On the Lógos

There is obviously an order to things. That order must be to them prior, if it is to order them at all; if, i.e., it is to characterize their relations. For, were the things prior to their order, then whence their obvious order (whence, i.e., and to begin with, each their own coherent integrity *as things*?)? Why in that case should those things be ordered in respect to each other? Should they not rather be utterly disordered? Should they not in that case be nowise, i.e., a coherent cosmos, such as we obviously inhabit? Were the things prior to their order, then what appears to us as their cosmic order could be but speciously such; could be, rather and only, the way that chaos right now happens to appear.

I grant that earthly life does often seem just like that: just one goddamn shitty thing after another …

But then, back to first principles: how could we possibly adjudge life right now to be shitty, had we no supernal basis for comparison?

Excursus: It’s no good to suppose that, in the absence of a prior eternal Lógos, one or another of the things then from everlasting existent somehow ordered the others, or perhaps just urged them to some end of its own.

For: Why? On what basis? What made the suggestion of one such being better than the suggestion of another?

All appeals to any basis of such an ordination presuppose a prior moral and aesthetic order: a Lógos.

In that case, what looks to us like an ordered cosmos that bears investigation and in respect to which science is possible, is in fact just a chaos, of which nothing can be known, and in respect to which no acts can therefore be ordered so as to work toward any ends.

In that case, i.e., *everything that we experience* argues against the priority of things over their prior Lógos.

It is hard to see how an organism – any organism – could be described accurately as an instance of chaos. Everywhere we look, we see order; or else, we see nothing. We see not always nice order, to be sure, but we do see always perfect order (bearing ever in mind that entropy – pain, etc. – is a feature of order; is a sort thereof, albeit defective): disparate things hang together immaculately, albeit not always happily.

Things want also – the urge is everywhere in nature – to arrive at equilibrium, and so at integrity: so, at proper rest (whence, again, that notion of propriety?). But if the telos of that urge – the character of that equilibrium – were not antecedent thereto, then could there be no single direction thereof, and so no agreement among things about where to tend, however messily. Never mind missing, that’s not the difficulty: it is not possible to aim at all, or then to miss, except in virtue of and attraction to a target that is out there to begin with, before the aiming starts. One can’t want to hit a target that just is not there.

Well, no, not so. One can want to hit a nonexistent target, but only as insane, or as evil. Insanity in the end reduces to evil. I.e., defect of reason – of, that is, conformity to the Lógos – reduces in the end to vice; to weakness, disease, death.

OK then: no eternal Lógos → no possibility of evil, or of good; of order, or then of of disorder.

So much for naïve polytheism of the modern sort (that, unlike all ancient and traditional polytheism, reckons no God Most High – which is therefore at bottom equivalent to Democritean materialism), and for atheism.

It’s the Lógos, or it’s nothing. Experience per se is something; ¬ nothing → Lógos.

Per the Apostle John, who was the man closest to the Lógos Incarnate, it all follows inexorably from that.