic theme of purification and inward ascent toward union with the transcendent source.
In their words
If any one were to desire to use more undisguised terms, he would not call the world, which is perceptible only to the intellect, any thing else but the reason of God, already occupied in the creation of the world.
The line they stand in
Influenced by: Plato and Middle Platonism; the Stoics (the Logos as cosmic reason); Pythagorean number-symbolism; and the Hebrew Scriptures.
- Influenced: early Christian theology, including the Logos of the Gospel of John and the thought of Origen and the Alexandrian fathers; Plotinus and Neoplatonism; Christian mysticism; and, indirectly, later Jewish mystical speculation.
Revelations they taught
Essential Works
- On the Creation of the World (De Opificio Mundi)c.30 CE
- On the Contemplative Lifec.30 CE