On the Logos

The beginning of John’s Gospel states “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things game to be through him, and without him nothing came to be. What came to be through him was life, and his life was the light of the human race, the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it” (John 1: 1-5 NAB). The term Word (capitalized) in this case is an English translation of the Greek word Logos. As faithful Catholics, we simply accept that Christ is the incarnate Word, the Son of God, and the second person of the Holy Trinity. John’s audience, of course, did not have the benefit of 2,000 years of magisterial teaching to fall back on. What, then, did they understand this term Logos to mean?

The Greek philosopher Aristotle understood three modes of persuasion that stem from the spoken word. The first mode of persuasion, the Ethos, refers to the person who actually speaks the words. If a speaker has a good moral character, their message is more likely to be accepted by the audience. For writers and speakers, the type of argument they are attempting to make also impacts their Ethos, for a personal attack against an opponent (known as an ad hominem argument) tends to paint the speaker in more negative light when compared to an attack on the issues.

The Pathos is the second mode Aristotle speaks of, and this refers to the emotions of the Audience. Aristotle understood that powerful emotions such as love, anger, and hate greatly impact our ability to make sound, rationale judgements. These same emotions can be evoked by the speaker (or writer) in an effort to make their words have a greater impact. Using an attractive person in a commercial for a diet or a new exercise, for example, can evoke emotions within us that compel us to buy this product in an effort to more closely resemble the person depicted in the television commercial.

This leads us to the third argument, the Logos. The Logos refers specifically to the argument itself, and refers to the underlying logic of the argument. The Logos separates the speaker and the emotion from the argument in an effort to examine the concept in its purest form. The Logos, according to Aristotle, separates man from animals in that only man can make reasoned, logical arguments that can be clearly articulated to another person. The logical arguments Aristotle promulgated read something like this:

All dogs are mammals

My Jack Russel is a dog

Therefore my Jack Russel is a mammal.

The Stoics would arrive on the scene later and would enhance and adapt Aristotle’s arguments. For the Stoics, the Logos is equated with the divine being that animates the universe, since this divine being encompasses perfect logic that is demonstrated by the order of the universe and is understood as the reason that rules the universe. The Stoics further explored this divine Logos through the seminal Logos, through which the universe was generated. The stoics also believed each person possessed a portion of the divine logos.

The Old Testament continues this concept of the Logos being the divine word in utilizing the term to describe how the act of creation is the word of God (Genesis provides a great foundation for this concept). While the idea of divine generation through the Logos is shared by both the Stoics and the Jewish people, the Jewish faithful never separated the Logos from God. For the Jewish Faithful, the Logos is intimately tied to the Lord and it is His creative act in the universe that is made present through His Logos. It is this same concept of Logos that John utilizes in his gospel, with John tying the creation of the universe described in Genesis to Christ, stating that the Logos described in the Old Testament has been made flesh in Christ Jesus. Although the apostle Paul does not express Christ as Logos in as explicit a manner as John, we can still see this teaching in his letters to the Corinthians and the Colossians. Thomas Aquinas tells us the term word “is taken strictly in God, as signifying the concept of the intellect (Prima Pars I.I). The word of God, according to Saint Thomas, is not an essential but a personal concept that requires a divine person to fulfill. This divine nature of Christ, through whom the universe was created and who is of on substance of the Father, was accepted as a dogma of the Church by the Council of Nicea in 325 A.D.