Insatiable souls: Philo of Alexandria’s readings of food

Abstract

While Philo of Alexandria maintained that the pleasure that stems from the consumption of food can overstimulate human desire, he attributed great philosophical significance to the symbolism of food. On the one hand, in De specialibus legibus 4, the food that is permitted for consumption in the Torah is open to philosophical explanation and inspires learning; on the other, Philo connects what he considers to be the most godlike part of humans—the intellect—with a kind of intellectual nourishment, which is accompanied by a transformed pleasure that is not—and cannot be—excessive. In this chapter, I suggest that Philo adopted Platonic food imagery to differentiate between different layers of desire for and enjoyment of food. This, in turn, was a way to articulate the difference, and also the mediation, between the intellectual (noetic) and the sense-perceptible cosmos.