Logos

by Tallis Raymond

  Heraclitus’ views are, it is usually assumed deliberately, enigmatic in their expression. Nevertheless, it seems plausible that he believed that, while the rational order of things did not make the world rational in itself, or conscious, or capable of thought, it became rational and conscious and thoughtful in the human Logos. In the mind of the philosopher, the microscopic human Logos was united with the macroscopic Logos of the Cosmos. Specifically, Logos, in the sense of The Word, provided the link between rational discourse and the world’s rational structure, the universal reason governing and permeating the world. This, possibly the first attempt to account for the mystery of the comprehensibility of the world, perhaps marginalized God as the underwriter of a sense-making world. At any rate, it is possible to see a tension between on the one hand a God-centred mythological cosmology and on the other a natural philosophy shaped by argument, tinged with a smidgeon of observation, in the Presocratic philosopher’s endeavours to understand the fact that the world makes sense.

  This is an appropriate juncture to reflect on the boundaries between Mythos (stories told as religious myths or in works of art) and Logos (in the narrow sense a reasoned account). The boundaries will of course be forever contested. After all, myths, too, are reasoned accounts of a kind: they make sense of making sense and they use words. And Logos must work with what is delivered to it by pre-rational means, using terms laden with historical baggage. Theo-logy and the scholarship applied to sacred texts are sprinkled with careful arguments that respect the laws of logic. In short, the conviction that there is a clear boundary between Logos and Mythos and that they are absolutely opposed may be a meta-myth, derogating myths from the standpoint of Logos. The meta-myth remains vulnerable so long as Logos is not complete and the sense we make of the world (including the fact that we make sense of the world) is not rounded off. Nevertheless, the distinction – though neither sharp nor absolute – has been and remains one of the most powerful motors of the intellectual history, indeed the collective self-awareness, of the human race.

  A classic – but much-contested – study of the transition from religious Mythos to philosophical Logos – is due to the English scholar F. M. Cornford. His central argument that “Behind philosophy lay religion; behind religion … lies social customs – the structure and institutions of the human group”8 reflects the overwhelming influence of the French sociologist Émile Durkheim in the early part of the twentieth century. It is a thought to which we shall return in Chapter 8.

  Cornford even suggested that Heraclitus “all but divined … what this book [Cornford’s own book From Religion to Philosophy] is intended to prove – that physis or Nature is, ultimately and in origin, a representation of the social consciousness”. He arrives at this surprising conclusion on the basis of Heraclitus’ identifying the nature of things with “that ‘common world’ or ‘common reason’ which is accessible to all, if only their eyes are open to perceive it, and they do not turn aside, as the many do, to slumber each in his individual world of private opinion or ‘seeming’”.

  Thus Heraclitus, the intellectual ancestor of Durkheim! Less contentiously, we may think of the philosopher as a demythologizer, insofar as the gods with personalities who figured in religion were replaced by the ultimate impersonality of a ubiquitous stuff: fire. Even when fire hurts, it does not intend it; even less does it intend any comfort it may bring.

  There was, of course, much life in the old God yet. Plato’s Logos was the rational activity of the world soul created by the “Demiurge”. The Demiurge is variously understood either as a being, himself created, second to the One or Monad, or as an uncreated being who is the Creator of the world. In either case, he is importantly an artisan – a craftsman, a benevolent being who shapes the world and hence makes it habitable and intelligible. Access to that intelligibility is gained by the intellect, typically through engagement in the dialectic of philosophical debate, which is able to look through the veil of appearance delivered by the senses. Thus, the Platonic Logos.9

  For Plato, the Heraclitean flux corresponded to the material world accessed through the deceitful senses, while the underlying reality, unveiled to the intellect, was the immobile Parmenidean Being. The Logos was therefore the kind of discourse or thought that accessed that which is unchanging, real and true, as opposed to sense experience which is unstable and untrue. Such discourse was possible because (as Socrates averred) there was a minute spark of cosmic fire within humans – analogous perhaps to the warmth round the ankles of flowers reflecting the sun’s giant furnace.

  Aristotle is archetypically presented as (an iconic) iconoclast in Raphael’s “School of Athens” bringing Logos from Platonic heaven down to earth. In his thought, Logos was the inherent formula determining the nature, life and activity of the body as well as, more narrowly (and somewhat confusingly), “significant utterance”. The term’s most particular reference was to argument from reason – which was deemed appropriate when matters of fact and understanding were at issue. More narrowly still, Logos was one of the three modes of persuasion (reasoned discourse), the other two being pathos (or emotion) and ethos (the honesty and morality of the speaker that justified trust). However, the Aristotelian Logos as applied to discourse, was elaborated and formalized in logic that defined the valid relationships between elements picked out by asserted propositions.

  Logos recovered its Presocratic majesty in Stoic thought. For the Stoics, it was the source of all the activity and rationality of an ordered world that was both intelligible and intelligent. A supreme directive and animating principle, a kind of fire – pneuma – it impressed its form and life on the entire world. Manifest in all the phenomena of nature, it was a “seminal reason”, which could bring things into being as well as bring them into order, a force, securing the inner cohesion of bodies and the world. It thus accounted not only for their intelligible structures and their energetic movements but also for their very existence.

  For the Stoics, as for Heraclitus, the world was intelligible to humans because the human soul participated in the cosmic Logos. Given that the one Logos is present in many human souls, men can be in communion with each other: we all partake of common sense – another echo of Heraclitus. Humans are truly happy only when they live in a state of harmony in which the Logos of their own soul resonated with the universal Logos, the harmony of nature.

  One of the most consequential and astonishing turns in the history of Logos – indeed in the history of humanity’s self-understanding – was the thought of Philo of Alexandria (ca. 20 bce – 40 ce). Philo, a near contemporary of John of the gospel, was a Jewish philosopher steeped in Greek thought, who devoted his life “to expressing the essence of Judaism using the terminology of Hellenic philosophy”.10 He inadvertently laid the theological and philosophical foundations for a religion that has so far outlived him by 2,000 years and brought much sorrow to his co-religionists: Christianity.

  Philo united the revelatory teachings of the prophet Moses with Platonic and Stoic thought; the historical thinking of the Old Testament, its interventionist God and directional history, with the eternal, frozen reality of Plato. Philo’s Logos is the creative act of God and also his thinking; the Divine Mind, the Idea of Ideas, the Form of Forms, the Divine Power in the Cosmos, that orders and shapes formless matter; the Divine purpose or agent in creation and an intermediary between God and man. Crucially the single law – the Logos that governs the entire world and is imprinted on nature – also subsumes the more parochial Mosaic Law. Philo’s synthesis of the Greek metaphysical Logos with the God of Moses generated a doctrine that was immensely more complicated (and compromised) than “the rational, intelligent and thus vivifying principle of the universe”11 of Greek philosophy.

  Most striking among Philo’s many descriptions of the Logos is as the First-Born Son of the Uncreated Father.12 The path to this extraordinary reunion of philosophy and religion, which locates humanity at the centre of the universe, is not straight: “The Logos has an origin
, but as God’s thought it also has an eternal generation. It exists as such before everything else all of which are secondary products of God’s thought and therefore is called the ‘first-born’.”13 As Edward Craig has put it, Logos – as the Word – was “a derivative divine power, at first seen as subordinate but eventually coordinated with the Father”.14

  Evidently, Philo’s Logos was a point of convergence of many diverse strands of thought: it is both the template according to which the universe is created and the agent by which it was brought about; and it encompasses the creative principle, divine wisdom, the image of God, and man, the word of the eternal god. At the same time, it is the archetype of human reason, that through which the supreme god contacts his creation; the intermediary between God and the world, and between God and man.

  Logos comes to be identified as Christ. Man, related to God through the Logos of his soul, is how God lets himself into his own creation. By connecting the “divine thought” with “the image” and “the first-born son of God”, “the archpriest” and “the intercessor”, Philo paved the way for the Christian conception of the incarnate “word become flesh”. In the Old Testament (Ecclesiastes, The Song of Solomon), the Wisdom of God was personified as He who selected among the divine ideas those which were actually to be created. Philo read this as “The Idea of Ideas”, the divider, who arranged the pattern of ideas for Creation. He/It was God’s elder Son, the created World being the younger. The Word by which He made the world, His law, and indeed Himself, known to man was realized in Christ. Logos was thus both domesticated – as a man, born of woman, and meeting an excruciatingly painful death – and ascribed a boundless majesty. The Word-as-Flesh was Divine as well as Incarnated.15

  Thus, in Philo’s synthesis of Hebrew and Greek thought, in which philosophical mysteries were back-lit by religious revelations, the ground was prepared for a new kind of mediator between the intelligibility of the world and the intelligence of the sense-making humans16 – divinity took on human form. And so we arrive back at St John’s Gospel: “In the beginning was the Logos”.

  This Logos is a person who mediates between God and the world, between the Creator and the creation, that through whom God could be apprehended, however imperfectly. The Logos is the second person in the Godhead, distinct from, although eternally inseparable from, the Father:

  In the beginning was the Logos, and the Logos was with God, and the Logos was God.

  (1:1)

  And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth.

  (1:14)

  While the Divine Flesh stands for all humanity and, beyond humanity, for the intelligibility of the world, He does so in a particular body at a particular time. The Logos-as-flesh spoke words and performed deeds: he walked the earth communing, during his thirty-three years of ontological slumming, with men as a man among men. When the Word became flesh, the eternal thought became a corruptible body, a transient token.

  Those words were recorded and incessantly repeated. They bred interpretations that were asserted, debated, contested, and fought over. The paradox of the Word-become-flesh, of the-God-become-man, symbolized, embodied, the mysteries of a world that made (partial) sense to its human inhabitants and of the relationship between the sense that is made of the world and of the lives of those self-conscious beings that live in it and what it is that they make sense of. Logos became entangled with the particulars of human life: it was a mode of being that was equidistant from the mirroring of the sense-making human mind and the intrinsic order of the world.

  If the Christian doctrine is a response to the challenge of connecting the small change of our daily sense-making with the intelligibility that is immanent and ubiquitous in the world, it gains existential heft at the cost of metaphysical sense. That the Logos should become flesh that is born, walks the earth, weeps, eats supper, suffers agony and dies, is of course profoundly absurd. More precisely, it is profound in one sense because it is absurd in another.

  The reduction of Logos to “word” at the same time as it expands into divinity–such that it was “the Word” that became flesh in the person of Christ – is not simply a way of linking the advent of Christ with an Old Testament promise. It is also – notwithstanding what I have just said – a means of affirming a core meaning of Logos transmitted via Plato from Presocratic philosophy. Logos as “the Word” and Jesus as “the Word become flesh” highlights the profundity, and the tension, at the heart of the notion of “the intelligibility of the world”. Jesus was both a singular and a universal: he took on the flesh not of a human being but of humanity. His flesh was a word standing for a general category: a token standing for a type; a Platonic intersection between something temporal and something eternal.

  In many respects this transformation of Logos represents the terminus of a remarkable journey in which Logos metamorphoses from being the impersonal order of the universe reflected in individual (preferably philosophical) minds, to something embodied in a deity that straddles the generality of the universe and the particularity of its human inhabitants. There were, of course, further developments inside and outside the rich Christian conversation often feeding into or from structures of power and violence as well as of belief but they need not concern us here. I have indicated those aspects of the 5,000-year argument most directly relevant to our inquiry.17

  The Christian story is true to the intellectual (or spiritual) tragedy (or comedy18) of our endeavours to make sense of the world. Our sense-making is inextricably mangled with our being organisms as well as persons. As we shall discuss in Chapter 5, when we strive to look beyond the horizon of the visible we do so from the marsh of our own bodies. This was a key preoccupation of the “carnophobic” philosophical tradition from Parmenides (for whom the senses were sources of delusion) that, through Plato, fed into Christianity; but it also concerns those who are at ease with the body, and whose central role as the existential underwriting of the biological authority of thought, we shall discuss. The poignant drama of Christ come down to earth also replicates the inexpressible relationship between words and that which is said or written, including the fact that it is expressible insofar as it can be stated, and what happens when a cry “That …!” (see Chapter 6) becomes folded into utterances, books and libraries, and the many institutions of, or underpinned by, thought and language. It occupies a pivotal place in reflections on the mediated relationship between the intelligible world and the intelligent mind. Christ, the essential mediator between Divine Wisdom and Human Understanding in an incarnate Logos, a divinity who lived side by side with humankind, sharing its joys and sorrows, injustice, and death, and leaving His footprints on the ground on which they, too, walked, is a startling self-image of human understanding.

  It is perhaps fanciful to see the mystery – or paradox, or (latterly) mere awkwardness – of eternal meanings instantiated in a transient token as a distant reflection of Plato’s tragic vision of the eternal Forms barely accessible to the intellect trapped in sentient flesh. Even so, the shocking mystery of Christ remains just about recognisable in the impossibility of understanding the relationship between mind (or self) and body in contemporary Western philosophy and the place of the mind in a largely mindless Cosmos. The resistance of articulate consciousness to reduction to material events in a material object (the brain) presents a formidable barrier to the completion of the project of developing a naturalistic worldview (discussed in Chapter 4) which claims that Logos loses its mystery because the material world and human beings were generated by the same processes.

  The First-Born Logos was a key moment in an unfolding story told by humanity of the twin origin of Being and Knowing, of Stuff and Sense, of a God who is both creator and architect. It is a notion that has expanded and contracted like a beating heart, as Diarmaid MacCulloch makes clear on the first page of his history of Christianity:

  Logos echoes with significances that give voice to the restlessness and tension embodied in the Christian message. It means
not so much a single particle of speech, but the whole act of speech, or the thought behind the speech, and from there its meanings spill outwards into conversation, narrative, musing, meaning, reason, report, rumour, even presence. John goes on to name this Logos as a man who makes known his father God: his name is Jesus Christ.19

  And so we retrace the boundaries of the wider conception of Logos: the Logos of Heraclitus and Plato and of Philo’s First-Born; the Logos that is the mysterious intelligibility of an equally mysterious world, connecting self-consciousness, agency, selfhood, intelligence on the one side with, on the other, a natural world ordered mathematically, or logically subordinated to the principle of sufficient reason, regulated by discernible laws and patterns of causation, a “becausative” reality.20

  Notwithstanding its rich meanings and its pervasive presence in the history of thought and, more widely, belief, Logos and the reasons for invoking it, seem to have been pushed to the margins in many areas of contemporary inquiry into the sense of the world and the fact that we seem capable of making that sense. Insofar as we seek to understand understanding, we often look to science, most recently neuroscience, which is thought to hold the key to the connection between the Logos within each of us and the Logos of the universe. Even those scientists who have religious beliefs, draw a line between the reason and principles that inform their work and those beliefs. Logos is fragmented into “logies” – disciplined inquiries into aspects of the world. Without the attachment to God, the Author of sense, in “theo-Logos”, Logos loses its capital initial letter. The double helix of mythos and Logos is unwound and what remains of Logos goes its own way.