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As the highest of all Logoi was man, the most perfect man was recognised as the son of God, the Logos become flesh, the highest thought and will of God. In this there is nothing miraculous. Everything is consistently thought out, and in this sense Jesus could have been nothing else than the Word or the Son of God.
That “the ALL is Logos, is Word or Reason,” was at that time as much the battle cry of the prevailing philosophy as the contrary has now become the battle cry of the Darwinians, who seek to explain species, kinds, i.e. the Logoi, the divine ideas, as the products not of the originating Mind, but of natural selection, of environment or circumstance, of the survival of the fittest.
In most of the manuscript it is divided into four Tetrabibloi, or four book parts, each of which consists of four sections called Logoi in Greek, Sermones in Latin. This work embraces all the departments of medicine, and has a considerable portion devoted to surgery, but most of the important operations and the chapters on fractures and dislocations are lacking.
The creative "Ideas" are equated collectively with the Supreme Logos, individually with the Logoi which represent God's particular activities. Thus the Logos represents the whole ideal or noetic world, "the kingdom of Heaven"; and it is in this metaphysical sense that the Logos is the first creation, "the first-born son of God," prior to the physical universe, which is His grandson.
This extremely interesting and important passage is also one of great difficulty, for it is full of technical terms and allusions which would need a small treatise to elucidate properly. For example, it seems to imply the doctrine of two Logoi that Clement of Alexandria was accused of teaching, and which is found in certain Hellenistic writings.
This would be intelligible from Philo’s point of view in relation to Abraham, but clearly does not go far enough to explain the deification of Christ as we find it in all the Evangelists. There remains possible therefore only a third conception. Philo knows very well that God has an infinite number of powers or ideas, all of which might be called Logoi, and together constitute the Logos.
This guiding principle determines Philo's attitude to knowledge, involving, as it does, that we only know by Divine inspiration, or, as he says, by the immanence of the Logoi. The possibility of knowledge was one of the burning questions of the age, and it was the failure of the old dogmatic schools to answer it which led to a great religious movement in Greek philosophy.
God has thought the world, and in the act of thinking has uttered or expressed it; and these thoughts which were in Him, and were thought and uttered by Him in rational sequence, are the Logoi, or species, or kinds, which we recognise again by reflection in the objective world, as rationally developing one from another. Here we have the true “Origin of Species” long before Darwin’s book.
It is only when Grabe refers to the Simonian Antirrhêtikoi Logoi, mentioned by the Pseudo-Dionysius, which he calls "vesani Simonis Refutatorii Sermones," that we get any new information.
This world of ideas in its entirety corresponds, as is readily seen, to the Greek Logos, the separate types to the Platonic ideas or the Stoic Logoi. The entire Logos, or the sum of Ideas, is called by Philo, entirely independent of Christianity, the true Son of God, while the realised world of Christian teaching passes as the second Son.
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