Philo’s Logos Theology
The following excerpt is taken from Michael F. Bird’s Jesus Among the Gods: Early Christology in the Greco-Roman World, published by Baylor University Press, Waco, TX in 2022], pp. 133-137. This is from section II. Jesus and Intermediary Figures, 4. Jesus and the “In-Betweeners”: Comparing Early Christologies and Intermediary Figures. All emphasis will be mine.
(3) Philo.
Philo was certainly aware of the association between God’s word and God’s Creative action. He noted at one point, “God spoke and at the same time acted,… this word was deed” (Sacr. 65). Yet Philo exceeded that assertion as he attributed a variety of functions and forms to the Logos that have various degrees of affinity with the Platonic demiurge, Stoic Logos, and Jewish wisdom traditions.
The problem, as Darrell Hannah points out, is that “neither in Platonism, Stoicism nor Aristotelian thought do we find the kind of significance that the concept has for Philo, nor the range of meanings that he gives to the term logos.” Resultantly, Philo “appears to be dependent upon a tradition in Alexandrian Judaism which was attributing a certain independence to God’s word.”12 Yet that is exactly the matter in dispute, precisely how “independent” from God is the Logos for Philo.
Philo’s Logos is many things—a divine mind, a divine image, a divine hypostasis—but can also be understood as a subordinate or second power in the heavens, an intermediate figure between the transcendent, immaterial God and the material, terrestrial realm. The principal functions of Philo’s Logos are typological, cosmological, and intermediatory.’13
First, on the typological side, Philo’s Logos is an archetype for God, the blueprint for creation, the image for humanity, and a priestly pattern.
In relation to God, Philo says the “divine word” is the “image of God” and “chiefest of all beings,” alone proximate to the truly existent One (Fug. 101). Gods image in creation and humanity are not direct impressions, but patterned after the Logos. Concerning the cosmos, the whole of creation is a copy of the “divine image,” which is the Logos of God, the sum and substance of the noumenal realm reflecting into the phenomenal world (Opif. 24-25, 29-31, 36). The Logos is the “rising one” of Zech 6.12, not a human person but a kind of noetic progeny, who is the reflection of the “divine image,” and who shaped things according to “archetypal patterns which the Father supplied” (Conf. 60-63; cf. Mos. 2.127-29).
Humans reflect the image of God, a divine rationality resident in the soul, an image provided by the Logos (Opif. 24-25; Conf. 147; Det. 83; Her. 230-35; Somn. 1.75). It is striking how the anti-polytheistic Philo calls the Logos a second god as part of his explanation of Gen 9.6 (LXX).
Tire rationale is that while God’s image in humanity is indeed a God-image, it is nonetheless mediated via the Logos:
“For nothing mortal can be made in the likeness of the most High One and Father of the universe but only in that of the second god [ton deuteron theon], who is his Logos. For it was right that the rational part of the human soul should be formed as an impression by the divine Logos, since the pre-Logos God [ho pro tou logou theou] is superior to every rational nature” (QG 2.62).
Further, the Logos is a type of priestly mediator, which is why the Logos is the high priest of creation who is typologically represented in the high priest of the Jerusalem cultus:
For there are, as is evident, two temples of God: one of them this universe, in which there is also as High Priest his firstborn, the divine Word, and the other the rational soul, whose priest is the real man; the outward and invisible image of whom is he who offers the prayers and sacrifices handed down from our fathers, to whom it was been committed to wear the aforesaid tunic, which is a copy and replicate of the whole heaven, the intention of this being that the universe may join with man in the holy rites and man with the universe. (Somn. 1.215)
Consequently, the high priest of the Jerusalem cultus is—allegorically interpreting Lev 16.17 LXX—“not a man, but the word of God” (Fug. 108).
In fact, the high priest, when presiding in judgment, disrupts the “boundary between God and human nature, as one less than God but greater than man,” even though this applies only in name, just as Moses the chief prophet was a god to Pharaoh as per Exod 7.1 (Somn. 2.188-89).
The Logos is, then, a kind of divine noetic fullness that is reflected in the created order, a divine intelligence that corresponds to the human soul and mind (i.e., imago dei), and even God’s priestly mediation to the world is mirrored in the Jerusalem cultus. Philo’s typological imagery contends that not only is God the archetype of the Logos and the Logos is the image of God, but also the Logos provides the pattern for creation, humanity, and the Jerusalem priesthood.
Second, Philos’ Logos is cosmological as the Creative instrument by which the world was ordered. The “image of God” is not only typological but also is demiurgical as “the Word through whom the whole universe was framed [demiourgeito]” (Spec. leg. 1.81; cf. Leg. all. 3.96).44
Philo declares God to be the “cause” of the universe, while the instrument is the “word of God through which it was framed, and the final cause of the building is the goodness of the architect [demiourgon]” (Cher. 127). The Logos is even a “glue and a bond and fills up ail things with his essence” (Her. 187; Fug. 112; Plant. 8-10; Somn. 1.241; cf. Sir 43.26), which has affinity with the Christian Logos as sustaining the universe (Col 1.17; Heb 1.3; Herm. 91.5; Diogn. 7.2). According to O’Brien, Philos’ Logos “is a mediating entity which functions as a co-Creator and plays an active role in the universe after genesis, although it does not compromise God’s unity.”45
On the one hand, the Logos is a divine personification, God’s personalized thought, Wisdom, and power operating between God and humans. To know God truly is to know his Word, who brings one towards God (Sacr. 8; Somn. 1.65-69; Post. 16-20). God and God’s Logos are divisible into two aspects, namely, God’s Creative and reigning powers (Fug. 95, 103; Mos. 2.99-100; Her. 166; Abr. 121; QG 2.16; QE 2.62, 68; cf. Cher. 27-29, where the Logos unites God’s goodness and sovereignty). Philo calls the Creative aspect “God” and the sovereign aspect “Lord,” while both are facets of the “one true God” (Mos. 2.99-100).46
On the other hand, the Logos is a divine agent, separate from God and inferior to God, but with a supremacy over the heavenly hierarchy of subordinate beings.47 We see this in Philo’s designation of the Logos as the “charioteer of the powers,” who holds the “reins of the universe” (Fug. 101).
We observe that the Logos is the “divine reason, the ruler and steersman of all” (Cher. 35). While God is the king and shepherd over the elements, mortals, and deities, he sets over it “his true Word and firstborn Son who shall take upon him its government like some viceroy of a great king” (Agr. 51).
While not everyone is yet learned enough to be considered “sons of God” (Deut 14.1), even so, Philo avers that everyone with a soul set on the pursuit of moral beauty can take their place under
“Gods firstborn, the Word, who holds the eldership among the angels, their ruler as it were. And many names are his, for he is called, ‘the Beginning,’ and the ‘Name of God,’ and ‘his Word,’ and ‘the Man after his image,’ and ‘he that sees,’ that is Israel. . . . For if we have not yet become fit to be thought sons of God yet we may be sons of his invisible image, the most holy Word. For the Word is the eldest-born image of God” (Conf. 146-47).
Much like Zeus in the Stoic tradition, Philo’s Logos goes by many names. The Logos is an “archangel” (Her. 205; Conf. 146), the “high priest of the cosmos” (Fug. 108; Somn. 1.215), the “Firstborn” (Agr. 51; Conf 146; Somn. 1.215,241), “God” (Somn. 1.230), “God’s man,” and the “Word of the Eternal” (Conf 41).
The angel of the Lord is God seeming to appear as an angel to who those who cannot see the “true God,” appearing as “the angel of his Logos” (Somn. 1.238-39; Fug. 5). Even if the Logos is a “second God” (QG 2.62), it is “a god” differentiated from the “one true God” (Somn. 1.229-30).48 For Philo the Logos is a mediator who stands “on the border to separate the creature from the Creator”; he is “neither uncreated as God, nor created as you [mortals], but midway between the two extremes” (Her. 205-6).49
The hypostatic and agential roles attributed to the Logos in Philo’s theological cosmology are united in the intermediate role that the Logos plays between the transcendent God and the rest of the universe. Philo, like other Middle Platonists, deploys the Logos as the intermediate metaphysical instrument through which the universe was originally crafted and continues to be sustained. The Logos shielded the transcendence of God and guarded the divine coherence at the core of the universe even as it imaged and mediated on God’s behalf.50
47 Marian Hillar (From Logos to Trinity: The Evolution of Religions Belief from Pythagoras to Tertullian [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012], 58) comments: “The Logos is more than a quality, power, or characteristic of God; it is an entity eternally generated as an extension, to which Philo ascribes many names and functions.” This would seem to rule out the common idea that Philo’s Logos is merely a divine personification, pare H.- F. Weiss, Untersuchungen zur Kosmologie des hellenistischen und paliistinischen Judentums (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1966), 318-31; Dunn, Christology in the Making, 220-30; Maurice Casey, From Jewish Prophet to Gentile God (Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox, 1991), 84; Aquila H. I. Lee, From Messiah to Preexistent Son: Jesus’ Self-Consciousness and Early Christian Exegesis of Messianic Psalms (Eugene, Ore.: Wipf & Stock, 2005), 72; Peter R. Carrell, Jesus and the Angels: Angelology and the Christology of the Apocalypse of John (SNTSMS 95; Cambridge; Cambridge University Press, 1997), 94; Richard Bauckham, Jesus and the God of Israel (Milton Keynes, U.K.: Paternoster, 2008), 16-17; and Hurtado, One God, One Lord, 41-49. This does not make the Logos an entirely independent entity, but more like a second power strangely within and beside God—almost like God’s executive self, who can be spoken of in the third person. The Logos is somewhere between an aspect of God and an angel of God. See discussion in David T. Runia, “God and Man in Philo of Alexandria,” JTS 39 (1988): 72-73, for the tension in Philo’s thought on this point. (Ibid., pp. 135-136)
49 Also Chester (Messiah and Exaltation, 49):
“Thus Philo cannot allow God to come into any direct contact with the world whatever; hence he uses the Logos as one of the many ways he has of expressing divine agency, and specifically activity, within the world, and portraying the active divine reason. Yet at the same time, the Logos is an intermediary figure and a person distinct from God; he moves between God and the human world, and is in some sense similar to both, yet is also distinct from both as well.”
Note that Origen can say that the Son is the same substance and nature of the Father (Princ. 1.2.6); he elsewhere says that Christ is an “intermediate between the nature of the uncreated and that of ail created things” (Cels. 6.34). (Ibid., p. 137)