Reason without love and the imagination is a curse
by Phil Hall
In trying to understand the concept of the Logos I read how Pope Benedict described Christianity as the religion of the logos.
‘From the beginning, Christianity has understood itself as the religion of the Logos, as the religion according to reason. … It has always defined men, all men without distinction, as creatures and images of God, proclaiming for them … the same dignity. In this connection, the Enlightenment is of Christian origin and it is no accident that it was born precisely and exclusively in the realm of the Christian faith. … It was and is the merit of the Enlightenment to have again proposed these original values of Christianity and of having given back to reason its own voice … Today, this should be precisely [Christianity’s] philosophical strength, in so far as the problem is whether the world comes from the irrational, and reason is not other than a “sub-product,” on occasion even harmful of its development—or whether the world comes from reason, and is, as a consequence, its criterion and goal. … In the so necessary dialogue between secularists and Catholics, we Christians must be very careful to remain faithful to this fundamental line: To live a faith that comes from the Logos, from creative reason, and that, because of this, is also open to all that is truly rational.’
Christianity pairs itself with science and all human knowledge because Christ is the embodiment of reason, too. The reason why Christ is considered to be the son of God is because he is the logos. So Christ is the embodiment of the word of God and he manifests God because God is the word.
But there are serious questions to ask about the nature of the logos. Not only in the Christian meaning, but in the Greek meaning and in the meaning of logos embedded in the philosophy of science.
The idea then is a simple one. That the world is an ordered place and that it is formed and ordered and that there is something about it that orders and forms it.
Humans have characterised this ordering principle in different cultures in different ways. For example, the Hindus and Buddhists characterise it as Dharma. But according to the peoples of the book the principle way this force expresses itself is through language: the logos. They understand the universe through exegesis, through readings and analyses of the scriptures of their religion. The concept of the logos comes down to us from Heraclitus via Philo of Alexandria and it was incorporated into Christianity:
‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God ‘
‘The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us.’
Harold Bloom, the literary critic thought Shakespeare used words to bring a certain type of human awareness of self into being. Bloom was also a Kabbalist and while he was a literary critic, he didn’t get lost in deconstruction and semiotics, where meaning tends to disappear up its own fundament. Kabbalism thinks of words as intermediaries or connections between us and God, אֵין סוֹף,.
Words exist, according to one branch of Jewish philosophy, in the methos: acting as a bridge. This is the obvious philosophy of a literary critic who venerates literature. In the Targumim (authorised translations of the Torah) the Logos is discussed. In The Book of Wisdom it is called the memra.
Shakespeare himself understood the idea of the logos perfectly. The power of language to conjure up whole orderly, consistent realities. In the end, Shakespeare drew many people into his world, just as the Bible did before Shakespeare.
But, unlike the Bible writers, Shakespeare doesn’t manage to convince himself of the transcendent value of what he has written. In The Tempest, Shakespeare the writer describes how Prospero breaks his staff and eschews his art. Shakespeare breaks his magic wand (his pen). He can’t enchant himself, though he can enchant everyone else.
The ancient Egyptians thought the word hu brought everything into being. They personified it. In modern terms you might say that the people who believe the universe is best explained through mathematics believe in the logos and Mathematics. Science and mathematics as their Hu. They personify science in the way the ancients personified the logos, but in an odd, disembodied way: ‘Science tells us that…’ Science is placed in the subject position of a sentence, as if it were an animate noun.
Logos is rationality, reason, thought. It is the essence of the enlightenment. The enlightenment disembodies god, ‘killing’ him, returning the logos to the abstract, the material. and depriving it of the imagination, of love and altruism. These become mere welcome additions. The enlightenment steals away some of the key defining qualities of the embodied and personified logos in Christ. In doing so it makes utilitarian obscenities like the Internet panopticon and eugenics seem logical and desirable. Once you separate out reason from the Logos, reason usurps the Logos and it becomes Procrustean.
My problem with the logos as a rational force is that it becomes what Jung termed the animus. It is what Nietzsche characterises as the Apollonian. It rejects the anima and the Dionysian.
In other words, whatever the logos as reason is, whatever the logic is that is used to justify a certain privileged position or viewpoint is, that which it is not considered reasonable is discarded, pathologised, relegated, ignored, misinterpreted, bowdlerised and rubbished.
So, some people who regard themselves to be rational and reasonable would abort all foetuses with Down’s syndrome. But someone with Down’s syndrome might strongly protest the abortion of all people with Down’s syndrome. Autistic people, people with crooked noses, the list of foetuses that the rational eugenicists might decide to abort is long.
Reason alone as the logos burns alternatives and possibility and creates chaos and destruction. Reason must be informed by ‘a holy spirit’. By an inclusive vision of humanity and life. By a closer, more intuitive and open-minded understanding of the real underlying ordering system of the universe, that which is sometimes characterised as the inexpressible Tao.
1.
‘Existence is beyond the power of words
To define:
Terms may be used
But are none of them absolute.
In the beginning of heaven and earth there were no words,
Words came out of the womb of matter;
And whether a man dispassionately
Sees to the core of life
Or passionately
Sees the surface,
The core and the surface
Are essentially the same,
Words making them seem different
Only to express appearance.
If name be needed, wonder names them both:
From wonder into wonder
Existence opens.’
Verse 1 of Lao Tsu’s Tao The Ching, Witter Bynner translation
Alternatively, as the Muslim Hadith has it:
‘The Prophet (ﷺ) said “If a house fly falls in the drink of anyone of you, he should dip it (in the drink) and take it out, for one of its wings has a disease and the other has the cure.’
Reason without love and the imagination is a disease.