Posted by PS on October 10, 2005 at 22:51:14:
In the interest of stimulating the vital life-signs of the beloved hifi bbs, I decided to post something I recently emailed to someone who was asking about my take on the classical idea of the Logos.
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OK, this is my conception of Logos as well as I can explain quickly. Warning: this may be heresy. Mmmmm...heresy...
Start with the idea of emanations in Neo-Platonism.
The One, the Abyss, the Unknowable
The Nous, the Divine Mind
The World Spirit
(and below that, the world of matter)
The Nous is the divine mind, the world mind, the highest conceivable concept, the source of all wisdom and beauty and truth in the world, the "mind of God" for a Christian. Yet the Nous is on the "level" below the One, the Unknowable, the Abyss, that no-thing-ness we call God. And by "level" it will be quite apparent we refer to the metaphorical distance above us relative to our ability to comprehend. Beyond the Nous we cannot delve; that is the Abyss of the One. The Nous is the rational and volitional part of the One, the part we can acknowledge, being rational and volitional ourselves. The Nous is the creative force and the reason for all things that have being. The World Spirit is on the "level" below the Nous. It is also spiritual, but is intimately connected to the world of things--and to the Nous. The World Spirit is powerfully immanent in all things. The World Spirit declares its origin--the Nous, the divine mind, the creator mind--by its very existence. The Nous is all we can "know" of God, the only revelation of the Unknowable One.
Now imagine you thinking about yourself. You abstract yourself outside of yourself to look at yourself and know yourself. Knowing anything requires two--subject and object, thus, the abstraction is necessary. This is the nature of self-awareness; it is the power to abstract oneself and look back and behold oneself face to face, as it were. It is self-awareness. It is self-beholding. It is facing oneself. It is also self-willing and self-loving (really the same thing in this sense). This power separates humanity from the other animal life forms. It is part of what it means to be made in the image of God. We are self-aware. In a sense, we recreate ourselves to contemplate ourselves.
Now when I talk about my self, that part that is actively knowing myself is the abstraction. You can learn about me from me because I can abstract myself.
What do we call the part of us that we abstract to behold ourselves? We do not name it, because it is pure abstraction, pure thought, and it has no life in itself. (What if it were alive and had being in itself?)
What if I had the power to create from nothing? What if I conceived of a thing and it was, because I thought it? I think all my thought with language; the language I use to reason is the same language I use to speak and express my reason. I think with language; I think in words. If I had this power to create from nothing with a thought, it would in a very real sense be "spoken" into existence--by my mind. I do not have this power. The Nous does.
The Nous is the Creator, the Divine Mind, the God we know, the God that knows us. We know him only because he knows himself. How does he know himself? The same way we do. He thinks of himself. He abstracts Himself to behold Himself. But unlike us, everything he thinks lives, and immediately has life in itself. He thinks, and the abstraction LIVES. The abstraction is the Logos. The Logos is the Nous beholding the Nous. The Logos beholds God, knows God, reveals God.
Logos (Greek) = Word, reasoning, communicable meaning
Because the Logos beholds God, we can contemplate God; the Logos is how God reveals himself. God makes himself known through his own self-awareness; the Logos is his self-awareness. The Logos is aware of all that God willed into existence through him, aware of all his designs and all his devices, everything that is, everything from the single blades of grass bending under our feet to the din of the great machines energizing it all. The Logos holds it all, sees it all, contemplates it all. By the Logos all things were brought into being. The Logos is the power to be, the power of being, the ground of all being.
In the beginning was the Logos, and the Logos was facing Theos, and the Logos was Theos. All things came into being through him, and without him, no thing came into being. In him was life, and his life was the illumination of men.
John 1:1,3-4 (my rendering)
"facing" = Gr. "pros"
Literally, the Logos was "toward" Theos. The Logos was face-to-face with Theos. The Logos was God beholding himself.
John asserts that the Logos took on flesh in the man Jesus. I believe that. And the humanity of Jesus is a very real part of the equation for me. But that is not what I am talking about here, of course. My assertion here is that any and all illumination we receive is from the Logos. He is all-beholding. He is the source of all metaphor, the communication of all meaning, the ground of all being, the creative force in everything.
Much more I should have said. Some I shouldn't have. And I will certainly feel like I expressed much of this wrongly and should have used other words. And I will not think the same way in a year. That is as it should be. All things change. We change. Oh, I forgot...
The Logos is the reason and the order in how everything changes. This is the first major concept of Logos, expressed in the late 6th or early 5th century BCE by Heraclitus. We only have fragments of his writings on logos. Many philosophers who followed developed the idea further. The Stoics made it central to their whole philosophy of life. The Neo-Platonists used it to illuminate Plato. The Christians saw Jesus, the eternally-generated One, the Son of God, who alone beholds the Father. Thus the declaration by John above.