From John Relly Beard's book: Illustrations of the Trinity
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All the active relations of God to the actual world, all objective revelation of God therein, is comprised in the out-spoken logos. He is the measure of all things, inasmuch as being the place of ideas, he gives to every thing its magnitude and relations, or contains in himself this magnitude and these relations. Accordingly, this logos forms or creates the world, since as the divine signet, he stamps himself on matter, or communicates to it his own ideal form. And as he created the world (or with a difference of expression, God created the world by him DI AUTOU) so he supports it also; he is the divine power dwelling in the world, which he upholds; and, as he contains the collected ideas of God, or powers of the world, so is he its lord. As such he is full of light and life, with which he also fills all; ruling and ordering the world with divine wisdom, love, justice, and holiness. Thus does he pervade and animate, guide and conduct the world, as the divine Providence, and is in external nature the divine order and necessity, by which all things are held together, in human kind, partly the divine power which dwells by nature in every soul, pure intelligence; partly the source of wisdom and the guardian of virtue. Since, however, all wisdom and order, as well as all virtue, streams forth from him, he is also called the wisdom of God H SOFIA TOU QEOU. He is, moreover, one and the same with the Spirit of God, with the Holy Spirit, in his objective appearance in the world; partly, inasmuch as he holds the world together as a uniting spirit; partly, inasmuch as he animates and enlightens man, especially as a prophetic spirit.
The logos according to Philo [was] the oldest creation of God; not unbegotten, as God himself, but also not created, as finite beings; he is the oldest son of the eternal Father, the first begotten, the image of God, the creator of the world, the revealed name of God, the mediator between God and the world, who separates and binds together both; the highest angel, even the second God, the high priest, atoner, advocate of the world and of men, whose historical life and appearance is visible, especially in the history of the Jewish people, so that all the divine forms and appearances in the sacred writings are to be referred to the logos.
Did Philo then conceive and represent the divine logos as a truly real and distinct personality, as an hypostasis distinct from God himself? As long as we confine our thoughts to separate representations, we may, considering these as figures of speech, see reason to hesitate, but the more we enter into the internal connexions of Philo's religious philosophy, the more decided an affirmative shall we give to the question. A part of Philo's personifications of the logos is purely imaginative and allegorical, and serves only for a figurative contemplation and a Biblical representation of his ideas. In this class may be placed the descriptions of the logos as high priest, advocate, chain, seal; many others of the same kind. But there are considerations which concur to show that Philo regarded out-spoken word, and as involved in this, the inner word, as a real being, different from and dependent on God.
Philo repeatedly names the logos ARCAGGELOS, archangel. But as, according to the then existing Jewish theology, he conceived of the angels as personal beings different from God, so must he have thought the logos, the highest angel, to be a person. But Philo expressly defines the logos as TON DEUTERON QEON—the second God; and distinguishes from this second God, the one that was before the logos; discribing the latter as the God who is above the logos; or as God who is highest and Father of all. He undertakes to explain, in what sense God in Gen. i. 27., in the image of God have I made man; and says this (namely image,) is meant of another God, that is, the first God made man in the image of the second God: distinctly adding, that nothing mortal can be in the likeness of the highest God, the Father of all, but to the second god, who is his word.
From these statements it is manifest that Philo held the logos to be a person. This fact is involved not merely in the terms he employs, but also in the substance of his philosophical system. Regarding God himself as an essence distinct and remote from the created world, having no connexion with matter, and being the object of no human thought, Philo was necessarily led to suppose another god, who stood in such a relation to finite things, as the doctrine of the Bible, touching the creation, the obvious lessons of nature, not to say his own philosophy, taught to exist, shewing that these finite things had an origin in the act, mediately or immediately, of an infinite intelligence. The monotheism of an advanced stage of civilization, as well as that of the Bible, refers the existence of the entire universe, to the will of the one sole God, creator of heaven and earth; but as Philo had reasoned himself into the conviction that this, 'the only true God' had and could have no connexion with matter, so was he led to make out of metaphorical language and the teeming fancies of his own mind, a second God, who did what the first was too high and too abstract to execute. The incompatibility which really existed between this contrivance and the pure monotheism of the sacred books he appears not to have been altogether ignorant of, since he says that the logos, as a second god, DEUTEROS QEOS, is god only in an improper sense, EN KATACRHSEI. Some difference must of necessity have existed in his mind between the two. What that difference was, it is now not easy to determine. Yet while the second remained god, he must have been so far different from the first, as to be fit to perform acts too humble for the first to execute. Hence the second obviously approached more nearly to outward, visible, and finite things. This difficulty, which is in truth insuperable, Philo tried to solve by the doctrine of emanation. Derived from the first, the second god remained divine, while by his very emanation he went forth to create the world, and dwell among men. Accordingly the logos is termed by Philo hUIOS TOU QEOU, Son of God, PRWTOLOGOS, first begotten, O ANQRWPOS TOU QEOU, the man of God.
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