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
thoroughgoing 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 [Greek: logos] 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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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