2021/09/24

Tel qu'en lui-meme... — Mallarmé poem in honor of Edgar Allan Poe.

Tel qu'en lui-meme... — Chronicles of Love and Resentment

Tel qu’en Lui-même enfin l’Eternité le change
Le Poëte suscite avec un glaive nu
Son siècle épouvanté de n’avoir pas connu
Que la mort triomphait dans cette voix étrange!

[At last changed by Eternity into himself
The poet arouses with a naked sword
His century terrified not to have known
That death triumphed in that strange voice.]

What do we become after we are dead? Many think this the key religious question. We like to imagine ourselves living in some kind of afterlife, heaven or hell, or, in the hopeful Catholic institution of purgatory, where we can rid ourselves of the sins we are unlikely to have sufficiently purged during our lifetime. We try to imagine what paradise might be like; what enjoyments are available to the blessed? (The torments of hell need little imaginary effort; we’ve already experienced enough of these on earth.)

Yet it isn’t difficult to conceive what will happen to us after we are dead; the model for the afterlife, as of all supernatural phenomena, of all transcendence, is the verticality of the sign’s relation to its referent.

If I am nothing but this mortal body and its associated sensations, then there is indeed no way to imagine an afterlife. After its death, the body cannot continue to live. What survives, it is usually said, is our soul or spirit. In today’s vocabulary, we may call this our self.

 Let us recall how the death of others is experienced. In the case of our family and personal friends, we rehearse our memories of them, we cherish objects associated with them. For those who have had a more general impact, we remember their works: the companies they built, the devices they invented, the treaties they signed, the books or music they composed.

Where is the self in all this? Mallarmé wrote the poem quoted above for the unveiling of a monument in honor of Edgar Allan Poe. Poe was an alcoholic who had led an unhappy, dissolute life. But his death makes such facts secondary; as he lives in our memory, it is in his art that Poe is truly Lui-même. Nor is this a sentimental figure of speech; it is a matter of historical fact. Perhaps Poe himself might have preferred to survive in some other guise, but we do not memorialize the dead in answer to their wishes. The himself that history makes of him is a function of his public image. It is subject to modification, but the dead person himself is no longer in control of this modification.

Death is a fact of life for all higher animals. What then could lead human beings at some point in history to begin to commemorate it? Poe is a name, a proper noun. The name is coeval with the self, which is in the first place a self-for-others; others give me my name, and call me by it. The idea that we have a self that survives our death depends on the existence of signs; in Greek, the word for both tomb and sign is the same: sêma. If we honor the dead, it is because death is a moment of crisis, when the referent of a public meaning, a proper name, is no longer directly available. What we fear is not the mere fact of death itself, but the extinction of a communally agreed-upon meaning. Death is the sign of a violence perpetrated against the community.

What then do I become after death? What I mean to others. Before, I had the potential to modify this meaning, even if I could not define it. Now that I am dead, I have no further chance to reposition myself in the marketplace of meaning–although my position within it will continue to evolve, modified by factors beyond my control.

Is this immortality? Today, market rationalization has caught up with the afterlife; the contemporary vision of the soul’s transcendent permanence is as fame. The pathos revealed in the horrors of daytime talk-shows reflects our hunger for what Andy Warhol so prophetically called our fifteen minutes of fame–hopefully enough to get us a footnote in a history book. The traditional ideas of heaven and hell belong to stable communities who can expect to remember their ancestors “forever”; industrial market society has changed all that.

Yet it has not changed the essence of our situation. Animals do not want to die, but they have no desire for, or concept of, immortality. That is a human trait, and like all human traits it is the result of our possession of language. We can only desire to survive beyond our death because we conceive of an essence, an Idea that corresponds to the name we are called by and yet does not die with us. If words have signifieds that survive the death of whatever they refer to, why not we?

The struggling artist in a garret is a familiar nineteenth-century model of cultural integrity. While others enjoy the fruits of their sell-out to the hated bourgeoisie, the authentic creator endures poverty and anonymity, confident that future generations will recognize his greatness. The culture of market society despises the marketplace, but puts its confidence in that future state of it that it calls posterity.

This idea still lives in today’s world of market-driven art. But theory has become the crucial testing-ground for the deferral of success that tested the artist’s mettle a century ago. I’ll try to give these ideas some theoretical polish next week.

====
THE GRAVE OF EDGAR ALLEN POE by Stéphane Mallarmé, Trans. by Jacques Houis
08/30/2016~JHOUIS

Such as into himself eternity finally changes him
The poet brings forth with a naked blade his century terrified at not having known that
death triumphed in this strange voice!
They, like a vile hydra’s start upon hearing anciently the angel give a purer meaning to
the words of the tribe, proclaimed loudly the spell imbibed
In the flow without honor of some black mixture.
If from hostile sky and soil, ô grievance!
Our idea cannot sculpt a bas relief
To ornament Poe’s
dazzling grave
Calm block fallen down here from some obscure disaster
Let this granite at least show forever their limit to the dark flights of Blasphemy scattered
in the future.

==

Le tombeau d’Edgar Poe

Tel qu’en Lui-même enfin l’éternité le change,
Le Poète suscite avec un glaive nu
Son siècle épouvanté de n’avoir pas connu
Que la mort triomphait dans cette voix étrange!
Eux, comme un vil sursaut d’hydre oyant jadis l’ange
Donner un sens plus pur aux mots de la tribu,
Proclamèrent très haut le sortilège bu
Dans le flot sans honneur de quelque noir mélange.
Du sol et de la nue hostiles, ô grief!
Si notre idée avec ne sculpte un bas-relief
Dont la tombe de Poe éblouissante s’orne
Calme bloc ici-bas chu d’un désastre obscur
Que ce granit du moins montre à jamais sa borne
Aux noirs vols du Blasphème épars dans le futur.


==



In Praise of Calvin's Total Depravity | Sojourners

In Praise of Calvin's Total Depravity | Sojourners


CommentaryPoliticsRacial Justice

IN PRAISE OF CALVIN'S TOTAL DEPRAVITY
We can’t defeat racism by “being good” or “feeling guilty.”

BY LUCAS KWONG

SEP 23, 2021
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Architect of Puritanism, inventor of the Protestant work ethic, forerunner of cancel culture: John Calvin’s list of supposed offenses stretches longer than his Bible commentaries.

In a recent interview with Cornel West, Atlantic staff writer Emma Green suggested that a form of “secular Calvinism” is at work among white leftists who now see themselves, and other white people, as “stained with sin before [they’re] born,” lacking “power to change [their] sinfulness.” Similarly, Green’s Atlantic colleague Anne Applebaum saw the enduring legacy of the Calvinist-descended Puritans (and their Scarlet Letter-esque shunning rituals) at work in cases like Donald McNeil’s firing from The New York Times for using the N-word, or Yale’s investigation into the alleged indiscretions of law professor Amy Chua, who popularized the stereotype of the Asian “tiger mother.”

As a post-evangelical, I have no interest in rehabilitating Calvin’s ideas about double predestination or his justification for the execution of Michael Servetus. Nonetheless, I’m unwilling to cast Calvin and his theological legacy in exclusively negative terms; I believe that confronting racial injustice today actually requires recuperating Calvin’s infamous doctrine of “total depravity,” or a spiritual condition staining humanity from birth. Doing so can help us better understand why both progressive and reactionary heirs to Calvinist thought fall short — and how we might work to transform our fallen world instead.

Consider theologian James H. Cone, who described lynching as America’s “original sin,” thereby integrating the idea of total depravity with an analysis of systemic racism — or racism that continues to manifest itself in laws, courts, schools, and health care. In The Cross and the Lynching Tree, Cone argues that the United States’ sinful legacy of racism alienates people from each other and from the God who stands in solidarity with the oppressed. For Cone, rescue from this depravity could only be found in Black liberation, fueled by Christ’s crucifixion: an act of divine solidarity with all who “suffer[ed] on lynching trees.”
READ MORE: Christian Opponents of CRT Peddle a Hollow Salvation

Cone’s analysis of lynching and racism extends Calvin’s vision of a corrupt tendency festering beneath apparent order and virtue. Though total depravity is often misunderstood as a description of maximal evil, Calvin used the phrase to name a distortion abiding throughout our world. According to Calvin, the only reason this distortion doesn’t erupt into chaos everywhere is because God’s providence “curbs the perverseness of nature, preventing it from breaking forth into action.” Thus, trying to defeat a latent enemy in seemingly upright individuals and institutions by “being good,” or even “feeling guilty,” doesn’t work; only radical grace can subdue the ever-present monster Calvin describes as a “hydra [that] lurks in every breast.”

Unlike the popular caricatures of Calvinistic theology that Green and Applebaum paint, Calvin depicts total depravity as a corruption so thorough that it stains not only individual people, but also the systems and structures they create. Ironically, these systems can display depravity precisely through misguided efforts to eradicate that depravity. Hence, what Green and Applebaum decry as the “secular Calvinism” or “New Puritanism” might be better understood as a kind of pseudo-Puritanism that is fixated on avoiding wrongdoing rather than advocating for transformation. This pseudo-Puritanism is absorbed in a personal holiness that doesn’t do justice to how Puritan thought eventually influenced social issues, like abolition.

In other words, Calvin’s thought actually affirms some of Green and Applebaum’s criticisms of white progressivism. If total depravity warps virtually everything that humans touch, including our most cherished institutions, we can’t vanquish the hydra of racism by celebrating how Teen Vogue editor Alexi McCammond was pressured to resign after anti-Asian and homophobic tweets she made in 2011 resurfaced. Nor can we defang the monster by merely condemning Princeton professor Joshua Katz, for denouncing an anti-racist letter signed by his colleagues. As guilty or wrongheaded as these individuals might be, fixating on them alone allows the status quo — and the systemic lynching the status quo enables through current carceral, medical, and educational policies — to thrive.

However, the sheer scale of total depravity also reminds us that these rituals of coercive moralism don’t just originate from anti-racist activists; debased versions of Puritan zealotry are also evident among those working to preserve a white-dominant status quo. Amy Chua, who Applebaum cited as a target of progressives, once threatened to “call every justice on the Supreme Court” to make sure they shunned a Yale Law student. The student’s crime: criticizing Chua’s husband for a right-leaning attack on campus sexual assault policies. Given that Chua prides herself on mentoring students of color, it’s not hard to see how such threats pressure the next generation of Black, brown, and Asian lawyers to defer to Yale’s white male-led establishment. More recently, the “China Initiative,” a Sinophobic project of the Department of Justice, has destroyed the livelihoods of Chinese academics over false accusations of espionage. This organized xenophobia originated under Trump and has now continued into Biden’s administration. If the hydra lurks in every breast, then attending only to anti-racist pseudo-Puritanism exposes just one head of the beast.

So how do we exit the nightmare of total depravity, particularly when it’s disguised in expressions of righteousness? Marilynne Robinson, a Calvinist, insists that this doctrine must be understood in light of Calvin’s “rapturous humanism,” which celebrates humanity as “a workshop graced with God’s unnumbered works.” In Calvin’s reckoning, the soul’s workshop of creativity, perseverance, and sheer sublimity is more foundational to humanity than depravity; our ongoing capacity to produce such gifts should prevent us from settling for performing allyship at anti-racist workshops.

For us, this means recognizing that humanity’s “workshop of grace” offers its highest fruits in Black civil rights leaders, Latin American radical priests, Hong Kong protesters, and white antifascists — people who all assert that depravity’s effects on the oppressed require a radical transformation of our world. Their activism embodies the “mediating stage of conversion and transformation” that West names as a corrective to white liberal fatalism. It’s a grace with which, I believe, Calvin would be proud to associate himself.

In that light, maybe the solution to the problem identified by Green and Applebaum isn’t to disown Calvin or his analysis of original sin. Rather, we might embrace Calvin’s insights regarding total depravity and the grace required to overturn it. Amid a tidal wave of domination and exploitation, Christians believe that such grace ultimately reaches humanity through a God who predetermines to dwell amongst those who liberation theologians call “the crucified of history.” Instead of encouraging an impulse to shun, a proper understanding of total depravity demands that we embrace those already shunned: the “least of these my brethren” with whom Christ, in his execution at the hands of an antisemitic imperial state, so emphatically identified (Matthew 25; 27:37). Through similar identification, we might find ourselves elected to ever deeper kinship with the crucified God who calls us, once and for all, to behead the hydra.



Lucas Kwong


Lucas Kwong is a writer, musician, assistant professor of English at New York City College of Technology. He has written for numerous publications and is the author of an open letter on anti-Asian racism and Christian nationalism, which you can read and sign here: www.againstchristianxenophobia.com. Follow him on Twitter @xenoseimi.

Logos - Wikipedia

Logos - Wikipedia

Logos

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Greek spelling of logos

Logos (UK/ˈlɡɒs, ˈlɒɡɒs/US/ˈlɡs/Ancient Greekλόγοςromanizedlógos; from λέγωlégōlit.''I say'') is a term in Western philosophypsychologyrhetoric, and religion derived from a Greek word variously meaning "ground", "plea", "opinion", "expectation", "word", "speech", "account", "reason", "proportion", and "discourse".[1][2] It became a technical term in Western philosophy beginning with Heraclitus (c.  535 – c.  475 BC), who used the term for a principle of order and knowledge.[3]

Ancient Greek philosophers used the term in different ways. The sophists used the term to mean discourseAristotle applied the term to refer to "reasoned discourse"[4] or "the argument" in the field of rhetoric, and considered it one of the three modes of persuasion alongside ethos and pathos.[5] Pyrrhonist philosophers used the term to refer to dogmatic accounts of non-evident matters. The Stoics spoke of the logos spermatikos (the generative principle of the Universe) which foreshadows related concepts in neoplatonism.[6]

Within Hellenistic JudaismPhilo (c.  20 BC – c.  50 AD) adopted the term into Jewish philosophy.[7] Philo distinguished between logos prophorikos ("the uttered word") and the logos endiathetos ("the word remaining within").[8]

The Gospel of John identifies the Christian Logos, through which all things are made, as divine (theos),[9] and further identifies Jesus Christ as the incarnate Logos. Early translators of the Greek New Testament such as Jerome (in the 4th century AD) were frustrated by the inadequacy of any single Latin word to convey the meaning of the word logos as used to describe Jesus Christ in the Gospel of John. The Vulgate Bible usage of in principio erat verbum was thus constrained to use the (perhaps inadequate) noun verbum for "word", but later Romance language translations had the advantage of nouns such as le Verbe in French. Reformation translators took another approach. Martin Luther rejected Zeitwort (verb) in favor of Wort (word), for instance, although later commentators repeatedly turned to a more dynamic use involving the living word as felt by Jerome and Augustine.[10] The term is also used in Sufism, and the analytical psychology of Carl Jung.

Despite the conventional translation as "word", logos is not used for a word in the grammatical sense—for that, the term lexis (λέξιςléxis) was used.[11] However, both logos and lexis derive from the same verb légō (λέγω), meaning "(I) count, tell, say, speak".[1][11][12]

Ancient Greek philosophy[edit]

Heraclitus[edit]

The writing of Heraclitus (c. 535 – c. 475 BC) was the first place where the word logos was given special attention in ancient Greek philosophy,[13] although Heraclitus seems to use the word with a meaning not significantly different from the way in which it was used in ordinary Greek of his time.[14] For Heraclitus, logos provided the link between rational discourse and the world's rational structure.[15]

This logos holds always but humans always prove unable to ever understand it, both before hearing it and when they have first heard it. For though all things come to be in accordance with this logos, humans are like the inexperienced when they experience such words and deeds as I set out, distinguishing each in accordance with its nature and saying how it is. But other people fail to notice what they do when awake, just as they forget what they do while asleep.

— Diels–Kranz, 22B1

For this reason it is necessary to follow what is common. But although the logos is common, most people live as if they had their own private understanding.

— Diels–Kranz, 22B2

Listening not to me but to the logos it is wise to agree that all things are one.

— Diels–Kranz, 22B50[16]

What logos means here is not certain; it may mean "reason" or "explanation" in the sense of an objective cosmic law, or it may signify nothing more than "saying" or "wisdom".[17] Yet, an independent existence of a universal logos was clearly suggested by Heraclitus.[18]

Aristotle's rhetorical logos[edit]

Aristotle, 384–322 BC.

Following one of the other meanings of the word, Aristotle gave logos a different technical definition in the Rhetoric, using it as meaning argument from reason, one of the three modes of persuasion. The other two modes are pathos (πᾰ́θοςpáthos), which refers to persuasion by means of emotional appeal, "putting the hearer into a certain frame of mind";[19] and ethos (ἦθοςêthos), persuasion through convincing listeners of one's "moral character".[19] According to Aristotle, logos relates to "the speech itself, in so far as it proves or seems to prove".[19][20] In the words of Paul Rahe:

For Aristotle, logos is something more refined than the capacity to make private feelings public: it enables the human being to perform as no other animal can; it makes it possible for him to perceive and make clear to others through reasoned discourse the difference between what is advantageous and what is harmful, between what is just and what is unjust, and between what is good and what is evil.[4]

Logospathos, and ethos can all be appropriate at different times.[21] Arguments from reason (logical arguments) have some advantages, namely that data are (ostensibly) difficult to manipulate, so it is harder to argue against such an argument; and such arguments make the speaker look prepared and knowledgeable to the audience, enhancing ethos.[citation needed] On the other hand, trust in the speaker—built through ethos—enhances the appeal of arguments from reason.[22]

Robert Wardy suggests that what Aristotle rejects in supporting the use of logos "is not emotional appeal per se, but rather emotional appeals that have no 'bearing on the issue', in that the pathē [πᾰ́θηpáthē] they stimulate lack, or at any rate are not shown to possess, any intrinsic connection with the point at issue—as if an advocate were to try to whip an antisemitic audience into a fury because the accused is Jewish; or as if another in drumming up support for a politician were to exploit his listeners's reverential feelings for the politician's ancestors".[23]

Aristotle comments on the three modes by stating:

Of the modes of persuasion furnished by the spoken word there are three kinds.

The first kind depends on the personal character of the speaker;
the second on putting the audience into a certain frame of mind;
the third on the proof, or apparent proof, provided by the words of the speech itself.

— Aristotle, Rhetoric, 350 BC

[24]

Pyrrhonists[edit]

The Pyrrhonist philosopher Sextus Empiricus defined the Pyrrhonist usage of logos as "When we say 'To every logos an equal logos is opposed,' by 'every logos' we mean 'every logos that has been considered by us,' and we use 'logos' not in its ordinary sense but for that which establishes something dogmatically, that is to say, concerning the non-evident, and which establishes it in any way at all, not necessarily by means of premises and conclusion."[25]

Stoics[edit]

Stoic philosophy began with Zeno of Citium c. 300 BC, in which the logos was the active reason pervading and animating the Universe. It was conceived as material and is usually identified with God or Nature. The Stoics also referred to the seminal logos ("logos spermatikos"), or the law of generation in the Universe, which was the principle of the active reason working in inanimate matter. Humans, too, each possess a portion of the divine logos.[26]

The Stoics took all activity to imply a logos or spiritual principle. As the operative principle of the world, the logos was anima mundi to them, a concept which later influenced Philo of Alexandria, although he derived the contents of the term from Plato.[27] In his Introduction to the 1964 edition of Marcus AureliusMeditations, the Anglican priest Maxwell Staniforth wrote that "Logos ... had long been one of the leading terms of Stoicism, chosen originally for the purpose of explaining how deity came into relation with the universe".[28]

Isocrates' logos[edit]

Public discourse on ancient Greek rhetoric has historically emphasized Aristotle's appeals to logospathos, and ethos, while less attention has been directed to Isocrates' teachings about philosophy and logos,[29] and their partnership in generating an ethical, mindful polis. Isocrates does not provide a single definition of logos in his work, but Isocratean logos characteristically focuses on speech, reason, and civic discourse.[29] He was concerned with establishing the "common good" of Athenian citizens, which he believed could be achieved through the pursuit of philosophy and the application of logos.[29]

In Hellenistic Judaism[edit]

Philo of Alexandria[edit]

Philo (c. 20 BC – c. 50 AD), a Hellenized Jew, used the term logos to mean an intermediary divine being or demiurge.[7] Philo followed the Platonic distinction between imperfect matter and perfect Form, and therefore intermediary beings were necessary to bridge the enormous gap between God and the material world.[30] The logos was the highest of these intermediary beings, and was called by Philo "the first-born of God".[30] Philo also wrote that "the Logos of the living God is the bond of everything, holding all things together and binding all the parts, and prevents them from being dissolved and separated".[31]

Plato's Theory of Forms was located within the logos, but the logos also acted on behalf of God in the physical world.[30] In particular, the Angel of the Lord in the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) was identified with the logos by Philo, who also said that the logos was God's instrument in the creation of the Universe.[30]

Neoplatonism[edit]

Plotinus with his disciples

Neoplatonist philosophers such as Plotinus (c. 204/5 – 270 AD) used logos in ways that drew on Plato and the Stoics,[32] but the term logos was interpreted in different ways throughout Neoplatonism, and similarities to Philo's concept of logos appear to be accidental.[33] The logos was a key element in the meditations of Plotinus[34] regarded as the first neoplatonist. Plotinus referred back to Heraclitus and as far back as Thales[35] in interpreting logos as the principle of meditation, existing as the interrelationship between the hypostases—the soul, the intellect (nous), and the One.[36]

Plotinus used a trinity concept that consisted of "The One", the "Spirit", and "Soul". The comparison with the Christian Trinity is inescapable, but for Plotinus these were not equal and "The One" was at the highest level, with the "Soul" at the lowest.[37] For Plotinus, the relationship between the three elements of his trinity is conducted by the outpouring of logos from the higher principle, and eros (loving) upward from the lower principle.[38] Plotinus relied heavily on the concept of logos, but no explicit references to Christian thought can be found in his works, although there are significant traces of them in his doctrine.[citation needed] Plotinus specifically avoided using the term logos to refer to the second person of his trinity.[39] However, Plotinus influenced Gaius Marius Victorinus, who then influenced Augustine of Hippo.[40] Centuries later, Carl Jung acknowledged the influence of Plotinus in his writings.[41]

Victorinus differentiated between the logos interior to God and the logos related to the world by creation and salvation.[42]

Augustine of Hippo, often seen as the father of medieval philosophy, was also greatly influenced by Plato and is famous for his re-interpretation of Aristotle and Plato in the light of early Christian thought.[43] A young Augustine experimented with, but failed to achieve ecstasy using the meditations of Plotinus.[44] In his Confessions, Augustine described logos as the Divine Eternal Word,[45] by which he, in part, was able to motivate the early Christian thought throughout the Hellenized world (of which the Latin speaking West was a part)[46] Augustine's logos had taken body in Christ, the man in whom the logos (i.e. veritas or sapientia) was present as in no other man.[47]

Islam[edit]

The concept of the logos also exists in Islam, where it was definitively articulated primarily in the writings of the classical Sunni mystics and Islamic philosophers, as well as by certain Shi'a thinkers, during the Islamic Golden Age.[48][49] In Sunni Islam, the concept of the logos has been given many different names by the denomination's metaphysicians, mystics, and philosophers, including ʿaql ("Intellect"), al-insān al-kāmil ("Universal Man"), kalimat Allāh ("Word of God"), haqīqa muḥammadiyya ("The Muhammadan Reality"), and nūr muḥammadī ("The Muhammadan Light").

ʿAql[edit]

One of the names given to a concept very much like the Christian Logos by the classical Muslim metaphysicians is ʿaql, which is the "Arabic equivalent to the Greek νοῦς (intellect)."[49] In the writings of the Islamic neoplatonist philosophers, such as al-Farabi (c. 872 – c. 950 AD) and Avicenna (d. 1037),[49] the idea of the ʿaql was presented in a manner that both resembled "the late Greek doctrine" and, likewise, "corresponded in many respects to the Logos Christology."[49]

The concept of logos in Sufism is used to relate the "Uncreated" (God) to the "Created" (humanity). In Sufism, for the Deist, no contact between man and God can be possible without the logos. The logos is everywhere and always the same, but its personification is "unique" within each region. Jesus and Muhammad are seen as the personifications of the logos, and this is what enables them to speak in such absolute terms.[50][51]

One of the boldest and most radical attempts to reformulate the neoplatonic concepts into Sufism arose with the philosopher Ibn Arabi, who traveled widely in Spain and North Africa. His concepts were expressed in two major works The Ringstones of Wisdom (Fusus al-Hikam) and The Meccan Illuminations (Al-Futūḥāt al-Makkiyya). To Ibn Arabi, every prophet corresponds to a reality which he called a logos (Kalimah), as an aspect of the unique divine being. In his view the divine being would have for ever remained hidden, had it not been for the prophets, with logos providing the link between man and divinity.[52]

Ibn Arabi seems to have adopted his version of the logos concept from neoplatonic and Christian sources,[53] although (writing in Arabic rather than Greek) he used more than twenty different terms when discussing it.[54] For Ibn Arabi, the logos or "Universal Man" was a mediating link between individual human beings and the divine essence.[55]

Other Sufi writers also show the influence of the neoplatonic logos.[56] In the 15th century Abd al-Karīm al-Jīlī introduced the Doctrine of Logos and the Perfect Man. For al-Jīlī, the "perfect man" (associated with the logos or the Prophet) has the power to assume different forms at different times and to appear in different guises.[57]

In Ottoman Sufism, Şeyh Gâlib (d. 1799) articulates Sühan (logos-Kalima) in his Hüsn ü Aşk (Beauty and Love) in parallel to Ibn Arabi's Kalima. In the romance, Sühan appears as an embodiment of Kalima as a reference to the Word of God, the Perfect Man, and the Reality of Muhammad.[58][relevant?]

Jung's analytical psychology[edit]

A 37-year-old Carl Jung in 1912

Carl Jung contrasted the critical and rational faculties of logos with the emotional, non-reason oriented and mythical elements of eros.[59] In Jung's approach, logos vs eros can be represented as "science vs mysticism", or "reason vs imagination" or "conscious activity vs the unconscious".[60]

For Jung, logos represented the masculine principle of rationality, in contrast to its feminine counterpart, eros:

Woman’s psychology is founded on the principle of Eros, the great binder and loosener, whereas from ancient times the ruling principle ascribed to man is Logos. The concept of Eros could be expressed in modern terms as psychic relatedness, and that of Logos as objective interest.[61]

Jung attempted to equate logos and eros, his intuitive conceptions of masculine and feminine consciousness, with the alchemical Sol and Luna. Jung commented that in a man the lunar anima and in a woman the solar animus has the greatest influence on consciousness.[62] Jung often proceeded to analyze situations in terms of "paired opposites", e.g. by using the analogy with the eastern yin and yang[63] and was also influenced by the neoplatonists.[64]

In his book Mysterium Coniunctionis Jung made some important final remarks about anima and animus:

In so far as the spirit is also a kind of "window on eternity".. it conveys to the soul a certain influx divinus... and the knowledge of a higher system of the world, wherein consists precisely its supposed animation of the soul.

And in this book Jung again emphasized that the animus compensates eros, while the anima compensates logos.[65]

Rhetoric[edit]

Author and professor Jeanne Fahnestock describes logos as a "premise". She states that, to find the reason behind a rhetor's backing of a certain position or stance, one must acknowledge the different "premises" that the rhetor applies via his or her chosen diction.[66] The rhetor's success, she argues, will come down to "certain objects of agreement...between arguer and audience". "Logos is logical appeal, and the term logic is derived from it. It is normally used to describe facts and figures that support the speaker's topic."[67] Furthermore, logos is credited with appealing to the audience's sense of logic, with the definition of "logic" being concerned with the thing as it is known.[67] Furthermore, one can appeal to this sense of logic in two ways. The first is through inductive reasoning, providing the audience with relevant examples and using them to point back to the overall statement.[68] The second is through deductive enthymeme, providing the audience with general scenarios and then indicating commonalities among them.[68]

Rhema[edit]

The word logos has been used in different senses along with rhema. Both Plato and Aristotle used the term logos along with rhema to refer to sentences and propositions.[69][70]

The Septuagint translation of the Hebrew Bible into Greek uses the terms rhema and logos as equivalents and uses both for the Hebrew word dabar, as the Word of God.[71][72][73]

Some modern usage in Christian theology distinguishes rhema from logos (which here refers to the written scriptures) while rhema refers to the revelation received by the reader from the Holy Spirit when the Word (logos) is read,[74][75][76][77] although this distinction has been criticized.[78][79]

See also[edit]

References[edit]

  1. Jump up to:a b Henry George Liddell and Robert Scott, An Intermediate Greek–English Lexicon: logos, 1889.
  2. ^ Entry λόγος at LSJ online.
  3. ^ Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy (2nd ed): Heraclitus, 1999.
  4. Jump up to:a b Paul Anthony Rahe, Republics Ancient and Modern: The Ancien Régime in Classical Greece, University of North Carolina Press, 1994, ISBN 0-8078-4473-X, p. 21.
  5. ^ Rapp, Christof, "Aristotle's Rhetoric", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2010 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.)
  6. ^ David L. Jeffrey (1992). A Dictionary of Biblical Tradition in English Literature. Grand Rapids, Michigan, USA: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co. p. 459. ISBN 978-0-8028-3634-2.
  7. Jump up to:a b Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy (2nd ed): Philo Judaeus, 1999.
  8. ^ Adam Kamesar (2004). "The Logos Endiathetos and the Logos Prophorikos in Allegorical Interpretation: Philo and the D-Scholia to the Iliad" (PDF)Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies (GRBS)44: 163–81. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2015-05-07.
  9. ^ May, Herbert G. and Bruce M. Metzger. The New Oxford Annotated Bible with the Apocrypha. 1977.
  10. ^ David L. Jeffrey (1992). A Dictionary of Biblical Tradition in English Literature. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co. p. 460. ISBN 978-0-8028-3634-2.
  11. Jump up to:a b Henry George Liddell and Robert Scott, An Intermediate Greek–English Lexicon: lexis, 1889.
  12. ^ Henry George Liddell and Robert Scott, An Intermediate Greek–English Lexicon: legō, 1889.
  13. ^ F. E. Peters, Greek Philosophical Terms, New York University Press, 1967.
  14. ^ W. K. C. GuthrieA History of Greek Philosophy, vol. 1, Cambridge University Press, 1962, pp. 419ff.
  15. ^ The Shorter Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy
  16. ^ Translations from Richard D. McKirahan, Philosophy before Socrates, Hackett, 1994.
  17. ^ Handboek geschiedenis van de wijsbegeerte 1, Article by Jaap Mansveld & Keimpe Algra, p. 41
  18. ^ W. K. C. Guthrie, The Greek Philosophers: From Thales to Aristotle, Methuen, 1967, p. 45.
  19. Jump up to:a b c Aristotle, Rhetoric, in Patricia P. Matsen, Philip B. Rollinson, and Marion Sousa, Readings from Classical Rhetoric, SIU Press, 1990, ISBN 0-8093-1592-0, p. 120.
  20. ^ In the translation by W. Rhys Roberts, this reads "the proof, or apparent proof, provided by the words of the speech itself".
  21. ^ Eugene Garver, Aristotle's Rhetoric: An art of character, University of Chicago Press, 1994, ISBN 0-226-28424-7, p. 114.
  22. ^ Garver, p. 192.
  23. ^ Robert Wardy, "Mighty Is the Truth and It Shall Prevail?", in Essays on Aristotle's Rhetoric, Amélie Rorty (ed), University of California Press, 1996, ISBN 0-520-20228-7, p. 64.
  24. ^ Translated by W. Rhys Roberts, http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/rhetoric.mb.txt (Part 2, paragraph 3)
  25. ^ Outlines of Pyrrhonism, Book 1, Section 27
  26. ^ Tripolitis, A., Religions of the Hellenistic-Roman Age, pp. 37–38. Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing.
  27. ^ Studies in European Philosophy, by James Lindsay, 2006, ISBN 1-4067-0173-4, p. 53
  28. ^ Marcus Aurelius (1964). Meditations. London: Penguin Books. p. 24. ISBN 978-0-14044140-6.
  29. Jump up to:a b c David M. Timmerman and Edward SchiappaClassical Greek Rhetorical Theory and the Disciplining of Discourse (London: Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010): 43–66
  30. Jump up to:a b c d Frederick CoplestonA History of Philosophy, Volume 1, Continuum, 2003, pp. 458–62.
  31. ^ Philo, De Profugis, cited in Gerald Friedlander, Hellenism and Christianity, P. Vallentine, 1912, pp. 114–15.
  32. ^ Michael F. Wagner, Neoplatonism and Nature: Studies in Plotinus' Enneads, Volume 8 of Studies in Neoplatonism, SUNY Press, 2002, ISBN 0-7914-5271-9, pp. 116–17.
  33. ^ John M. Rist, Plotinus: The road to reality, Cambridge University Press, 1967, ISBN 0-521-06085-0, pp. 84–101.
  34. ^ Between Physics and Nous: Logos as Principle of Meditation in Plotinus, The Journal of Neoplatonic Studies, Volumes 7–8, 1999, p. 3
  35. ^ Handboek Geschiedenis van de Wijsbegeerte I, Article by Carlos Steel
  36. ^ The Journal of Neoplatonic Studies, Volumes 7–8, Institute of Global Cultural Studies, Binghamton University, 1999, p. 16
  37. ^ Ancient philosophy by Anthony Kenny 2007 ISBN 0-19-875272-5 p. 311
  38. ^ The Enneads by Plotinus, Stephen MacKenna, John M. Dillon 1991 ISBN 0-14-044520-Xp. xcii [1]
  39. ^ Neoplatonism in Relation to Christianityby Charles Elsee 2009 ISBN 1-116-92629-6 pp. 89–90 [2]
  40. ^ The Westminster Dictionary of Christian Theology edited by Alan Richardson, John Bowden 1983 ISBN 0-664-22748-1 p. 448 [3]
  41. ^ Jung and aesthetic experience by Donald H. Mayo, 1995 ISBN 0-8204-2724-1 p. 69
  42. ^ Theological treatises on the Trinity, by Marius Victorinus, Mary T. Clark, p. 25
  43. ^ Neoplatonism and Christian thought (Volume 2), By Dominic J. O'Meara, p. 39
  44. ^ Hans Urs von Balthasar, Christian meditation Ignatius Press ISBN 0-89870-235-6 p. 8
  45. ^ Confessions, Augustine, p. 130
  46. ^ Handboek Geschiedenis van de Wijsbegeerte I, Article by Douwe Runia
  47. ^ De immortalitate animae of Augustine: text, translation and commentary, By Saint Augustine (Bishop of Hippo.), C. W. Wolfskeel, introduction
  48. ^ Gardet, L., "Kalām", in: Encyclopaedia of Islam, Second Edition, Edited by: P. Bearman, Th. Bianquis, C.E. Bosworth, E. van Donzel, W.P. Heinrichs.
  49. Jump up to:a b c d Boer, Tj. de and Rahman, F., "ʿAḳl", in: Encyclopaedia of Islam, Second Edition, Edited by: P. Bearman, Th. Bianquis, C.E. Bosworth, E. van Donzel, W.P. Heinrichs.
  50. ^ Sufism: love & wisdom by Jean-Louis Michon, Roger Gaetani 2006 ISBN 0-941532-75-5p. 242 [4]
  51. ^ Sufi essays by Seyyed Hossein Nasr 1973ISBN 0-87395-233-2 p. 148]
  52. ^ Biographical encyclopaedia of Sufis by N. Hanif 2002 ISBN 81-7625-266-2 p. 39 [5]
  53. ^ Charles A. Frazee, "Ibn al-'Arabī and Spanish Mysticism of the Sixteenth Century", Numen 14 (3), Nov 1967, pp. 229–40.
  54. ^ Little, John T. (January 1987). "Al-Ins?N Al-K?Mil: The Perfect Man According to Ibn Al-'Arab?". The Muslim World77 (1): 43–54. doi:10.1111/j.1478-1913.1987.tb02785.xIbn al-'Arabi uses no less than twenty-two different terms to describe the various aspects under which this single Logos may be viewed.
  55. ^ Dobie, Robert J. (17 November 2009). Logos and Revelation: Ibn 'Arabi, Meister Eckhart, and Mystical Hermeneutics. Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press. p. 225. ISBN 978-0813216775For Ibn Arabi, the Logos or "Universal Man" was a mediating link between individual human beings and the divine essence.
  56. ^ Edward Henry WhinfieldMasnavi I Ma'navi: The spiritual couplets of Maulána Jalálu-'d-Dín Muhammad Rúmí, Routledge, 2001 (originally published 1898), ISBN 0-415-24531-1, p. xxv.
  57. ^ Biographical encyclopaedia of Sufis by N. Hanif 2002 ISBN 81-7625-266-2 p. 98 [6]
  58. ^ Betül Avcı, "Character of Sühan in Şeyh Gâlib’s Romance, Hüsn ü Aşk (Beauty and Love)" Archivum Ottomanicum, 32 (2015).
  59. ^ C.G. Jung and the psychology of symbolic forms by Petteri Pietikäinen 2001 ISBN 951-41-0857-4 p. 22
  60. ^ Mythos and logos in the thought of Carl Jung by Walter A. Shelburne 1988 ISBN 0-88706-693-3 p. 4 [7]
  61. ^ Carl Jung, Aspects of the Feminine, Princeton University Press, 1982, p. 65, ISBN 0-7100-9522-8.
  62. ^ Aspects of the masculine by Carl Gustav Jung, John Beebe p. 85
  63. ^ Carl Gustav Jung: critical assessments by Renos K. Papadopoulos 1992 ISBN 0-415-04830-3 p. 19
  64. ^ See the neoplatonic section above.
  65. ^ The handbook of Jungian psychology: theory, practice and applications by Renos K. Papadopoulos 2006 ISBN 1-58391-147-2 p. 118 [8]
  66. ^ Fahnestock, Jeanne. "The Appeals: Ethos, Pathos, and Logos".
  67. Jump up to:a b "Aristotle's Three Modes of Persuasion in Rhetoric".
  68. Jump up to:a b "Ethos, Pathos, and Logos".
  69. ^ General linguistics by Francis P. Dinneen 1995 ISBN 0-87840-278-0 p. 118 [9]
  70. ^ The history of linguistics in Europe from Plato to 1600 by Vivien Law 2003 ISBN 0-521-56532-4 p. 29 [10]
  71. ^ Theological dictionary of the New Testament, Volume 1 by Gerhard Kittel, Gerhard Friedrich, Geoffrey William Bromiley 1985 ISBN 0-8028-2404-8 p. 508 [11]
  72. ^ The International Standard Bible Encyclopedia: Q-Z by Geoffrey W. Bromiley 1995 ISBN 0-8028-3784-0 p. 1102 [12]
  73. ^ Old Testament Theology by Horst Dietrich Preuss, Leo G. Perdue 1996 ISBN 0-664-21843-1 p. 81 [13]
  74. ^ What Every Christian Ought to Know by Adrian Rogers 2005 ISBN 0-8054-2692-2 p. 162 [14]
  75. ^ The Identified Life of Christ by Joe Norvell 2006 ISBN 1-59781-294-3 p. [15]
  76. ^ [16] Holy Spirit, Teach Me by Brenda Boggs 2008 ISBN 1-60477-425-8 p. 80
  77. ^ [17] The Fight of Every Believer by Terry Law ISBN 1-57794-580-8 p. 45
  78. ^ James T. Draper and Kenneth Keathley, Biblical Authority, Broadman & Holman, 2001, ISBN 0-8054-2453-9, p. 113.
  79. ^ John F. MacArthur, Charismatic Chaos, Zondervan, 1993, ISBN 0-310-57572-9, pp. 45–46.

External links[edit]