by Laurent Guyénot, The Unz Review:
Somewhere in Asia Minor in the late 1st century AD, two philosophers, a Stoic and a Platonist, were sitting at the edge of a marketplace, surrounded by a dozen bystanders. They were debating about the Logos, the divine Intelligence that rules heaven and earth. The Platonist conceived the Logos as an intermediary principle between God and the physical universe. The Logos, he said, is the Mind of God, or the totality of the existing Forms or Ideas. The Stoic considered these distinctions arbitrary. Since God is by definition infinite, nothing is outside of Him. Therefore the Logos is not distinct from God, and neither is it distinct from the order or harmony (kosmos) of the world. He quoted Seneca’s On Benefits (IV,7): “what is Nature (Phusis) but God and divine reason, which pervades the universe and all its parts.” Therefore Theos, Logos and Kosmos are three different aspects, or just different names, of the same reality.
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At this point, a Jew among the listeners interrupted the philosophers to inform them that the Logos had actually come down from heaven in the form of the king of the Jews, crucified and resurrected in Jerusalem. Everyone burst out laughing.
The Jew’s name was Yohanan. He went on writing a scroll that started with: “In the beginning was the Logos, and the Logos was with God, and the Logos was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made, without him nothing was made that has been made” (John 1:1-3).
Never in their wildest nightmares could our two philosophers imagine that, two centuries later, this scroll would become official holy scripture, and the belief that the Logos was “made flesh” as a Jew declared compulsory throughout the Roman Empire, under penalty of death.
But such is the story of the Christianization in a nutshell.
There is a cruel irony in the Christian appropriation of the Logos. It is commonly translated as “the Word,” but the Greek logos, from which our word “logic” derives, is closer to “reason”. Whether Stoics or Platonists, philosophers posited that each man’s rational soul was a direct participation to the divine Logos, which is why men have the ability to rationally understand God and the universe. When early Greek-speaking Christian apologists blamed philosophers for putting their faith in “reason” rather than God, they used the word logos (Justin Martyr, Tatian, Theophilus of Antioch). But the same authors worshipped Jesus and claimed that he was the true and complete Logos all by himself. They changed the meaning of Logos so radically as to claim that being saved by the Logos required faith rather than reason. The Logos, the divine source of man’s reason, has been hijacked by a religion that requires men to surrender their reason to blind faith in impossible stories. “The wisdom of this world is foolishness in the sight of God,” wrote Paul (1Corinthians 3:19). “It is straightforwardly credible because it is senseless … it is certain because it is impossible,” wrote Tertullian (De Carne Christi 5.4). The philosophers’ libido sciendi was condemned as a mortal vanity, a concupiscence born of our corruption or of the Devil.
