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(Greek word ) is an important term in philosophy, analytical psychology, rhetoric and religion.
Its semantic field extends beyond "word" to notions such as "thought, speech, account, meaning, reason, proportion, principle, standard", or "logic". In English, the word is the root of "log" (as in record), of "logic," and of the "-ology" suffix (e.g., geology).
Heraclitus established the term in Western philosophy as meaning the fundamental order of the cosmos. Sophists used the term to mean discourse, and Aristotle applied the term to argument from reason. After Judaism came under Hellenistic influence, Philo adopted the term into Jewish philosophy. The Gospel of John identifies Jesus as the incarnation of the Logos, through which all things are made. The gospel further identifies the Logos as god (theos), providing scriptural support for the trinity. It is this sense, the Logos as Jesus Christ and God, that is most common in popular culture.
Psychologist Carl Jung used the term for the masculine principle of rationality.
Heraclitus (c 535–475 BCE) established the term in Western philosophy. <blockquote>One must not follow what is common; but, even though the Logos is common, most people live as though they possessed their own understanding of it. (Heraclitian fragment 2) The common is what is open to all, what can be seen and heard by all. To see is to let in with open eyes what is open to view, i.e. what is lit up and revealed to all. The dead (the completely private ones) neither see nor hear; they are not closed. No light (fire) shines in them; no speech sounds in them. And yet, even they participate in the cosmos. The extinguished ones also belong to the continuum of lighting and extinguishing that is the common cosmos. The dead touch upon the living sleeping, who in turn touch upon the living waking. (Heraclitian fragment 26) </blockquote> Heraclitus also used Logos to mean the undifferentiated material substrate from which all things came: "Listening not to me but to the Logos it is wise to agree that all [things] are one." In this sense, Logos is the arche, the first principle of the cosmos in Pre-Socratic philosophy. Logos therefore designates both the material substrate itself and the universal, mechanical, "just" way in which this substrate manifests itself in and as individual things; that is, it subsumes within itself the later Platonic distinction (in Timaeus) between "form" and "matter".
By the 300s BCE, the time of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, logos described the faculty of human reason and the knowledge men had of the world and of each other. Plato allowed his characters to engage in the conceit of describing logos as a living being in some of his dialogues. The development of the Academy with hypomnemata brought logos closer to the literal text. Aristotle, who studied under Plato, first developed the concept of logic as depicting the rules of human rationality.
The Stoics understood Logos as the animating power of the universe.
Logos is also derived from the Greek word "caverna."
Aristotle defined logos as argument from reason, one of the three modes of persuasion. The other two modes are pathos, emotional appeal, and ethos, reputation and credibility. An argument based on logos need to be logical, and in fact the term logic derives from it. Logos normally implies numbers, polls, and other mathematical or scientific data.
Logos has many advantages:
Philo (20 BCE - 50 CE), a Hellenized Jew, used the term logos to mean the creative principle. Philo followed the Platonic distinction between imperfect matter and perfect idea. The logos was necessary, he taught, because God cannot come into contact with matter. He sometimes identified logos as divine wisdom.
In Christianity, the prologue of the Gospel of John calls Jesus "the Logos" (usually translated as "the Word" in English bibles such as the KJV) and played a central role in establishing the doctrine of Jesus' divinity and the Trinity. (See Christology.) The opening verse reads: "In the beginning was the Logos, and the Logos was with God, and the Logos was God."
Some scholars of the Bible have suggested that John made creative use of double meaning in the word "Logos" to communicate to both Jews, who were familiar with the Wisdom tradition in Judaism, and Hellenic polytheism, especially followers of Philo. Each of these two groups had its own history associated with the concept of the Logos, and each could understand John's use of the term from one or both of those contexts. Especially for the Hellenists, however, John turns the concept of the Logos on its head when he claimed "the Logos became flesh and dwelt among us" (v. 14). Similarly, some translations of the Gospel of John into Chinese have used the word "Tao (道)" to translate the "Logos" in a provocative way.
Early Christians who opposed the concept of Jesus as the Logos were known as alogoi.
John's placement of the Word at creation reflects Genesis, in which God (Elohim) speaks the world into being, beginning with the words "Let there be light."
Gordon Clark (1902 - 1985), a Calvinist theologian and expert on pre-Socratic philosophy, famously translated Logos as "Logic": "In the beginning was the Logic, and the Logic was with God and the Logic was God." He meant to imply by this translation that the laws of logic were contained in the Bible itself and were therefore not a secular principle imposed on the Christian worldview. His theology was founded on propositional truth and logic.
On April 1, 2005, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (who would become Pope Benedict XVI just over two weeks later) referred to the Christian religion as the religion of the Logos: <blockquote>Christianity must always remember that it is the religion of the "Logos." It is faith in the "Creator Spiritus," in the Creator Spirit, from which proceeds everything that exists. Today, this should be precisely its philosophical strength, in so far as the problem is whether the world comes from the irrational, and reason is not, therefore, 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.
The Christian faith inclines toward this second thesis, thus having, from the purely philosophical point of view, really good cards to play, despite the fact that many today consider only the first thesis as the only modern and rational one par excellence. However, a reason that springs from the irrational, and that is, in the final analysis, itself irrational, does not constitute a solution for our problems. Only creative reason, which in the crucified God is manifested as love, can really show us the way. 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.[1]</blockquote>
In Carl Jung's analytical psychology, the logos is the masculine principle of rationality and consciousness. The female counterpart, eros (Greek, love), represents interconnectedness.
Within Eastern religions there are ideas with varying degrees of similarity to the philosophical and Christian uses, all combining notions of cosmic order (creation) and language (name).
Goethe has his Faust translate John's logos as "Will", an idea taken up by Aleister Crowley Thelema, equating a person's "Word" with their "True Will".
The idea is similar to Apollinarism.
Logos as it is also presently understood today in Theosophical terms and by the Rosicrucians (in their conception of the cosmos) which further influenced how this word was understood later on (in 20th century psychology, for instance).
The Logos was also the name of a a ship in the popular movie series The Matrix, piloted by Niobe. Besides this ship, many other things, such as ships and the main city, are named after philosophical or theological things. See also: Thematic motifs of the Matrix series.
A 2004 episode of "CSI: Crime Scene Investigations" (episode #419, "Bad Words") featured a fictional, Scrabble-like board game played with round, lettered tiles. The game was called "Logos."