The Discovery of Logos

In the beginning was the word . . . John 1:1 NASB

Word – We are not going to go another round on the Trinitarian debate over this verse. What we are going to do is examine how much of the Hellenized world was influenced by the Greek concept of logos. To do that, we need some historical and philosophical background.

In Greek thought logos is not about a person. It’s about abstract principles that claim to apply to all men everywhere. This is a monumental shift in the history of human thought. Before the Greeks, humanity was interested in territorial gods and customs, in tribal paradigms, because men lived within the confines of tribal societies. Even if those territories became the size of Assyria, the philosophy of tribalism predominated. Men worshiped local gods, lived according to local customs and thought of the world in terms of territorial ideas. We see this even in the Genesis accounts where Jacob, after experiencing the vision of the “ladder,” remarks that he couldn’t imagine God was in this place. Why couldn’t he image that? Because his God, YHVH, was a tribal God and therefore, geographically confined.

With the discovery of the idea of logos, the world was transformed. Local cultures were turned into ideologies claiming universal authority and application. And because logos was the paradigm of human thought, conceptual knowledge became independent of revelation. In other words, following Greek philosophy, understanding the true principles that governed the universe was available to all men with enlightened intellect. Logos usurped the role of the priest and the prophet. As Jonas remarks, a man became a Hellene “not by birth but by education.”[1]   The Greeks enthroned reason with the discovery of logos, and the Western world has never been the same. Today we absorb this Greek idea by cultural osmosis. We don’t consider the fact that for most of human history this ideological view was not the standard, and when we encounter tribalism in the contemporary world, we firmly believe that those who hold such views are in need of education so that they too might enjoy the benefits of rational thinking. We are so far removed from the world of the ancients that we would never consider consulting with a priest or a prophet in order to determine the orbit of Jupiter or any other circumstance in our purview.

Under the banner of logos, freedom became the highest good of Greek rationalism. However, because the logos is about mental states of the inner man, the idea of freedom does not ultimately reside in the body politic. It is a mental attitude, allowing a man to exercise his mind without concern for the restrictions placed upon his physical existence. Aristotle concludes that to be a good citizen of the polis is to be a moral man, that is, a man of pure reason, of logos, and nothing else.

Logos, then, leads to the invention of individual privacy, the right of each person to be detached from the world of illusion, that is, the world be rifted with illogical appearances.

The detached man is whole in and of himself. He volunteers to become involved in society and social networks. His commitment to community is a choice, not an obligation, even for his own consciousness. In this way, logos provided the grounds for the saying, “Every man in his own castle.” Society became the product of elective choice and therefore it rests on the will of the people, not on the obligations of anyone to human behavior under the auspices of God. All this is in opposition to the Semitic culture, a culture built of moral obligation to care for another regardless of the other’s intellectual agreement. Thus, God can direct His people to provide for the enemy without requiring that the enemy first convert to the tribal view. Today we still see the enormous influence of tribal morality in the Middle Eastern idea of hospitality. It is never optional, unless, of course, you are thinking like a Greek. The smallest building block of society in Semitic thought is the family. In Greek thought it is the individual, and the consequences are enormous.

Ultimately this led to religious syncretism. Eastern thought was incorporated into the Greek philosophy of the Church. Eastern ideas were transformed into universals, often through the mechanics of elaborate rational justifications following the Greek logos. Men began to reason their way to God, and to provide rational grounds for their beliefs based not on the words of the prophet but rather on the collection of evidence that appealed to the mind. For example, today we find believers who argue that the dietary laws are correct because they provide health benefits. This, of course, is entirely a Greek approach even if it is true. The children of Israel, as Easterners, did not follow the dietary laws because they were worried about mercury poisoning. They followed the dietary laws because God said so. End of story. But with the advent of logos, the world shifted. With the adoption of logos by the Church, the world vomited.

“Christianity did not destroy paganism; it adopted it. The Greek mind, dying, came to a transmigrated life in the theology and liturgy of the Church; the Greek language, having reigned for centuries over philosophy, became the vehicle of Christian literature and ritual . . . Other pagan cultures contributed to the syncretist result. From Egypt came the ideas of a divine trinity . . . and the mystic theology that made Neoplatonism and Gnosticism, and obscured the Christian creed . . . Christianity was the last great creation of the ancient pagan world.”[2]

Topical Index: logos, Hellenism, tribalism, John 1:1

[1] Han Jonas, The Gnostic Religion: The message of the alien God and the beginnings of Christianity (Beacon Press, 1963, 2^nd Edition), p. 5.

[2] Will Durant, The Story of Civilization, Vol. 3: Caesar and Christ, p. 595, 599.