Think too how wondrously liberating it would be if you never wrote another nasty venom-spewing breakup revenge song! If you want collaborators willing to craft that song with you, I would humbly suggest that you pay a visit first to the nuns, and then to my monastery in Dallas—Brother Francis and I do a wicked good cover of “Mean”!
26. Taylor Swift (b. 1989) is a very popular American singer-songwriter.
27. See Hart and DeNeut, Ear of the Heart. HBO also made a documentary about her entitled God is the Bigger Elvis.
Heraclitus28
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