Today I am in the city where history tells us that Saint John spent most of his ministry. John’s gospel begins by using a term for God the Son, logos, that would have had deep resonance in Ephesus. The most famous philosophical son of the City had used that term in a different way to talk about the Divine. This philosopher, Heraclitus, provided John with a vocabulary that he could use for his own ends.
Any philosopher who buries himself alive in dung to prove a point commands attention. There exists a story that the philosopher Heraclitus of Ephesus took the practice of his philosophy to just such extremes. How did he end up in such an absurd position?
In his search for the universal constant, the arche, Heraclitus settled on fire. This was in line with the longstanding tradition of selecting one of the four traditional elements as the unifying cosmic principle. Heraclitus applied this concept to every element of his thought, including biology. Heraclitus reasoned that fire was the source of life. Fire is warm. What did he discover when looking at the world? Dead bodies are cold. Living bodies are warm.
Heraclitus was not just content with this simple confirmation. He practiced his beliefs. If life was fire or warmth, then he had a key to health. As he began to feel the pangs of death, he decided that what his body needed was more warmth. What was a philosopher to do? One could not simply leap into a fire.
Observation came to the rescue. On a cold day, Heraclitus could see piles of bovine excrement steaming in a field. Since this mysterious substance produced controlled heat, Heraclitus had himself buried in it. Sadly, too much of a good thing proved the philosophers undoing.
Anaximenes had been correct about one thing. Air is good for living creatures. Heraclitus died as the first martyr to a radical commitment to his scientific beliefs. Scientists and philosophers have been buried in their own zeal ever since.
Heraclitus inspired this sort of story. He was the first scientist/philosopher to cultivate the inscrutable image of a crank. He spoke in short, pithy, seemingly contradictory phrases. He was fond of saying things like: “The way up is the way down”. Biographers report that he refused to help his city with practical political questions. He would not play the expected part of the “wise man”. His attacks on traditional religion also did not endear him to the masses of his fellow citizens. He left no actual writings and a complete collection of his known sayings is very small indeed.
Despite all of this, no pre-Socratic philosophy has exercised a greater influence on the history of ideas. Hundreds of years later, the Stoics would adopt him as their ideological “father”. Martin Heidegger wrote a book motivated by Heraclitus’ thought. In many ways, the cryptic style of Heraclitus turned him into a sort of intellectual Rorschach test. If not very careful, the philosopher can end up seeing in Heraclitus what he wants to see.
With that warning in mind, what was the logos philosophy of Heraclitus? The philosophers who came before him had developed new ways of viewing the world. They were “ontological dualists”. They believed that both matter and soul existed. Each of these philosophers had an open philosophy of science. Heraclitus was able to use these critical tools to develop his own cosmology. In that, he was not particularly original or important. He also was able to kick away the final traces of traditional Greek religion. That move was of critical importance. Since the concept of “soul” now explained agency, there was no need for the Greek gods. Physical events received physical explanations. Events produced by agents received personal (soul) explanations. What remained for Zeus and Athena to do? Greek religion, always hard to defend on ethical grounds, now had no job left to do.
It was still possible to save if Greek religion if one resorted to a sort of “God of the gaps” apologetic. Zeus did things just in those cases where contemporary cosmology or understanding was limited. This was a losing strategy, however. Increasingly sophisticated cosmologies explained more and more natural events without recourse to such divine intervention. Second, the notion of soul fully explained all the intelligently produced actions of the universe without the invocation of the full Greek pantheon.
Contemporary Christian apologists run the risk of failing to learn this lesson. One need not invoke God whenever there are gaps in human understanding of the natural world. Mere ignorance is an insufficient argument for agency. A detective postulates a murder when he has reason to think an agent has been involved in a death. He does not merely claim that any unexplained death was a crime.
Unlike certain contemporary religious thinkers, Heraclitus was not willing to save Greek religion simply because he had grown up with it. Heraclitus had the integrity not to appeal merely to the possible, but allow what was probable to be his guide. His cosmology and religious views could find no meaningful place or function for the bloody sacrifices of Greek pantheism. He rejected them. A true iconoclast, his biographers report that he rejected his family role as one of the rulers of the city. He demanded rationality from his religion. The beliefs of Homer and Hesiod were incapable of meeting such demands.
Heraclitus was looking for unity. Greece was always looking for unity. This was true politically and in every other way. Change is obvious. The ability of a situation to fragment was one all too familiar to the ancient Greeks. What could provide the unity? The previous philosophers had provided two principles: soul and matter. Heraclitus would expand on the “soul”. He would give his revised concept of the “cosmic intelligence” intellectual priority. He would link the material and intelligent substances.
Fire was the basic element. It unified matter. Fire was not, however, the end of the story. It was coextensive with a divine “logos”. What was the “logos?” Heraclitus for the first time used this common term for a “word” in a technical manner.
Heraclitus “logos” is hard to understand for just that reason. Later thinkers were all tempted to find their own use of the term in Heraclitus. It is safest to say simply that in Heraclitus “logos” was the divine idea. It was the glue that permeated everything and which held the universe together. In a cosmos of change, logos gave order and pattern to nature.
This divine unity manifested itself in the traditional opposites such as the hot and cold, dry and wet. These opposites were stages of a process of change that is constant. This change takes place under the supervision of the divine logos. This view is best summed up in the most famous saying of the philosopher. Heraclitus said, “You can never step into the same river twice.” What did he mean by this (typically) cryptic statement?
Imagine a woman standing on the banks of the mysterious Nile. She steps into the water and it swirls around her legs. Her name is Cleopatra. More than two thousand years later, another young woman steps in the eternal Nile. Her experience is both similar and different. She does not experience the feeling of the very water that touched the Queen of Egypt. She does bathe in the eternal Nile itself. The water in the river is constantly changing, but the river itself endures. The change and constancy of the universe are both metaphorically present in the experience of a river.
I once stood in an art gallery before a baptismal font from the Middle Ages. When I dipped my hand into the water at the bottom of the old stone structure, I felt a connection with hundreds of other Christians who had done the same thing in times past. The water was not the same. It was always changing, but the font was the same. More important, the idea behind my action was also the same. Put in terms of the philosophy of Heraclitus, the font is the logos of the universe and the water of this baptism is a particular. It is unrepeatable and unique. Standing years later in church, watching my daughter’s baptism, I thought of this fact. There will never be another baptism just like that of my daughter Jane, but there will be other baptisms. There is constancy in the change of the world. Heraclitus first caused men to think along these lines.
Popular culture has used this theme in plays like Showboat and in the animated film Pocahontas. The “Old Man River” keeps rolling along. It changes, but it does not change. Plato would use this very division to develop a view of reality that would forever change philosophy. He would describe a world where the important things, the ideas, never changed. The idea of a river was eternal. The physical manifestation of the river was ephemeral.
This use of logos became standard in Greek philosophy. It attempted to give meaning to reason at the cosmic level. Action was underwritten by logos. It was left to Plato to flesh out this skeleton. After Plato, it is safe to safe that the notion of logos was permanently a fixture religious philosophy.