From all that has been said of the Philonic doctrine of the Logos, it is clearly apparent that Philo recognised it as the highest of all the divine forces ; and yet many of his descriptions of it were in no essential like those of the apostle John, but rather belonged to Jewish ideas which he found already existing. The distinction of a concealed God and a revelation of him was connected with the Old-Test, idea of theophany. But by tracing back all theophanies to the one principle of revelation lying at their basis, and by making it their objective, the idea of the Logos was attained. The apocryphal book of The Wisdom of Solomon had already interposed wisdom between God and the world as the reflection of the eternal light; the fountain of all knowledge, virtue, and skill; the moulder of all things; the medium of all the Old-Test, revelations (ch. vii-x). This idea Philo also conceived, but he modified it according as the Pla- tonic influence was more or less strongly felt. Says VIII.— H
Neander, " In proportion as he occupied the stand- point which divested the Divine Being of human qual- ities, or that which favored anthropomorphism, the ideal or the symbolical, might not the Xoyoc, appear as a power of God or as a hypostatic being?" Philo de- scribes the Xoyoc, therefore, as the first-born before all existence, the irpioToyovog vibg rov Sfou, as the per- fect reflection of God, as the dpyayytKog among the angels, as the original power of the divine powers. Al- luding to the vorjrbv irapaCEiyfia of Plato, he describes him as the world-constructing reason; he compares the world to the £wov of Plato, and the Xoyoc to the soul of the world ; he calls him God's vicegerent in the world (virapxog) ; he gives him the office of mediator between God and the universe, since the connection of phenom- ena with God is effected through the reason revealed in the world. Hence he is the high-priest of the world, the advocate (-rrapdKXrjrog) for the defects of men with God, and generally the revealer of the divine nature to the universe. The Logos is the archetype of the rea- son, which is formed not after the Absolute himself, the "Ov, but after the Logos. He, as the revelation of the Absolute in the reason, is the image of God, after which man, according to Genesis, was created. In this con- nection he calls the Logos the ideal man ; and alluding to a Jewish mystical idea, the original man. In the Logos is the unity of the collected revelations of the Divine Being which is individualized in man. In gen- eral, everything is traced back to the distinction be- tween the Divine Being as he is in himself and his rev- elation in the Logos, or the eivai and the Xtyeo-Sai. The revelation of God in creation — in all positive reve- lation— in the communication of separate ideas by pe- culiar dogmas — all this forms part of the knowledge of the revealed God in the phenomenal world, and of the symbolical knowledge from the standpoint of the vioi too Xoyov, over which the standpoint of the vioi tov "Ovrog is raised. But this Logos by Philo is only a sort of intermediate being between God, who is in his nature hidden, simple, without attributes, and the eternal, shapeless, chaotic matter- (the Platonic vXi]). It is the reflection, the first-born Son of God; the second God; the sum of the ideas, which are the original types of all existence; the ideal world itself (Kvufiog vorjToc); the medium through which the actual, sensible world (koo- pog aia^rjToc) is created and upheld; the interpreter and revealer of God; the archangel, who destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah, spoke to Jacob and to Moses in the burning bush, and led the people of Israel through the wilderness; the high-priest (dpxnpebc), and advo- cate (-a-apaKXriTog) , who pleads the cause of sinful hu- manity before God, and procures for it the pardon of its guilt. "We see an apparent affinity of this view with the christology of St. Paul and St. John, and thus it probably came to exert no small influence with the early Church fathers in the evolution of their doctrine of the Logos. But at the same time we must not over- look the very essential difference. Philo's doctrine would not itself suggest the application of the idea of the Logos to any historical appearance whatever; for the revelation of the Logos refers not exclusively to any single fact, but to everything relating to the revelation of God in nature and history. If, according to John's Gospel, the appearance of the Logos is the highest and only medium of communication with God, then commun- ion with the Logos in Philo's sense can only be a subor- dinate standpoint ; for not even the highest man immedi- ately apprehends the Absolute. Yet out of this religious idealism a preparation and a medium might be formed for Christian realism, when what was here taken in a merely ideal sense showed itself as realized in human- ity. Christianity refers the Logos to the perfect rev- elation of God in human nature, to the one revelation in Christ ; and substitutes for the immediate apprehen- sion of the Absolute the historically founded communion with God revealed in Christ. The symbolical meaning of Philo's Paraclete was elevated bv the reference to the