2. The origin of the Logos theory: Plato, Philo.
(Extract from Reformation and Scholasticism in Philosophy, Vol II)
Let the theory be examined! Quite early, a tendency became manifest to emphasize to the utmost the transcendence of the deity above the principle of matter. Plutarch and Albinus had already done this in the so-called middle Platonic school, and so, under strong Platonic influence, did the Jewish Alexandrian philosopher Philo. Numenius of Apamea, who was in turn influenced by Philo and also by neo-Pythagorean philosophy, did the same. To maintain this transcendence, any direct action of the highest deity upon the cosmos, bound as [the latter was deemed to be] to the matter principle, had to be denied; and intermediate beings were needed in order to ensure divine influence on the material world. This had already happened to some extent in Plato’s Timaeus, where the demiurge, after “creating” the imperishable celestial deities and the immortal part of the human soul, leaves the formation of mortal beings, subject to the power of the matter principle, to these celestial deities (particularly the sun).
The Jewish thinker Philo (born ca. 25 BC), in attempting to strike a synthesis between Old Testament Jewish doctrine and Platonic and Stoic philosophy, devised a logos theory that became more or less the prototype for the later development of this theory in Christian theological and philosophical thought. Philo lived in Alexandria, where Hellenic culture and Greek philosophy blossomed a second time and underwent a synthesis with Eastern religions. He tried to gain a speculative, philosophical understanding of God’s absolute transcendence, as this is taught in the Old Testament (where it is inseparably connected, however, to His immanence in the creation), from within the framework of the Greek religious form-matter motive.
Thus Philo had to deny any direct contact between the deity and “impure matter.” Even the Platonic forms or ideas were still related to the matter principle, since the being of material things, the human person included, was based, according to Plato, on their participation (methexis) in the ideas. What is more, the world of ideas and its thinking correlate, the nous or the logos, still contain a plurality, whereas the deity has to be conceived as an absolute unity, elevated above all plurality. In Philo’s view, therefore, God is elevated even above reason and the ideas. He is the absolute unity, utterly simple in nature and sufficient unto Himself, who is omnipresent in His divine power but not in His being.
For the creation of the world God [in Philo’s view] employed incorporeal forces or ideas, since He Himself could not touch “impure matter.” Philo thus imagined the Platonic ideas as animate, active beings, a notion that Plato himself had already embraced in his dialogue The Sophist (359 BC), written during the period of crisis in his theory of ideas. These ideal forces supposedly surround God as ministering spirits, like the courtiers of a monarch. Among them two basic forces are predominant: the creative force and the ruling force. Philo called the first of these the divine goodness, again following Plato, since Plato had designated the idea of the Good as the final purpose and cause in the entire formation of the world. To these two main forces Philo added many others as the “law-givers.” He regarded them all not merely as divine attributes but as relatively independent spirits, which can appear to men and even have personal relationships with certain people, such as Abraham.
This entire active world of ideas is seated in the divine Logos,which, just like the human logos, operates in two inseparable ways: as thinking reason and as word. The Logos is the mediator between God and the creation, and God uses it to create the world. Philo’s acceptance of the Greek motive of form and matter forced him to abandon the Scriptural doctrine of creation. His Logos finds itself confronted with an eternal matter, and from this it forms creatures “in the image of the eternal ideas,” as Plato had taught. Philo believed that this theory of ideas was present already in Moses, who taught in the book of Genesis (1:27) that God created humankind in His own image. According to Philo, what there is said of humankind has to be applied to the whole visible world.
In his exposition of the Logos and of the ideas in general, Philo vacillates between a purely attributive view, which regards them merely as attributes of the deity, and a substantial view in which they also function as independent beings. One can safely say, however, that the second view, in which the Logos is hypostatized as a Person, predominates in his thought. For the most part, at least, Philo places the Logos next to God the Father as a second divine Person, and it therefore cannot be reduced to a mere attribute or function of the first Person. When he speaks explicitly of the second Person he makes him clearly subordinate to the first, just as happened later in the Monarchian movement in Christian dogmatics. An incarnation of the Logos was out of the question for him, however, merely because of his notion that matter is impure. For this same reason he could not identify his Logos with the hoped-for Messiah.
(Extracted from Reformation and Scholasticism in Philosophy, Vol II, Paideia Press, 2013, pp 68-70)
The above book is available HERE
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Logos critique extracts:
1) The theory of the Logos in the critical realism of Kuyper, Bavinck, and Woltjer.
3) The Logos theory of Plotinus
4) Logos speculation in Christian thought before Council of Nicea (325).
