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 Where did everything begin? Language? Civilization? God’s people? The Incarnation? How about the discovery of time, and the rise of Islam, and science?
 All these topics and more are treated by Dr. E. Michael Jones, author editor of Culture Wars magazine, in his new (very readable if dense) tome  Logos Rising: The History of Ultimate Reality. There so many elements to this important book that I needed to break it into two episodes. Not everyone is going to agree with 100% of his thesis, a maxim that applies to 100% of my guest. As ever, take what you find true and helpful and leave the rest. 
 🔴 Read the rest of the show notes and links at https://www.patrickcoffin.media

Can God's existence be known apart from faith?

What was the difference made in history in your life and mine to the incarnation of the Logos Jesus Christ?

That's what we're going to talk about in part 1 of the series with Dr.

Michael Jones Subscribe to this channel hit that notification bell.

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Michael Jones, author of Low-Glass Rising.

Warning, the following podcast contains ideas and arguments that might challenge your worldview.

You know me, I'm a famous actor and the narrator of every documentary ever made.

And I'm the voice of the thrice holy God.

And I say unto you, Listen to my servant, Patrick Coffin.

Michael Jones, editor of Culture Wars Magazine, author of Degenerate Moderns and Slaughter of Cities and Barren Metal and Libido Dominandi and Monsters from the Id.

And this enjoyable tome, Logos Rising, A History of Ultimate Reality.

This comes in at like a mere 840 pages, something like that.

Yes, I was thinking of calling it a short history of ultimate reality.

Yeah, I think that wry irony would not have been lost.

When people say, well gee, it's a large book and it's more expensive than the average book, my reply is you're actually getting several books in this compilation, this I call it a magisterial romp through the history of beginnings.

Did it sort of come to you whole cloth, or are these ideas that you developed over time talking about other things?

It grew out of the Jewish revolutionary spirit, because I couldn't write that book without the term Logos.

Because the central thesis of that book is that Jesus Christ is the Logos.

That's obviously in the Gospel of Saint John, but I had to unpack it there and say, you know, that when the Jews killed Christ, they rejected Logos.

And when they rejected Logos, they rejected the order of the universe.

And when they rejected the order of the universe, they became revolutionaries.

And then once I did that, then people started saying, well, what do you mean by Logos?

And then I started to think, I guess I have to explain that word.

And so that eventually ended up with this book because Logos is the source of who we are, it is the ultimate reality of the universe, it is the turning point in human history, and so I needed to explain it and devote my attention to that topic exclusively.

What year did The Jewish Revolutionary Spirit come out?

Okay, and that was the book that got you expunged from polite society because you were taken

I was no longer fit for polite company after I wrote that book.

I mean, I was on my way out already, but I mean, that was the final nail in my coffin of respectability.

It sounds like you, in your career, you've been the pariah.

Mary's College in South Bend for your position on abortion, namely you were against it.

So you were already on the outs as far as operating beyond the shadow of the ivory tower.

Have you always been drawn to ideas that are unpopular and kind of going against the grain of conventional thinking?

You know, it's something, it must be some type of unconscious thing with me.

I'm going to, I'm not trying to be kicked out, but I always get kicked out.

I invariably get kicked out of every organization that I try to join.

And I'm sure it's a character flaw on my part, but I mean, I guess it's too late to do anything about it.

I mean, after I got kicked, I would never join a club that would accept me as a member.

So maybe every time they accept me as a member, I feel upset and want to get kicked out of it.

I'll have to go to a psychiatrist to figure that 1 out, I guess.

Mary's, I tried to establish this magazine and I did the book on Medjugorje and then I got kicked out of that club.

And then I got kicked out of the conservative club and so here I am.

What adjectives would you use to describe yourself and the mission of Culture Wars?

Just the desire to get, impatience with confected narratives that are supposed to keep you imprisoned in your ignorance.

I don't even know that I'm goring someone's ox sometimes.

When I first encountered your books, it was at Franciscan University of Steubenville.

I did a graduate graduate program there in theology and we had to read degenerate moderns and 1 of the scales that fell from my eyes was your chapter on Luther's legacy.

And it really got me thinking about this conflict throughout time that we call history.

That 1 set of ideas will be crushed by either a boot or a gun or some other set of ideas.

And then from that there'll be a kind of resurrection of an old order.

And then I read Libido Dominandi and it was in Libido Dominandi, Dr.

Jones, that I noticed that you were kind of stumbling upon a certain pattern and that is the preponderance of a very narrow set of interests that were selling these revolutionary ideas.

And you didn't say, oh, this is called the Jewish revolutionary spirit.

Why does that book arouse so much anger in people?

Why do they immediately jump to, you must be an anti-Semite?

Because I've seen you interview Jews who don't disagree with you.

Yes, it's because you're not allowed to criticize a Jew.

So If you go to Dionysus Rising, that whole chapter on Arnold Schoenberg was a critique of basically the Jewish attitude toward music.

And you know, Rabbi Dresner, Sam Dresner, used to tell other Catholics they should subscribe to my magazine because it was a great magazine.

And I had reviewed his book and so on and so forth.

And at 1 point he said to me, why do you always talk about Jews?

I said, what do you mean talk about Jews?

And at that point I started to become conscious that maybe that Schoenberg thing and these other people fit together in a different way.

And that along with the neocon takeover of our foreign policy in 2003 got me thinking, maybe there is something to this story and that's what led to the book.

But you can't, in many ways, every book you write, I write, grows out of the book I just wrote.

So writing John Cardinal Kroll opened me to the idea that something happened to the cities and I wrote Slaughter of Cities, Urban Renewal as ethnic cleansing.

It's like I can't get to the top until I do this bottom part here.

So you're like building a pyramid 1 layer at a time and you can't get to the next layer until you complete this layer.

And each book is a prelude to another book.

Was it Joe Sobran who said that antisemitism used to be someone who didn't like Jews and now it's become someone Jews don't like?

Jones when I first interviewed you and I've the fact that I've had you back This is I think our fourth conversation was not me trying to you know, stick my finger in someone's eye saying I'll I'll show you I just don't understand why people can't simply disagree.

The, the vitriol level is way out of proportion to the discussion under hand.

I won't name them because it sounds like, yeah, some of my best friends are black.

But I just don't understand the, and it's cross, it crosses denominational and political lines.

People on the far right and people on the far left, there's just a, just a weird reaction to things.

When you talk about Logos, the rejection of Logos, what is a revolution?

What was the proportion of Bolsheviks or the, the the Vienna school, you know, the Frankfurt school rather, it just keeps cropping up over and over again.

And people notice it and the heavy hand of the Holocaust and so on is, I think it intimidates people and they don't, maybe the goal is to shut down conversation so that there's no interchange.

There are certain things you're not allowed to talk about.

And suddenly when you get to that, you realize, wait a minute, holy smoke, there's a pole barrier that I didn't even know because I was steering clear of it.

And now suddenly when you get there, you realize, no, you're not allowed to talk about this.

So I, just to give you 1 instance of this, I was invited to Armenia, okay?

And it got canceled because everything got canceled.

But then I thought, oh, I'll do a little research and I'll think, well, I'll look into the Armenian genocide.

My father used to say, when I wouldn't eat my food, he'd say, think of the starving Armenians.

That's how I knew about this type of thing.

So I look into it and the state of the art there is basically Armenians pointing their fingers at the Turks and Turks pointing their fingers at the Armenians and say, you guys are responsible.

I discovered the Jewish revolutionary spirit.

Not even looking for it, I discovered it.

Because what happened here is that you had, at this point in time, let's say the late 19th century, you have large numbers of people converting to the Jewish revolutionary spirit.

So both Armenians and Turks were abandoning their traditional beliefs and joining revolutionary movements like Narodnaya Volia in Russia, which was a Jewish revolutionary movement.

There was a traditional Russian revolutionary movement and the Jews got nowhere because it was back to the land and the peasants wouldn't listen to them.

So they formed their own movement which was based on terrorism.

Richard Pipes, who was a Jew, professor at Harvard, said it's the first terrorist organization in the world.

This suddenly threw the whole Armenian genocide question into a totally new construct, a totally new context, only because there is this concept out there called the Jewish Revolutionary Spirit.

So it wasn't just me, it wasn't just a category in my mind, it's out there and it helps you to understand and it helped me understand the Armenian genocide.

It was like putting a key into a lock and the door opened.

It's out there and it's in there all of human history and that's what the book is about.

We're gonna revisit this when we get to the incarnation in part 2 of this conversation.

I want to, if we can, press rewind and go way way back.

For people listening to my show, they know that I'm very interested in philosophy and argumentation, how to spot fallacies.

And early on in Logos Rising, you summarize the basic problems with the 4 Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, the late Chris Hitchens, rest his soul, and Richard Dawkins.

Can you go summarize, if you could, the example that the late Chris Hitchens uses of the eyeball.

Because it goes to this, both Dawkins and Hitchens had this idea that you can have your cake and eat it too.

You can have this gradual evolution and natural selection that avoids the obvious, how did something go from non-being to being?

But that image of the eyeball and the way you take it apart was very fascinating.

Well, I mean, it's an all or nothing proposition.

And what you realize throughout history is all these things are all or nothing propositions.

The jaw, the wing, there is a design here, they are designed to do something like that.

So what you're saying is, well, how did we get up to that point?

Well, there must have been a gradual evolution.

Well, you can't have a gradual evolution because no matter how you try to describe it, you're always going from non-being to being.

And the man who discovered you cannot do that is Parmenides.

This is 1 of the early steps of the development of Logos.

That which is cannot come from that which is not.

It led to problems, obviously, because now you can't explain change, but it is a fundamental issue, a fundamental concept of ontology that is valid today.

And the place where it's best applicable is evolution, Because evolution is constantly telling you you can go from that which is not to that which is.

And Hitchens tries to do it with the eyeball and Dawkins tries to do it with the eyeball and Dawkins tries to do it with the wing.

Okay and so Dawkins will say you know well it looks impossible but from Mount Improbable there are 2 sides and one's a big leap and the other's a gradual slope and if you go up the gradual slope with small steps it's easy.

Well what he forgot to say was every single step along that gradual slope is a step from non being to being.

Okay, so what you're seeing here is biology as bad metaphysics.

Dawkins has no idea about metaphysics, complete ignoramus when it comes to this, and he tries to substitute biology and these gradual steps without understanding that you can't do it you can't get there from here so he says well suppose you had.

Well 49% of a wing is better than no wing at all right.

Wait a minute professor if it's 49% of a wing it's a wing.

So you've already got the wing that you're trying to prove came out of evolution.

The same thing was true with Hitchens' eyeballs.

Well, wait a minute, those light sensitive cells that you're talking about, either they can see in which case you've already got an eye or they cannot see in which case you don't have an eye.

But it's 1 or the other, so it's a tautology.

You're already talking about something you already have.

Could you say the whole idea of survival of the fittest is a tautology?

Because none of the parts of the argument add anything.

Survival of the fittest, How do you know?

It's a tautology, it's a circular argument, and the best way out of it is to explain metaphysics and logos and these early steps that these people took in Ionia to enable human progress.

We had to come to some understanding of ultimate reality that was independent of this mythologizing that had come into the world codified by Homer and all those gods fighting.

First of all, there can only be 1, and secondly, he's not going to fight.

Now we do have an understanding that God is a father, and that's not just a revelation.

It's the Romans, the Greeks, everybody had it.

We would call that Logos Spermaticoi, the seeds of Logos that God put into the universe, into the mind of man.

But it went down the wrong road because you start saying, well, God is a father, he must have a beard.

And if he's got a beard, well then, does he shave every day or does he shave every other day?

And you go down that road and you're going nowhere because you're going away from God into the metaphor and that's not what God is, okay?

I think Christian art in its well-meaning attempt to visualize the Trinity say in stained glass created a problem because if God is an old man with a long white beard then Jesus must be a younger man with a short brown beard and then the Holy Spirit's what, a dove, a bird, a flame?

Right, you're going to be, first of all, the whole point of Logos is that it went into a level of abstraction that was necessary because before that they were saying, well, the ultimate reality is water, the ultimate reality is fire, the ultimate reality is air.

These are all material things and we had to go beyond material things in order to understand this.

If you're talking about the ultimate immaterial thing, you're talking about God And so anytime you have an analogy, it's going to be, fall short, it's going to fall short of the reality.

And who was the first to use or popularize Logos?

I think it was Heraclitus, yes, who also said it was fire.

And he was a, he was, this is all in Ionia, which is basically on the coast of Turkey right now, in Western Turkey.

And they were ruled by Persia at the time and there are people who say that Heraclitus was influenced by Zoroastrianism which worships fire.

And there is, I mean, fire does create an interesting image because it is the notion of energy, it's what we would call energy, and energy is certainly an integral part of the universe, and energy is constantly changing and constantly the same, like the water flowing in a river, so it's profound.

And maybe so, so I postulate in the book, well maybe fire is Logos in action.

And then you've got the whole spectrum of the book.

Because you've got the, first the part is the history of Logos, where we have to understand what that term means.

And then the second part is when we understand that, then we can see that there's a logos to history, which includes time.

And you say that, along with the historian, Christopher Dawson, that the discovery of time began in earnest with Augustine.

We're getting a little ahead of ourselves.

So, Thales argued that the fundamental, ultimate reality was water.

So they all have this, They're all capturing a facet of the truth.

They just don't have the fullness of it that perhaps didn't come until Logos was picked up by the author of the fourth gospel, St.

But talk a little bit, for people who have no exposure to the word, If you look up in a Greek interlinear or a lexicon, what do you find with the word logos?

You find column after column after column of English equivalence.

And this is what struck me when I was studying Greek way back when.

There's simply, and because of that, there is no other word that you can use.

So it's not an affectation on my part to use the word logos because there's no other word.

And this becomes apparent with the translations of the gospel of Saint John.

So, in arche ein halogos, in principio erod verbum, well now we're back to word, in the beginning there was the word, anfang vardas vort.

So once you get away from the original Greek, they're all the same and they all use the word word and I don't know what it means.

I'm sorry, but I didn't know what it meant.

It was total, that's a totally mysterious sentence when you say in the beginning there was the word.

But then when I suddenly realized, when I saw the word logos and all the English equivalent, I said, oh, now I understand what you're talking about.

Because in the beginning there was this order to the universe that is related to our rationality.

And language is 1 of the key principles of the universe and we are the only ones who have it.

So once you start bringing all that in, suddenly it makes a lot more sense.

And then to jump from there to say, and Logos was with God and Logos is God.

Now I'm starting to understand the immensity of this type of statement.

Where you're taking, I mean, we have our separated brethren who like to complain about how the Catholic Church accepts pagan concepts.

Well do you accept the Gospel of Saint John as canonical?

Well you're talking about pagans here, right?

Because he didn't write, he wrote in Greek And the Greeks had this thing called philosophy, and he baptized that philosophy.

And we wouldn't have that gospel if we weren't able to use Greek concepts and Greek words.

Maybe the thing that redeems word or gives it some intelligibility is a line from the memoirs of Helen Keller.

She's talking to Annie Sullivan about, now this is a woman who's blind and deaf, but once she had that insight, you can see it comes through in the film, The Miracle Worker, where the unintelligibility of the outside world suddenly, all of the external reality rushes into her mind through the signals that, Ms.

She eventually concluded that, the soul is like the meaning of a word and the word itself is the body of the meaning.

word with a speaker is a kind of a metaphor or analogy to the human person.

Where souls that you can't see, but we're also bodies that you not only can see, but they're the medium through which the invisibility of your mind is communicated.

So then we're left with the Logos as the Word and God the Father as the Speaker of the word.

I know you've pondered all this but that's what that was my takeaway.

And we and we're left with the gospel where there are 2 where it proposes the Trinity.

The Trinity is not the word Trinity is not in the Bible.

But once this was proposed and they had to figure out, well, what is the relationship between the son and the father?

And so what are the characteristics of the son?

What are the characteristics of the second person, the best of Trinity?

Well, logos, as I said, could be the abstract order of the universe and the Greeks understood that there was something like that and you could say, well, geometry.

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183: Logos Rising, Part One—Dr. E. Michael Jones