NOTES ON THE GOSPEL OF JOHN. I. 1-18. (The Introduction of John's Gospel.) "In the beginning was the Logos, and the Logos was with God, and the Logos was God.' "There is no word in English answering to the Greek word Logos, as here used. It was employed to denote a mode of conception concerning the Deity, familiar at the time when St. John wrote, and intimately blended with the philosophy of his age, but long since obsolete, and so foreign from our habits of thinking, that it is not easy for us to conform our minds to its apprehension. The Greek word Logos, in one of its primary senses, answered nearly to our word Reason. It denoted that faculty by which the mind disposes its ideas in their proper relations to each other; the Disposing Power, if I may so speak, of the mind. In reference to this primary sense, it was applied to the Deity, but in a wider significance. The Logos of God was regarded, not in its strictest sense, as merely the Reason of God; but, under certain aspects, as the Wisdom, the Mind, the Intellect of God. To this the creation of all things was especially ascribed. The conception may seem obvious in itself; but the cause why the creation was primarily referred to the Logos or Intellect of God, rather than to his goodness or omnipotence, is to be found in the Platonic philosophy, as it existed about the time of Christ, and particularly as taught by the eminent Jewish philosopher, Philo of Alexandria. "According to this philosophy, there existed an archetypal world of IDEAS, formed by God, the perfect model of the sensible universe; corresponding, so far as what is divine may be compared with what is human, to the plan of a building or city which an architect forms in his own mind before commencing its erection. The faculty by which God disposed and arranged the world of Ideas was his Logos, Reason, or Intellect. This world, according to one representation, was supposed to have its seat in the Logos or Mind of God; according to another, it was identified with the Logos. The Platonic philosophy further taught, that the Ideas of God were not merely the archetypes, but, in scholastic language, the essential forms, of all created things.* In this philosophy, matter in its primary state, primitive matter, if I may so speak, was regarded merely as the substratum of attributes, being in itself devoid of all. Attributes, it was conceived, were impressed upon it by the Ideas of God, which Philo often speaks of under the figure of seals. These Ideas, indeed, constituted those attributes, becoming connected with primitive matter in an incomprehensible manner, and thus giving form and being to all things sensible. But the seat of these Ideas, these formative principles, being the Logos or Intellect of God,—or, according to the other representation mentioned, these Ideas constituting the Logos,-the Logos was, in consequence, represented as the great agent in creation. This doctrine being settled, the meaning of the term gradually extended itself by a natural process, and came at last to comprehend all the attributes of God manifested in the crea *For an account of Plato's doctrine of Ideas, see Genuineness of the Gospels, Vol. III. Additional Note A. |