The Gospel of Hellas - Research Institute for Waldorf Education

hellas and christianity
by the Logos,” said Aristotle. 209 Logos means here logical discrimination with
regard to the moral action of man. For Logos is the criterium of any ethical
action. It is the ethical ideal of Aristotle’s philosophy.
This transformation from Logos to logic (as described in the preceding
chapter XI) was perfected after the torch of the priest Herostratus had fired
and destroyed the Ephesus temple. The spiritual counterpart to the deed
of Herostratus, which was intended to destroy the sanctuary of the ancient
Logos-mystery, was the ethics of Aristotle based on his discovery of logical
discrimination. The ethics of Aristotle culminated in the idea that the human
being who uses fully his faculty of the Logos as moral discrimination becomes
the most beloved friend of the Deity.
In Alexandria where, through Alexander the Great, the heritage of
Aristotle was brought to new fruition, the Greek Logos-teaching flowed
into the current of Hebrew tradition. This happened through Philo Judaeus
of Alexandria. Philo declared that the same Logos, which was conceived by
Heraclitus of Ephesus as the fire-element within the creation of the world,
appeared before Moses in the burning bush. 210 The Logos in the teaching of
Philo lies before us like a garment of nature, but it never reveals its form. His
Logos is an impersonal idea. We see that the Logos in the system of Philo
became more abstract than it was to the Hellenic philosophers. The Philonic
Logos lives under the sign of an iron necessity of nature and, as such, is a concept
tinged with a certain materialism of the Stoic and Hellenistic philosophy which
brought forth the naturalistic idea of the Logos-spermaticos, a spiritual world
sperma, a cosmic principle of supreme propagation.
In Philo’s logosophy, the doctrine of the Stoics in their naturalistic
interpretation of the Logos was brought to its height. In concordance with the
Stoics, Philo conceived the Logos in an abstract form in which the fire and
warmth of the previous thinkers seemed to have vanished. The current of the
impersonal Logos-idea from the Stoics to Philo was destined to dry up. This
can best be seen in the Logos-idea of Plutarch (in the first century ad) and in
Plotinus (in the third century ad). Plutarch’s Logos is the work of nature as
divine, formative principle. It is the world as a part of God, and the relationship
of this part to God is that of a son to a father, for the Logos (also often called