4. Logos speculation in Christian thought before Council of Nicea (325).
(Extract from Reformation and Scholasticism in Philosophy, Vol II)
Christian thought was devastated during its first few centuries by these logos speculations. At first, Philo’s idea of the logos was followed almost literally. Circa A.D. 150 it was the central idea of religious philosophical thought, and the Apologists simply identified it in its Jewish-Hellenistic form with the “Word” (Logos] of the Gospel of John. Thus they regarded the Logos as a being that was actually neither God nor cosmos, but was rather the bridge or mediator between spirit and matter. Tertullian (160-222), a lawyer in Carthage, elaborated on this theology at length in a materialistic, Stoic manner.
According to Berkhof, the main features of the Apologists’ theology can be summarized as follows:
“For the purpose of creation God called into existence a personal being, the Logos, through whom He has made all things. The human person, though a participant in the Logos, was misled by demons and thus ensnared in ignorance, polytheism, and immorality. In order to set humankind right again the Logos himself appeared in human form. Thus Christ unmasked the deception of the demons, proclaimed the true doctrine of God and the world and of the coming judgment, and showed the way to a God-pleasing manner of life. This manner of life is practiced in the church; and there are also ‘seeds of the Logos’ outside of it (especially in Plato), but there people remained trapped in error. The human being has a free will and can, with the help of Christ’s teaching and example, free himself from the grip of the demons. In Christ, therefore, there has appeared a mere demigod, who is not a Redeemer in the Scriptural sense but only an example and teacher.” (Hendrikus Berkhof, De Geschiedenis der Kerk, Nijkerk, 1967, pp. 52 ff)
Thus, the acceptance of the Jewish-Hellenistic logos theory initially led to a radical undermining of the ground-motive of the divine Word-revelation, that of creation, fall into sin, and redemption through Jesus Christ. Under the influence of the dualistic ground-motive of form and matter, the Christian religion was converted into a moral system with a Christian veneer.
Things did not improve in the theological-philosophical systems of Clement of Alexandria (ca. 150-215) and of the great Greek church father Origen (185-254), who only added philosophical depth to the logos theory of the Apologists. According to Clement the world is animated by the Logos as the vehicle of all rational-moral forces, who illuminated the souls from the beginning. The Logos instructed the Jews through Moses and the prophets, and among the Greeks he raised up wise men and offered philosophy as a teacher of righteousness. Only in Jesus Christ, however, was this Logos fully revealed.
Clement’s Logos is the archetype of the created world, the sum total of the ideas, the mediator between God and world (in the sense of Philo) and the rational law of the cosmos. Within the divine triad, the Holy Spirit occupies the third position after the Father and the Logos.
Clement then connected this Logos doctrine with a ranking, borrowed from pseudo-Christian Gnosticism, between pistis (faith) and gnōsis (knowledge). The faith of the simple was contrasted with the Christian knowledge of the Gnostic, which ranks much higher and is able to penetrate to the hidden meaning of the Word-revelation through allegorical interpretation of Scripture. Philosophy is indispensable for arriving at this gnōsis. Pistis too is a necessary condition for Christian gnōsis, but it is only through gnōsis that one can freely and fully surrender himself to God.
Only the works of the Christian Gnostic are perfectly good, because they correspond to the Logos, the divine reason. This ideal of the wise Christian person came dangerously close to that of the Stoic sage, for it was carried all the way to the demand of apatheia, of freeing oneself of all feelings and emotions. Clement in fact wrote a book called The Pedagogue, in which his exposition of the rules for Christian living often literally followed the discourses of the cynically inclined Stoic Musonius Rufus. An obvious connection became manifest here between the logos theory and the Greek religious idea of theoria, which I will discuss later. The Gnostic, who shares in the Logos, already on earth becomes a “God walking in the flesh.” (Stromateis VII, 16; Stählin edition 3, 71). He raises himself above the temporal world and, in the eternal theoria he beholds and grasps God – not just in isolated ecstatic moments, as Philo and later the Neoplatonists taught, but in lasting communion.
Origen was the first to incorporate the Jewish-Hellenistic logos theory, in combination with Neoplatonic elements, in a systematic exposition of Christian doctrine, which in his hands was turned into a theological-philosophical system of grand dimensions. Like Clement, he regarded Christian doctrine merely as the perfection and completion of what the Logos had already disclosed in Greek philosophy. Origen thus saw pagan wisdom as a preparation for Christianity, even though his judgment of it still remained rather reserved.
In complete conformity with the philosophical theology of both Philo and the later Neoplatonists, Origen taught that God, in the truest sense of the word, is the absolute unity, exalted above both nous (the thinking mind) and being (Contra Celsum VII, 38). This God in the highest sense of the word is the Father, the origin and goal of all created things. The Son or Logos has been generated from eternity from God the Father as an emanation of the divine light. The Son does have a commonness of being with the Father, but this homoousion is merely relative in nature and implies nothing more than Plotinus’ commonness of being between the divine unity and the nous.
Origen’s Logos is an archetype that proceeds from the Father, but it is of lesser divinity. It is a second God (deúteros theós) of lower rank, who has the same relationship to the Father that the Christian has to him. In relation to the cosmos this Logos is the original type, the image of the invisible God (Contra Celsum VI, 64. Ante-Nicene Fathers, Vol. 4, p. 603). By him all things are created, and they are made in his image alone, not in the image of the Father. As the first-born of the Father the Logos is the principle of all rationality. Seen from the point of view of the creation he is God, but seen from God’s point of view he is a creature (Contra Celsum III, 34. Ante-Nicene Fathers, Vol. 4, p. 478; “Intermediate between the nature of the uncreated and all created things.”).
As the divine unity unfolds into a multiplicity, the Logos is the first member and the Holy Spirit is the second. This Spirit is even less divine than the logos, and it stands the closest to the created cosmos.
The Holy Spirit thus begins the series of lower spiritual beings, which along with their divine nature also have a free will of their own. Already at this point human souls, as spiritual beings, have the freedom to choose between good and evil. Those who have not chosen the good, God has cast away in punishment for their guilt and encased them in material bodies.
At the end of all things, however, all creatures will be brought back into unity with God (cf. Origen’s main systematic theological work De principiis III, 6, 1 ff). Then will come the destruction of sin, which for Origen, as for the later Neoplatonists, was merely a privation of being; but then also the material bodies will revert to non-being. [Origen believed in a future resurrection of a spiritual body, which resembles “the splendour of the celestial bodies” but, nevertheless, is a body, not mere spirit (De principiis II, 2, 2)].
Origen’s logos theory, too, led to a radical undermining of the ground-motive of the Christian religion. The creation was understood in Neoplatonic fashion as an emanation of the divine light. The radical meaning of the fall into sin was denied. The Logos, in its manifestation in Christ Jesus, is not the Redeemer in the true sense but only a moral example. Finally, the Scriptural doctrine of the divine Trinity was undermined by the Hellenistic speculation about the Father as the absolute One.
(Extracted from Reformation and Scholasticism in Philosophy, Vol II, Paideia Press, 2013, pp 74-78)
The above book is available HERE
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Logos critique extracts:
1) The theory of the Logos in the critical realism of Kuyper, Bavinck, and Woltjer.
3) The Logos theory of Plotinus
4) Logos speculation in Christian thought before Council of Nicea (325).
