Logos

“ The logos is thus the expression of the philosophy of men measurably cultured; it is the intelligent exegesis of the content of the mythos in terms of objective and subjective reality; it is scientific because it is logical; it is the later literary criticism—the analytic and synthetic treatment of myths and epics. So, in the experience of every people having an ethnic past, mythos and logos represent two well-defined stages of human thought—the naïve and the philosophic—and also the elder time and the modern. ”

“ Those who, of old, attempted to base National Education on the principle of the Logos, or rhythmic pulsation, struck the true key-note at starting. The symbol of the covenant made with man by Infinite Knowledge was the Rainbow; which no man can capture or embalm or enshrine ; which is made by the breaking up of the One Light into many colours, to fade before long into the Unity of white light again; and leaves nowhere in all the world a trace of its ever having existed, except in Man's heart an impression of spiritual beauty, and in his mind a suggestion how to discover the Laws of Light. ”

“ And yet if you and I, in our tiny personalities, repeat in miniature the life of the Logos in the vast sweep of His creative activity, who shall say that in a movement such as ours there is not similarly a retracing of the lines along which humanity at large has to grow? And who shall say whether we may not understand our movement better, and guide it more wisely, if we recognise these correspondences of the great growth of the world to the small growth of our Movement—a world-reflection in a tiny mirror? ”

“ It assumes that the Logos idea is familiar in Christian theology, and vividly summarizes the main features of the Philonic conception—the eternal existence of the Logos, its relation to God (πρὸς τὸν θεόν, yet distinct) , its creative, illuminative and redemptive activity. But the adaptation of the idea to John’s account of a historical person involved at least three profound modifications:— (1) the Logos, instead of the abstraction or semi-personification of Philo, becomes fully personified. ”

“ It is the Logos who guides us to the Father, God "by the same Logos both creating all things and leading up [———] the perfect man from the things of earth to himself." (3) These are very imperfect examples, but it may be asserted that there is not a representation of the Logos in the fourth Gospel which has not close parallels in the works of Philo. ”

“ Wait till the Book on the Logos were done;—alas, till your own terrene eyes, blind with conceit and the dust of logic, were purged, subtilized and spiritualized into the sharpness of vision requisite for discerning such an "om-m-mject."—The ingenuous young English head, of those days, stood strangely puzzled by such revelations; uncertain whether it were getting inspired, or getting infatuated into flat imbecility; and strange effulgence, of new day or else of deeper meteoric night, colored the horizon of the future for it. ”

“ That uttered word is the Logos, and is afterwards conceived as a person, and as creative, then as building and glorifying the world. All of God that is sent forth from passive concealment into active manifestation is the Logos. ”

“ But in particular reference to the creation of the material universe, the Logos came in time to be conceived of by many as hypostatized, as a proper person going forth, as it were, from God in order to execute the plan prepared, to dispose and arrange all things conformably to it, and to give sensible forms to primitive matter, by impressing it with the ideas of the archetypal world. ”

“ Logos is a single intellectual act under two aspects; it is an untranslatable word. We were told at school that it was strange that the Greeks should not have distinguished between Logos Speech and Logos Reason, and it was represented as a progress toward clearer thought that later writers should have distinguished between Logos the spoken word and Logos the inner thought. ”

“ In this impersonal character does the Logos manifest the Divine thought in the visible universe; in the minds of godly men, which are the source of law; in the glance of prophets, which catches and interprets the divine significance of all times; and first assumes a full personality in the Incarnation. Having left the primary Will behind in the Father's essence, the Logos remains but an inchoate hypostasis, till alighting, in the human nature, on another centre of volition. ”

“ On the other hand, it may be that one who fixes his eyes on the height of the exaltation of the Logos, may find the loosing of those shoes which when one is seeking them seem to be bound, so that He also looses those shoes which are separable from the Logos, and beholds the Logos divested of inferior things, as He is, the Son of God. ”

“ The Logos is the mediator between the world of sense and the unimaginable God. When man steeps himself in knowledge, he becomes united with the Logos, which is embodied in him. The person who has developed spirituality is the vehicle of the Logos. ”

“ Moreover, the only-begotten Son himself is nothing else than the idea of humanity, than man preoccupied with himself, man hiding from himself and the world in God,—the heavenly man. The Logos is latent, tacit man; man is the revealed, expressed Logos. The Logos is only the prelude of man. ”

“ As the God who is over all is God with the article not without it, so “the Logos” is the source of that reason (Logos) which dwells in every reasonable creature; the reason which is in each creature is not, like the former called par excellence The Logos. ”

“ What language does is to take up the work of grouping where it has been left by generic ideation; and if it is found expedient to name any generic ideas, it is the more generic as well as the less generic that are selected for the purpose. In short, immense as is the organizing power of the Logos, it does not come upon the scene of its creative power to find only that which is without form and void: rather does it find a fair structure of no mean order of system, shaped by prior influences, and, so far as thus shaped, a veritable cosmos. ”

“ He is neither uncreated like God, nor created like the things that are finite. The Logos is the prototype of the universe, the delegate of God, whose behests it communicates to the world, the interpreter who reveals His will and constantly accomplishes it, the archangel who shows forth his works, the high priest and intercessor between the world and God. Early Christianity made use of this doctrine of the Logos in order to assume a philosophic aspect. ”

“ The Logos being the universe in idea, coming events (or those about to manifest themselves on the objective plane) are generally manifested long, it may be, before they actually happen, in the plane of the Logos from which all impulses spring originally. ”

“ An explanation of Logos in Greek philosophy is much simpler than is commonly supposed. It is only needful not to forget that for the Greeks thought and word were inseparable, and that the same term, namely, Logos, expressed both, though they distinguished the inner from the outer Logos. It is one of the most remarkable aberrations of the [pg 020] human mind, to imagine that there could be a word without thought or a thought without word. ”

“ To the pure in heart who see the Logos, all things are pure, because all things suggest the ineffable "process of becoming"; and those things are naturally sacred to any man, and an object of religious reverence, which most vividly suggest it to him. But to the masses things are not thus pure; because they see, in each thing, not the Creative Logos, but some special quality which is, or which they suppose to be, the especial characteristic of that object. Each Seer tries to break up the association of special Sanctity which clings round the symbol employed by his predecessor ”

“ But in some special cases the Logos does descend to the plane of the soul and associate itself with the soul during the lifetime of the individual; but these cases are very rare. In the case of such beings, while they still exist as ordinary men on the physical plane, instead of having for their soul merely the reflection of the Logos, they have the Logos itself. ”

“ There is a logos in the forms of things, by which they are prepared to serve as types or images of what, is inmost in our souls; and there is a logos also of construction in the relations of space, the position, qualities, connections, and predicates of things, by which they are formed into grammar. In one word, the outer world which envelopes our being is itself language, the power of all language. ‘Day unto day uttereth speech, and night unto night showeth knowledge; there is no speech nor language where their sound is not heard ”

“ The entire Logos, or the sum of Ideas, is called by Philo, entirely independent of Christianity, the true Son of God, while the realised world of Christian teaching passes as the second Son. If the first Logos is occasionally called the image or shadow of God, the world of sense is the image of the image, the shadow of the shadow. More logically expressed, God would be the causa efficiens, matter the causa materialis, the Logos the causa instrumentalis, while the goodness of God is sometimes added as the causa finalis. ”

“ But in addition the Logos itself must be in us and cause for us the insight into our divine nature. The Logos must guide us, come to the aid of our human weakness with his supernatural strength in the struggles against the world and sin and raise us up to God. Thus the apotheosis of man is the goal aimed at in all religious activity. The Logos, however, is the only means to this end, in so far as we are raised through union with him in faith and love to our true origin and life’s source, “the vision of God,” and thereby have participation in his life. ”

“ According to this classification the Logos does not form one of the human principle but is something higher towards which the human monad must ultimately go. In the cosmic principles as well as in those of the solar system the Logos forms the 3rd principle, while in man the Logos forms no principle at all. The doctrine of correspondence shifts here a great deal. The Logos, which is the 3rd in the cosmos, become something beyond the 4th in man. ”

“ Taking the Reason-Principle, the Logos, in all its phases, the lowest and last springs from a mental act [in the higher Logos] and is itself a contemplation, though only in the sense of being contemplated, but above it stands the total Logos with its two distinguishable phases, first, that identified not as Nature but as All-Soul and, next, that operating in Nature and being itself the Nature-Principle. ”

“ John, we have made it a main article of our belief that the Logos, really the Thought plus Speech, of God, became about the year B.C. 4 specially incarnate in the person of Jesus the Nazarene, we ought not to forget that, being the one Power by which all that ever came into existence was created and all that exists is sustained, the Logos in any case ever was, is, and will be, incarnate in every sentient being. ”

“ 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. ”

“ And the power of the Logos, having in itself a faculty to foresee future events, not as fated, but as taking place by the choice of free agents, foretold from time to time the issues of things to come; it also became a forbidder of wickedness by means of prohibitions, and the encomiast of those who remained good. ”

“ This character of the Logos as thought and word, at once capable of distinction and yet undifferentiated and inseparable, is of the highest importance for Christian speculation; without an exact comprehension of it, we shall see that the relation of the Son to the Father as we find it explained by Clement and other fathers of the church, remains dark and misty. We have no concept without a word, and philology has shown us how every word, even the most concrete, is based on a concept. ”

“ This distinction between Logos as ratio and Logos as oratio, so much used subsequently by Philo and the Christian fathers, had been so far anticipated by Aristotle’s distinction between the ἔξω λόγος and the λόγος ἐν τῇ ψυχῇ. It forms the point of attachment by which the Logos doctrine connected itself with Christianity. The Logos of the Stoics (q.v.) is a reason in the world gifted with intelligence, and analogous to the reason in man. ”

“ How this Logos became objectively and materially real, is as far beyond human comprehension as is the origin of the cosmos out of countless atoms, or even out of living cells. So far, then, one hypothesis would be as complete and as incomplete as the other. ”

“ The Logos, that was before the Day-Star was, has appeared among men as a teacher,—he by whom all things were made. {284} As Demiurge he gave life; as teacher he taught to live well; that, as God, he may lavish upon us life forever. Many voices and many means has the Saviour employed for the saving of men. Lest you should disbelieve these, the Logos of God has himself become man that you might learn from man how man may become God. ”