Logos and Love

on the wildness of Christian reason

GK Chesterton has a great line in The Paradoxes of Christianity:

“…the more I considered Christianity, the more I found that while it had established a rule and order, the chief aim of that order was to give room for good things to run wild.”

Chesterton considered Christianity unique because it held together seeming opposites in a delicate balance: to fight fiercely and to love totally; to hate the sin but love the sinner; to demand justice and deliver mercy.

Christianity is a religion where there is “room for wrath and love to run wild,” he says, precisely because it is contained within a structure that is built on paradox.

“Remember that the Church went in specifically for dangerous ideas; she was a lion tamer. The idea of birth through a Holy Spirit, of the death of a divine being, of the forgiveness of sins or the fulfillment of prophecies are ideas which need but a touch to turn them into something blasphemous or ferocious..

If some small mistake were made in doctrine, huge blunders might be made in human happiness…Doctrines had to be defined within strict limits even in order that man might enjoy general human liberties. The Church had to be careful, if only that the world might be careless

I mean the monstrous wars about small points of theology, the earthquakes of emotion about a gesture or a word. It was only a matter of an inch; but an inch is everything when you are balancing. The Church could not afford to swerve a hair’s breadth on some things if she was to continue her great and daring experiment of the irregular equilibrium.

This is the thrilling romance of Orthodoxy. People have fallen into a foolish habit of speaking of orthodoxy as something heavy, humdrum and safe. There never was anything so perilous or so exciting as orthodoxy.”

It is good to remind ourselves of this thrilling romance especially when we talk about things like doctrine or truth and all the “monstrous wars about small points of theology.” They are the walls of the garden that allow all the good things to run wild.

WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE

What are these good things? The answer to that question is manifold and should rightly be the thing that interests us most - the good news.

One of the wildest things I ever heard was from Joseph Ratzinger: “Before you were born, you were a thought in the mind of God.”

Think about that for a second and tell me it doesn’t fall under the Chestertonian category of thrilling and daring ideas.

“We are not some casual and meaningless product of evolution,” he said. “Each of us is the result of a thought of God.” (Inaugural Mass, Apr 24, 2005)

That to me is just one example of the wildness of Christian thought, how it challenges culturally accepted ideas and opens up exciting ways of thinking about ourselves and the world.

LOGOS

What Ratzinger is referencing here is the idea of the Logos, a very rich and central concept for Christianity, which can be translated as word, reason, meaning

“For the ancient world and the Middle Ages, being itself is true, in other words apprehensible, because God, pure intellect made it and he made it by thinking it.

To the creative original spirit, the Creator Spiritus, thinking and making are one and the same thing. His thinking is a creative process. Things are, because they are thought.” (Intro to Christianity p. 31)

Our participation as beings, things that are thought, automatically confers meaning on us, Ratzinger goes on to say. Our minds participate in the mind of God because we were created by that intelligence. That intelligence of God is called Logos:

“Man can re-think the logos, the meaning of being, because his own logos, his own reason, is logos of the one logos, thought of the original thought, of the creative spirit that permeates and governs his being.” (p.32)

LOVE

But God’s “thinking” is not a calculated, purely mental thinking. God’s thinking is creative, it generates things and it does so because it is also love.

“The logos of the whole world, the creative original thought is at the same time love; in fact this thought is creative because, as thought, it is love and, as love, it is thought.

“It becomes apparent that truth and love are originally identical; that where they are completely realized they are not two parallel or even opposing realities but one, the one and only absolute. (Introduction to Christianity p. 103)

What I love here is this combination, the paradox, of both a wildly creative and supremely rational God:

“God is the absolute and ultimate source of all being; but this universal principle of creation – the Logos, primordial reason – is at the same time a lover with all the passion of a true love. (Deus Caritas Est)

Of course there is much more to be said on the Logos particularly in reference to Christ and the truly radical form of love shown on the Cross. I will not attempt an exhaustive overview of the topic!

I only want to remind myself and anyone else interested in such things that we are not an either/or religion – either love or truth; either mercy or judgement; either doctrinal or pastoral. The uniqueness of Catholicism as Chesterton reminds us, is that we are all of those seeming opposites delicately balanced in the perilous and thrilling adventure of Christianity.