called an evangelist, since he proclaimed good news, but I consider him a full-fledged member of the elite club of wisdom lovers.
His name is John, and he penned a most extraordinary book that, fortunately, is not fragmented. He devoted the very first lines of his book, called a gospel, to an exposition of the logos as he understood it (John 1:1–5):
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 came to be through him, and without him not one thing came to be. What came to be through him was life, and the life was the light of human beings. The light shines in darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.
After reading the opening verses of the Gospel of John, do you hear the same echoes of your teaching on the logos that I do? His description has much in common with yours, Heraclitus. The logos for John is the cause of all things, and sustains all things in being. There is even a brief reflection on the opposites of light and darkness, though I don’t think you had such a moral meaning in mind with your take on opposites.
John begins his gospel with a central concept of Greek philosophy surely known to his Hellenized readers. A few verses later, though, something altogether unique and startling appears without warning: “And the logos became flesh and pitched his tent among us, and we have seen his glory” (John 1:14).
I would love to see your facial expression when you read that verse for the first time. This simple and awesome sentence highlights the crucial difference between your logos and John’s, a distinction that has vast consequences for our understanding of the logos and our own relationship to it. Whereas for you the logos is a law, a harmonizing force, or a cold cosmic mind, for John the logos is a person, one who enters into relationship with all human beings. You probably noted that something was going on with the references to “he” and “him” in the prologue of the gospel, but the line in verse 14 is unmistakable and shocking: John insists that this eternal logos, this most glorious and unifying truth of life, became a human being at a specific point in history. The name of that human being, the logos incarnate, is Jesus Christ, and all those who read the Gospel of John as a word (a written logos) sent from God are called Christians.
I must tell you that I am not the first person to see parallels between your teaching on the logos and that of John. About a century after the life of Jesus, a Christian by the name of Saint Justin Martyr dared to call you and several other philosophers Christians, even though he knew that you lived before the time of Christ. He believed your insights into the logos were true, and that human beings possess the ability to know that there is an ultimate law accessible to us through our minds. Because of this, Saint Justin regarded your philosophy as a sneak preview of the full logos revealed by Jesus during his ministry. You had only a partial intuition of the full mystery behind the logos, since you were philosophizing before the supreme revelation of the logos had arrived on the earth.32 But by living in accordance with the logos, you nevertheless scattered “seeds of the logos” in the fertile soil of the human heart, so that when the fullness of time came (Gal 4:4), men and women might be able to perceive in Christ the perfection of the truth you saw from afar:
Therefore, whatever things were rightly said among all people are the property of us Christians. For next to God, we worship and love the logos who is from the unbegotten and ineffable God, since also He became man for our sakes, that, becoming a partaker of our sufferings, He might also bring us healing. For all the writers were able to see realities darkly, through the presence in them of an implanted seed of logos.33
At this point, Heraclitus, I think you can see why I asked you a little earlier whether you believed the fire or the logos knew you. Even if you did not, you are a precious witness to the way the human mind is blessed with the ability to reach rarefied heights and pave a guiding path for future philosophers to follow. I like to think your pursuit of wisdom in your native city of Ephesus prepared your fellow Ephesians, living centuries later, to receive the Gospel preached by Christian evangelists. One apostle in particular, Saint Paul, worked tirelessly to sink the roots of the gospel deep into the hearts of the men and women of your hometown. Perhaps his exhortation to unity in a letter to them borrows, even if only as a faint echo, the language you employed to describe the harmony of opposites:
For [Jesus Christ] is our peace, who made both one and tore down the dividing wall of enmity, abolishing through his flesh the law of commandments and legal claims, in order that he might create in himself one new person in place of the two, making peace and reconciling both to God in one body through the cross, putting enmity to death by it. (Eph 2:14–16)
Saint Paul is referring here to the unity of various ethnic groups who have come to believe in Christ; they are no longer Jews and Gentiles, but Christians, united as one body, as he notes further on:
. . . exerting yourselves to preserve the unity of the spirit in the bond of peace: one body and one Spirit, just as you were called in the one hope of your call; one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all. (Eph 4:3–6)
Heraclitus, I owe you a great debt of gratitude for stamping my impressionable mind with an admiration for the logos. What I found in the Gospel according to John perfected your initial glimpse of the logos, but I was able to see the fruits of the Gospel more clearly by standing on your philosophical shoulders. I cannot think of a more harmonious line for you than a verse in which Paul seems to be quoting an early Christian hymn, one whose words could have been penned by you (except for the part about Christ): “For everything that becomes visible is light. Therefore, it says: ‘Awake, you who sleep; rise from the dead, and Christ will shine upon you’” (Eph 5:14). I am firmly convinced that you possess firsthand knowledge of the Lord and logos, whose dark mystery you penetrated so deeply without divine light. I therefore look forward to conversing with you someday about these wonderful matters.
28. Heraclitus (ca. 535–ca. 475 BC) was a pre-Socratic philosopher from Ephesus. Only fragments of his works exist. One of the guiding themes of his philosophy is that all realities come into existence in accordance with the logos.
29. See a different translation offered in Heraclitus, Fragments, 27: “The river where you set your foot just now is gone—those waters giving way to this, now this.”
30. Ibid., 21.
31. Ibid., 2–5, 60–61.
32. See Justin Martyr, First and Second Apologies, 55: “And they who lived with the logos are Christians, even though they have been thought atheists; as, among the Greeks, Socrates and Heraclitus.”
33. Ibid., 84.
Martin Luther King Jr.34
To the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King Jr.,
Just before sitting down to write this letter, I listened to your “I Have a Dream” speech, given in front of the Lincoln Memorial on August 28, 1963. I have heard several other sermons of yours, and I must make a confession, from one pastor to another: I am awed by the power of your words. You measure the force of each syllable with grace, punctuate each phrase with the fury of the prophets, and demand a response from your congregation worthy of the faith raging in your words. The carefully crafted images, the gradual crescendo of your captivating voice, the syllables you lengthen
