Logos: Mind of God

It’s hard to think of a concept that had a greater bearing on medieval philosophy – or one, for that matter, whose precise meaning is harder to grasp – than the Logos. Throughout its 2,500 year history, the Greek term has been variously – and rather unhelpfully – translated as word, speech, reason, ground, plea and opinion, but, as we shall see, its usage bespeaks a meaning far deeper and more complex.

Though it was first proposed as a principle of philosophical inquiry by the Pre-Socratics, it would achieve its greatest influence in its Christian incarnation, where, thanks initially to John the Evangelist, it came to be associated with Jesus Christ. Over the centuries, the greatest medieval philosophers applied themselves with such vigour to its appropriation, and integrated it so inextricably within the broader theological framework, that any competent analysis of Christian doctrine is now impossible without a thorough understanding of it.

 GREEK ORIGINS

 It is the Pre-Socratic Heraclitus (c. 535 – c. 475 BCE) who first used the word, Logos in a philosophical context. The enigmatic philosopher, who posited change as the basic principle of existence, is noted for his saying, “No man steps into the same river twice”. Legitimating his nickname, “The Obscure”, he also believed this basic principle was the Logos. How both can true at the same time – that the Logos can manage to somehow remain constant while everything in the universe is meant to always be in a state of flux – is a question for another day. Suffice it here to say that, for Heraclitus, the Logos was the cosmic ordering principle; that which pervaded all objects and living things, bestowing on them reason and order.

 Anaximander (c. 610 – c. 546 BCE) had proposed a similar idea, but given it another name: Nous, or mind. The world, he argued, was an emanation of the Nous. Like the logos, the Nous bestowed order on the universe and everything in it. It was a mind in the very sense of a vessel or diffuser of reason; in the words of scholar Gordon Clark, the “supreme intelligence governing the universe”.

 It isn’t clear through which of these two ancient philosophers Plato (c. 428 – ca. 348 BCE) was exposed to the idea of a supreme governing principle, but exposed he was, given the debt his philosophy seems to owe to it. Plato never used the term Logos – or Nous, for that matter – in the way the Pre-Socratics did; he never had an explicit Logos doctrine. But he did believe in a rational order to the universe; a ‘oneness’ connecting all physical particulars.

Plato, as is well known, posited the existence of two separate realms. The first is the realm we inhabit, the world of material things and objects, which are mutable and perishable and therefore no help to us in our search for eternal and immutable Truth. For this, we must turn to another, non-material realm; a world populated by perfect entities called ‘forms’ (in Greek, eidos), of which physical particulars are imperfect earthly incarnations.

 Because all particulars partake (albeit imperfectly) in the forms that determine their essence, what binds them is, not the separate forms, which clearly change depending on the particular in question, but the very idea of a form itself. The forms for each particular are different, but their “formness”, which itself must have had its own form, a “form of forms”, remains constant. This “form of forms” was as close to a definition of god as Plato ever came to providing, and is generally seen to be his own elaborate take on the Heraclitan Logos. The ideal of “formness” is, for Plato, the universe’s ordering principle.

 The Stoics went farther than Plato in their theoretical elaboration of the Logos, and it is thanks more to these than to either Plato or the Pre-Socratics that the Logos was handed down to Christianity. Like their predecessors, the Stoics – whose founding member was Zeno of Citium (c. 334 – c. 262 BCE) – also posited the existence of an all-encompassing cosmic principle, and named it as Heraclitus had.

They also believed that the Logos inhabited each and every thing, which is implicit in Heraclitus, and can be said to echo the Platonic assertion that each particular partakes in the same form of forms. Unlike Plato, however, the Stoics were materialists. In other words, they didn’t believe in the existence of an otherworldly realm to which perfect forms and ideals were confined. The Logos, as all other things, inhabits the material world we can see, feel, hear and touch. In this, they were clearly at odds, not only with Plato, but also with Christianity, as we shall now see. 

IN THE BEGINNING…

The turning point in the history of the Logos, from the Medieval Christian perspective, came with the Gospel according to John (c. 90 CE); or, more specifically, its prologue.

John’s Gospel, which was originally written in Greek, opens thus:

In the beginning there was the word (Logos), and the word was with God, and the word was God. (1:1)

This sentence will puzzle the reader ill-versed in the historical evolution of the Logos concept, but makes a great deal more sense when interpreted in view of it, as does the following verse:

 All things came to be through [the Logos], and without him nothing came to be. (John, 1:3)

 The Logos, here, is – to a certain extent, at least – what it had been for Heraclitus, Plato and the Stoics: that which gives form and order to all things.

 And yet there is already something new. For the first time, there is an explicit equation of the Logos with god. The Logos is no longer, as it had been for the Greeks, an amorphous idea; no longer an abstract principle. It’s sentient now; a thinking, reasoning being with a personality, a teleological mindset and an active orientation in the world.

 In the next verse, John uses a metaphor, the metaphor of light, which will also go on to have immense impact on the Medieval mindset:

What came to be through him was life, and this life was the light of the human race; the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it. (1: 4 – 5) 

The Logos is a “light that shines in the darkness”; that which illuminates man’s idle and ignorant mind with god’s divine ideas. In this sense too, the Christian Logos diverges from its Greek progenitor. For the Greeks, the Logos had been an ontological principle defining the basic structure of being. For the Christians, it acquired an epistemological function. The Logos was, not only in everything, but the way to everything. It was the way to understand the divine mind; the one and only path to truth.

 But it is toward the end of the prologue that we find John’s most significant deviation from the Greek doctrine:

And the Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us, and we saw his glory, the glory as of the Father’s only Son, full of grace and truth. (1: 15)

 Here we learn that the Logos is none other than Jesus Christ himself, whom god sent as his only son to dwell among us. Nowhere in the Ancient Greek literature had the Logos become incarnate in a human being, let alone one sent, from the other realm to this one, to do god’s bidding. Here, Greek philosophy merges gleefully with Hebrew theism and messianic prophecy to create something entirely new: the Christian deity who is, at once, heavenly king and earthly missionary, father and son, creator and Logos.

 It is uncertain to what degree John was aware of the philosophical history of the term, but, given the exactitude of the correspondences, it can be reasonably deduced he had at least rudimentary knowledge of it. Be that is it may, the next 1,100 years saw a flourishing of attempts to give a rigorous philosophical systematisation to the Logos doctrine.

 The first of these attempts can be traced back to the second and third centuries CE, and specifically to Justin Martyr (100 – 165) and Origen (c. 184 – c. 243). Justine Martyr, an early Christian theologian, adopted the Logos concept of the Stoics – with an important caveat. Justin did not share the materialist standpoint of the Stoics, who, as we have seen, believed that the Logos itself was a part of the material world, as was everything else. For Justin the logos was that by virtue of which all had been ordered and created. The Logos was god, and god was anything but material.

 Origen, born some 80 years later, made a similar attempt to bring Greek metaphysical concepts into a synthesis with Christian belief. To avoid any confusion, the third-century theologian stressed that god was unitary, not made of separate parts. The Logos was, not an independent being, as the demiurge had been for Plato, but that aspect of god which mediated between the one and creation. Building on John’s original proposition, Origen insisted on identifying the Logos with the Christ. God had become incarnate through the Logos, the word had been “made flesh”, and this meant one thing and one thing only: Christ was god the Logos.

 More importantly still, Origen provides what may be the first-ever elaborate rendering of the epistemological function of the Logos:

 [The Logos] declares to all other beings, that is to the whole creation, the meaning of the mysteries and secrets contained in God’s wisdom, and so he is called the Word, because he is as it were an interpreter of the mind’s secrets (Peri Archon)

 Origen may have neglected, here, to use John’s ‘light’ metaphor, but the parallel cannot be overlooked. He speaks of the Logos as an intermediary between the minds of god and of man, a bridge between created and creator. The logos is he who conveys to all living things the mysteries of God’s wisdom; who illuminates the darkness of the human mind with god’ truth.

 It is in his capacity as mediator between the human and the divine, as illuminator of minds, that the Logos would have the greatest impact on medieval philosophy. Augustine (354 – 430), in fact, would return directly to John’s prologue to highlight this aspect:

 God’s word is the true light that gives light to every man who arrives in this world. (Confessions, Book Seven: IV)

 And in the following passage, Augustine provides, without using the term itself, as bold and succinct a Logos doctrine as had even been seen:

 …In this faith [the human mind] might advance the more confidently towards the truth, the truth itself, God, God's Son…For it is as man that He is the Mediator and the Way. (City of God, Book Eleven)

 Jesus is, at once, the way to the truth (in his capacity as Logos) and truth itself (in his capacity as god). Paraphrasing St Paul, whose Letters to the Romans he treats as law, Augustine comes to the jubilant conclusion that god (and therefore Christ, the Logos) is that principle without which man cannot live truthfully:

 When, therefore, man lives according to himself—that is, according to man, not according to God—assuredly he lives according to a lie.” (City of God, Book Fourteen)

 And if he cannot live truthfully, he can certainly never be happy:

 And why is this, but because the source of man’s happiness lies only in God. (Ibid.)

 The ultimate human reliance of man on Christ, the way and the light, is an idea that the Logos had a direct hand in birthing, and one that would have a great impact on much subsequent medieval thought – as we shall now see.

 FAITH VS REASON

 If man’s reliance on the Logos is total; if it is by means of it alone that he can gain even the a partial insight into the inner workings of god’s mind, what does this say about man? What does it say about the natural reach and power of human reason?

 To put it bluntly, not much.

 According to the medieval, who, thanks chiefly to Augustine, believed in the falsehood of the material world and the evil of a life lived according to the flesh, man’s innate perceptive faculties (reason included) were, at best, flawed, and, at worst, dangerously misleading. To follow one’s own inner logic without regard for divine truth was to be led into falsehood and, ultimately, to eternal damnation.

 Faith in god the father and Christ the Logos was to ascend, through the era, to a position of epistemological supremacy, and the relationship between faith and human reason was to become one of the major philosophical issues in the later Middle Ages.

 It is perhaps first in Augustine that we first see clear Christian light shed on this question:

 But since the mind itself, though naturally capable of reason and intelligence, is disabled by besotting and inveterate vices … it had, in the first place, to be impregnated with faith, and so purified. (City of God, Book XI) 

 Augustine’s famed motto was “faith seeks understanding”, which is a rather telling. To have faith is, not (as Kierkegaard would have it 1,200 years later) to lay aside one’s intellect to follow god blindly, without questioning his purpose. It is, in a sense, the opposite. Faith is our means for taking in reality as god has created it. It is, not to embrace ignorance, but to seek the truth. To have faith is to understand.

 600 years on, Anselm (ca. 1033 – 1109) would provide his own spin to this Augustinian utterance: “Credo ut intelligam” (I believe in order that I may understand). This was, in many respects, the starting point for subsequent Medieval philosophical discussions. Philosophy, for the man of the age, was not a neutral activity, motivated by a pure – one could say ‘pagan’ – love for wisdom. It was an actively religious undertaking. As the chief means for understanding god’s plan, faith necessarily preceded human reason. Man’s most probing inquiries about the nature of existence thus needed to be directed accordingly. Generalised philosophical musings were considered idle, pointless and, in the worst cases, heretical.

 This would be the position of most major philosophers of the period. Those that differed, like Siger of Brabant (1240 – 1284), who argued that philosophy and theology were two different ways of seeing truth, were often charged with heresy. For the better part of 900 years, philosophy and theology in the West amounted to the same thing.

 Thomas Aquinas (1225 – 1274) was no exception. Aquinas allowed for a two-fold truth, but his approach to it was narrower and less liberal that of Siger of Brabant. While there were certain truths available to our unassisted reason, the loftiest ones far exceed its reaches:

 Since man's nature is dependent on a higher nature, natural knowledge does not suffice for its perfection, and some supernatural knowledge is necessary…” (Summa Theologica, Of the Act of Faith)

 And there is no way man can accede to these higher truths except through faith:

 It is necessary for man to accept by faith not only things which are above reason, but also those which can be known by reason…For human reason is very deficient in things concerning God. (Ibid.)

 There we have it. What Augustine had mentioned in passing 900 years earlier, Aquinas was now spelling it out for us. Reason is deficient. Faith enhances human reason, which is, in itself, weak and naturally susceptible to corruption.

 The effects on civilisation of such a reason-diminishing epistemology are easily intuitable. Along with Plato’s scorn for all forms of empirical knowledge, modified for Christian purposes by Augustine in his City of God, it is the single largest contributing idea to the delay of the Scientific Revolution, in the West, until the fifteenth century. For if neither man’s senses nor his reason could be completely trusted, if his reliance on the Logos for truth was total, how could he be expected to dedicate his life to scientific inquiry, to understanding the world in terms of any laws other than those emanating from god himself?