a word from our silence

“The Logos became man, so that man might become Logos.”
~ The Philokalia, Vol. I, p. 156.

I.

We humans are creatures of comfort, and that applies no less to our purchasing choices than to our desire for warmth, food, and a roof over our heads. Enter the brand: the staple of a commercial and high-tech civilization. The difference between that which is branded and that which is not is tangibly summed up in the price difference between the “genuine” article on your store shelf, and the cheap knock-off sitting next to it—however the quantified difference may or may not correspond to a difference in quality.

The brand is most forcefully seen as the logo, shorthand for the early 19th century term “logotype” or “logogram,” which combines the Greek terms for “word” (logos, λόγος) and “writing” or “what is written”: hence, from potential and abstract to act and reality. Accordingly, for all the public is aware, a company without a logo and the means to make it visible might as well not even exist. The logo concentrates into a unique, provocative and clever visual signifier the company’s mission and, ideally, the collective experience of dense hordes of anonymous peers, the magnitude of whose positive review is implicit in direct proportion to the ubiquity of the design in question. The assumption is that if any person (including the legally-defined-person in the corporate sense) can afford to put up the capital to have thus-n-such be in your face across increasingly large swathes of both time and space, then surely this endowment must be vouchsafed from the pockets of repeat customers—and a repeat customer is, we assume, a repeatedly happy customer.

II.

Having thus rendered unto Caesar his due, we take leave to look back across the millennia to see that the Greek word λόγος which has, pardon the pun, gained currency in this fashion, is the same one used by St John in his Gospel, which starts: “In the beginning was the λόγος, and the λόγος was with God, and the λόγος was God.” This of course is the same λόγος which is later incarnate in the world as the God-Man Jesus in the Gospel narrative. λόγος, however, as a term denoting a metaphysical rather than a merely verbal or even psychological reality, goes back some six hundred years prior to St John’s Gospel, to the writings of Heraclitus: “This λόγος holds always… all things come to be in accordance with this λόγος…”

Both St John and Heraclitus testify that this λόγος, this “Word,” eternally co-exists with That which utters it, which is presumably Silent apart from this singular utterance. They both similarly testify that it is specifically through the Word that the world comes to be created by this selfsame Silence (St John writes “All things were made through Him, and without Him nothing was made that was made.”) [1].

For the Stoics beginning circa 300 B.C., λόγος was the impersonal principle of reason undergirding the universe, making a cosmos (order) of the primordial chaos. Thus λόγος corresponds to the Latin “ratio” (whence rational). The λόγος is what makes the universe not only perceptible, but intelligible, a continuous phenomenon which exhibits properties subject to measurement and accounting and, therefore, predictability. The λόγος as Christ is not only the Sacred Heart, but the Sacred Intellect as well, and, as He states in John 14:6, “No one comes to the Father except through Me.” Just as God requires the agency of the λόγος in order to create the phenomenal world, likewise do we the creatures of the creator require the intermediary of the λόγος in order to come to know our source, the Silence at the center of it all. The “science” of the Silence is the Word, and the Word is a two-way street.

λόγος as ratio also indicates a relationship of proportion which inheres in the structure of the universe, that property which in addition to enabling measurement as a means to come-to-know, also enables analogy (metaphor) for the same purpose, without which such things as this very essay would be impossible. This property of proportionality is explicitly identified in the Lord’s Prayer with the words “Thy will be done, as in heaven, so in earth” (Luke 11:2). Furthermore in Genesis 1:27 we are told “… God created man in His image.” Creature and creation are seen to be a proportion of the Creator, and this is only made apparent through the λόγος.

The specifically Christian articulation of this theme takes it one logical step past Heraclitus and the Stoics, insofar as Christianity depends, in its articles of faith, upon the actual physical incarnation amongst its own creation of the λόγος. The symmetrical resonance of this action is almost fractal in its implication, rather like the Escher hand drawing itself into ever-smaller scales and orders of magnitude. And the express purpose of Christ’s time amongst His creation is, of course, its redemption. The 4th century Church Father St Athanasius writes in De Incarnatione Verbi Dei:

… the renewal of creation has been wrought by the Self-same Word Who made it in the beginning. There is thus no inconsistency between creation and salvation for the One Father has employed the same Agent for both works, effecting the salvation of the world through the same Word Who made it in the beginning.

The symmetry doesn’t end there: Christ is seen as the “second Adam,” who sets aright what the first one felled; and whereas the first Eve is supposed to have been brought out of the body of the first Adam, a logical symmetry implies that the second Adam should be born from the “second Eve,” just as Christ was born from Mary the Theotokos (“God-Bearer”).

III.

The primordial Silence at the center of the creation forever utters its Word (from both above and within) because it wants to be known, and if we can’t hear it, it’s because the signal is lost amid the noise. We’re left instead with grasping at parodies and surrogate silences which don’t want to be known, which rather use their Word, their logo, as a shield against any deeper investigation, an assurance of trust into which billions of dollars are sunk every day. The 20th-century French metaphysician René Guénon writes, in his magnum opus The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times, of the “inversion” of true spirituality during the times in which we live, which as I’ve tried to demonstrate in a previous essay, correspond to the “end-times” of much of the world’s mythological and religious eschatology.

… false spirituality can be spoken of in every case in which, for example, the psychic is mistaken for the spiritual… The attraction of “phenomena” … may also play a very important part, for most men will be caught and deceived by it … since it is said that the “false prophets” who will arise at that time shall “show great signs and wonders, so as to lead astray, if possible, even the elect.”

Instead of devotion to an invisible-yet-ever-present Silence, based on the development and satisfaction of an inner and well-honed sensitivity with only incidental overlap with the five physical senses [2], today we have “brand allegiance” based on the gratification of one or more of those same senses and little else. Heraclitus again: “For the best men choose one thing only and sacrifice everything to it, glory eternal of the mortals, while the many are stuffed like beasts.” The problem with this scenario is that the objects of the senses always possess a shelf-life. Perhaps the best-known articulation of this principle is the Second “Noble Truth” of the Buddha, which tells us that suffering arises through attachment to the transient. The things we love to buy inevitably go away. The scriptural revelation of the Christian λόγος contains the very same sentiment; in the Gospel of St Luke we read:

Whoever comes to Me, and hears My sayings and does them, I will show you whom he is like: He is like a man building a house, who dug deep and laid the foundation on the rock. And when the flood arose, the stream beat vehemently against that house, and could not shake it, for it was founded on the rock. But he who heard and did nothing is like a man who built a house on the earth without a foundation, against which the stream beat vehemently; and immediately it fell. And the ruin of that house was great.

The “revolution” spoken of in this week’s theme can be understood in multiple ways. The book excerpt [3] which inspired the theme speaks of a Roman slave revolt against oppressive conditions, among which was the practice of branding slaves on the face. Please note that we, too, have been branded in the face, by way of the conditioned reaction to certain familiar visual stimuli which constitutes the physiological basis for “brand allegiance.” Pavlov would no doubt be proud to see his experimental findings so thoroughly validated on as wide a scale as they have been by the multi-billion-dollar advertising and marketing industries.

So where does the revolution against this state of affairs begin? To fantasize about some anti-capitalist jihad is to fall prey to the opposite side of the very same dialectic: think of how many hundreds of millions of dollars the film Fight Club raked in, for instance. No, the object is to abandon the entire conditioned action-reaction dialectic altogether (what Buddhists call “samsara”), and to apply the λόγος so providentially present in the very structure of the universe itself, in order to restore an interior state, a proportional micro-cosmos, of the primordial Silence whence it came: “By your patience possess your souls.” (Luke 21:19) [4]

Notes

Tags: branding leads to revolution, heraclitus, jesus christ, logos, metaphysics, photography, rene guenon, silence, stoics, symmetry