In Lógos, Part I, we talked about the fact that the natural world and everything in it is structured intelligently and behaves intelligently; and how because nothing in the natural world (apart from human beings) actually possesses intelligence, this means that the intelligence must have a transcendent source (beyond the natural world).

The ancient philosopher, Heraclitus of Ephesus, called this intelligence the Logos, a Greek term that can be translated into English as ‘Reason’, ‘Wisdom’, or ‘Word’. But because all three of these concepts are contained in the term Logos, I suggested that a good definition would be “the intelligent expression of a thought or idea that is true and right,” since words are intelligent expressions of thoughts or ideas, and wisdom and reason involve recognizing what is true and right. And this is what we see in the structure and behavior of things in the natural world; intelligence, reason, and wisdom. For example, an apple tree has, built into it, the intelligent, rational idea that they should make more apple trees, and their structure and behavior express this idea.

But ideas and thoughts can only come from a mind, which means that there must also be a mind behind the Logos. Hence we can infer from the intelligibility we see in the world that there exists a transcendent Mind which is the source of all things; not just some unintelligent force or mindless universal power that causes things to be as they are, but a rational Creator. And this Creator, this transcendent Mind, is who we call God.

Before we can move forward, though, we must first go back — all the way back, to the very beginning.

The Voice Of God

“In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.

The earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep; and the Spirit of God was moving over the face of the waters.

And God said, “Let there be light”; and there was light.

And God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness.”
_{Genesis 1:1-4}

These are the opening lines of the Bible, the beginning of the first chapter of the first book, Genesis, which is a Greek word that means ‘origin’, ‘creation’, or ‘generation’. In Genesis, we find a poetic, theological account of the creation of the universe. The third line in the story — “And God said ‘Let there be light’; and there was light” — is fairly well-known, even in popular culture; yet I’d wager that most people probably haven’t reflected on the significance of the wording. Ask yourself: why doesn’t the text just read “And God created light,” why does it specify that God said “Let there be light” before the light came into existence?

It’s not just light that God speaks into being, either; it’s every single thing in existence. This pattern, where God says “Let there be X” and then X comes into being, is repeated eight times in the Genesis creation account; the Earth, the Heavens, the seas, the stars, the plants and animals, and finally the first human beings, are all summoned forth from nothingness by God’s Word. The message here is simple: God creates through speech, through his Word — through the Logos. So while Heraclitus’s conception of the Logos was a novel idea in ancient Greece, that’s really only because the Greeks weren’t Jewish. The notion that God creates and governs the world by his Logos is a fundamental principle of Judeo-Christian theology. And the idea isn’t just found in Genesis, either. Here are a few other passages from the Old Testament that express the same notion:

“Let all your creatures serve you; for you spoke, and they were made.
You sent forth your breath, and it formed them.”
_{Judith 16:14}

“By the word of the LORD the heavens were made, and all their host by the breath of his mouth.
For he spoke, and it came to be; he commanded, and it sprang into being.”
_{Psalm 33:6, 9}

“God of my ancestors, Lord of mercy, you who have made all things by your word,”
_{Wisdom 9:1}

“By the LORD’s word his works were brought into being”
_{Sirach 42:15}

Now, it’s important to understand that God isn’t literally speaking actual words to bring things into being. God is immaterial, which means he doesn’t have a physical body; and no body means no mouth and no vocal chords, which means no actual speech. This language of God “speaking” — like most of the language we use to discuss God — is analogical. Analogy is when you talk about one thing as though it’s another thing in order to make an explanatory point.

We often talk about God as though he’s human in order to explain certain things, to express certain truths, even though what we’re saying isn’t literal. And when we say that God creates through his Word, one of the truths we’re expressing is exactly what I’ve been explaining about the Logos thus far; that the world around us is imbued with intelligence, and that this is because it has been brought forth by a rational Mind. The authors of Genesis may not have had all of the technical metaphysical language needed to express these things in great detail, but we can see that their poetry still contains the very same truths that philosophers like Heraclitus have since expressed in a different way.

Beside Him As Artisan

Alright, so God creates through his Word, but God’s Word clearly isn’t just any sort of word. Words can be unwise, and they can be untrue; but God’s Word cannot be either of these, because God is the very source of Wisdom and Truth. So, when God speaks, he is always speaking Truth and Wisdom. It’s fitting, then, that elsewhere in the Old Testament there are references to God creating through his Wisdom:

“The LORD by wisdom founded the earth;
by understanding he established the heavens;
by his knowledge the deeps broke forth,”
_{Proverbs 3:19-20}

“It is he who made the earth by his power,
who established the world by his wisdom,
and by his understanding stretched out the heavens.
When he utters his voice there is a tumult of waters in the heavens,
and he makes the mist rise from the ends of the earth.”
_{Jeremiah 10:12-13}

In fact, some passages actually personify Wisdom, portraying it as a Divine Person, who was with God since before time began. And in several places, the Scripture authors write poetically from the first-person perspective of Wisdom — as though Wisdom herself is the one speaking (Wisdom is artistically portrayed as a woman, likely because the Hebrew language is gendered, and their word for ‘wisdom’ is feminine):

“From the mouth of the Most High I came forth,
and covered the earth like a mist.
In the heights of heaven I dwelt,
and my throne was in a pillar of cloud.”
_{Sirach 24:3-4}

“The LORD begot me, the beginning of his works,
the forerunner of his deeds of long ago;
From of old I was formed,
at the first, before the earth.

When there were no deeps I was brought forth,
when there were no fountains or springs of water;

When he established the heavens, there was I,
when he marked out the vault over the face of the deep;

When he fixed the foundations of earth,
then was I beside him as artisan;”
_{Proverbs 8:22-24, 27, 30}

As you can see, God’s Wisdom is credited with creating the world in union with God. This makes it clear that ‘Word’ and ‘Wisdom’ are essentially interchangeable terms to use when discussing the power by which God creates; which makes sense if, as I’ve said, Logos can be translated as either one. So when Scripture talks about God creating through speech, by his Word, and when it talks about God creating by his Wisdom, we can take both of these as references to the Logos.

But so far I’ve only quoted from the Old Testament. So you might be wondering: is there any discussion of the Logos in the New Testament?

And The Word Was God

Believe it or not, virtually the entire New Testament is dedicated to discussing the Logos.

Nowhere is this made more clear than in the prologue to the Gospel of Saint John:

“In the beginning was the Word [Logos],

and the Word was with God,

and the Word was God.

All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being.

In him was life, and the life was the light of men.

The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.”
_{John 1:1-5}

Do you see the parallels to the opening lines of Genesis?

The most obvious one is that the first few words of each passage are identical. By starting off his Gospel with “In the beginning,” John was sending a message to his Hebrew audience. He was letting them know that this Logos he was describing was the very same Word by which God spoke the universe into being in Genesis.

Perhaps the strangest line in this passage, though, is: “and the Word was God.”

How can God’s Word be God? Isn’t this a contradiction? When I speak, my words are not me; my self and my words are two separate things. So how can it be said that God’s Word is God?

Bishop Robert Barron provides a wonderful explanation of this, in his commentary on John’s Gospel:

“Whenever we use words, we express something of ourselves. For example, as I type these words, I’m telling you what I know about the prologue to the Johannine Gospel; when you speak to a friend, you’re telling him or her how you feel or what you’re afraid of; when an umpire shouts out a call, he’s communicating how he has assessed a play; etc.

But God, the sheer act of being itself, the perfect Creator of the universe, is able utterly to speak himself in one great Word, a Word that does not simply contain an aspect of his being but rather the whole of his being. This is why we say in the Nicene Creed that the Word is ‘God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God’; and this is why St. John says that the Word was God.”

What a beautiful account of the Logos. As an aside, if you aren’t familiar with Bishop Barron, I very much recommend checking out his YouTube channel; his videos explaining Catholic teaching played a central role in my return to faith a couple of years ago, after having spent much of my adult life drifting between agnosticism and atheism.

The Incarnation

But the most profound part of John’s Gospel comes just a few more lines down:

“And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth; we have beheld his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father.

And from his fullness have we all received, grace upon grace.

For as the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.

No one has ever seen God; but the only Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, he has made him known.”
_{John 1:14, 16-18}

That’s right. Here John is making the radical claim that the man, Jesus Christ, is in fact the human Incarnation of the Word of God — the Logos. This intelligence we’ve been discussing that’s implicit in the natural world, this rational principle that structures and governs reality, by which all things came to be, is not only a Divine Person, but a Divine Person who entered into our world in a tangible way, taking on the form of a human being.

John also refers to Jesus as “the Son” — as in the Son of God, a phrase which you’ve likely heard before. This title tells us something important about the Logos, namely that he was not created by God, but rather — just as Scripture says of Wisdom in the passage I quoted from Proverbs — he was begotten by God, before the foundation of the world.

Think of the difference between God creating the world vs. God begetting the Logos, as being analogous to the difference between a man creating a sculpture vs. a man begetting a child. Like all analogies, this is imperfect, but what it’s meant to illustrate is that there’s a distinct difference between creating a work of art and conceiving a child. God creates the world and everything in it from nothing, ex nihilo in Latin; but God brings forth his Son from his very essence. And because God is eternal, that means the Son is eternal, and so was never “created” in the sense that we typically think of it; the Son of God never began to exist. Rather, he is eternally begotten by the Father, beyond time, in the eternal now.

This is why, in the Nicene Creed, Catholics say that Jesus Christ, the Son of God, was “begotten, not made; consubstantial (one in substance) with the Father”. But this is getting into the theology and the metaphysics of the Trinity, which I plan to do a full post on in the near future. The important thing for us to understand right now is that the Person who is the Word of God exists eternally, and that he chose to enter into a specific time and place in the Incarnation, taking on the form of man, in order to redeem our humanity.

Here are several quotes from the document Dei Verbum (The Word of God), promulgated by Pope Paul VI in 1965, which will help shed more light on what the Church calls “the mystery of the Incarnation”:

“In His goodness and wisdom God chose to reveal Himself and to make known to us the hidden purpose of His will by which through Christ, the Word made flesh, man might in the Holy Spirit have access to the Father and come to share in the divine nature. Through this revelation, therefore, the invisible God out of the abundance of His love speaks to men as friends and lives among them, so that He may invite and take them into fellowship with Himself.”

“By this revelation then, the deepest truth about God and the salvation of man shines out for our sake in Christ, who is both the mediator and the fullness of all revelation.”

“[A]fter speaking in many and varied ways through the prophets, “now at last in these days God has spoken to us in His Son” (Heb. 1:1-2). For He sent His Son, the eternal Word, who enlightens all men, so that He might dwell among men and tell them of the innermost being of God. Jesus Christ, therefore, the Word made flesh, was sent as “a man to men.” He “speaks the words of God”, and completes the work of salvation which His Father gave Him to do. To see Jesus is to see His Father. For this reason Jesus perfected revelation by fulfilling it through his whole work of making Himself present and manifesting Himself: through His words and deeds, His signs and wonders, but especially through His death and glorious resurrection from the dead and final sending of the Spirit of truth. Moreover He confirmed with divine testimony what revelation proclaimed, that God is with us to free us from the darkness of sin and death, and to raise us up to life eternal.”

By the way, in a fascinating turn of events, Saint John actually wrote his Gospel while living in the Greek city of Ephesus, where he had moved with Saint Paul (whose letter to the Ephesians is part of the New Testament canon) to found a church community. This is, indeed, the very same Ephesus in which Heraclitus had lived around 600 years prior. How poetic that Heraclitus formulated his concept of the Logos in the same city in which Saint John would later author his biography of Jesus Christ, the human Incarnation of the Logos. As the modern apologist Scott Hahn loves to say:

“History may not repeat itself; but it sure does rhyme!”

Truth, Simplified

If trying to understand all of this is making your head spin, perhaps I can bring a bit more clarity to the matter. At this point we’ve established that the Logos, the Word of God, the Wisdom of God, the Son of God, and Jesus Christ, are all names that refer to the same Divine Person. But perhaps the easiest way to understand what we’re really discussing here is to call the Logos by a different name: Truth. In John 14:6, Christ himself says, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life.”

Truth is simple; the concept of truth is easy for us to comprehend. What’s true is what’s real; truth is what aligns with reality. When we say that Christ is the Incarnation of the Logos, what we’re saying is that he is Truth in the form of a human being. So it follows that whatever he says is true, and whatever he does is true — objectively and absolutely. He cannot lie, in word or action; not because his will is constrained, but because it would be contrary to his nature, as he is the full embodiment of Truth, itself. To say that Christ could lie is equivalent to saying that the truth could be false; it’s a logical contradiction.

This means that he doesn’t simply obey truth, rather he determines truth. The Logos — and so Christ — is the very arbiter of reality. This is demonstrated in Genesis when everything God speaks becomes real, and it is demonstrated throughout the Gospels when everything Jesus speaks becomes real; telling the sick to be healed, telling the lame to walk, telling demons to leave the possessed, telling the dead to rise, and even telling the Apostles at the Last Supper that the bread was his body and that the wine was his blood (Matthew 26:20-29, Mark 14:17-25, Luke 22:14-20, 1 Corinthians 11:23-25, or this page which lists all four accounts side-by-side). Understanding Christ as the Logos is actually very helpful when trying to understand the Eucharist, but I plan to write a full post about that soon.

A More Perfect Union

Truth itself came to us in the form of a human being, in part to show us the true way to be a human being. The Logos took on our nature so that he might be an example to us — our absolute ideal. Jesus Christ is the perfect man, and he invites us all to strive to embody that very same perfection. All that is Good, all that is True, all that is Beautiful, is such only insofar as it participates in the Divine nature; and Jesus Christ shows us what it looks like when the Divine nature is manifested fully in a human being.

It is a dogma of the Church that Jesus Christ has two natures, a human nature and a Divine nature, existing together in perfect harmony within a single person. This tells us something profoundly important about God: that he is never in competition with us. God doesn’t impose, he doesn’t overwhelm. It’s never “us or him” — if God enters into our being, he doesn’t crowd us out and take over.

This might be hard for us to conceive of, because it’s contrary to how the physical world operates. You and I cannot occupy the same space, because my being and your being are in competition. Not so with God. Instead, the precise opposite happens; when we invite God into our existence, into our lives, into our souls, he makes us more ourselves than we were before.

This is because we were made for him — for union with the Divine. This is our sole purpose; this is the meaning of our lives. As Saint Augustine of Hippo said:

“You have made us for yourself, O Lord,
and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.”

Jesus Christ, the Logos, entered into time and space in order to help us attain union with God. In his human nature, he lovingly extends to each one of us an invitation to join him in sharing in the Divine nature.

Accept the invitation.

God love you.