LOGOS . The noun logos is as old as the Greek language itself. It has acquired, over the course of time, a large number of different meanings, which only with difficulty can be drawn into a simple unity. "Reason" is the translation that causes perhaps the least trouble, but "reason" itself is of course far from unambiguous. Perhaps it will help to carve up the vast semantic field covered by the word logos if the three principal meanings are distinguished, even though this entails considerable simplification. First there is an objective meaning: the rational ground or basis (Ger., Grund ) for something. This is often of a numerical or logical nature and functions as a principle of explanation. Second, there is a subjective meaning: the power or faculty of reasoning (Ger., Vernunft ) or thought. Third, there is what shall be called an expressive meaning: thought or reason as expressed in speech or in writing (the "speech" may be either vocalized or purely cerebral).
Stoic Views of Logos
No one of these three meanings is limited specifically to the study of religious thought and experience. One specific use of the word did, however, come to have pride of place in some of the philosophical schools of the ancient world, and especially among the Stoics. In these circles logos came to mean the rational order of the universe, an immanent natural law, a life-giving force hidden within things, a power working from above on the sensible world. This use of the word has obvious affinities with the first of the meanings listed above. Clearly we have to do here with the idea of rational ground or basis. There is, however, the obvious difference that we are dealing not with the rational ground of some one particular entity as distinct from some other, but with the cosmos as a whole. It is this extension in the scope of the word, an extension reaching out to embrace the confines of the universe, that gives to this particular use of logos a religious dimension. Hence the willingness of the Stoics to call this logos "God." Deeply embedded in the matter of the universe, God does not demand our worship, does not cry out for temples built by human hands. He does nonetheless call forth a theology, and he does stir in us a sense of piety; but theology and piety are centered on the cosmos.
The point to appreciate is that, for the Stoics, logos is associated with all the functions that are normally attributed to the divine. Logos is destiny and providence. Chrysippus, one of the founders of Stoicism, tells us for example that "it is in conformity with the Logos that what has happened, has happened, that what is happening, is happening, that what will happen, will happen" (Stoicorum veterum fragmenta 2.913). The Logos impregnates the world, from within, with its order and rhythm. The Stoic emperor Marcus Aurelius (5.32.2) tells us that wisdom consists in coming to know "the Logos that extends through the whole of matter, and governs the universe for all eternity according to certain fixed periods." For all that, the Logos is not limited to controlling nature. "If there is any common bond between gods and men, it is because both alike share in the Logos, which Logos is the natural law" (Stoicorum veterum fragmenta 2.528).
Such were the theses upheld by the oldest of the Stoics, in the third century before the common era. Were these Stoics taking over an earlier set of ideas that had been worked out even before their time by Heracl*tus of Ephesus toward the end of the sixth century? Heracl*tus believed in the existence of a Logos common to all humans, shared by all, over and beyond their private thoughts, a Logos by which all things happen as they do, a Logos clothed with many of the attributes of divinity. There were, besides, many readers in the ancient world who thought that Heracl*tus's Logos was close to the Logos of the Stoics and could therefore be taken as the first mapping out of the Stoic conception. On the other hand, one must remember how laconic are the very few quotations from Heracl*tus on the nature of his Logos that have come down to us, and how very different are the meanings that can attach to the word. There can therefore be no certainty that the Logos of Heracl*tus was really the principle guiding and underlying the universe that the Stoics were going to call by the same name.
It is certain, nevertheless, that of all the theological thinkers of pagan antiquity who made use of the idea of a Logos, the Stoics took the idea furthest and had the greatest influence. Although the great philosophers of the classical period made much use of the word logos, they did not attach to it a meaning capable of sustaining the same religious development. Nor can such development be traced in any of the later spiritual movements rooted in the tradition of Greek thought. Contrary to what one might have expected, the Neoplatonists gave only a very limited place to the Logos within the framework of their religious ideas. The Logos does not belong to the hierarchy of hypostases set up by Plotinus. In the Enneads there are only two short treatises, both called On Providence (3.2.3 [47, 48]), in which Plotinus plays with the idea, perhaps under the influence of Gnostic beliefs. Where Jewish and Christian speculative thinkers are to be found giving the word logos the full depth of its religious value, they, no less than their pagan counterparts, draw upon ways of thinking that are recognizably Stoic in origin.
Should we then look upon the Stoic philosophers as the fountainhead of the entire subsequent development of a theology of the Logos? Not quite: Stoic influence would hardly have been capable, without reinforcement, of stimulating such a profound development. But as it happened, the Stoic conception was joined by a new way of thinking that probably originated in the Near East and that encouraged people to see as independent and separate personifications what had hitherto been understood as different psychological aspects of a single divine being. What had been simply modes of the divine essence now came to be thought of as substances in their own right, each of which had issued from the divine by a process neatly epitomized in the title of a thesis presented by Helmer Ringgren: Word and Wisdom: Studies in the Hypostatization of Divine Qualities and Functions in the Ancient Near East (Lund, 1947). This same shift in thought is brought out by the Christian Tertullian in a treatise against the Gnostics (Against the Valentinians 4.2), in which he writes of the difference between Valentinus and his disciple Ptolemy. In the thought of Ptolemy, "the Aeons, each distinguished by its own name and by its own number, became personalized substances, characterized independently of God, whereas Valentinus had included them in the divine whole itself, and had taken them as thoughts, feelings and emotions of the divine." Earlier, Irenaeus (Against Heresies 1.12.1) had written in a similar vein of the same Ptolemy's belief that there had issued forth from the Father Aeons that had earlier been thought of as mere "dispositions" (diatheseis ) of the Father.
The Logos should be seen as the chief of these dispositions. As the name itself testifies, it originally designated the divine reason before becoming a reality in its own right, distinct from God, and soon to be personified by taking on the characteristics of the Son of God. A parallel transformation into a hypostasis distinct from God was undergone by another divine faculty, Wisdom (Sophia). Both developments took place in the first two centuries of the common era, in the Hellenized Jewish circles of Alexandria, and reached their fullest expression in the works of Philo Judaeus (first century ce). The conceptual effort required by these transformations bears all the marks of Stoicism, but the change has been made on the basis of underlying doctrinal shifts. The personalized Logos, distinct from God insofar as accounted the Son of God, is far removed from the supreme principle immersed in matter that the Stoics called by the same name. A difference in terminology brings out just how far the idea has traveled: the "god Logos" of Stoicism has given way, more often than not, to the "Logos of God," or "divine Logos" (e.g., Philo, On the Maker of the World 5.20). This change takes on its full meaning when the Christian Origen contrasts his own belief with that of his adversary Celsus, who on this point can be taken for all intents and purposes as a Stoic. Origen writes as follows (Against Celsus 5.24): "The Logos of all things, according to Celsus, is God himself, whereas we believe that the Logos is the Son of God. In our philosophy it is he of whom we say: 'In the beginning was the Logos, and the Logos was with God, and the Logos was God' (Jn. 1:1)."
Logos and Wisdom
The theology of Wisdom is inseparable from the theology of the Logos. The theology of Wisdom stems from the Old Testament, where in Proverbs (8:22–23) Wisdom speaks: "The Lord created me at the beginning of his work, the first of his acts of old. Ages ago I was set up, at the first, before the beginning of the earth," and so on. Wisdom is plainly presented here as the first of God's creatures and as God's collaborator in the creation of all that was yet to be created. How Wisdom is to be thought of in conjunction with Logos may be gleaned from a Hellenistic Jewish text, the Wisdom of Solomon (9:1–9): "God of my fathers and Lord of thy mercy, thou who hast made all things in thy Logos, and who by this Wisdom has called forth man … grant me the Wisdom seated by thy throne."
Jews and Christians have devoted much commentary to these two passages. Philo sees the Wisdom of Proverbs as the mother of the universe. In accordance with an obviously Stoic train of thought (Stoicorum veterum fragmenta 2.1074), she is held to have received from God the seeds (spermata ) of creation (On Drunkenness 8.30–31; On the Cherubim 14.49). Elsewhere (Allegorical Interpretation 1.19.64; On Flight and Finding 20.109; On Dreams 2.37.245), she is identified in his eyes with the Logos, and either can be taken as typified by the manna from heaven in Exodus 16. These apparent inconsistencies in Philo's thought have a great deal to do with his allegorical exegesis. They also show how ideas of Wisdom and Logos became intertwined in the Judeo-Greek world of Alexandria. Things worked out differently, however, in the purely Jewish tradition, the tradition we speak of as Palestinian. The rabbinical commentators took Wisdom in Proverbs 8:22 to mean the preexistent Torah, conceived by them as being the plan according to which God had created the world.
The Christians of the second century exercised their minds on the same pages of the Bible and came up with conclusions that were not dissimilar. This, for example, is how Justin Martyr interprets the text from Proverbs, just before quoting liberally from it: "As a principle prior to all his creatures, God has called forth from himself a Power that is like a Logos [dunamin logikēn ]". He goes on to say that in different contexts, scripture calls this power Son, Wisdom, God, and Logos (Dialogue with Trypho 61.1, 129.3–4). But there is a difference, and one with important ramifications, in the way in which Philo and Justin quote from the same verse of Proverbs. Philo reads the text in a Greek translation that has Wisdom say: "The Lord, to whom I belong [ektēsato ], has made me the principle of his ways." But Justin, in common with other Christian writers of his day, follows another Greek translation, the so-called Septuagint, which rightly or wrongly gives the verse as: "The Lord has created me [ektise ]." One can hardly mistake the significance of the idea of creation that has thus been introduced into the passage.
Justin's aim, an aim that will be shared by the whole of ancient Christianity, is to read this verse from Proverbs in the light of the prologue to the gospel according to John, and so to see in Wisdom a prophetical foretelling of the Logos or the preexistent Son of God. But such an aim is not supported by the fact that Wisdom is said to be "created," which obviously could not be applied to the Son of God. This explains why Justin, as we just saw, abandons the idea of creation and adopts instead the idea of generation, an idea altogether more suited to describe the arrival of the Christian Word. Nonetheless, the idea that Wisdom had been "created" was a constant irritant, impeding any attempt at a syncretistic explanation of Wisdom as the Word. It is not until the fourth century that Eusebius of Caesarea (Ecclesiastical Theology 3.2.14ff.) resurrects and insists upon the reading ektēsato that had been given by Philo of Alexandria, while Jerome, when he comes to translate the same word in his Latin version of the Hebrew scriptures, chooses the meaning of possessio and excludes the idea of creatio (see his Letter 140.6).
Shortly after Justin, the Christian Theophilus of Antioch takes up the association of the Logos and Wisdom and sometimes seems even to identify the two (To Autolycus 2.10, 2.22). In other passages, however, he distinguishes them (1.7, 2.8), while once (2.15) he uses a very striking formula to tell us of a triad made up of God, his Logos, and his Wisdom. It is tempting to see at this point a preliminary version of the doctrine of the Trinity, with Wisdom occupying the place of the Holy Ghost. The different ways that Theophilus has of expressing himself on the subject show, however, that the doctrine has not as yet really taken on definite shape in his mind. Not until Irenaeus, who never wavers in his identification of Wisdom with the Holy Ghost, does the idea of the Trinity become a consistent and self-conscious doctrine.
Seminal Logos
We can see here how, from the very beginning, the Christian theology of the Logos, or of the Word, was deeply rooted in the particular way in which theologians read and understood Proverbs and the Wisdom of Solomon in the cultural circles of Hellenistic Judaism. No less important was the influence that Stoicism exerted on these Jewish speculations, though its importance was of another kind. Stoicism provided the theoretical framework that made it possible for images and ideas drawn from scripture to take on definite doctrinal shape.
Take, for example, the Stoic idea of logos spermatikōs, seminal or spermatic logos. This was an idea that the Stoics had worked out to explain how every being contains within itself a principle of development suitable to itself—an idea that they applied to the individual beings within the cosmos as well as to the cosmos itself in its entirety. When applied to individual beings, the formula is used in the plural. We are told, for example, that God, "in looking to the birth of the world, holds within himself all the seminal logoi, according to which each thing is produced, as required by necessity" (Stoicorum veterum fragmenta 2.1027). We have already seen how Philo makes use of this way of thinking when he writes of Wisdom receiving from God the seeds of creation.
Justin is no less indebted to the same mode of thought, although the turn of ideas in his case is very different. Justin wonders how pagan philosophers and poets have been able to utter certain truths, despite their having had no access to the truths of revelation. He decides that it is "because of the seed of the Logos that has been implanted in the whole human race," with the difference that the pagans respond to only "a part of the seminal Logos," whereas the Christians' rule of faith is founded on "the knowledge and the contemplation of the whole Logos, that is, of Christ" (Second Apology 8.1, 8.3). The same Stoic concept underlies the thought of the Gnostic Ptolemy at about the same time (as reported by Irenaeus in Against Heresies 1.8.5): Ptolemy claimed that the Father, in the Son, had called forth all things seminally (spermatikōs ).
Inner Logos and Spoken Logos
Stoic psychology emphasized the lack of coincidence between the reasoning power, which rests within, and language, which gives outward expression to the powers of reason. Since the same word logos was used to designate both the power of reasoning and reason as expressed in speech, the difference came to be stated as a difference between two logoi. One might no less properly express this as a distinction between two types or states of language. A language within, or an inner language (logos endiathetos ), is then distinguished from a language that we have in common with talking birds, a language expressed in speech (logos prophorikos ). We should refrain, however, from giving too much importance to the significance that the Stoics themselves attached to this distinction, for the accounts of it are few and far between. Thus we find in Heracl*tus, a commentator on Homer (first century ce?), the claim that if Hermes, god of the logos, is given double honors, "this is because language is double. The philosophers call one an 'inner' language and the other a 'spoken' language. The 'spoken' language is the messenger of the thoughts that pass within us, whereas the 'inner' language stays enclosed within the fastness of our heart" (Homeric Problems 72.14–16).
From small beginnings, this Stoic way of thinking came to cut deep into the Christian theology of the Logos. No one threw himself with greater abandon into the description of the idea and its transposition into a Christian context than Theophilus of Antioch, at the end of the second century. In his treatise To Autolycus (2.2), he gives brilliant proof of the idea outlined earlier, according to which the Jewish and Christian Logos resulted from exteriorizing and personifying what had originally been God's own internal faculty of reflection. At first God is alone, and the Logos is quite simply God's weighing up of things within himself; then, when he wishes to create, God brings forth the Logos to be his instrument and his messenger. By cleverly cutting off the opening of the prologue of John's gospel, Theophilus is able to drum up a scriptural warrant for this Stoic representation of the two logoi. The evident weakness in the process lies in introducing into the condition of the Logos a kind of historical development that is ill-suited to the nature of the divine. Because Theophilus has taken over the movement ad extra by which the Stoics passed from the logos endiathetos to the logos prophorikos, the Word of God has to pass through two different and successive states, and it seems clear that his begetting, for all that it is the essential mark of his relation to the Father, belongs only to the second state.
The danger inherent in this view of the Trinity did not escape the eagle eye of Origen, who very neatly seizes upon it in a passage (De principiis 1.2.2) written around 230. By means of a subtle philosophical argument, proceeding by dilemma, he establishes that from all eternity God is, and always has been, the Father of his only Son.
Theophilus of Antioch probably best typifies the tendency that we have found in him. Yet he is by no means the only writer able to manipulate such ideas. In the second century and at the beginning of the third, almost all Christian theologians write of the Logos in a way that implies development: starting from a lack of distinction within the innermost being of God, they make the Logos "proceed" from out of God and take upon himself the work of creation. To be sure, only some of these authors deliberately and explicitly draw upon the Stoic model of the two logoi and cast their ideas in the technical terms of the theory; but they all have the same model in mind. One may quote Justin (Dialogue 61.2) and his disciple Tatian (Speech to the Greeks 5), and in the Latin-speaking world Tertullian (Against Praxeas 5–7) and finally Hippolytus of Rome (Against Noëtus 10; Refutation 10.33.1–15). Hippolytus virtually repeats the analyses given by Theophilus, although there are some differences of nuance: for example, Hippolytus splits in two the outward state of the Logos and sees therein a separate stage for the Word incarnate. Yet two noteworthy exceptions should be mentioned: Clement of Alexandria (Stromateis 5.1.6.3) and even more so Irenaeus (Against Heresies 2.13.8, 2.28.5). His struggle against the Gnostics (who in practice shared the views of Theophilus and others) gave Irenaeus an additional reason for forcefully rejecting any assimilation of the generation of the Word with happenings related to the human Logos.
Irenaeus's negative approach won the day. The analogy with Stoic theory of the two logoi is heard of no more for a while, then reappears during the fourth century in the theology of the Word expounded by Marcellus of Ancyra and Photinus. Both these writers were condemned and anathematized by synods in 345 and 351. The declaration of faith in 345 ran as follows: "But as for us, we know that Christ is not merely a Logos of God uttered outwardly or resting within [prophorikos ē endiathetos ]. He is the Logos God, living and subsisting of himself, Son of God, Christ" (Macrostich Formula of the third synod of Antioch, pt. 6, in August Hahn, Bibliothek der Symbole und Glaubensregeln der alten Kirche, 3d ed., Breslau, 1897, para. 159, p. 194). This conciliar statement had in any case been anticipated by Eusebius of Caesarea (De ecclesiastica theologia 1.17; 2.11; 14; 15), and was shortly to receive the approval of Cyril of Jerusalem (Catechesis 11.10) and Athanasius (Speech against the Arians 2.35). Marcellus of Ancyra and Photinus, then, were fighting rearguard battle. In the dogmatic formula approved in 325 by the ecumenical council of Nicaea (the Nicene Creed), the word logos, which Eusebius had suggested, had already disappeared in favor of "Son of God" (Hahn, 1897, pp. 160–161). This substitution obviously brought on the demise of the old Stoic ways of thinking that had been indissolubly linked to the term logos. Not until the fifth century, and then only in the Latin-speaking world, does one find, in the great trinitarian synthesis of Augustine, a new way in which the two states of human language (verbum quod intus lucet, verbum quod foris sonat ) can again be employed to mark out similarities with the divine Word; yet even then the comparison has to be handled with the greatest circ*mspection. Augustine differs from the theologians of the second century in holding that the spoken human word finds for its analogue not the begotten Logos seen against the background of its participation in creation, but the Word made flesh (De trinitate 15.10.19–11.20).
Functions of the Logos
Philo of Alexandria, as well as the early Christians, confers upon the Logos a number of different functions. The chief of these can be described by three words: creation, revelation, mediation.
The idea of speech as creative is hardly likely to have arisen in Greece, where men thought instead in terms of an antithesis between the two nouns logos and ergon: the antithesis of talking and doing, of words and acts, of the lips and the heart. Quite other is the world of the Old Testament, where sentences abound such as those in Psalm 33:9: "For he spoke, and it was done; he commanded, and it stood fast." (See also Ps. 148:5, 42:15 et al.) Philo was especially struck by the fact that this temporal coincidence between the divine command and its effect was nowhere to be found in the culture of the Greeks: "At the moment that he speaks, God creates, and there is no gap in time between the two; alternatively one might say, if one wished to improve upon the truth of this opinion, that his Word was act [logos ergon ]" (On the Sacrifices of Abel and Cain 18.65).
This moment in Christian doctrine led naturally to giving the Logos (which is also the divine Word) a part in the creation of the cosmos. Its role was that of an instrument (organon ), and Philo takes care to distinguish between the instrument and God himself, who is cause, or aition (On the Cherubim 35.127). This is the same instrumental causality, a subordinate form of causality, that early Christians normally attributed to the Logos. The idea was nearly always expressed by the preposition dia with the genitive, and one should translate it (or at least understand it as meaning) "by means of," starting from John 1:3: "All things were made by the Logos."
Philo does, however, take the instrumental role of the Logos in a fairly wide sense and makes room for what the Greek philosophical tradition called the "exemplary cause" (which was distinguished thereby from the idea of instrument; see Basil of Caesarea, On the Holy Ghost 3.5). An extract from the Allegorical Interpretation (3.31.96) makes clear how the Logos is at one and the same time instrument (organon ) and model (archetupos, paradeigma ). And Philo's analyses help us in turn to understand some later texts. Toward the year 177 Athenagoras, no different in this from other Christian writers of the time, writes that "God, by means of the Logos that comes from him, has called the universe into being, has set it in order, and keeps it beneath his governance" (Legatio 10). But a little later he adds, and indeed repeats, that "the Son of God is the Logos of the Father in idea and in act [en ideai kai energeiai ]." These final words would be shrouded in mystery, did we not recall the dual role that Philo assigned to the Logos in creation since, for Philo, the Logos is at one and the same time the ideal model and the agent of creation. At this point, therefore, the influence of Greek philosophy makes itself felt again in the thought of Philo and no less in that of Athenagoras. Thus a pagan contemporary of Athenagoras, the Platonist Albinus, will write of a principle that he calls the first Intellect: "its activity [energeia ] is itself idea [idea ]" (Didascalicos 10).
In the loose and widespread Platonism with which Jewish and Christian ideas of the time were saturated, the impossibility of an adequate knowledge of God was stressed. In such an intellectual climate the Logos inevitably took on a second function, whereby it became a means of revealing the Father to us. This idea becomes so commonplace that I shall only allude to it. There is, however, one very early noncanonical Christian writer who gives the idea a novel twist. Ignatius of Antioch (d. 107) writes as follows (Letter to the Magnesians 8.2): "There is only one God, who makes himself known to us through Jesus Christ his Son, who is his Logos who comes forth from his silence [logos apo sigēs proelthōn ]." Sigē (Silence) is a figure well known to us from the theogonies current in Simonian and Valentinian Gnosticism, where one of the first Aeons—that is, one of the earliest emanations—is called by this name. Are we to conclude that Ignatius has drawn his inspiration on this point from the Gnostic theory of divine emanations, as Marcellus of Ancyra later did (according to Eusebius, Ecclesiastical Theology 2.9.4)? The possibility cannot be ruled out. But it is more likely that Ignatius made use of this gripping expression to describe how, when the Logos comes forward to reveal the Father, he breaks the silence that God had kept for ages past.
Entrusted from on high with the creation of the cosmos and the revelation of the Father, the Logos is in some ways closer to humanity than is the Father. The Logos stands on the borderline (methorios stas ), so to speak, between the Father and the human race, and so can play the part of a mediator. To God he offers the prayers and worship of mortal men, while to mortal men he gives the assurance of a divine help that will never fail them. That, at least, is how Philo shapes his ideas, sometimes applying these trains of thought deliberately and explicitly to the Logos (On Dreams 2.28.188–189; On the Special Laws 1.23.116). But the role of mediator finds its fullest scope only in Christianity, where the incarnate Logos draws together and makes of itself a center for human and divine nature and is thereby in the ideal position to facilitate the communication of one nature with the other. There are some famous passages in Augustine that one could quote as answering exactly to this point (Confessions 7.18.24; City of God 9.15–17). No less apposite, but less hackneyed, is the following quotation from Clement of Alexandria, where a flavor of baroque archaism results from his quoting Heracl*tus: "Heracl*tus was quite right to say: 'The gods are men, and men are gods. For the Logos is one and the same.' Light shines through this mystery: God is in man, and man is God, and the Mediator [mesitēs ] fulfills the will of the Father; for the Mediator is the Logos, which is the same for man and for God, at one and the same time Son of God and savior of men, God's servant and our Teacher" (Teacher 1.2.1).
The Christian Logos
With the rise of Christianity, old words and ideas became charged with a new meaning, and new wine was poured into old skins, with all the risks attendant upon such an enterprise, as we have already seen in our study of the Stoic theory of the two logoi. Some Christian authors take up with confidence and determination the earlier pagan prehistory of this idea and see therein a providential pattern mirroring sacred history itself: "Those who lived with the Logos are Christians, even if in their day they passed for atheists: among the Greeks, such are Socrates, Heracl*tus, and their like; among the barbarians, Abraham, Ananias, Azarias, Misaël, Elijah, and many others." Such is the claim of Justin Martyr (First Apology 46.3), who revels in ferreting out from Greek philosophy and religion ideas that are compatible with the Christian Logos. He draws attention to Mercury, who was called the angelic word of God (22.2), and most of all to the world soul that Plato (Timaeus 36B) says is embedded in the universe in the shape of a cross or the Greek letter chi, a symbol for the cross of Christ (60.5–7).
This movement toward harmonizing pagan Greek and Christian beliefs, a movement that reflects a grandiose conception of the theology of history, did not keep early Christianity from becoming clearly aware of what, in its conception of the Logos, was most peculiarly its own. Thus the prologue to the Gospel of John shows a writer deeply aware of the historical background from which he has sprung (which included the Wisdom of Hellenistic Judaism and the Torah of Palestinian Judaism). But the prologue is also without peer in revealing the overriding importance given to the perfect coincidence between the preexisting Logos and the Jesus of history. Even so, in John, the personality of this Logos is taken as the known, and not spelled out, a point to which the early theologians will direct their efforts. Such, for example, is Justin's preoccupation when he writes against those (possibly Jews taking their lead from Philo) who believe that individuality of the Logos is no more distinct from that of the Father than light is distinct from the sun. In his Dialogue with Trypho (128.4, 129.3–4), Justin argues instead in favor of a distinction that is not merely nominal but a distinction of number. As proof, he takes his stand on the bringing forth of the Logos: for "what is brought forth is numerically distinct from him who brings forth; anyone must allow us that."
To be perfectly accurate, Justin does not write of the Logos as "numerically distinct," but as "other [heteros ] in virtue of number." In writing thus, Justin hit upon a word full of pitfalls, a word that could suggest the existence of two gods as well as a debasem*nt of the Logos in relation to the Father. It could even suggest both ideas at once, as seen in another sentence from the same Dialogue, a sentence truly staggering in its lack of theological foresight: "There is, as has been said, another [heteros ] god and lord below the Creator of the universe … the Creator of the universe has no other [allos ] god above him" (56.4). Perhaps Justin's pen has run away with him, forcing his ideas in a direction that he did not really intend. Others, whose thinking was really no different from his, will take much greater care in how they express themselves (e.g., Hippolytus, Against Noëtus 11). Origen himself will downgrade the Logos in calling it "second [deuteros ] god" (Against Celsus 5.39, 6.61, etc.) or again in writing "god" (theos ) without the article, whereas he calls the Father ho theos, "the God" (Commentary of Saint John 2.2.13–18).
The analyses quoted above may seem oddly archaic in the light of later theology, but they lose a good deal of this quality if we take account of two points. In the first place, the expressions employed by Justin and Origen can already be found in Philo, whose use of them naturally occasions much less surprise. Thus Philo had used the presence or absence of the article to distinguish the "true" God from the Logos god (On Dreams 1.39.229–230), and had marked out the Logos as being "the second god" (Questions and Answers on Genesis 2.62). Before Justin and Hippolytus, Philo sees in the Logos "another god" (ibid.). The second point to bear in mind is that the Platonist philosophers of the day also contribute to the movement toward giving the Logos only a diminished form of divinity. They refer regularly to a first principle or a first god, obviously implying the existence of a god of second rank. One such Platonist writer, Numenius (later than Philo but known to Origen), uses the term second god for the demiurge (fragments 11, 15, 16, 19). It is hard to avoid the conclusion that the Christian theologians of the second and third centuries, even theologians of the caliber of Origen, were simply prisoners of the Zeitgeist when they came to see the Logos as a god of second rank. They were as yet unequipped with the conceptual apparatus that their successors were going to need so as to share, without loss of identity, the divine nature between Persons Three.
See Also
Archetypes; Hypostasis; Jesus; Kalām; Sophia; Torah.
Bibliography
Aeby, Gervais. Les missions divines de saint Justin à Origène. Fribourg, Switzerland, 1958.
Daniélou, Jean. Gospel Message and Hellenistic Culture, vol. 2 of A History of Early Christian Doctrine before the Council of Nicea. Translated by John A. Baker. London, 1973.
Harl, Marguerite. Origène et la fonction révélatrice du verbe incarné. Paris, 1958.
Hatch, Edwin. The Influence of Greek Ideas on Christianity (1888). Reprint, New York, 1957.
Holte, Ragnar. "Logos Spermatikos: Christianity and Ancient Philosophy according to St. Justin's Apologies." Studia Theologica 12 (1958): 109–168.
Kretschmar, Georg. Studien zur frühchristlichen Trinitätstheologie. Tübingen, 1956.
Kurtz, Ewald. Interpretation zu den Logos-Fragmenten Heraklits. Spudasmata, vol. 17. Hildesheim, 1971.
Lebreton, Jules. Histoire du dogme de la Trinité des origines au Concile de Nicée, vol. 1, Les origines, and vol. 2, De Saint Clément à Saint Irénée. 6th ed. Paris, 1927–1928. This is an essential work for the study of the Logos doctrine in early Christianity.
Lebreton, Jules. "La théologie de la Trinité chez Clément d'Alexandrie." Recherches de science religieuse 34 (1947): 55–76, 142–179.
Orbe, Antonio. En los albores de la exegesis iohannea. Analecta Gregoriana, vol. 65. Rome, 1955.
Orbe, Antonio. Hacia la primera teología de la procesión del Verbo. 2 vols. Analecta Gregoriana, vols. 99–100. Rome, 1958. The two works by Orbe are important for the study of the notion of logos in Gnostic traditions.
Prestige, G. L. God in Patristic Thought. London, 1952.
Rendel, Harris J. "Athena, Sophia and the Logos." Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 7 (July 1922): 56–72.
Ringgren, Helmer. Word and Wisdom: Studies in the Hypostatization of Divine Qualities and Functions in the Ancient Near East. Lund, 1947.
Wolfson, Harry A. "The Trinity, the Logos, and the Platonic Ideas." In his The Philosophy of the Church Fathers, vol. 1. Cambridge, Mass., 1964.
New Sources
Bonetskaia, N. K. "The Struggle for Logos in Russian in the Twentieth Century." Russian Studies in Philosophy 40 (Spring 2002): 6–40.
Desjardins, Rosemary. The Rational Enterprise: Logos in Plato's Theaetetus. Albany, 1990.
Lee, Bernard H. Jesus and the Metaphors of God: The Christs of the New Testament. New York, 1993.
Montiglio, Silvia. Silence in the Land of Logos. Princeton, N.J., 2000.
Rauser, Randal. "Logos and Logoi Ensarkos: Christology and a Problem of Perception." International Journal of Systematic Theology 5 (July 2003): 133–147.
Roochik, David. The Tragedy of Reason: Toward a Platonic Conception of Logos. New York, 1990.
Swearingen, C. Jan. Rhetoric and Irony: Western Literary and Western Lies. New York, 1991.
Wilcox, Joel. The Origins of Epistemology in Early Greek Thought. Lewiston, N.Y., 1994.
Jean PÉpin (1987)
Translated from French by Denis O'Brien
Revised Bibliography
