LOGOS – (Gr. Word) St. John the Evangelist uses this expression for the Word of God, the Second Person of the Holy Trinity, Who was God from the beginning, and through Him all things were made. “And the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us” (JoHN 1:1-18). This Gospel is read at Divine Liturgy on Easter Day.
The Greek word logos already had a long history before it was used by St. John. Its three principle meanings are: ‘think, reckon, and speak. Like all things rational, logos at its most profound level conveys: the meaning, the ordering, and reasonable content. In time, this also came to be identified with Universal Reason, and Creative Reason.
St. John completes the philosophical truths of the Ancient Greeks, by connecting them to the Jewish Tradition of his day. So when St. John?s Gospel tells us, In the beginning was the Logos, and the Logos was with God, and the Logos was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through Him, and without Him was not anything made that was made. In Him exists life, and the life was the light of men … And the Logos became flesh and dwelt among us… St. John clearly states that Jesus Christ is the Logos. The Logos, the second Person of the Holy Trinity, is also known as the Wisdom, Intellect and Providence of God. It is in the Logos that creation finds its reason, cause, and purpose.
It is a word of great resonance in biblical and patriotic Greek, logos can mean any or all of the following: reason, word, rational(ity), speech, discourse, argument, divine will, or the second person of theTrinity. Its most famous use is the opening of the Gospel of John: “In the beginning was the Word (1:1) . . . by whom all things were made (1:4) . . and the Word became flesh (1: 14) “. This text, em-phasized particularly by Church Fathers such as Ignatius of Antioch, Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, Origen, Athanasius, Cyril of Alexandria, and Maximus the Confessor, signaled at once the divine preexistence of Christ and his intimate involvement with the creation and recreation (or redemption) of the world. The term thus includes a rev-elation fundamental to theology, Christology, cosmology,and-since the “words” (logoi) of God are gathered in his living Word-to Scripture as well. Maximus the Confessor therefore wrote that Christ’s Incarnation constitutes the fulfillment of what is already implicit in the creation of the world and explicit in the Old Testament revelation. The cosmos is sustained by the divine wills (logoi) addressed to each created thing and by the words of the Word present in the Scriptures.