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 This rounds out a two-part series on the profound implications and global scope of Jones’ 800+ page  Logos Rising: The History of Ultimate Reality. In the first episode, we covered from creation up to the Incarnation of the Logos Himself, Jesus Christ.
 In Part Two, we hit the high spots from the early Church and St. Paul, up to the “death and burial’ of Thomism (the study and application of St. Thomas Aquinas to philosophical errors and other problems) in America at Notre Dame University.
  
  

This is the second episode in a series on Logos Rising, a history of ultimate reality with my guest, Dr.

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

He memorized pi to the highest number before infinity, and he discovered the only synonym for thesaurus.

I don't usually listen to podcasts, but when I do, I always listen to the Patrick Coffin Show.

As promised, part 2 of a two-part series on Logos Rising, the very readable, accessible tome by my guest, Dr.

Michael Jones, editor of Culture Wars Magazine.

He's also the author of Degenerate Moderns, Modernity as Rationalized Sexual Misbehavior, Libido Dominandi, Sexual Liberation and political control, slaughter of cities, the Jewish revolutionary spirit and its impact on world history, living machines, barren metal, and his latest book, as we mentioned, Logos Rising.

Last week we covered the beginning of everything and you took apart the arguments of people like Daniel Dennett and the late Chris Hitchens, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett.

Yeah, Richard Dawkins, that's right, the retired microbiologist.

And then we talked about the origin of the concept, logos, the Greek word that's so rich in meaning, first mentioned or popularized by Heraclitus.

And I thought we would go from creation to the Logos incarnate and then take the the narrative up From there fair enough Sure, this is so much to cover this could easily be a 14 part series

Okay, maybe we can start with John 1 verse 1, which compresses so much into a few words.

In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God.

And that English word, word is, it's kind of a lightweight considering the weighty nature of what St.

And part of your thesis here is that this is providential, that the Greeks had this concept of logos as intellect, you know, design, order, speech.

It's like the gospel and the incarnation itself was being prepared in some way by these ideas in Greek philosophy.

That's right, And we shouldn't hold that in contempt because the church did not hold it in contempt.

There are people out there who said, oh, all that Catholicism does is baptize some type of paganism.

Well, that's What you're really saying there is that God the Father prepared the way for the arrival of God the Son on this earth by leaving in creation what we would call the Logos Spermatoi, seminal words.

Paul that you can show that God exists without believing in faith at all.

You don't need faith at all, reason can prove that God exists.

But the church fathers went farther than that.

They said you could find evidence of the trinity in creation if you looked hard enough, and there were people who did exactly that.

And that's precisely where we start now with John.

I speculate here that John was aware, John, the blessed mother and Paul were all in Ephesus around the same time.

I suspect that John knew about Paul's failure at the Areopagus, tried to introduce Jesus Christ to the Greek-speaking world and it didn't go well.

For the most part, as soon as he said this man rose from the dead, they all said, well we'll talk about that some other time.

He got 2 converts and then left for Corinth where he got a good reception with the whores and sailors, but the church didn't get started for another 500 years in Athens.

He didn't make that connection and I think John knew that and I think he knew that if you're going to speak to the Greek-speaking world, there's no point in giving Hebrew genealogies because they don't know who these people are.

And so he started with a way of addressing the Greeks and there's the 3 sentences that you just mentioned at the beginning of the Gospel of Saint John.

This is addressing a philosophical audience, an audience that whose language was the basis for their philosophy and whose philosophy was intimately bound up with their language.

And 1 of the crucial words was logos, which means order and all of the stuff that we've talked about, or every word that ends in ology, it has relates back to logos in 1 way or another.

But this is new, that was kind of metaphysics and anybody could understand that if they spoke Greek and were familiar with Greek history and philosophy.

But he brought up something new because he started talking about the Logos as the sun.

The sun and the Logos were, They were the same being.

So it's not just, it's not just geometry.

This plan is dynamic and the closest we can come to that is Heraclitus' understanding of fire.

Because fire is always in motion, but it's always the same.

And so what you have now is the Logos is a person.

And that means that this plan has a dimension in time.

It means that there is a person who is going to bring this plan to fulfillment in human history.

You don't repudiate the past, You expand the past.

You expand it to a new dimension that builds on the past of what you know, but expands it way beyond anything you could ever thought of.

Resolving the conflict in Greek philosophy between the unmoved mover and the demi-orgas between transcendence and imminence because now it's all located in 1 person and that person is the vehicle of logos in human history.

And that is such a stunning new revelation that it took about 1200 years to digest it.

So, John, John killed, in many ways he killed philosophy.

Augustine is the 1 who killed it because he was familiar with it and said there's no point in trying it anymore.

This is something new, we're going to have to figure this out.

Killed it in the sense of put it on its proper footing and framing it within its limitations?

It expanded it, it opened up so much new territory here that we had to sort of colonize that territory before he could get back to what the original project was.

And I think it took about, I'm saying it took about from the gospel of John, it took about 1200 years to finally get back to...now there was a Boethius was in the middle of that and he did philosophy but he was the exception that proved the rule because everybody after that did theology.

There's an interesting conversation in around 1976 or 7 with then Bishop Sheen, who had been retired for 10 years, and Malcolm Muggeridge.

Muggeridge was still an Anglican at that point.

And they talk about Paul's failure, just to jump back a little bit to Acts 17 at the Areopagus, Paul speaking at Mars Hill, right?

And it was really Paul's only evangelical failure because he didn't hit the rapprochement, he didn't really mention the cross, he kind of got to the starting gate and left the race before the shot was fired.

Which is right in a way counterintuitive.

And I'm going to, you know, you're going to be buttonholes you and says, I'm going to tell you, I'm going to tell you some stuff.

Now you pay attention and I've only got 15 minutes, but I'm going to, that's kind of the way because he had to get someplace else.

And I think he was in too much of a hurry at this point.

He's always, and then he went, and then he went, and then he went, and he went, the image of fire by Heraclitus, it's kind of a brilliant, image to me.

And I, I believe you mentioned the church fathers.

Don't some of the church fathers liken the fire that burns the bush but doesn't consume it as a kind of prototype of Jesus the son?

Kulkinsen Probole, there's a Greek word bole and it applies to light.

And so the fact that the sun can give off light but that never runs out of light to give off.

And they talked about this as a kind of this sun emanating from the father in the way that light emanates from the sun and it actually got into the creed.

Light from light, true God from true God.

So that was a metaphor that they used to explain how you could be kind of the same thing and yet different at the same time.

So of course, what we're talking about here is the Trinity and that was the big problem right after that.

John gave us the kind of basic tools, the basic building blocks out of Revelation and then for the next about 3 centuries, let's say to 325, the Council of Nicaea, they sat around thinking how do these parts fit together?

And again, they couldn't have done it without Greek.

They could not have done it without the Greek language.

And in many ways, this whole, the Western fathers were innocent of heresy largely because they couldn't understand Greek.

And so they were kind of cut out of the discussion because to get involved in the heresy, you had to know the difference between homoousion and homoiousion, which came to be the second was the Aryan formula that they tried to superimpose over the orthodox formula of Homoousia.

1 in being with the father, consubstantial with the father.

So the whole thing, it's basically 1 large debate in Greek philosophy that was necessary in order to be able to understand the Trinity in some type of systematic fashion so that you could come up with a creed that was an accurate representation of what you believed.

I wanted to ask you about the particularity of the Logos Incarnate.

You in Logos Rising you quote from the Roman Martyrology and I'd never I'd never seen this text put in 1 spot I'll just normally I'm allergic to reading but here it is This is the Roman martyrology that dates Christ's birth as the 25th of December.

When ages beyond number had run their course from the creation of the world, when God in the beginning created heaven and earth and formed man in his own likeness, when century upon century had passed since the Almighty set his his bow in the clouds after the great flood as a sign of covenant and peace in the 21st century since Abraham our father in faith came out of Ur of the Chaldees in the 13th century since the people of Israel were led by Moses in the Exodus from Egypt, around the thousandth year since David was anointed King, in the 65th week of the prophecy of Daniel, in the 194th Olympiad, in the year 752 since the foundation of the city of Rome, in the 42nd year of the reign of Caesar, Octavian, Augustus, when the world was at peace.

Why, why this sense of we have to locate this not just as a Greek philosophical idea but something that happened historically?

Because the danger is that someone's going to say it's a myth.

And the big breakthrough in Greece was the move away from myth.

And there are other areas of the world where they never did it, never moved away from myth.

If you tried Indians when they write philosophy, it always ends up with some type of superhero in mythology.

So they were very careful about wanting to situate this in a historical context, an accurate historical context that everyone would recognize.

So it's not just the Hebrew scripture, it's the Greek Olympiad and the Ab-Orbe Condita, the founding of Rome.

So that you know exactly what we're talking about, when this happened.

And Christ did not appear in Athens or Jerusalem or Rome or any of the great urban cosmopolitan centers, but Backwoods, Hick area.

Just that he was not going to be the powerful military ruler that the Hebrews wanted.

And that became the big stumbling block among the Jews who would have preferred a powerful military leader.

But it is Logos and Logos does have some type of power, but you have to have the eyes to see it, to recognize it.

And that meant that you were not, he's dealing with Hebrew chauvinism here.

And probably the best example of Hebrew chauvinism is the Gospel of St.

John where the Jews say to Jesus, we're the seed of Abraham.

And so, they had to bring in, to deflate Jewish hubris, they had to bring in the Olympiad and the history of Rome and all of these because that was important too.

Not so much to situate it, but There are other people, God has taken contributions from other parts of humanity as well.

He didn't come onto a superstar platform but an unknown spot that was, if anything, didn't have a good reputation.

Can anything good come from Nazareth, right?

The first non-Jews to see Jesus Christ were Persian astronomers and philosophers.

Astronomy and philosophy were intimately linked at that point because they felt that God dwelled in the heavens and that the mechanism whereby he communicated his will were the spheres, the celestial spheres.

And astrology and astronomy were sort of the same thing at that point in time.

Kramer So over time, the next couple centuries, when John 1, verse 1 and following gets fleshed out and we get the formulation of the dogma of the Trinity and the relationship between the human nature and the divine nature of Jesus Christ and the foundation of the sacraments and all that.

Augustine, and you devote a lot of time in Libido Dominandi, which is a phrase from City of God, I believe.

Here in Logos Rising, you say Augustine is in a way the 1 who discovered time.

Yeah, that's Christopher Dawson said that and I just appropriate it because that is true.

But yeah, because he was a Platonist as a young man, then he became a Manichean and got involved in all these mystery cults in that time of the Roman Empire, but as a Platonist, time had no meaning.

Aristotle said time was the number of motion and that's kind of like the clock, It goes around in a circle and it really doesn't go anywhere and it doesn't really have any meaning.

And that's the time of scientific measurement and that's the time we use, okay?

But he has a really sophisticated understanding of time that is really complicated in the city of God which has to do with memory and expectation and goes deep into the psychological perception of time.

But he also, the point of the book is that there is a plan for human history.

Now the only people who ever felt that way were the Hebrews, so this is a new concept to Greece because you can have people like Herodotus who just, you know, interesting stories.

Not really true, we're not going to look into it, but it was just a lot of interesting stories.

But there's no sense that there's some type of plan for human history.

And that was the contribution of Augustine because he saw that in Christianity and was the 1 who made it explicit.

Like a pole, an engine, a drive, a purpose, a point?

Aristotle used that term and it means end or goal and it means that all action has an end, a purpose.

You don't act unless you have some type of purpose in mind.

And that purpose is then the end or the end point or goal of what you're doing.

So he could see that with individual action, with animals, they all have act for a purpose, but he couldn't see it for history because nobody, nobody did.

There were certain, I mean he was the greatest, il maestro de color che sanno, the master of all those who know as Dante called him.

But he had limitations because of his time and place and there were things that he didn't know.

And 1 of the things he didn't know was that actually history had a purpose too.

The Hebrew revelation is over time and it's basically the story of the Hebrew people and how they were given the covenant and how they violated the covenant and went back and forth.

So they got the history right but it was the Greeks who could understand the kind of the metaphysical implications of history and Augustine brought them together and says, yes, there's a purpose to history and history has a beginning, a middle, and an end.

So Aristotle knew that there was, that's When he wrote the Poetics, he said the drama has a beginning, a middle, and an end.

But he didn't know that history had 1 because he didn't know that there was going to be an incarnation, that there was going to be a Logos, that God was going to enter into history because His God did not enter into history.

His God was the uncaused cause and the unmoved mover that lived completely in a transcendent realm and if maybe through the motion of the spheres it was communicated, but we couldn't be sure.

What is the nature of the 2 cities, city of man and city of God?

City of man is love of self to the extinction of God, and the city of God is love of God to the extinction of self.

And those are the 2 options in human history, and nothing will change in that regard.

And history will be the rise and fall of empires that either embody 1 or the other ideal, or generally what it is, you start off embodying 1 and you end up embodying the other and decadence sets in and the empire fails and collapses.

The man who talked about that is Vico and that's, there's a chapter on him but that's getting ahead of the story.

Let's move to the rise of Islam and the separation a couple of centuries later.

I've interviewed Robert Riley on his book, the closing of the Muslim mind and I learned a lot about, and you talk about it in Logos rising, the Mutazilite and the, the more anti-rational, asteroids.

1 sees a lot as pure will and he's totally capricious, he can lie and so on, and the other is more akin to Christian philosophy.

Well, it started as they, they were the Muslims were the first to get Aristotle's text.

The Christianity had some texts for Plato, largely through Boethius, the translation, but it was the Muslims who had Aristotle and they were just confronted with a dichotomy here because Aristotle said the world was eternal and Islam said it was created because they got their idea from Genesis.

And so you have this conflict and how are we going to resolve the conflict?

Now I try to portray this as a conflict, an internal conflict between Arabia and Persia.

That's kind of the way I see the development of Islam.

The Arabs, even up till 1907, the 1970s, 85% of Saudi Arabia earned its living from animal husbandry.

And 2,500 years ago, the Persians or the Iranians were philosophers.

As I said, the 3 people that first, the first 3 non-Hebrews to see Jesus Christ were Persian philosophers.

So they had a head start and they considered themselves a superior culture and they were, it was a superior culture.

But Unfortunately, they lost the war and the Arabs were mobilized by this epic, this national epic called the Koran.

It's like the Aeneid was to the Romans or the Nibelungenleid to the Germanic tribes, and El Cid to the Spaniards.

And it energizes and unifies this group of people and they become extremely powerful militarily And they go out and conquer the world, and part of the world they conquered was Persia.

And so at this point, you have a conflict.

There are plenty, I mean part of this was my experience going to Iran and dealing with the Iranians, talking to them.

And then talking, you know, off the record to people, you know, and what was your experience?

And the experience is, you know, the 1 thing the Iranians prize is poetry.

They have some of the greatest poetry in the world.

I visited his tomb in Shiraz when I was there.

Goethe thought he was so great that he did it, tried to imitate Hafez.

And so, the Persian children memorized Hafez's poetry, other poetry as well.

Ferdowsi wrote a long epic called the Shahnameh and they memorize it and they read it, but they only read excerpts because it's so long.

And then at some point, they go to the bazaar and they pick up the unexpurgated edition and suddenly you open it and Ferdowsi thinks that the worst thing that ever happened to Iran was Islam.

The conqueror, we were conquered by barbarians.

We're poets and philosophers and these camel jockeys came in and destroyed our culture.

And so this is part of the consciousness of the Persian people to this day, to this day.

And as a result, it just, there's this uneasiness that I noticed.

Because when you talk to, you know, I've been in a situation where you talk to the Mullah And the Mullah is just this ferocious advocate of sola scriptura.

So you know, I tried to talk about, you know, let's talk about the wheel, let's talk about the dog.

I'm trying to explain this because we're, I'm in Mashhad.

This is where the horse, the wheel, all these things.

Islam is like a thousand, it's like 10,000 years in the future.

We've had dogs and wheels, domesticated dogs for 10,000 years before, for 10,000 BC.

Everything comes from the Koran because the Koran is the source of all knowledge.

And so if it doesn't come from the correct Koran, it comes from the Hadith and the Hadith are created to make up the gaps in the Quran.

And so as a result, you have this anti-intellectual superstructure imposed on the Persian mind and it just doesn't fit.

These are the anti-rational Ashurite Muslims for whom you said it's like soul script could you say

scripture flights did not succeed they did not they were they eventually extinguished

you had Tragic figures in Islamic history who try and kind of make some type of connection between faith and reason and they end up getting their heads chopped off more than that.

It just does not take, Islam always reverts to some type of asherite some type of fundamentalism

and could you say it's it doubles down in a more extreme direction from soul scriptura by identifying the Quran with Allah himself the Quran is kind of eternalized

well they they have they have what is going to be a very difficult, a notion of divine revelation that is going to be very difficult to defend.

So their concept of divine revelation is that the angel Gabriel came down from Heaven where the Koran exists.

He came down and he dictated it into the ear of the prophet who then wrote it down word for word even though he was illiterate and didn't know how to write.

The problem is that now scripture scholarship is being applied to the Koran and what you start to realize is that, well no, these were passages that were all picked up elsewhere.

How do you square that with this dictation into Muhammad's ear?

So Just to give you 1 instance, I was invited to talk about in Tehran, I was invited to talk about mercy, about the first shura of the Koran.

So I contact my friend at the University of Warsaw in Poland who's an Islamic scholar and I said, where does this come from?

He says it's not, it's a Syriac Christian prayer.

So how are you going to square this with the notion that I've already expressed of revelation?

How are you going to make these 2 things come together?

And I think they know that and as a result, there's always going to be some type of reversion to a type of fundamentalism because it can't withstand the rational scrutiny in the way that the Bible can.

This insight here seems to be the 1 that got then Pope Benedict the 16th in so much trouble.

After his speech at Regensburg, identifying the disconnect between reason revelation leading to an impulse toward violence.

And in response, there were violent reactions around the world.

Is this disconnect between Logos as God and the interface between human reason and what God can reveal, is that behind the fact that science did not arise from the Islamic world?

That's what every- the big puzzle about the Islamic world is Why didn't science arise there?

Because they had a huge head start compared to Europe.

And I'm saying, I mean the point of my book is well because you didn't understand the trinity.

Because you got your notion of Jesus Christ from Nestorian heretics because they're the only people who were around in what became the Islamic world.

And they didn't believe that Jesus Christ was God.

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184: Logos Rising, Part Two—Dr. E. Michael Jones