but προφορικός when it is expressed as a word. This distinction
between Logos as ratio and Logos as oratio, so much used subsequently
by Philo and the Christian fathers, had been so far
anticipated by Aristotle’s distinction between the ἔξω λόγος and
the λόγος ἐν τῇ ψυχῇ. It forms the point of attachment by which
the Logos doctrine connected itself with Christianity. The Logos
of the Stoics (q.v.) is a reason in the world gifted with intelligence,
and analogous to the reason in man.
2. The Hebrew Logos.—In the later Judaism the earlier anthropomorphic conception of God and with it the sense of the divine nearness had been succeeded by a belief which placed God at a remote distance, severed from man and the world by a deep chasm. The old familiar name Yahweh became a secret; its place was taken by such general expressions as the Holy, the Almighty, the Majesty on High, the King of Kings, and also by the simple word “Heaven.” Instead of the once powerful confidence in the immediate presence of God there grew up a mass of speculation regarding on the one hand the distant future, on the other the distant past. Various attempts were made to bridge the gulf between God and man, including the angels, and a number of other hybrid forms of which it is hard to say whether they are personal beings or abstractions. The Wisdom, the Shekinah or Glory, and the Spirit of God are intermediate beings of this kind, and even the Law came to be regarded as an independent spiritual entity. Among these conceptions that of the Word of God had an important place, especially the creative Word of Genesis i. Here as in the other cases we cannot always say whether the Word is regarded as a mere attribute or activity of God, or an independent being, though there is a clear tendency towards the latter. The ambiguity lies in the twofold purpose of these activities: (1) to establish communication with God; (2) to prevent direct connexion between God and the world. The word of the God of revelation is represented as the creative principle (e.g. Gen. i. 3; Psalm xxxiii. 6), as the executor of the divine judgments (Hosea vi. 5), as healing (Psalm cvii. 20), as possessed of almost personal qualities (Isaiah lv. 11; Psalm cxlvii. 15). Along with this comes the doctrine of the angel of Yahweh, the angel of the covenant, the angel of the presence, in whom God manifests Himself, and who is sometimes identified with Yahweh or Elohim (Gen. xvi. 11, 13; xxxii. 29-31; Exod. iii. 2; xiii. 21), sometimes distinguished from Him (Gen. xxii. 15, &c.; xxiv. 7; xxviii. 12, &c.), and sometimes presented in both aspects (Judges ii., vi.; Zech. i.). To this must be added the doctrine of Wisdom, given in the books of Job and Proverbs. At one time it is exhibited as an attribute of God (Prov. iii. 19). At another it is strongly personified, so as to become rather the creative thought of God than a quality (Prov. viii. 22). Again it is described as proceeding from God as the principle of creation and objective to Him. In these and kindred passages (Job xv. 7, &c.) it is on the way to become hypostatized.
The Hebrew conception is partially associated with the Greek in the case of Aristobulus, the predecessor of Philo, and, according to the fathers, the founder of the Alexandrian school. He speaks of Wisdom in a way reminding us of the book of Proverbs. The pseudo-Solomonic Book of Wisdom (generally supposed to be the work of an Alexandrian flourishing somewhere between Aristobulus and Philo) deals both with the Wisdom and with the Logos. It fails to hypostatize either. But it represents the former as the framer of the world, as the power or spirit of God, active alike in the physical, the intellectual, and the ethical domain, and apparently objective to God. In the Targums, on the other hand, the three doctrines of the word, the angel, and the wisdom of God converge in a very definite conception. In the Jewish theology God is represented as purely transcendent, having no likeness of nature with man, and making no personal entrance into history. Instead of the immediate relation of God to the world the Targums introduce the ideas of the Mēmrā (word) and the Shechīnā (real presence). This Memra (= Ma’amar) or, as it is also designated, Dibbūrā, is a hypostasis that takes the place of God when direct intercourse with man is in view. In all those passages of the Old Testament where anthropomorphic terms are used of God, the Memra is substituted for God. The Memra proceeds from God, and retains the creaturely relation to God. It does not seem to have been identified with the Messiah.[1]
3. Philo.—In the Alexandrian philosophy, as represented by the Hellenized Jew Philo, the Logos doctrine assumes a leading place and shapes a new career for itself. Philo’s doctrine is moulded by three forces—Platonism, Stoicism and Hebraism. He detaches the Logos idea from its connexion with Stoic materialism and attaches it to a thorough-going Platonism. It is Plato’s idea of the Good regarded as creatively active. Hence, instead of being merely immanent in the Cosmos, it has an independent existence. Platonic too is the doctrine of the divine architect who seeks to realize in the visible universe the archetypes already formed in his mind. Philo was thus able to make the Logos theory a bridge between Judaism and Greek philosophy. It preserved the monotheistic idea yet afforded a description of the Divine activity in terms of Hellenic thought; the Word of the Old Testament is one with the λόγος of the Stoics. And thus in Philo’s conception the Logos is much more than “the principle of reason, informing the infinite variety of things, and so creating the World-Order”; it is also the divine dynamic, the energy and self-revelation of God. The Stoics indeed sought, more or less consciously, by their doctrine of the Logos as the Infinite Reason to escape from the belief in a divine Creator, but Philo, Jew to the core, starts from the Jewish belief in a supreme, self-existing God, to whom the reason of the world must be subordinated though related. The conflict of the two conceptions (the Greek and the Hebrew) led him into some difficulty; sometimes he represents the Logos as an independent and even personal being, a “second God,” sometimes as merely an aspect of the divine activity. And though passages of the first class must no doubt be explained figuratively—for Philo would not assert the existence of two Divine agents—it remains true that the two conceptions cannot be fused. The Alexandrian philosopher wavers between the two theories and has to accord to the Logos of Hellas a semi-independent position beside the supreme God of Judaea. He speaks of the Logos (1) as the agency by which God reveals Himself, in some measure to all men, in greater degree to chosen souls. The appearances recorded in the Old Testament are manifestations of the Logos, and the knowledge of God possessed by the great leaders and teachers of Israel is due to the same source; (2) as the agency whereby man, enmeshed by illusion, lays hold of the higher spiritual life and rising above his partial point of view participates in the universal reason. The Logos is thus the means of redemption; those who realize its activity being emancipated from the tyranny of circumstance into the freedom of the eternal.
4. The Fourth Gospel.—Among the influences that shaped the Fourth Gospel that of the Alexandrian philosophy must be assigned a distinct, though not an exaggerated importance. There are other books in the New Testament that bear the same impress, the epistles to the Ephesians and the Colossians, and to a much greater degree the epistle to the Hebrews. The development that had thus begun in the time of Paul reaches maturity in the Fourth Gospel, whose dependence on Philo appears (1) in the use of the allegorical method, (2) in many coincident passages, (3) in the dominant conception of the Logos. The writer narrates the life of Christ from the point of view furnished him by Philo’s theory. True, the Logos doctrine is only mentioned in the prologue to the Gospel, but it is presupposed throughout the whole book. The author’s task indeed was somewhat akin to that of Philo, “to transplant into the world of Hellenic culture a revelation originally given through Judaism.” This is not to say that he holds the Logos doctrine in exactly the same form as Philo. On the contrary, the fact that he starts from an actual knowledge of the earthly life of Jesus,
- ↑ Cf. the Targum of Onkelos on the Pentateuch under Gen. vii. 16, xvii. 2, xxi. 20; Exod. xix. 16, &c.; the Jerusalem Targum on Numb. vii. 89, &c. For further information regarding the Hebrew Logos see, beside Dr Kaufmann Kohler, s.v. “Memra,” Jewish Encyc. viii. 464-465, Bousset, Die Religion des Judenthums (1903), p. 341, and Weber, Jüdische Theologie (1897), pp. 180-184. The hypostatizing of the Divine Word in the doctrine of the Memra was probably later than the time of Philo, but it was the outcome of a mode of thinking already common in Jewish theology. The same tendency is of course expressed in the “Logos” of the Fourth Gospel.
