Conversely, the rabbis taught that from each word that proceeded from the mouth of God an angel was created, as it is said: "By the word of the Lord the Heavens were made, and all the host of them by the breath of His mouth."[208]
Apart from these sudden and occasional emanations of the Divine Spirit, the individual man has within him a permanent Divine Logos by which he may direct his conduct aright. Viewed in this aspect, the Logos, i.e., the activity of God, is conscience, the [pg.151] Judge in the soul, which is the true man dwelling within,[209] ruler and king, judge and arbiter, witness and accuser, correcting and restraining. Rising to bolder personification, Philo, who loves to present a spiritual thought in a concrete image, calls it the undefiled high priest in us.[210] In this power he finds a sure refutation of skepticism; for in virtue of the Divine voice man may secure moral certitude: and he finds also a philosophical value for popular superstition. It was a common notion of the pagans as well as the Jews of the time that an intermediate order of beings passed between heaven and earth and brought supernatural aid to men; and also that a familiar spirit, or Dæmon, dwelt within the soul of each man. The finer spirit of Philo resolves the attendant Dæmon and the messenger-dæmons or angels into the spiritual effluences of the one Deity; save for a few places where he makes a pose of agreement with popular notions and speaks of winged denizens of Heaven[211] who descend to earth, he habitually expounds angels as inward revelations of God.
As the revelation of God to the individual is a Logos, so, too, is his revelation to the whole of mankind. It was pointed out in the last chapter that Philo identified the Torah with the law of nature, and he did this by regarding it as the Divine Logos. The more perfect emanation of God is in one view the power by [pg.152] which He directs the physical creation, in another the perfect law which He set up as the model of conduct for His highest creatures. The rabbis, indeed, were prone to glorify the law as the primal creation of God, and the instrument of all the later creations,
.[212] They speak of it as the light, the pillar, and the bond of the universe, the model whereon the architect looked;[213] and Philo amplifies this simple poetical concept and develops it afresh in the light of Greek idealistic and cosmical notions,[214] so that the Torah, as the Logos of God, is equated with the source of all being, wisdom, and knowledge, with the ideal world which is the archetype of the material, and with all the law and order of nature. And as the Torah is the Logos, so also its particular precepts are Logoi.
It seems difficult to trace the unity among all these different aspects of the "Word," but in fact they are only different expressions of the Divine activity in the universe. All these are comprehended in the Logos, and then again divided out of it, so that it is, as it were, a crystal prism reflecting the light of the Godhead in a myriad different ways. One curious illustration of the universal sense in which Philo understood the Logos is his interpretation of the manna; it is typical also of his manner of exegesis [pg.153] and his habit of spiritualizing the material. It is related in Exodus (xvi. 15) that when the Israelites saw the heavenly food they exclaimed
, "What is it?" and hence the food obtained its name of manna. Now the Greek Septuagint word for
which means not only "what" but "anything." Philo sees in the gift of the heavenly food a symbol of the inspiration of the chosen people by the Divine Logos, and says that the Logos is rightly called manna, i.e., anything, because it is the "most generic of all things, and that by which man may be nourished."[215]