The Stoics, animated chiefly by a practical interest, sought to connect the world of true being, as conceived by Plato, witli the actual world of man's existence. They abandoned the theory of supersensible archetypes and fell back on the simpler hypothesis of Heraclitus, that the universe is pervaded in all its parts by an eternal Reason. Man in his individual life may raise himself above all that limits him, and realize his identity with this Logos, which resides in his own soul, and is also the go\erning principle of the world. The Stoic philosophy not only furnished the general conception of the Logos to later thinkers, but also emphasized the distinction which became of prime importance in the later development. The faculty of reason as it exists in man reveals itself in speech, which is denoted by the same Greek word, Xoyo;. To the universal Xoyoi Stoicism ascribed the two attributes that mark the reasoning power in man. On the one hand it is Xoyoi ivhidHiTo;, — reason in its inner movement and potentiality, — and on the other hand koyo; Tpo^opixo;, — reason projected and made concrete in the endless variety of the \isible world.
1. Philo ai)propriates the main Stoic conception, but combines it with other elements borrowed eclectically from previous .systems of thought. The Logos idea is loosened from its connexion with Stoic materialism and harmonized with a thoroughgoing Platonism, which regards the visible things as only the types and shadows of realities laid up in the higher world. It becomes identical in great measure with Plato's idea of the Good, except that it is further regarded as creatively active. Philo's grand innovation, however, is to press the Logos theory into the service of a theology derived from the OT. The same problem which Stoicism had tried to solve had in a different manner become urgent in Jewish thought. Here also all progress, alike in the moral and intellectual life, was like to be arrested by an overstrained dualism. The effort to conceive of God as abso- lutely transcendent had resulted in separating Him entirely from the world, of which He had yet to be regarded as the Creator and Governor. Already in the later books of the OT, much more in Rabbinical speculation, we can trace the idea of an intermediary between God and the world. ' Wisdom ' is described in Job and Proverbs, with something more than a poetical personification, as God's agent and co-worker Peculiar significance was attached by the later expositors to the various OT allusions to the ' word ' of God. By His ' word ' He had created heaven and earth and revealed Himself to the prophets. The actual hypostatizing of the Word in the doctrine of the Memra was subsequent to the time of Philo, but it was the outcome of a mode of thinking already prevalent in Jewish theology. God who was Him"- self the High and Holy One, of purer eyes than to behold iniquity, mediated His action through the Divine Word. It was natural for Philo, with his Hellenic and philosophical culture, to advance a
step further and identify the Word of the OT with the Stoic \6yos.
The Logos of Philo requires to be understood in the light of this double descent from Greek and OT thought. The Stoic conception, as we have seen, took account of the two meanings of \6yos as reason and uttered speech, but the distinction was of little practical importance. What the Greek thinkers sought to afiirm was tlie ration- ality of the world. The Logos under all its aspects was simply the principle of reason, informing the endle.ss variety of things, and so maintaining the world-order. To Philo, on the other hand, the idea of reason is conxbined with that ol the out- going of Divine power. While describing his Logos in terms directly borrowed from Plato and the Stoics, he regards it as in the last resort dynamic, like the creative word in Genesis. Tkis difl'er- ence between Philo and the Greek thinkers is con- nected with another and still more vital one. To the Stoics the eternal Reason was itself an ultimate principle, and the necessity was not felt of explain- ing it as the reason of God. The doctrine of the Logos may, indeed, be regarded as an attempt, more or less conscious, to escape from the belief in a Divine Creator. Philo could not content himself with this notion of an absolute Logos. He started from the Hebrew belief in a supreme, self -existing God, to whom the immanent reason of the world must be related and subordinated. To this clash- ing of the primary Greek concept'on with the demands of Hebrew monotheism, v, i may largely attribute one of the most perplexing peculiarities of the Philonic doctrine. The ^iOgos appears, sometimes as only an aspect of the ictivity of God, at other times as a '.second God,' an independent and, it might seem, a personal b^ing. There can be little doubt that Philo, who iiever ceased to be an orthodox Jew, had no inten^^^on of maintaining the existence of two Divine af,ents ; and the pas- sages in which he appears to ietach and personify the Logos must be explained .iiainly in a figurative sense. The Word -which is described as sjieaking, acting, creating of itseF, is the word of God, vividly realized by an i) ^aginative thinker. But this sejjarate existence i ssigned to the Logos may also be set down in somi^ measure to the composite origin of the idea. The Stoical doctrine of an independent Reason crald not be wholly reconciled with the Jewish belifi in one supreme God.