The paradox of Christianity is beyond the pagan teachings of Heraclitus.
At the heart of the Christmas celebration is the fact that the Word became flesh and dwelt among us. God has shown us how to be human by becoming human, and so this fact has much to teach us about human existence. In particular, it reminds us that as human beings, we have a physical existence.
Recently, I completed a PhD dissertation in the philosophy of physics. My original motivation for writing such a dissertation was that I wanted to understand how Aquinas’s doctrine on the human soul could be compatible with contemporary physics. But in order to gain a deeper understanding of contemporary physics, I began my dissertation by wrestling with the so-called EPR-Bohm paradox which describes a phenomenon in which it appears to be possible for some effect to propagate faster than the speed of light. This is paradoxical because according to Einstein, travelling faster than the speed of light is supposed to be impossible. I spent so much time wrestling with this paradox, I’d written enough to get a doctorate before I’d even started on the question of how contemporary physics relates to the soul. Nevertheless, I’ve found that wrestling with a paradox can be a great way to gain a deeper understanding of physical reality.
Now there is nothing new about the idea that one can gain a deeper understanding of reality by thinking about paradoxes. In fact, this is one of the oldest ideas there is in phil-osophy, and it was championed by the pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus who lived in Ephesus in the 6th century BC.
Heraclitus was known as the riddler, and he used to say paradoxical things to give peop-le something to wrestle with in the hope of getting them to think about reality in a higher kind of way. For instance, in one saying Heraclitus says: “Listening not to me, but to the logos, it is wise to agree that all things are one.” Now there are several reasons for thinking this saying is paradoxical. For instance, Heraclitus is telling us not to listen to him, but we are listening to him when he says this. And by speaking of things, plural, as being one, Heraclitus is suggesting that somehow the whole of reality is both a plurality and a unity. And then there is this word logos that Heraclitus speaks of.
Logos has multiple meanings: it could mean an account, a reason, a statement, a speech or a word. It’s from logos that we get the word logic, which is the art of reasoning. The word logos also gives us the names of all those subjects that end in -ology, such as theology which offers an account of God and biology that offers an account of life. But in the way that Heraclitus uses the word logos, he makes it sound like the logos is some fundamental principle of reality that speaks to us and makes reality intelligible. But what is especially interesting from a theological point of view is that St John the Evangelist uses this word logos in the opening line to his gospel “In the beginning was the Logos”. This is the Gospel we have for the morning Mass of Christmas.
It is of course debatable how much St John’s use of the word logos was influenced by Heraclitus. Perhaps it is just a coincidence that St John is thought to have written his gospel in the same city, Ephesus, from where Heraclitus came. Nevertheless, we shouldn’t necessarily suppose that what Heraclitus said was completely alien to Christianity. This is something St Augustine noticed in his Confessions where he considers the opening passage of St John’s Gospel. There, St Augustine speaks of how he had read in the pagan philosophers similar ideas such that the Logos, God, is “born not of the flesh, nor of blood, nor of the will of man nor of the will of the flesh, but of God”. But then St Augustine adds “‘that the Logos was made flesh and dwelt among us’, I did not read there.” There is therefore something radically new about Christianity. Christian revelation isn’t simply restating what the pagan philosophers like Heraclitus knew, but rather it is going way beyond it. For whereas in Heraclitus the path to wisdom is via paradoxical sayings, in Christianity, the path to wisdom is via a paradoxical person, Jesus Christ, the Word, the Logos made flesh, who is one of three persons in one God, a person who is both divine and human, a king who was born in a stable, who rules humanity from the Cross, and who conquers death by His own death.
Wrestling with paradoxes can be a great way of developing a deeper understanding of reality, but if we are to understand that ultimate meaning and purpose of reality that gives life to our souls, there is only one way: the way of Jesus Christ, the Word made flesh, who dwelt among us and whose glory we have seen, full of grace and truth.
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