Friday, November 25, 2011
Word Become Flesh
I am thinking about written, redacted traditions vs living oral traditions with regard to the notion of LOGOS as "word become flesh or incarnate." The earliest attempts at recording informations were NOT phonetic alphabets, nor were they hieroglyphs of the Egyptians or the Hanzi Chinese characters, but rather the cave drawings and paintings. In Plato's cave analogy, those in chains in darkness are deceived NOT by written words but by shadowy IMAGES upon the cave wall. Glyphs and logograms came much later (China circa 8000 - 5000 BCE) and phonetic alphabets much later still. Archaeologists have found some fragments of what appear to be phonetic Hebrew writing, created by slaves or a working class as a furtive kind of rebellion from the formal hieroglyphs of the priestly ruling class. BUT in the Torah we are presented with the notion that God inscribes Hebrew letters in a stone tablet, and one of those letters has a part in its center which is believed to have FLOATED in mystic fashion as a piece of stone suspended in the hole of the tablet. So, when Jesus says "No man has seen the Father at any time; he who sees ME sees the father (as a living IMAGE or icon of the Father)." I am thinking of Logos as a pictogram or glyph or icon, and it is a image or shadowy representation of A WAY OF LIVING ONE'S LIFE from day to day. Cardinal Newman's term "illation" brought to life in Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited has some bearing upon this logos.
