Logos Theology

JUSTIN M. LASSER

The meaning of the Greek term Logos is intimately related to what it means to be human and what it means to contemplate a significant and meaningful world. Logos carries a plethora of uses, but takes its origin from the notion of speech and language. The early Greeks intuited that speech was closely, if not inalienably, connected to thought. In this sense speech became something more – it symbolized thought itself. As language moved beyond ostensive definition it acquired the capacity to name things that existed outside empir­ically demonstrative categories (such as “The Good”). It is uncertain how this potential within language was realized but, in reference to later Logos theology, mathe­matics had a seminal role to play. With the advent of ethereal mathematical entities (such as the Pythagorean theorem), two very important uses of the term Logos emerged in the philosophical vocabulary: first, as connoting the method of logical discourse or rationale of proof and, second, to evoke the apparent existence of pure forms existing beyond the present world.

The theologian philosophers among the ancient Greeks (especially Plato and his school, but also Pythagoras and the Stoics) intended to intuit these ethereal entities. In this manner the earliest Logos theology, if it could be called such, assumed that forms and principles were discovered, not invented. Furthermore, these forms that existed beyond this world also informed the form of the material world. However, the division of the material from the formal created a chasm between the perfect heav­enly realm and the material world below. Plato in his Timaeus resolved this issue by introducing the notion of a demiourgos or “demi-god” that formed the world according to the perfect formal principles (the logoi) but managed to do so imper­fectly. In this vein the duty of the philoso­pher was to contemplate the world in order to intuit the more perfect logoi or principles of the perfect (or Ideal Platonic) realm. Among the later Christians this aspect of Logos theology survived to become a major aspect of the ascetical mystical tradition, especially visible in Evagrios Pontike, Maximos the Confessor, and the later Byzantine ascetics. Evagrius used Logos theology in the service of his theology of prayer (Kephalaia Gnostica), in which he instructed his disciples to begin by contem­plating the natural logoi and to progress toward the contemplation of the supreme Logos.

Initially, Logos speculation among the Greek philosophers was concerned with the logoi (or principles) of creation, but in time the interest moved beyond the individual logoi and gravitated toward the overarching or supreme Logos, the parts being subsumed into the larger governing principle. In this manner the Logos operated as creator of categories or sets – or, as Origen was later to phrase it, “the Essence of essences” or the “Infinity of infinities.”

Early Christian thinkers were inheritors of the ancient proclivity to personify cer­tain governing principles and this can be seen in their development of the Hellenis­tic Logos theory as a way of expressing a biblical cosmology. They had already witnessed the manner in which Philo had combined Logos theology with the biblical Sophia tradition (the so-called Wisdom literature). They understood the Logos as the divine agency acting beside God the Father as the force of creation (the rational principle of all that is, and the head of all that derives from that – revelation and salvation especially). Clement and Origen of Alexandria did much to popularize this association of biblical and sophistic thought, and other leading patristic contributors to the Logos school were Justin Martyr, Tertullian, and Hippolytus. At first they were criticized by opponents as having elevated “two godheads” in the church’s monotheistic faith, and early attempts to resolve this accusation led to a stress on the subordina­tion of the Logos/Son to the Father’s monarchy. But if this was seen as a defect of early Logos theology, the alternative pro­posals of the 2nd-century Monarchians (Sabellius and the Theodoti) proved even more unsatisfying, in their apparent confusion of the Father and the Son. The association of Logos and Sophia among the 3rd-century Logos theologians helped to precipitate the Arian controversy in the 4th century, which was concerned with the nature and operations of the Logos/Christ. In Proverbs 8.27–31 Wisdom/Sophia pro­claims very beautifully: “When God set the heavens in place, I was there ... I was by God’s side, a master craftswoman, delighting God day by day, ever at play at God’s side, at play everywhere in God’s domain.” The status of the Logos in creation was made unclear in this proclamation, for Prov. 8.22 was remarked to have stated: “The Lord created me at the beginning of his work, the first of his acts of old,” which was taken by a range of Arian theo­logians to denote the ontological subordi­nation of the Logos/Son to the Father, and his creaturely status. Anti-Arian theolo­gians such as Athanasius were able to raise up a host of alternative biblical proof texts such as the preface of the Gospel of John: “In the beginning was the Logos, and the Logos was with God, and the Logos was God.” In so far as the Arian con­troversy was precisely concerned with the question of the Logos’ origins (was the Logos created or eternally existent?), the Orthodox answer to this question, as even­tually articulated in the Nicene Creed, affirmed that the Logos was “eternally begotten of the Father,” “true God from True God,” and consubstantial with him. According to one of the greatest Logos theologians, Origen of Alexandria, the Logos was the governing principle of crea­tion and was God precisely because the Logos essentially existed towards God (Commentary on John, 2.10), that is in terms of his relationship with the Father, as manifesting Son of that incomprehensi­ble Father. In this manner the Logos is omnipresent as architect and accessible as Lord within the world. Beyond the world the Logos exists as one of the three hypostases within the trinitarian Godhead. Humanity intuits the Logos as revealed in the world (the economy of the Son, made apprehensible by the sanctifying power of the Spirit), but the inner, essential, relations within the Trinity remain abso­lutely beyond the power of human theolog­ical speculation (a point brilliantly sustained in Gregory of Nazianzen’s Orations 27 and 28). In Orthodox theo­logy, therefore, the Logos specifically denotes the second person of the Trinity, the eternal Lord who was incarnated on earth as the Christ, and it is the language of Logos theology that thus made the artic­ulation of trinitarian theology possible. After the resolution effected by the Council of Nicea, Logos theology became the church’s stable and primary means of expressing Christology, and it underpins all the major ecumenical statements. It’s high point is generally taken to be as manifested in the work of the great fathers Athanasius, the Cappadocians, Cyril of Alexandria, and Maximos the Confessor.

Modern Orthodoxy has standardized and fixed its hypostatic language about God, reserving it to trinitarian theology. It is uncertain about the value, even the permissibility of other forms of theological “personification” (hypostatization). It is comfortable with the biblically supported personification of Sophia, and the patristic biblico-philosophical tradition of Logos, but remains uncomfortable with the person­ification of other attributes of God (such as pistis faith), which play a very important role in early Gnostic texts, and which was also a tendency in the ethos that led the Byzantines at Constantinople to dedicate their greatest churches to abstract principles such as Holy Wisdom and Holy Peace. However, it is precisely this proclivity to hypostasize abstract concepts (take infinity as an example) that led Orthodox mathematicians in early 20th-century Russia to provide possible answers to the most perplexing age-old mathematical and cosmological problems. It is in this sense that Logos theology is hardly a closed chapter in Orthodoxy’s past but, rather, remains a catalyst for continuing Orthodox contributions to modern philosophy. The works of such as Pavel Florensky, Sergius Bulgakov, Vladimir Solovyov, Nikolai Berdiaev, and Nikolai Luzin dem­onstrate that Logos theology is still alive and well in wider Orthodox intellectual circles.

SEE ALSO: Apophaticism; Berdiaev, Nikolai A. (1874–1948); Bulgakov, Sergius (Sergei) (1871–1944); Cappadocian Fathers; Council of Nicea I (325); Florensky, Pavel Alexandrovich (1882–1937); Gnosti­cism; Holy Trinity; Pontike, Evagrios (ca. 345–399); St. Athanasius of Alexandria (ca. 293–373); St. Cyril of Alexandria (ca. 378–444); St. Maximos the Confessor (580–662); Solovyov, Vladimir (1853–1900); Sophiology

REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS

Evagrius of Ponticus (1990) “The Kephalaia Gnostica,” trans. D. Bundy, in V. L. Wimbush (ed.) Ascetic Behavior in Greco-Roman Antiquity: A Sourcebook. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, pp. 175–86.

Florensky, P. (1997) The Pillar and Ground of Truth, trans. B. Jakim. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Graham, L. and Kantor, J.-M. (2009) Naming Infinity: A True Story of Religious Mysticism and Mathematical Creativity. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

Wolfson, H. A. (1970) The Philosophy of the Church Fathers. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.