[1] The word is also used of the writers of speeches for the use of
the contending parties in the law courts, who were forbidden to
employ advocates.
[2] There is some doubt as to whether this Acusilaus was of
Peloponnesian or Boeotian Argos. Possibly there were two of the name.
For an example of the method of Acusilaus see Bury, _op. cit._ p. 19.
LOGOS [Greek: logos], a common term in ancient philosophy and theology.
It expresses the idea of an immanent reason in the world, and, under
various modifications, is met with in Indian, Egyptian and Persian
systems of thought. But the idea was developed mainly in Hellenic and
Hebrew philosophy, and we may distinguish the following stages:
1. _The Hellenic Logos._--To the Greek mind, which saw in the world a
[Greek: kosmos] (ordered whole), it was natural to regard the world as
the product of reason, and reason as the ruling principle in the world.
So we find a Logos doctrine more or less prominent from the dawn of
Hellenic thought to its eclipse. It rises in the realm of physical
speculation, passes over into the territory of ethics and theology, and
makes its way through at least three well-defined stages. These are
marked off by the names of Heraclitus of Ephesus, the Stoics and Philo.
It acquires its first importance in the theories of Heraclitus (6th
century B.C.), who, trying to account for the aesthetic order of the
visible universe, broke away to some extent from the purely physical
conceptions of his predecessors and discerned at work in the cosmic
process a [Greek: logos] analogous to the reasoning power in man. On the
one hand the Logos is identified with [Greek: gnômê] and connected with
[Greek: dikê], which latter seems to have the function of correcting
deviations from the eternal law that rules in things. On the other hand
it is not positively distinguished either from the ethereal fire, or
from the [Greek: heimarmenê] and the [Greek: anankê] according to which
all things occur. Heraclitus holds that nothing material can be thought
of without this Logos, but he does not conceive the Logos itself to be
immaterial. Whether it is regarded as in any sense possessed of
intelligence and consciousness is a question variously answered. But
there is most to say for the negative. This Logos is not one above the
world or prior to it, but in the world and inseparable from it. Man's
soul is a part of it. It is _relation_, therefore, as Schleiermacher
expresses it, or reason, not speech or word. And it is objective, not
subjective, reason. Like a law of nature, objective in the world, it
gives order and regularity to the movement of things, and makes the
system rational.[1]
The failure of Heraclitus to free himself entirely from the physical
hypotheses of earlier times prevented his speculation from influencing
his successors. With Anaxagoras a conception entered which gradually
triumphed over that of Heraclitus, namely, the conception of a supreme,
intellectual principle, not identified with the world but independent of
it. This, however, was [Greek: nous], not Logos. In the Platonic and
Aristotelian systems, too, the theory of ideas involved an absolute
separation between the material world and the world of higher reality,
and though the term Logos is found the conception is vague and
undeveloped. With Plato the term selected for the expression of the
principle to which the order visible in the universe is due is [Greek:
nous] or [Greek: sophia], not [Greek: logos]. It is in the
pseudo-Platonic _Epinomis_ that [Greek: logos] appears as a synonym for
[Greek: nous]. In Aristotle, again, the principle which sets all nature
under the rule of thought, and directs it towards a rational end, is
[Greek: nous], or the divine spirit itself; while [Greek: logos] is a
term with many senses, used as more or less identical with a number of
phrases, [Greek: ou heneka], [Greek: energeia], [Greek: entelecheia],
[Greek: ousia], [Greek: eidos], [Greek: morphê], &c.
In the reaction from Platonic dualism, however, the Logos doctrine
reappears in great breadth. It is a capital element in the system of the
Stoics. With their teleological views of the world they naturally
predicated an active principle pervading it and determining it. This
operative principle is called both Logos and God. It is conceived of as
material, and is described in terms used equally of nature and of God.
There is at the same time the special doctrine of the [Greek: logos
spermatikos], the seminal Logos, or the law of generation in the world,
the principle of the active reason working in dead matter. This parts
into [Greek: logoi spermatikoi], which are akin, not to the Platonic
ideas, but rather to the [Greek: logoi enuloi] of Aristotle. In man,
too, there is a Logos which is his characteristic possession, and which
is [Greek: endiathetos], as long as it is a thought resident within his
breast, but [Greek: prophorikos] when it is expressed as a word. 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 [Greek: exô logos]
and the [Greek: logos en tê psychê]. 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.
2. _The Hebrew Logos._--In the later Judaism the earlier anthropomorphic
conception of God and with it the sense of the divine nearness had been
succeeded by a belief which placed God at a remote distance, severed
from man and the world by a deep chasm. The old familiar name Yahweh
became a secret; its place was taken by such general expressions as the
Holy, the Almighty, the Majesty on High, the King of Kings, and also by
the simple word "Heaven." Instead of the once powerful confidence in the
immediate presence of God there grew up a mass of speculation regarding
on the one hand the distant future, on the other the distant past.
Various attempts were made to bridge the gulf between God and man,
including the angels, and a number of other hybrid forms of which it is
hard to say whether they are personal beings or abstractions. The
wisdom, the Shekinah or Glory, and the Spirit of God are intermediate
beings of this kind, and even the Law came to be regarded as an
independent spiritual entity. Among these conceptions that of the word
of God had an important place, especially the creative word of Genesis
i. Here as in the other cases we cannot always say whether the Word is
regarded as a mere attribute or activity of God, or an independent
being, though there is a clear tendency towards the latter. The
ambiguity lies in the twofold purpose of these activities: (1) to
establish communication with God; (2) to prevent direct connexion
between God and the world. The word of the God of revelation is
represented as the creative principle (e.g. Gen. i. 3; Psalm xxxiii. 6),
as the executor of the divine judgments (Hosea vi. 5), as healing (Psalm
cvii. 20), as possessed of almost personal qualities (Isaiah lv. 11;
Psalm cxlvii. 15). Along with this comes the doctrine of the angel of
Yahweh, the angel of the covenant, the angel of the presence, in whom
God manifests Himself, and who is sometimes identified with Yahweh or
Elohim (Gen. xvi. 11, 13; xxxii. 29-31; Exod. iii. 2; xiii. 21),
sometimes distinguished from Him (Gen. xxii. 15, &c.; xxiv. 7; xxviii.
12, &c.), and sometimes presented in both aspects (Judges ii., vi.;
Zech. i.). To this must be added the doctrine of Wisdom, given in the
books of Job and Proverbs. At one time it is exhibited as an attribute
of God (Prov. iii. 19). At another it is strongly personified, so as to
become rather the creative thought of God than a quality (Prov. viii.
22). Again it is described as proceeding from God as the principle of
creation and objective to Him. In these and kindred passages (Job xv. 7,
&c.) it is on the way to become hypostatized.
The Hebrew conception is partially associated with the Greek in the
case of Aristobulus, the predecessor of Philo, and, according to the
fathers, the founder of the Alexandrian school. He speaks of Wisdom in
a way reminding us of the book of Proverbs. The pseudo-Solomonic _Book
of Wisdom_ (generally supposed to be the work of an Alexandrian
flourishing somewhere between Aristobulus and Philo) deals both with
the Wisdom and with the Logos. It fails to hypostatize either. But it
represents the former as the framer of the world, as the power or
spirit of God, active alike in the physical, the intellectual, and the
ethical domain, and apparently objective to God. In the Targums, on
the other hand, the three doctrines of the word, the angel, and the
wisdom of God converge in a very definite conception. In the Jewish
theology God is represented as purely transcendent, having no likeness
of nature with man, and making no personal entrance into history.
Instead of the immediate relation of God to the world the Targums
introduce the ideas of the _Memra_ (word) and the _Shechina_ (real
presence). This Memra (= Ma'amar) or, as it is also designated,
_Dibbura_, is a hypostasis that takes the place of God when direct
intercourse with man is in view. In all those passages of the Old
Testament where anthropomorphic terms are used of God, the Memra is
substituted for God. The Memra proceeds from God, and retains the
creaturely relation to God. It does not seem to have been identified
with the Messiah.[2]
3. _Philo._--In the Alexandrian philosophy, as represented by the
Hellenized Jew Philo, the Logos doctrine assumes a leading place and
shapes a new career for itself. Philo's doctrine is moulded by three
forces--Platonism, Stoicism and Hebraism. He detaches the Logos idea
from its connexion with Stoic materialism and attaches it to a
thoroughgoing Platonism. It is Plato's idea of the Good regarded as
creatively active. Hence, instead of being merely immanent in the
Cosmos, it has an independent existence. Platonic too is the doctrine of
the divine architect who seeks to realize in the visible universe the
archetypes already formed in his mind. Philo was thus able to make the
Logos theory a bridge between Judaism and Greek philosophy. It preserved
the monotheistic idea yet afforded a description of the Divine activity
in terms of Hellenic thought; the word of the Old Testament is one with
the [Greek: logos] of the Stoics. And thus in Philo's conception the
Logos is much more than "the principle of reason, informing the infinite
variety of things, and so creating the World-Order"; it is also the
divine dynamic, the energy and self-revelation of God. The Stoics indeed
sought, more or less consciously, by their doctrine of the Logos as the
Infinite Reason to escape from the belief in a divine Creator, but
Philo, Jew to the core, starts from the Jewish belief in a supreme,
self-existing God, to whom the reason of the world must be subordinated
though related. The conflict of the two conceptions (the Greek and the
Hebrew) led him into some difficulty; sometimes he represents the Logos
as an independent and even personal being, a "second God," sometimes as
merely an aspect of the divine activity. And though passages of the
first class must no doubt be explained figuratively--for Philo would not
assert the existence of two Divine agents--it remains true that the two
conceptions cannot be fused. The Alexandrian philosopher wavers between
the two theories and has to accord to the Logos of Hellas a
semi-independent position beside the supreme God of Judaea. He speaks of
the Logos (1) as the agency by which God reveals Himself, in some
measure to all men, in greater degree to chosen souls. 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.
4. _The Fourth Gospel._--Among the influences that shaped the Fourth
Gospel that of the Alexandrian philosophy must be assigned a distinct,
though not an exaggerated importance. There are other books in the New
Testament that bear the same impress, the epistles to the Ephesians and
the Colossians, and to a much greater degree the epistle to the Hebrews.
The development that had thus begun in the time of Paul reaches maturity
in the Fourth Gospel, whose dependence on Philo appears (1) in the use
of the allegorical method, (2) in many coincident passages, (3) in the
dominant conception of the Logos. The writer narrates the life of Christ
from the point of view furnished him by Philo's theory. True, the Logos
doctrine is only mentioned in the prologue to the Gospel, but it is
presupposed throughout the whole book. The author's task indeed was
somewhat akin to that of Philo, "to transplant into the world of
Hellenic culture a revelation originally given through Judaism." This is
not to say that he holds the Logos doctrine in exactly the same form as
Philo. On the contrary, the fact that he starts from an actual knowledge
of the earthly life of Jesus, while Philo, even when ascribing a real
personality to the Logos, keeps within the bounds of abstract
speculation, leads him seriously to modify the Philonic doctrine. Though
the Alexandrian idea largely determines the evangelist's treatment of
the history, the history similarly reacts on the idea. The prologue is
an organic portion of the Gospel and not a preface written to conciliate
a philosophic public. 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 ([Greek: pros ton theon], 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. The word that
became flesh subsisted from all eternity as a distinct personality
within the divine nature. (2) Much greater stress is laid upon the
redemptive than upon the creative function. The latter indeed is glanced
at ("All things were made by him"), merely to provide a link with
earlier speculation, but what the writer is concerned about is not the
mode in which the world came into being but the spiritual life which
resides in the Logos and is communicated by him to men. (3) The idea of
[Greek: logos] as Reason becomes subordinated to the idea of [Greek:
logos] as Word, the expression of God's will and power, the outgoing of
the divine energy, life, love and light. Thus in its fundamental thought
the prologue of the Fourth Gospel comes nearer to the Old Testament (and
especially to Gen. i.) than to Philo. As speech goes out from a man and
reveals his character and thought, so Christ is "sent out from the
Father," and as the divine word is also, in accordance with the Hebrew
idea, the medium of God's quickening power.
What John thus does is to take the Logos idea of Philo and use it for a
practical purpose--to make more intelligible to himself and his readers
the divine nature of Jesus Christ. That this endeavour to work into the
historical tradition of the life and teaching of Jesus--a hypothesis
which had a distinctly foreign origin--led him into serious difficulties
is a consideration that must be discussed elsewhere.
5. _The Early Church._--In many of the early Christian writers, as
well as in the heterodox schools, the Logos doctrine is influenced by
the Greek idea. The Syrian Gnostic Basilides held (according to
Irenaeus i. 24) that the Logos or Word emanated from the [Greek:
nous], or personified reason, as this latter emanated from the
unbegotten Father. The completest type of Gnosticism, the Valentinian,
regarded Wisdom as the last of the series of aeons that emanated from
the original Being or Father, and the Logos as an emanation from the
first two principles that issued from God, Reason ([Greek: nous]) and
Truth. Justin Martyr, the first of the sub-apostolic fathers, taught
that God produced of His own nature a rational power([Greek: dynamin
tina logikên]), His agent in creation, who now became man in Jesus
(_Dial. c. Tryph._ chap. 48, 60). He affirmed also the action of the
[Greek: logos spermatikos], (_Apol._ i. 46; ii. 13, &c.). With Tatian
(_Cohort. ad. Gr._ chap. 5, &c.) the Logos is the beginning of the
world, the reason that comes into being as the sharer of God's
rational power. With Athenagoras (_Suppl._ chap. 9, 10) He is the
prototype of the world and the energizing principle ([Greek: idea kai
energeia]) of things. Theophilus (Ad _Autolyc._ ii. 10, 24) taught
that the Logos was in eternity with God as the [Greek: logos
endiathetos], the counsellor of God, and that when the world was to be
created God sent forth this counsellor ([Greek: symboulos]) from
Himself as the [Greek: logos prophorikos], yet so that the begotten
Logos did not cease to be a part of Himself. With Hippolytus (_Refut._
x. 32, &c.) the Logos, produced of God's own substance, is both the
divine intelligence that appears in the world as the Son of God, and
the idea of the universe immanent in God. The early Sabellians (comp.
Eusebius, _Hist. Eccl._ vi. 33; Athanasius, _Contra Arian._ iv.) held
that the Logos was a faculty of God, the divine reason, immanent in
God eternally, but not in distinct personality prior to the historical
manifestation in Christ. Origen, referring the act of creation to
eternity instead of to time, affirmed the eternal personal existence
of the Logos. In relation to God this Logos or Son was a copy of the
original, and as such inferior to that. In relation to the world he
was its prototype, the [Greek: idea ideôn] and its redeeming power
(_Contra Cels._ v. 608; _Frag. de princip._ i. 4; _De princip._ i.
109, 324).
In the later developments of Hellenic speculation nothing essential
was added to the doctrine of the Logos. Philo's distinction between
God and His rational power or Logos in contact with the world was
generally maintained by the eclectic Platonists and Neo-Platonists. By
some of these this distinction was carried out to the extent of
predicating (as was done by Numenius of Apamea) three Gods:--the
supreme God; the second God, or Demiurge or Logos; and the third God,
or the world. Plotinus explained the logoi as constructive forces,
proceeding from the ideas and giving form to the dead matter of
sensible things (_Enneads_, v. 1. 8 and Richter's _Neu-Plat.
Studien_).
See the histories of philosophy and theology, and works quoted under
HERACLITUS, STOICS, PHILO, JOHN, THE GOSPEL OF, &c., and for a general
summary of the growth of the Logos doctrine, E. Caird, _Evolution of
Theology in the Greek Philosophers_ (1904), vol. ii.; A. Harnack,
_History of Dogma_; E. F. Scott, _The Fourth Gospel_, ch. v. (1906);
J. M. Heinze, _Die Lehre vom Logos in der griech. Philosophie_ (1872);
J. Réville, _La Doctrine du Logos_ (1881); Aal, _Gesch. d. Logos-Idee_
(1899); and the _Histories of Dogma_, by A. Harnack, F. Loofs, R.
Seeberg. (S. D. F. S.; A. J. G.)