In this master thesis, I investigate how Philo of Alexandria (ca. 15 BCE - 45 CE), as a Jewish philosopher, interpreted the Jewish figure of Wisdom (a personification that Proverbs 8 describes as having been present with God when he created the world) in the Platonic/Pythagorean philosophical context in which Philo operates. To this end, I examined the personification of Wisdom in the Hebrew wisdom literature (Proverbs, Job, Baruch & Ben Sira). Then, I searched through Plato's dialogues for similar ways of conceptualizing the world order and its relation to the divine. In my third chapter, I review the tradition of the early Academy and of neo-Pythagoreanism, which forms the hermeneutical paradigm for Philo's understanding of Plato. Then, I turn to the Greek translations of the Jewish wisdom literature, and to Aristobulus and Wisdom of Solomon, to look for attempts to relate Wisdom to Greek philosophy before Philo. Finally, I discuss a select number of passages in which Philo speaks about wisdom.

This chapter presents examples of motherly talk of God from Syriac, Greek and Latin "fathers" and into the middle ages. It argues that these ancient witnesses to Christian theology both provide us with interesting ways to understand God and reassurance that talk of God as mother was not understood as problematic.

This essay surveys selected Philonic visio Dei passages and demonstrates the presence of four recurring elements in all three of the commentary series. (1) The identity of the object of sight varies, not only from passage to passage in a treatise, but even within the same passage. Nevertheless, in all three commentary series there are clear statements of the visibility of the “Existent One” (τὸ ὄν). (2) A hierarchy of visionary accomplishment, based on the spiritual advancement of the noetic philosopher, often determines who is seen, and quite often it is τὸ ὄν who is seen by the highest category of mystic philosopher. (3) The intermediaries operate as autonomous agents, conceptually distinct from τὸ ὄν, both in passages promoting a hierarchy of visionary accomplishment, as well as those depicting the Logos as the ἀναγωγός, the “means and guide” of the noetic ascent. (4) Philo occasionally allows his allegiance to divine transcendence to direct the discussion, and τὸ ὄν is then said to be absolutely “non-visible.” It is also apparent that “intermediary-free” visio Dei passages are not as commonly encountered as those populated by intermediaries, and are most prevalent in the Exposition.

The present paper focuses on some aspects of the Neoplatonist literary-metaphysical theory, which has clearly been expressed in the anonymous Prolegomena to Plato’s philosophy and further confirmed in Proclus’ exegesis of the Timaeus. Thus, this contribution, examines and compares several passages from the Prolegomena and from Proclus’ Commentary on the Timaeus with a view to showing that it is legitimate to speak of a certain cosmogony of the Platonic dialogue that is analogous to that of the macrocosm. Moreover, the analogy between macrocosm and microcosm makes it possible to further investigate the similarity between the λόγος-ζῷον of the Demiurge and that of Timaeus, on the one hand, and the reality which the λόγος expresses, on the other. This similarity turns out to be both structural/morphological and content-related/semantic. Thus, by combining the natural and theological science, the analysis of the “generation” of the macrocosm and microcosm brings out the strongly analogical nature of Plato’s dialogues, which is particularly visible in the Timaeus.

This article argues that recent scholarship has misunderstood Paul’s maternal imagery in Romans 8.18—23. It integrates modern metaphor theories with tradio-historical readings of ancient Jewish texts in attempt to discern the precise contours of Paul’s metaphorical description of Creation in vv. 19—22. This interdisciplinary investigation reveals that maternal descriptions of the Earth were quite common among Paul’s religio-literary predecessors and that his particular metaphor in Rom 8.19—22 spans wider than is commonly thought: vv. 18—23. Paul’s ‘Mother Earth’ metaphor serves the broader purpose of Rom 8 by conveying the future bodily resurrection as the Earth’s giving birth to the dead.

The paper offers the first systematic collection of all the papyrus evidence for Anaxagoras preserved in both Graeco–Egyptian and Herculaneum papyri, ordering them in six sections according to their content (Anaxagoras’ life and works; the charge of impiety; physics; theology; ethics; along with two testimonia considered spurious or dubious). The essay deals in particular with the testimonia that contribute to a better understanding of Anaxagoras’ conception of god(s) and elucidate certain questions concerning his alleged ‘atheism’, along with the reasons for the charge of impiety levelled against him. The image of Anaxagoras as an ‘atheist’, in addition to the ‘Enlightenment’ features of his thought, seems to be the outcome of a stratified doxographical tradition that the papyri significantly help to reconstruct.