|
Ancient Roots of the Solar Logos
- "I am the light of the world; he who follows me will not walk in
darkness, but will have the light of life." [John 8:12]
- The Logos represents the heart of the cosmic pattern and the source
of existence, its emblem is the sun, which is the source of life and
light.
- For the Greeks and Romans the "Invincible Sun" was the master of
all nature, creator and preserver of men.
- Like God, the sun eternally gives forth from itself without ever being
diminished, thus establishing itself as the most perfect symbol of the
ineffable First Cause.
- Commonplace in Hellenistic thought, if the sun can be seen as the
material reflection of the First Cause, by analogy the First Cause can
be represented as the Spiritual or Intelligible Sun.
- Philo refers to God as the Intelligible Spiritual Sun, and the Logos
his offspring, as the Son of God.
- "The Logos is God's Likeness, by whom the whole kosmos was fashioned."
[Philo Judaeus]
- "We speak of God, of the Son, his Word, and of the holy Spirit; and
we say that the Father, the Son, and the Spirit are united in power.
For the Son is the intelligence, reason, and wisdom of the Father, and
the Spirit is an effluence, as light from fire." [Athenagoras]
- The nature of the Logos was also represented by the natural principle
of musical harmony. It is through the power of harmony that all parts
of creation are reconciled into a greater whole.
- The Logos is in the arche, the Beginning, Source or Fount of existence.
As the underlying harmonic pattern of creation, all things were made
through the Logos, which contains the principles of Life and Light.
- The kosmos itself is a reflection of the Logos, which exists here-and-now
in the manifest world; yet, without the power of Mind--the power of
Light--the created world is unaware of the higher realities, even though
it mirrors them.
- According to early Christians the Logos was made flesh, became incarnate
in Jesus. The meaning here is that the Revelation of the New Law, the
Logos, has now been made manifest among humanity.
- No one has at any time seen the ineffable, High God. But the only
begotten Son--the Logos--who is in the bosom of the Father, has revealed
to humanity the nature of the transcendent Source, both through consciousness--the
Light of Life--and through the structure of the universe itself.
- As put by Jesus, in the Gospel of Thomas, "It is I who am the light
which is above them all. It is I who am the All. From me did the All
come forth, and unto Me did the All extend. Split a piece of wood and
I am there..."
The Solar Logos as the Cosmic Christ
- "The spirit of the Lord...fills the whole world, and that which holds
all things together knows every word that is said." [Wis. 1:7]
- The cosmos is fundamentally and primarily living...Christ, through
his Incarnation, is internal to the world...rooted in the world, even
in the very heart of the tiniest atom...Nothing seems...more vital,
from the point of view of human energy, than the appearance and eventually,
the systematic cultivation of such a "cosmic sense." [Teilhard de Chardin]
- What is the pattern that connects? [Gregory Bateson]
- He is the image of the unseen God and the first-born of all creation,
for in him were created all things in heaven and on earth: everything
visible and everything invisible...Before anything was created, he existed,
and he holds all things in unity. [Col. 1:15-17]
- The Cosmic Christ, seen as the "pattern that connects," affirms the
scientific quest for such a pattern. It offers hope by insisting on
the interconnectivity of all things and on the power of the human mind
and spirit to experience personally this common glue among things...The
Cosmic Christ personalizes and localizes the "pattern that connects."
- The Cosmic Christ ushers in an era of coherence, of ending the separations,
divisions, dualism, piecemealness that characterize a world without
mysticism, a society without a living cosmology. A cosmos is always
a whole, a unity, a state of coherence even if the coherence seemingly
exists for a time only in the hearts and imaginations of the people,
only in hope. The Cosmic Christ unites psyche and cosmos once again.
- It is not enough to celebrate the Cosmic Christ as "the pattern that
connects" and the "bearer of coherence" as expressed in Jesus. There
is a real sense in which the Cosmic Christ is not born yet.
- The name "Christ" means "the anointed one." All of us are anointed
ones. We are all royal persons, creative, godly, divine, persons of
beauty and of grace. We are all Cosmic Christs, "other Christs." But
what good is this if we do not know it? Everyone is a sun of God as
well as a son or a daughter of God, but very few believe it or know
it...We are all called, like the Cosmic Christ, to radiate the divine
presence to/with/from one another.
- Because we are Cosmic Christs and because we are called to birth the
yet unborn Cosmic Christ we are, like Jesus, prophets of order over
chaos.
Sources:
- David Fideler, JESUS CHRIST SUN OF GOD: ANCIENT COSMOLOGY AND EARLY
CHRISTIAN SYMBOLISM, Quest Books, 1993.
- Matthew Fox, THE COMING OF THE COSMIC CHRIST, Harper & Row, 1988.
|