from Plato, lending to it a theosophic significance. In the Platonic
metaphysics objective existence was attributed to general terms, the
signs of general notions. Besides each particular man, horse, or tree,
and besides all men, horses, and trees, in the aggregate, there was
supposed to exist an ideal Man, Horse, and Tree. Each particular man,
horse, or tree consisted of abstract existence plus a portion of
the ideal man, horse, or tree. Sokrates, for instance, consisted of
Existence, plus Animality, plus Humanity, plus Sokraticity. The visible
world of particulars thus existed only by virtue of its participation in
the attributes of the ideal world of universals. God created the world
by encumbering each idea with an envelopment or clothing of visible
matter; and since matter is vile or imperfect, all things are more or
less perfect as they partake more or less fully of the idea. The pure
unencumbered idea, the "Idea of ideas," is the Logos, or divine Reason,
which represents the sum-total of the activities which sustain the
world, and serves as a mediator between the absolutely ideal God and
the absolutely non-ideal matter. Here we arrive at a Gnostic conception,
which the Philonists of Alexandria were not slow to appropriate. The
Logos, or divine Reason, was identified with the Sophia, or divine
Wisdom of the Jewish Gnostics, which had dwelt with God before the
creation of the world. By a subtle play upon the double meaning of the
Greek term (logos = "reason" or "word"), a distinction was drawn between
the divine Reason and the divine Word. The former was the archctypal
idea or thought of God, existing from all eternity; the latter was the
external manifestation or realization of that idea which occurred at the
moment of creation, when, according to Genesis, God SPOKE, and the world
was.

In the middle of the second century, this Philonian theory was the one
thing needful to add metaphysical precision to the Gnostic and Pauline
speculations concerning the nature of Jesus. In the writings of Justin
Martyr (A. D. 150-166), Jesus is for the first time identified with the
Philonian Logos or "Word of God." According to Justin, an impassable
abyss exists between the Infinite Deity and the Finite World; the one
cannot act upon the other; pure spirit cannot contaminate itself by
contact with impure matter. To meet this difficulty, God evolves from
himself a secondary God, the Logos,--yet without diminishing himself any
mo