Jewish pious imagination, and in the Logos of Philo the
fruit matured. It is idle to try to formulate a single definite notion
of Philo's Logos. For it is the expression of God in all His multiple
and manifold activity, the instrument of creation, the seat of ideas,
the world of thought which God first established as the model of the
visible universe, the guiding providence, the sower of virtue, the
fount of wisdom, described sometimes in religious ecstasy, sometimes
in philosophical metaphysics, sometimes in the spirit of the mystical
poet. Of his last manner let us take a specimen singled out by a
Christian and a Jewish theologian as of surprising beauty. Commenting
on the verse of the Psalmist, "The river of God is filled with water,"
Philo declares that it is absurd to call any earthly stream the river
of God.

"The poet clearly refers to the Divine Logos that is full of
the fountain of wisdom, and is in no part itself empty. Nay,
it is diffused through the universe, and is raised up on
high. In another verse the Psalmist says, 'The course of the
river gladdens the city of God.' And in truth the continuous
rush of the Divine Logos is borne along with eager but
regular onset, and overflows and gladdens all things. In one
sense he calls the world the city of God, for it has
received the 'full cup' of the Divine draught, and has
quaffed a perpetual, eternal joy. But in another sense he
gave this name to the soul of the wise, wherein God is said
to walk as in a city. And who can pour out the sacred
measures of their joy to the blissful soul which holds out
the holy cup, that is its own reason, save the Logos, the
cupbearer of God, the master of the feast? Nor is the Logos
cupbearer only, but it is itself the pure draught, itself
the joy and exultation, itself the pouring forth and the
delight, itself the ambrosial philtre and potion of
bliss."[204]

Through the luxury of metaphor and imagination one may discern the
underlying thought of the mystic writer, that the Logos is the
effluence of God, either in the whole universe or the individual man,
filling the one as the other with the Divine Shekinah. It is the link
which joins God and man, the ladder of Jacob's dream, which stretches
from Heaven to earth.[205] That man can attain the Divine state by the
help of God's effluence was a cardinal thought of Philo's; this,
indee