Logos
Page 7
A few glances at the history of the jewel in the crown of natural science, mechanics, will, I hope, suffice to carry this point. This was implicit in Galileo’s separation of the question of “how the heavens go” from “how to go to Heaven”.21 Newton’s belief that space was the sensorium of God had no influence on the formulation of the laws of motion and of gravity. And when Einstein – who brought classical mechanics to its glorious completion – referred to God as “the Old One” who would not play dice with the world, it is difficult not to see this as an affectionate, and somewhat patronizing, nod to an idea rather than a felt reality. Subsequent allusions to reading “the mind of God” by those who sought to arrive at the equations that would, in virtue of uniting general relativity and quantum mechanics, amount to a Theory of Everything are more a deliberate provocation of the clergy than a statement of a deistic faith.22
The laws uncovered by natural science may be evident in the world, underpinning its intelligible order, but are not, as we noted in the previous chapter “decreed”. Far from being the Mind of God, they are godless and mindless. Logos as Cosmic Law is simply the reliable habits of Nature – habits that can be gathered in a book or even “a mindful” because if they could not be thus gathered, they could not be conceived as a totality. The shaping power of the Creator has been reallocated to the (uncreated) Creation. The very reason why the world seems ordered may be because it can be totalized – added up to a Universe – only if seen through the lens of a few, simple, ordering principles. The intuition of idea of The Universe brings with it the notion of a universal, informing intelligence. This alone makes it mind-portable.
Separating the mystery of the world making sense from the idea of sense-giving (and law-giving) gods, replacing the will of God by the mechanical laws of disenchanted Nature, the principles that make the world comprehensible from (say) a man crucified upon a cross, is not entirely unwelcome.23 However, it leaves us with a challenge that we must address in the chapters that follow: to find a basis for the intelligibility of the world without invoking an informing intelligence permeating that world and reflected in our minds; without supposing that the universe has an intelligible order because it was created by an intelligent being for intelligent beings.24 The infinite distance between God and man crossed by Logos has its secular equivalent in the disproportion between the individual knowing mind and the universe that it, at least in part, knows. Consigning religious answers to the (“childish”25) past of the human mind does not take away the question. We should not lose the profundity of the question through rejecting the answers that have been offered it.
In the next two chapters, we shall look at two attempts to face this challenge of understanding the intelligibility of the world, without directly or indirectly appealing to God. On the surface very different, these two approaches have in common the endeavour to collapse the distance between the sense-making mind and the world of which it makes sense.
Addendum Beginnings: bangs, flashes and commands
Creation myths requisition a variety of ingredients: Stuff, Light, Sound, Words, Commands – brought into being and united by some primordial power. Being, order, and sense-making are generated by the divine act that secures an intelligible universe. Scant attention is paid to the ordering of carts and horses – although this is a fault common to religious and secular cosmogonies. The godless creation of the universe out of a quantum vacuum – so that Nothing can magic itself into something – assumes that the laws of nature are in place before there is anything for them to operate on.26
When we look back from the Gospel According to St John to the Book of Genesis, we find the Word at the very beginning: it is there in the command “Let there be light!”. At this point of origin, word and light are one in the Logos, the word of God that is no mere word, no mere commentary, or description, after the fact, but a generative command. In Genesis, the moment of creation is simultaneously one of illumination and articulation. The questionable ordering of carts and horses may be seen as an allegorical representation of the problematic relationship between that which is there and that which is articulated; between that which is supposed to exist in itself and that which is made explicit and articulated; of the difficulty of saying, or conceiving, or imagining Being before speech, before conception, or the illumination of an image.
The Logos of the world is guaranteed by the inseparability, in divine speech, of making and making intelligible; the co-creation of Stuff and Sense. “In the beginning was the Logos” seems to apply equally to the Old Testament story of the Creation and to the New Testament story of redemption from a Fall that began a process of an awakening to knowledge of things that only God should know. That beginning marks both the emergence of Something out of Nothing and the guarantee that that Something will make sense to the privileged human beings within it.
Both ends of St John’s assertion that “In the beginning was the Logos” are puzzling. No event is in itself a beginning. It is picked out only in the light of what succeeds it, the putative endings to which it points. The opening of a story is an opening in virtue of the future closure. The cart invokes the horse: the beginning is only retrospectively identified from the standpoint of an end, as the first of a series of moments or events. To this limited extent, we may conclude that “In the Beginning” was the word “beginning” – spoken by a God who could see what would unfold. This is an uncompromised, absolute beginning that knows its end and hence knows that it is the beginning of everything.
The Pentateuch which moves swiftly from an account of how Something came out of Nothing to a story about the first humans and their relationship, initially to God and then to each other, thence to the history of a particular nation’s relationship to God and to other nations, mediated by God, runs quickly into the implicit impurity of any beginning, compromised by the rhetorical purposes of story-telling. Philosophers whose ambition is to uncover the Logos of the world without Mythos (including even in some cases doing without that which comes from the testimony of senses which are deemed to be unreliable) dream of such a beginning – one that belongs to all possible sense-makers – is not tethered to any specific, that is to say contingent, ending, and is not pre-begun.
This is in part expressed in the philosophical dream of standing so far back and adopting a point of view from which all that is may be seen as consequence, or a conclusion of, a general potentiality, of the most fundamental nature of the world and of ourselves in it. The First Philosophy would specify the first kind of Stuff, the properties that characterize its standing state, and the laws that dictate its evolution. The ontologist or metaphysician replicates the act of Creation in an act of re-creation. A dormer window is opened, bringing the hope that human consciousness has found a new outside from which it can see and examine itself and its world – the view from nowhere and no-one that is the asymptote of objectvity. We are promised the sunrise of a higher mode of human self-consciousness. In reality, philosophers find themselves caught up in the threads of the multi-stranded millennial-long conversation humanity has been having with itself rather than discovering a hoped-for, uncompromised Beginning of all Beginning.
The beginning, in which Being and Sense are co-created, and man the sense-making creature is fashioned, is captured by Augustine in this poignant claim: “Initium ergo, ut esset, creatus est homo, ante quem nullus fuit” [“Man was created so that there could be a beginning”].27 There are many ways of interpreting this striking thought. Eternal God, Who is without end, is also without a beginning. He therefore creates man so that there shall be a beginning – the first moment in a story of unfolding sense, which in virtue of being a story must be driven by a sensed incompleteness that furnishes it with its forward momentum, opening the space of possibility, of not-yet, of the unknown. The act of creation separates: that which is from the sense it has; the sense-making from that which is made sense of; and (connected with this) the sense that is hitherto made from the sense yet to be made. Without the discontinui
ty, the interruption, the delay and (implicitly) the incompleteness of sense, there is no act of sense-making, no explanation, no understanding, no revelation. So, at the moment of creation God might as well have said “Let there be half-light” in order that humanity, living by the mind-sweat behind its furrowed brows, may undertake a journey from greater to lesser darkness.
There is another aspect of the Beginning captured in the numinous, polysemous Greek term arche. As well as “beginning” arche means “origin” and, importantly, “source of power”. In Presocratic philosophy, it meant both the first principle or element, the formless stuff out of which the differentiated world arose, but also the divine order which informed and hence shaped it. In short, arche is primordial stuff, and the order which shapes it, and the power that drives it towards order: it is initial Chaos and subsequent Cosmos and the transformation of the former into the latter. Arche was not only “the ultimate underlying substance” but also the “ultimate undemonstrable principle”, as if arche for Aristotle provides the conditions of the possibility of things – thus uniting creation and shaping, actualization and forma formans.
Which is a cue for a return to the Creation myth echoed in the Old Testament background of St John’s enunciation of Salvation and what we might characterize as the battle for priority between Logos (and uttered, and hence Sound) and Light, between the Word and what it commanded into existence:
And the earth was without form and void; and darkness was on the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.
And God said, “Let there be light”; and there was light.
(Genesis 1:2–3)
And so it came to pass that the Word brought the void to its, and eventually, to our, senses. Nothing(ness) was told what to do and obediently it became Something. God’s first command switched on the light, poised between Stuff and Sense. And, although darkness was on the face of the pre-creation deep, He switched on the darkness as well. The light highlighted the dark and the dark “highdarked” the light.
Leaving aside the strange notion that the void should understand Hebrew (or English in the received pronunciation of educated Jacobeans), or whatever Ur-Language God spoke (or spake – because His antiquity demands antique grammatical forms) and that it should be inclined to obey the command to cease to be void – the priority given to light is thought-provoking. For while the association of light with our lives and wakefulness, which begins when we open our eyes and finishes with our lids being sealed for ever, places light at the centre of our sense of the world, there is something deeper. Light is the proto-revelation that precedes the Word in which the world is spoken, and the world knows itself and is gathered up as one. The visual field is the proto-world revealed in a proto-picture.
In Genesis, light being commanded into existence must, however, be preceded by words. It was the Word that brought into being light and all that succeeded the Great Flash with which the universe began. And thus we have another case of horse and cart disorder. The command as to what ought to be the case must issue from and be addressed to what is already the case, even if that is only an attentive and obedient void. The notion that (non-)existence could be commanded into existence, that the utterance of words can bring about things, is therefore problematic, although it helps in seeing how Being and Sense co-emerged.
Of course, words make things happen. Our common human worlds, our lives lived and led, chosen and inflicted, are woven out of words. Speaking is acting and speech acts are the very fibre of our social being. Words are the means by which we extend our agency through acting on others who are agents like ourselves. You do as I say. I do as you say. We do as they say. They do as we say. Word-mediated agency, however, requires, operates through, other agents. Words must be manufactured by existing beings, arising out of an existing culture, and travel through existing spaces. They are thus far downstream of any First Act that brings the Universe into being.
God, alone, can bring things about directly through words. And he brings about, rather than merely shapes, things. His throat is the ultimate 3- (or indeed 4-) D printer. “My word … shall not return to me empty; but it shall accompany that which I purpose” as Isaiah (55:11) said, ventriloquizing God. God’s thoughts create what they think in virtue of creating the truth conditions of his thoughts. God furnishes the world; we only rearrange the furniture. Things are ordered into existence and, existing, they are ordered. The initial command that brought Nothing into Something also imposed order on disorder. And it did so through bringing darkness into light.
Light – that luminous beginning of everything – is the First Effect of the uttered First Cause. Or closer even than that: God’s very existence is identical with light, as reflected in the evocative phrase of Aramaic St John, who refers to “The I am” that “illuminates the world” (1:4). So, the Light and the Word jostle for position as the beginning of the beginning. If the light seems to have priority, it is because the Word of God may not seem like a word at all; rather a translation of unimaginable power into a language that does not (yet) exist: an anachronism; a pre-equine cart. The words spoken by God belong to a space that precedes language; they share the already noted impossibility of philosophy that begins before the beginning and speaks where there is no medium of speech and locates the philosopher outside of himself and humankind, exploiting the impossibility of language that transcends itself and says “language”, the temporal being who discusses “time”, the conscious individual who puzzles over “consciousness”, the material object that speaks of “matter”. Even so, the notion that the word marked the beginning of the All is compelling: it reflects our sense that the world acquired its identity when someone said “World”; when This, That, and the trillion-trillion-fold Other, were gathered into a unity, by means of language that from the beginning had the capacity to outreach its grasp.
The capacity of language to reach beyond its grasp – and paradoxically to seem to pre-exist its own existence – is thus evident in the Genesis story. It is instantiated also in the notion of there being a Universe, a Creation, a Totality, notions which must themselves be children of language. In this sense, the Universe began when speakers began to speak of “The Universe”. This may make sense of the claim that language reaches back through billions of speechless years before it came into existence; a long, overwhelmingly silent backward shout. Words can envisage a time when the very universe in which they were spoken and heard, and that of which they spoke, lay in an unimagined and indeed unimaginable future.
Herein, too, may lie the deep link between the word and the light; why they are rival versions of that which occasioned the universe. The command “Let there be light!” gives priority to words; but light itself is the first substance of the creation. What light and language have in common are that they are the weft and warp of a grid of coherence gathering a world together, collecting what has been separated in visible space and the invisible realm. Words and gazes, thinking and looking, both collect multiplicity into a unified field.
The story of how it is that the world makes sense to us will be incomplete so long as it does not also account for the incremental process of sense-making – quite different from the all-at-once matching of the Logos of the universe and the Logos of the human mind. We therefore need a complementary account of how the Light became mingled with darkness, became half-light: of the Cognitive Fall into a world of incomplete sense, ironically arising out of a desire for Divine Knowledge.
One early consequence of the Fall was the decline, described in Genesis, of the Word, no longer underwritten by the Divine mind, into a babble of mutually unintelligible languages. Things had begun well with creation and discourse coordinated in a pre-established harmony of matter and meaning:
So out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field and every bird of the air; and whatever the man called every living creature that was its name. The man gave names to all cattle, and to the birds of the air, and to every beast of the field.
(Genesis 1:19–20)
Thus the prelapsarian linguistic paradise, when words were co-indexed with things, language with Being. Each word was the name of a thing, or type of thing, and each thing had a name. The world made sense and that sense could be spoken, perhaps even spoke itself, with things speaking prose or at least nouns: “And the whole earth was of one language and of one speech” (Genesis 11:1).
So what went wrong? Adam wanted to know; to trace the meaning of the world to its source. To know was to know what God knew and so become god-like: to close the gap between the Creator and his creation. Hence the expulsion from Paradise – a Paradise of good-enough understanding as well as of unearned material goods. After The Fall, the dream of becoming God-like and returning to Heaven was forever renewed. The Tower of Babel was built to bridge the earth and the heavens: a pre-scientific attempt, perhaps, to know the mind of God. The punishment was precisely calibrated to the crime: it was for the minds of men to be even more curdled by a multiplicity of languages. The Word was shattered into smithereens of sense: not only was it broken up into names, it was further fragmented into separate cultures and minds that did not comprehend one another. Speakers emitted bits and pieces of meaning from their separate vessels of flesh. There followed misunderstanding between individuals, connected and separated, linked but more deeply divided, by their common needs and their common sense. Mutually opaque discourses, a thousand languages, tens of thousands of dialects, millions of idiolects – thus humanity shouting across a network of large and small divides, constituting the million-stranded conversation it had with itself. Logos, harvested into imperfectly communicating vessels, was contaminated with nonsense and senselessness. Primordial Understanding was darkened by Blunderstanding.