Logos
/ˈloʊɡɑːs/noun
Reason as the ordering principle of the world, and in Christian theology the Word made flesh.
The Greek roots
Literally: “word, reckoning”
The story of the word
The range of the Greek word is the whole story: something said, a calculation, an account you give of yourself, the rational order behind everything. Heraclitus used it for the principle governing the cosmos, the Stoics built a physics on it, and the opening of John's gospel put it at the beginning of creation. English has it as a technical term from the 1580s. Every -logy in the dictionary is a fragment of it, and so is logic.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Latin → English
- First recorded
- 1580s
The same roots elsewhere
Other languages reached for exactly the same Greek pieces.
Same family
In a sentence
He argued that the Stoic logos and the Johannine Logos are not the same idea.
The lecture spent an hour on logos before mentioning a single Christian text.