Jonesing the Logos

Jonesing the Logos

The town of Echt, close to the southern tip of Holland, has a Carmelite convent and a railway station. It was from here, in 1942, that Sister Teresia Benedicta a Cruce (born Edith Stein) was taken by the Gestapo to her death at Auschwitz, following a statement by the Dutch bishops denouncing the Nazi invaders’ treatment of the Jews. She had just that morning finished writingThe Science of the Cross. “We go for our people,” she is said to have told her sister Rosa, who had joined her in the Carmel, and who with Edith and 40,000 other Jewish converts to Christianity were killed in the Nazis’ monumental act of spite.

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Bertrand Russell and "Ultimate Reality"

Bertrand Russell and "Ultimate Reality"

At the beginning of 2015, I spent six weeks traveling through India. The Catholics are a tiny minority in a sea of over one billion people, most of whom are Hindu. But they have a significant cultural asset. They have established a network of schools which are the best in India. Because of that fact, 80 percent of the students attending those schools are Hindus. I met one of those students at a Catholic school I visited in Delhi. After I gave a short talk to an English class of 16 year olds, a Hindu teenager by the name of Samil stood up and asked if I could come up with a scientific proof for the existence of God.

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Is Adherence to Logos Anti-Semitism? 

Is Adherence to Logos Anti-Semitism? 

Human dignity and the life of the human person in whom it inheres is not primarily an object of politics. Our primary access to the phenomenon of life is self-awareness and the perception of other humans and other living beings. Life is the being of the living. Vivere viventibus est esse, says Aristotle. Being, however, is never an object of politics as it is not an object either of natural science. It is in fact the primum notum of reason and as such secondarily an object of metaphysical reflection. Because life is the being of the living, then life cannot be defined. According to the classical adage ens et unum convertuntur, it holds true for every living organism that it is alive precisely as long as it possesses internal unity. 

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John and the Logos

John and the Logos

As a thought experiment, try to imagine what might have happened if Paul had begun his speech before the Areopagus by saying, “In the beginning there was Logos,” the sentence which begins the Gospel of St. John. Both John and Paul were involved in trying to make the birth, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ comprehensible to the Greco-Roman world. In order to do that, both men had to explain not only what Jesus did but who he was.  Paul prepared the way for the reception of John’s concept of the Logos into the world of Christian thought in his Epistle to the Hebrews when he described Christ as the “eternal High-priest after the order of Melchizedek.” A priest is by definition a human being. An “eternal High priest” is something else, but exactly what is not clear.  In order to make Christ’s identity clear, John took the concept of “logos,” which had been in existence for 500 years and reworked it in light of what he knew about Jesus Christ to provide the vocabulary which brought “one of the great cycles in human history” to a close1 and a new era into being based on an enhanced understanding of what went before. Paul criticized the vanity of the silversmiths and their apologists, but John took the gold and silver out of Greece. The word “logos” was in every sense of that notoriously polyvalent word the transition which did not abolish what went before but rather raised it to a new previously unattainable level. 

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