Transcendence Through Negation
Insights from the apophatic method
Philo Judaeus was a Jewish philosopher from Alexandria, who lived contemporaneous with the Christ. While Jesus walked around extolling the positive attributes of a unitary God: compassionate, merciful, loving, kind. Philo preferred a different approach to describing the absolute — by negating characterizations.
In Philo’s allegorical exegesis on the Old Testament in Greek, he spurned the anthropomorphization of God. His view on human-like descriptions of God in scripture was that they were not to be taken literally, but instead considered metaphors. Since humans, “frame our conceptions of the uncreated from our own experience” (De Confusione Linguarum).
Rather than endorse the common maxim that God created man in His image, Philo propounded that man created God in his image. Philo believed that the true nature of the Absolute lay beyond the realm of our rather anthropocentric cognizance and could only be hinted at by negating all designations. Quoting from his work, De Mutatione Nominum.
Think it not then a hard saying that the highest of all things should be unnamable when His word has no name of its own which we can speak. And indeed if He is unnamable, He is also inconceivable and incomprehensible.
