a term in ancient Greek philosophy signifying both “word” (“sentence,” “statement,” or “speech”) and “meaning” (“concept,” “proposition,” or “foundation”). “Word” is not to be understood as sound perceived by the senses, but exclusively in its meaningful aspect. On the other hand, meaning is felt as something revealed, shaped, and therefore “word-like.” From everyday language the concept of Logos acquired the sense of precise numerical relation: of “counting” and hence of “accounting” (logon didonai, “to render an account”). Logos is both the objectively given content, of which the mind must “render an account,” and the “accounting” activity of the mind itself, and, finally, the all-encompassing, meaningful orderedness of being and consciousness. Logos is the antithesis of everything that is unaccountable and nonverbal, unresponsive and irresponsible, and senseless and formless in the world and in man.
Heraclitus was the first to use the word logos as a philosophical term. Making use of the term’s superficial identity with the everyday name for human “word,” Heraclitus created an ironic paradox that served to emphasize the gulf that separates Logos, as the law of being, from human speech, falling short of it.
The cosmic Logos, as befits the word, “calls out” to people but they, even having “heard” it, are incapable of grasping and comprehending it. In the light of Logos the world is an integral whole and, therefore, harmony, but ordinary consciousness sets its individual willfulness above the “common idea” and attaches different values to the equally indispensable parts of the whole. Within this all-embracing unity “everything flows,” things and even essences flow into each other, but Logos maintains its self-identity: Logos is the rhythm of their mutual transformations and the pattern of their interrelations. Thus, Heraclitus’ vision of the world, although dynamic and catastrophic, maintains stability and harmony due to the notion of Logos. As a whole, Heraclitus’ teachings about Logos reveal a close historical and philosophical parallel to Lao-tzu’s teachings about the Tao.
For the later Greek natural philosophers, for the Sophists, and for Plato and Aristotle, Logos lost its fundamental ontological content. Only the Stoics returned to Heraclitus’ concept of a substantial cosmic Logos, describing it as the soul of the cosmos, which consists of fine matter (ether, fire), and as the totality of form-generating potentialities (logoi spermatikoi, “seminal reasons”) from which things are “conceived” in inert lower matter. The Neoplatonists inherited this concept but rejected its naturalist and materialist aspects: logoi are no longer the outflowings of very fine matter but the emanations of the intellectual universe that form and regulate the sensory world. This puts an end to the history of the ancient classic interpretation of Logos as “word,” which is substantial but not personal, and manifests form but not will.
However, by this time the concept of Logos had long been part of the teachings of Judaism and Christianity, where it was reinterpreted as the word of the personal and “living” god who with this word summoned things and called them forth out of nonbeing. Thus, for Philo Judaeus, Logos is the “image of god” and, as it were, a “second god” that mediates between the other-worldliness of god and the temporality of the world.
For Christianity, the meaning of Logos is defined by the very first words of the Gospel according to John: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” The entire history of Christ’s earthly life is interpreted here as the incarnation and “humanization” of Logos, which brought revelation to man and was itself this revelation (“the word of life”) and the manifestation of the “invisible god.” Christian dogma affirms the substantial identity of Logos with god the father, whose “word” Logos is, and considers Logos as the second person of the trinity.
Some Russian idealist philosophers (V. F. Ern, P. A. Florenskii) used the term “Logos” to signify “integral” and “organic” knowledge, which is characterized by a balance between mind and heart, analysis and intuition.
S. S. AVERINTSEV