The theory is not far distant from that which is found in the earlier Apologists, and which passed through more than one phase before it won its way to general acceptance. The leading point in both is the relation of the individual logoi to the Logos. We have already become acquainted with the syncretism which had blended the Platonic ideas with the Stoical logoi, the former being regarded as forces as well as forms, and the latter being not only productive forces, but also the laws of those forces; and which had viewed them both in their unity, rather than in their plurality, as expressions of a single Logos. We have also seen that the solution of the problem, How could God create? was found in the doctrine that He created by means of His Logos, who impressed himself in the innumerable forms of created things. The solution of the metaphysical difficulty, How can a transcendent God know and be known? was found to lie in the solution which had already been given to the cosmogonical difficulty, How could God come into contact with matter?[525] The Forces were also Reasons: they were activities and also thoughts: in men they woke to consciousness: and the mind of man knew the mind of God, as like knows like, by virtue of containing within it “a seed of the Logos,” a particle of the divine Logos itself. That divine Logos “of which the whole human race is partaker,” “which had at one time appeared in the form of fire, and at another in the form of angels, now by the will of God, on behalf of the human race, had become a man, and endured to suffer all that the dæmons effected that he should suffer at the hands of the foolish Jews.”[526] The difference between Christ and other men was thought to be, that other men have only a “seed of the Logos,” whereas in him the whole Logos was manifest: and the difference between Christians and philosophers was, that the latter lived by the light of a part only of the divine Logos, whereas the former lived by the knowledge and contemplation of the whole Logos.[527]
Within half a century after these tentative efforts,[528] and largely helped by the dissemination of the Fourth Gospel, which had probably at first only a local influence, the mass of Christians were tending to acquiesce not only in the belief of the transcendental nature of God, but also in the belief that, in some way which was not yet closely defined, Jesus Christ was the Logos by whom the world had been made, and who revealed the unknown Father to men.
The form in which the belief is stated by Irenæus is the following:
“No one can know the Father except by the Word of God, that is by the Son revealing Him: nor can any one know the Son except by the good pleasure of the Father. But the Son performs the good pleasure of the Father: for the Father sends, and the Son is sent and comes. And His Word knows that the Father is, as far as concerns us, invisible and unlimited: and since He is ineffable, He himself declares Him to us: and, on the other hand, it is the Father alone who knows His own Word: both these truths has the Lord made known to us. Wherefore the Son reveals the knowledge of the Father by manifesting Himself: for the manifestation of the Son is the knowledge of the Father: for all things are manifested by the Word.... The Father therefore has revealed Himself to all by making His Word visible to all: and conversely the Word showed to all the Father and the Son, since He was seen by all. And therefore the righteous judgment of God comes upon all who, though they have seen as others, have not believed as others. For by means of the creation itself the Word reveals God the Creator; by means of the world, the Lord who is the Fashioner of the world; and by means of His handiwork (man), the Workman who formed it; and by the Son, that Father who begat the Son.”[529]
(3) The Distinctions in the Nature of God, or the Mediation and Mediator.—It was by a natural process of development that Christian philosophers, while acquiescing in the general proposition that Jesus Christ was the Logos in human form, should go on to frame large theories as to the nature of the Logos. It was an age of definition and dialectic. It was no more possible for the mass of educated men to leave a metaphysical problem untouched, than it is possible in our own days for chemists to leave a natural product unanalyzed. Two main questions engaged attention: (i.) what was the genesis, (ii.) what was the nature, of the Logos. In the speculations which rose out of each of these questions, the influence of Greek thought is even more conspicuous than before.
(i.) The question of the genesis of the Logos was mainly answered by theories which were separated from one another by the same broad line of distinction which separated theories as to the genesis of the world.
The philosophers of the school of Basilides, who, as we have seen, had been the first to formulate the doctrine of an absolute creation, that is, of a creation of all things out of nothing, conceived that whatever in their theory corresponded to the Logos was equally included with all other things in the original seed. Hence came the definite proposition, which played a large part in the controversies of the fourth century, that the Logos was made “out of the things that were not.”[530]
But the majority of theories expressed under various metaphors the idea, which was relative to the other theory of creation, that in some way the Logos had come forth from God. The rival hypotheses as to the nature of creation were reconciled by the hypothesis that, though the world was created out of nothing, it was so created by the Logos, who was not created by God, but came forth from Him. The metaphors were chiefly those of the “putting forth” (προβολή, prolatio), as of the leaves or fruit of a plant, and of the begetting of a son. They were in use before the doctrine of the Logos had established itself, and some of them were originally relative, not to the Logos, but to other conceptions of mediation between God and the world. They were supplemented by the metaphors, which also were in earlier use, of the flowing of water from a spring, and of the radiation of light.[531] That there was not originally any important distinction between them, is shown both by the express disclaimer of Irenæus and by the fact of their use in combination in the same passages of the same writers. The combination was important. The metaphors supplemented each other. Each of them contained an element in the theory which ultimately expressed the settled judgment of the Christian world.
The main difficulty which they presented was that of an apparent inconsistency with the belief in the unity of God. The doctrine of the “sole monarchy” of God, which had been strongly maintained against those who explained the difficulties of the world by the hypothesis of two Gods in conflict, seemed to be running another kind of danger in the very ranks of its defenders. The Logos who reflected God and revealed Him to rational creatures, who also contained in himself the form and forces of the material world, must be in some sense God. In Athenagoras there is a pure monism: “God is Himself all things to Himself, unapproachable light, a perfect universe, spirit, force, logos.”[532] But in other writers the idea of development or generation, however lightly the metaphor might be pressed, seemed to involve an existence of the Logos both outside God and posterior to Him.[533] He was the “first-born,” the “first offspring of God,” the “first force after the Father of all and the Lord God;” for “as the beginning, before all created things, God begat from Himself a kind of rational Force, which is called by the Holy Spirit (i.e. the Old Testament) sometimes ‘the Glory of the Lord,’ sometimes ‘Son,’ sometimes ‘Wisdom,’ sometimes ‘Angel,’ sometimes ‘God,’ sometimes ‘Lord and Logos,’ sometimes he speaks of himself as ‘Captain of the Lord’s host:’ for he has all these appellations, both from his ministering to the Father’s purpose and from his having been begotten by the Father’s pleasure.”[534] It follows that “there is, and is spoken of, another God and Lord beneath the Maker of the universe.”[535] The theory thus formulated tended to ditheism and was openly accused of it.[536] It was saved from the charge by the gradual formulating of two distinctions, both of which came from external philosophy, one of them being an inheritance from Stoicism, the other from Neo-Platonism.[537] The one was that the generation or development had taken place within the sphere of Deity itself: the generation had not taken place by the severing of a part from the whole, as though the Divine nature admitted of a division,[538] but by distinction of function or by multiplication, as many torches may be lit from one without diminishing the light of that one.[539] The other was that the generation had been eternal. In an early statement of the theory it was held that it had taken place in time: it was argued that “God could not have been a Father before there was a Son, but there was a time when there was not a Son.”[540] But the influence of the other metaphors in which the relation was expressed overpowered the influences which came from pressing the conception of paternity. Light, it was argued, could never have been without its capacity to shine.[541] The Supreme Mind could never have been without His Thought. The Father Eternal was always a Father, the Son was always a Son.[542]
(ii.) The question of the nature of the eternally-begotten Logos was answered variously, according as the supra-cosmic or the transcendental idea of God was dominant in a writer’s mind.[543] To Justin Martyr, God is conceived as supra-cosmic. He abides “in the places that are above the heavens:” the “first-begotten,” the Logos, is the “first force after the Father:” he is “a second God, second numerically but not in will,” doing only the Father’s pleasure.[544] It is uncertain how far the idea of personality entered into this view. There is a similar uncertainty in the view of Theophilus, who introduced the Stoical distinction between the two aspects of the Logos, thought and speech—“ratio” and “oratio;”[545] while Tertullian still speaks of “virtus” side by side with these.