The Pattern and the Image

One of Plato’s best-known ideas is that the sensible world is an image of the intelligible pattern. The book examines the second life of this concept in late antiquity, especially in the Hellenistic Jewish and Christian milieu. It opens with the discussion of the key features of the pattern-image concept in Plato and Plotinus, and then focuses on the adoption of this concept in the works of Philo of Alexandria and the early Christian authors—Clement of Alexandria, Origen, Eusebius, Athanasius, G