On Writing Anything at All

A Theological Reflection on Writing

“In the beginning was the Word (in Greek, Logos), and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”

Thus begins John’s Prologue.

What is this all about? What does it mean that the Word is in the beginning and why does this matter?

The classical mind perceived the world as inherently meaningful — a unified whole filled with seemingly disparate parts, and one that was intelligible to the human mind. The Pre-Socratics (i.e., Greek philosophers before Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle), described the mystery of unity amid diversity as logos. Logos was this mysterious rationality that held opposites in tensive unity. Similarly, the Stoics saw logos as the fundamental principle that held all things together. Stoic thinkers foresaw a materialistic world consisting of active realities (energy) and passive ones (matter).

This Stoic worldview differed from that of Plato, who held that there was a world of ideas beyond our world that our world was based upon. The problem for Plato had to do with how the ideas became reality. How did the ideas move from abstraction to reality?

Philo (1^st century Jewish philosopher) squares Plato’s circle. Commenting on Genesis 1, the creation of the world, Philo blends Platonic and Stoic thought. He puts the ideas, the reasons in the mind of God, and it is God’s word, utterance, that speaks the ideas into reality — hence giving meaning to the world. The thoughts in the mind of God are spoken — creating a coherent reality. John the Evangelist would have known of Philo’s work and takes it one step further — identifying the Logos with the person of Jesus Christ. In other words, the God of the philosophers is taken up with the one true God, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob — the God who takes flesh in Jesus making his Trinitarian identity known, making his love known.

In the beginning was the Logos, and the Logos was with/toward God, and the Logos was God.¹

Meaningfulness in the Christian Vision of Reality

Therefore, in the Christian vision, the whole of reality is inherently meaningful. All of reality comes from the Word. Meaningfulness is written into and through all of reality. Additionally, all reality is marked by an inherent relationality that, foundationally, finds itself in relation to its Creator (i.e., the Word, which is in relation to God, the Father, Being itself).

We see this meaningfulness of creation as John’s text goes on:

He was in the beginning with God.

All things came to be through him,

and without him nothing came to be.

What came to be

through him was life,

and this life was the light of the human race;

the light shines in the darkness,

and the darkness has not overcome it.

John 1 is a commentary on Genesis 1. Note that in Genesis 1, the word itself is the uncreated light through which all that is created comes to be. “Then God said: Let there be light, and there was light” (Gen. 1:3). God speaks light. He doesn’t make light. All the other creatures are made or fashioned in some way. Not light. God’s speech is light. God’s word is light. God is light.

The human mind, human reason, corresponds to God’s mind, God’s reason, God’s truth — logos. The human mind can come to know and grasp the truth precisely because, made in the “image and likeness” of God, the human mind is logos-like. It can perceive. It can recognize meaning (that word recognize is to re-cognate, to re-think what has already been-thought by God. All human thinking is simply re-thinking).

Let’s take this a step further — all human speaking is (or ought to be), a re-speaking, a re-stating that which has been spoken. By extension, then, all human writing is (or ought to be), a re-writing of that which has been spoken. Writing is a participation in the light — an expression of the truth that breaks darkness, an echo of the meaningfulness written into all of reality. Writing, then, is a human participation in and expression of the truthfulness written into all reality.

In fact, we see this participation in God’s creative word from the very beginning. God, logos, invites human beings to participate in naming created realities (Gen. 2:19-20). Stratford Caldecott describes this as sort of mediation of logos. He says:

Naming is our first task, our mission. It is to connect the Ideas in God and the things in the world. We are to be the mediator, the recognizer. The Ideas are somehow in us, or we could not recognize them. Made in god’s image we are also an image of the whole world. The other creatures reflect the same reality but more partially, in a fragmented way. It is man who puts the pieces together, who sees how they belong and where they should go.²

Human beings are that part of creation capable of giving utterance to logos. We speak. We name. We utilize language to express the inherent meaningfulness of created realities. But we do not name God. “This would imply that we have some kind of power over him,” Caldecott says. “In fact, the most archetypal act of naming is not Adam’s naming of the animals, but God’s naming of himself. In the encounter with Moses at the burning bush, God names himself ‘I am.’”³

In addition to Caldecott, St. John Paul II engages with this task of mediating the logos, albeit with different imagery, in his Letter to Artists. He says:

The opening page of the Bible presents God as a kind of exemplar of everyone who produces a work: the human craftsman mirrors the image of God as Creator....What is the difference between “creator” and “craftsman”? The one who creates bestows being itself, he brings something out of nothing...and this, in the strict sense, is a mode of operation which belongs to the Almighty alone. The craftsman, by contrast, uses something that already exists, to which he gives form and meaning. This is the mode of operation peculiar to man as made in the image of God. God therefore called man into existence, committing to him the craftsman's task. Through his “artistic creativity” man appears more than ever “in the image of God”, and he accomplishes this task above all in shaping the wondrous “material” of his own humanity and then exercising creative dominion over the universe which surrounds him.⁴

The human person mediates logos, word. The human being does not create logos, word, but shapes and crafts the prior word — allowing its light to shine brightly amid the darkness and nothingness that threatens to consume every corner of creation. Writing, in its own way, engages in this mediation of the truth.

Writing and Tradition

Writing, that is, the written form of language, is, in itself, an exercise of living tradition. We enter the stream of human “handing over” (which is what the word tradition literally means) — at once the grateful recipients of a cultural inheritance of language laden with meaning and simultaneously those entrusted with handing it on afresh. According to Caldecott, tradition “is not something we simply manufacture, nor something cooked up by our parents, but something our parents themselves have received with gratitude and respect...Tradition is based on the act of faith. I adhere not simply because it has been handed down to me, but because I believe it is true, even if I cannot directly verify its truth for myself.”⁵

This is precisely where Descartes goes wrong. He imposes a universal skepticism on all tradition, history, and any sense-knowledge, yet he relies on tradition (in the form of language) to express such skepticism and the resulting conclusions. This effectively amounts to sawing off the branch he’s sitting on, for even those famous words of the cogito ergo sum, each relies on a legacy of linguistic tradition. Without such tradition, the words would mean nothing, and Descartes’ pure thought evaporates into oblivion. Matthew Crawford’s conclusions about such a way of thinking are apt in a case like this. When it comes to knowing anything, Crawford says, “Other people (and the resources of language) are indispensable. Without them, your experiences are partial, and may sediment as idiosyncratic bad habits.”⁶

Tradition is a gift of logos and it contains a task of handing on logos. We are recipients of this gift. We are tradition’s beneficiaries. And this gift comes with a task. The gift is the truth, and the task is faithfully handing it on. Writing, the written word, is one means of participating in the vast movement of logos, in the flow of tradition, concretizing it in the form of pen and paper (or words on a screen, I guess). Writing, that we can write, is a gift that invites us to give — to offer ourselves, on paper, to another, thus participating in the tradition of handing on meaning.

Back to the Word

Tradition always points to its origins, however. And this we must never forget. As Hans Urs von Balthasar notes, “To honor the tradition does not excuse one from the obligation of beginning everything from the beginning each time.”⁷ Thus, every time we engage with words — with truth and with words (whether written or spoken) — we have the opportunity to remember that logos who was in the beginning, with God, and who is God. We have the opportunity to remember that logos took flesh and dwelt among us, such that there is not only objective meaning in this world — which can be carried forth in the craft of writing, for instance — “but that this meaning knows me and loves me...in the countenance of the man Jesus of Nazareth.”⁸ And, for this reason, we remember that “the Christian faith is not a ‘religion of the book.’ Christianity is the religion of the ‘Word’ of God, a word which is ‘not a written and mute word, but the Word which is incarnate and living.’”⁹

1. The Logos is God and is in relation with God. The interpersonal reality of the Trinity is already emerging.

2. Caldecott, Beauty in the Word, 41.

3. Caldecott, Beauty in the Word, 42

4. John Paul II, Letter to Artists, §1.

5. Caldecott, Beauty in the Word, 46.

6. Crawford, The World Beyond Your Head, 63.

7. Balthasar, Razing the Bastions, 34.

8. Ratzinger, Introduction to Christianity, 80.

9. CCC, §108.