Читать книгу The Roots that Clutch - Thomas Esposito - Страница 9

Dear Heraclitus of Ephesus,

You probably don’t remember me, but a philosophy professor introduced me to you at the beginning of my junior year of college. The occasion was a semester-long fiesta called Ancient Philosophy, and you, at least for me, were the life of the party. Your wonder at the beauty of the cosmos was invigorating after the enlightened beatdown I received the previous semester at the hands of Hume, Kant, and Hegel. Truth be told, all of the pre-Socratic philosophers, not just you, fascinated me. I remember the thrilling sensation of grasping what Thales meant when he said that everything was water, and the joy of realizing how Empedocles could be right in asserting that love and strife govern every part of the cosmos and human life. There is an enduring freshness to the philosophy practiced by you and your Greek-speaking comrades that I found much more attractive than the analytic nitpicking I endured in other courses. I must confess, though, that a hopelessly romantic notion of the initial stages of philosophy clouds my judgment.

I hesitate to inform you that your book of musings, On Nature, survives only in fragmentary form. It was somehow lost in the flowing river of time, and we possess mere scraps of words and sentences of all the pre-Socratics, yourself included. The only reason we have even a glimpse of your actual text is because other philosophers and theologians quoted your words in their books. Their preservation of certain passages has ensured that your name is passed down along with these fascinating fragments. I suppose you will appreciate the mystique that attaches to thinkers like yourself who have been consigned to live only in the lines of others.

Anyone claiming that everything is fire is bound to gain a captive audience amongst pyro-happy male youth. I was particularly intrigued by your notion that an overall harmony is achieved by means of the coincidence or unity of opposites: night and day are, you argue, one and the same, as each gives way to the other. The idea itself of unity emerging from multiplicity is not unique to you. Many of your fellow pre-Socratics preached something similar, and even the distant philosophy of yin-yang in Taoism stresses the harmony of sun and moon, hot and cold, etc. Regarding all things as one brings a sense of wholeness to all of nature and human existence. Thus you could say, in the most famous line that has been transmitted to us, “No one steps into the same river twice.”29 We think the river is the same, and yet the water in that river is ever flowing, changing while always maintaining its identity.

You say the same thing about fire, noting that it changes as it burns, while always remaining the same fire. For you, fire is the fundamental element of our material world. Instead of thinking that the world was created, you maintain that it is an “ever-living fire” which expands and contracts as time moves forward. The burning sun is new every day, even though it always remains the same sun.30

In other fragments, you talk about fire possessing the ability to reason or think. After a certain amount of time spent scratching my head, I reached a moment of insight as a college lad. If I understood your teaching correctly (which is far from certain!), Heraclitus, fire is merely a sign or manifestation of the ultimate source of law, harmony, and unity in the universe, which you call the logos. For you, the logos is divine and objective; it causes all things to come into being, and every rational being has some share in this ultimate logos. That doesn’t mean, however, that everyone lives according to it—you have some scathing lines in which you claim that a majority of people live according to their own selfish logos, and even while awake act as they do when asleep, having tumbled out of the real world into a fantasy universe all their own.31 Those who are fully conscious, on the other hand, come to realize that there is but one cosmos common to us all, one reality in which we all participate.

It is about this logos that I want to talk to you. In the fragments attributed to you, the word is a cause, the reason behind all things, and the source of unity binding all opposites together. In reading your assertion that fire, the symbol of the logos in our world of experience, is wise and rational, the thought occurs to me: Have you ever pondered whether the logos knew you, or even loved you? Aware that you are by definition a lover of wisdom, namely, a philosopher, I thought you might be grateful to hear the speculations of a fellow Greek-speaking lover of the logos who lived a few centuries after you. He is usually called an evangelist, since he proclaimed good news, but I consider him a full-fledged member of the elite club of wisdom lovers.

His name is John, and he penned a most extraordinary book that, fortunately, is not fragmented. He devoted the very first lines of his book, called a gospel, to an exposition of the logos as he understood it (John 1:1–5):

In the beginning was the logos, and the logos was with God, and the logos was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came to be through him, and without him not one thing came to be. What came to be through him was life, and the life was the light of human beings. The light shines in darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.

After reading the opening verses of the Gospel of John, do you hear the same echoes of your teaching on the logos that I do? His description has much in common with yours, Heraclitus. The logos for John is the cause of all things, and sustains all things in being. There is even a brief reflection on the opposites of light and darkness, though I don’t think you had such a moral meaning in mind with your take on opposites.

John begins his gospel with a central concept of Greek philosophy surely known to his Hellenized readers. A few verses later, though, something altogether unique and startling appears without warning: “And the logos became flesh and pitched his tent among us, and we have seen his glory” (John 1:14).

I would love to see your facial expression when you read that verse for the first time. This simple and awesome sentence highlights the crucial difference between your logos and John’s, a distinction that has vast consequences for our understanding of the logos and our own relationship to it. Whereas for you the logos is a law, a harmonizing force, or a cold cosmic mind, for John the logos is a person, one who enters into relationship with all human beings. You probably noted that something was going on with the references to “he” and “him” in the prologue of the gospel, but the line in verse 14 is unmistakable and shocking: John insists that this eternal logos, this most glorious and unifying truth of life, became a human being at a specific point in history. The name of that human being, the logos incarnate, is Jesus Christ, and all those who read the Gospel of John as a word (a written logos) sent from God are called Christians.

I must tell you that I am not the first person to see parallels between your teaching on the logos and that of John. About a century after the life of Jesus, a Christian by the name of Saint Justin Martyr dared to call you and several other philosophers Christians, even though he knew that you lived before the time of Christ. He believed your insights into the logos were true, and that human beings possess the ability to know that there is an ultimate law accessible to us through our minds. Because of this, Saint Justin regarded your philosophy as a sneak preview of the full logos revealed by Jesus during his ministry. You had only a partial intuition of the full mystery behind the logos, since you were philosophizing before the supreme revelation of the logos had arrived on the earth.32 But by living in accordance with the logos, you nevertheless scattered “seeds of the logos” in the fertile soil of the human heart, so that when the fullness of time came (Gal 4:4), men and women might be able to perceive in Christ the perfection of the truth you saw from afar:

Therefore, whatever things were rightly said among all people are the property of us Christians. For next to God, we worship and love the logos who is from the unbegotten and ineffable God, since also He became man for our sakes, that, becoming a partaker of our sufferings, He might also bring us healing. For all the writers were able to see realities darkly, through the presence in them of an implanted seed of logos.33

At this point, Heraclitus, I think you can see why I asked you a little earlier whether you believed the fire or the logos knew you. Even if you did not, you are a precious witness to the way the human mind is blessed with the ability to reach rarefied heights and pave a guiding path for future philosophers to follow. I like to think your pursuit of wisdom in your native city of Ephesus prepared your fellow Ephesians, living centuries later, to receive the Gospel preached by Christian evangelists. One apostle in particular, Saint Paul, worked tirelessly to sink the roots of the gospel deep into the hearts of the men and women of your hometown. Perhaps his exhortation to unity in a letter to them borrows, even if only as a faint echo, the language you employed to describe the harmony of opposites:

For [Jesus Christ] is our peace, who made both one and tore down the dividing wall of enmity, abolishing through his flesh the law of commandments and legal claims, in order that he might create in himself one new person in place of the two, making peace and reconciling both to God in one body through the cross, putting enmity to death by it. (Eph 2:14–16)

Saint Paul is referring here to the unity of various ethnic groups who have come to believe in Christ; they are no longer Jews and Gentiles, but Christians, united as one body, as he notes further on:

. . . exerting yourselves to preserve the unity of the spirit in the bond of peace: one body and one Spirit, just as you were called in the one hope of your call; one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all. (Eph 4:3–6)

Heraclitus, I owe you a great debt of gratitude for stamping my impressionable mind with an admiration for the logos. What I found in the Gospel according to John perfected your initial glimpse of the logos, but I was able to see the fruits of the Gospel more clearly by standing on your philosophical shoulders. I cannot think of a more harmonious line for you than a verse in which Paul seems to be quoting an early Christian hymn, one whose words could have been penned by you (except for the part about Christ): “For everything that becomes visible is light. Therefore, it says: ‘Awake, you who sleep; rise from the dead, and Christ will shine upon you’” (Eph 5:14). I am firmly convinced that you possess firsthand knowledge of the Lord and logos, whose dark mystery you penetrated so deeply without divine light. I therefore look forward to conversing with you someday about these wonderful matters.

28. Heraclitus (ca. 535–ca. 475 BC) was a pre-Socratic philosopher from Ephesus. Only fragments of his works exist. One of the guiding themes of his philosophy is that all realities come into existence in accordance with the logos.

29. See a different translation offered in Heraclitus, Fragments, 27: “The river where you set your foot just now is gone—those waters giving way to this, now this.”

30. Ibid., 21.

31. Ibid., 2–5, 60–61.

32. See Justin Martyr, First and Second Apologies, 55: “And they who lived with the logos are Christians, even though they have been thought atheists; as, among the Greeks, Socrates and Heraclitus.”

33. Ibid., 84.