In the best conversations, people collaborate and offer themselves in service of the Logos rather than just to prove a point. Hence, a conversation can be thought of as dialogue (διάλογος), which is, dia- “through” + logos. In dialogue, person will be eager to stand in for his brother when the latter falters or goes searching his pockets for the right word but comes up empty-handed. Again, this is because the dialogue is a tertium quid, whose value is recognized and participated by both interlocutors.
Bona fide dialogue can only be described as a spiritual ascent (i.e. invoking images from Plato’s Republic and Symposium). True conversation is always a conversion, or metanoia (μετάνοια, meta– “beyond,” “above” + nous “mind”), of a certain kind. I might begin to describe one element of the conditions that are necessary for such conversation by suggesting that to enact them demands the mutual willingness of both parties to sacrifice personal standpoint for the sake of understanding. This initial gestures establishes the conversation under the standard of philosophy, which is the union of friendship or love (i.e. Greek philia) through the shared orientation toward insight or wisdom (i.e. Greek Sophia). Philosophy is the matrix in which participation in the Logos is most eminently possible. As Plato says, “whithersoever the wind, as it were, of the logos blows, there lies our course.”1 Returning to the image introduced above, I imagine the communion of two souls through the logos as the creation of a sort of temple—a sacred space that can host the Logos just as Mary received the Spirit of God. I have had the thought “this is the New Communion because we are partaking in the mystical body of Christ.” Hence, “wherever two or more are gathered in my name, there am I in their midst,” as Jesus says.2
It seems that this is the only resolution to the “post-truth” phenomenon and the only deliverance from the fugue of the meaning crisis. Namely, to relinquish the theories of truth as coherence or correspondence and so on and to see truth rather as a verb and an activity—like “balance” or “life.” As “it is written, Man does not live by bread alone,” and indeed, it is this communion in truth that sustains us in soul and spirit. Truth is a state we can enter: as we can be “in love,” so we can attempt to dwell “in truth.” I take this to be a participation in Christ, who is the Logos3 and “the way, the truth, and the life.”4 The wafer of Communion is the body of the Logos.
To express certain spiritual truths seems to be impossible without recourse to religious language and for this reason, it is a pity that it often seems necessary to attempt to forgo it in many contexts because it is considered “bad form.” Incidentally, I bore personal antipathy towards Christianity until I was 27 or so and so I understand the aversion that many people feel towards it. But I also know from experience that it is possible to overcome prejudices of this sort. I will leave the final words to Owen Barfield, who captures what I wish to convey with a natural eloquence to which I can only aspire:
It is possible—I know because it happened in my case—for a man to have been brought up in the belief, and to have taken it for granted, that the account given in the Gospels of the birth and the resurrection of Christ is a noble fairy story with no more claim to historical accuracy than any other myth; and it is possible for such a man, after studying in depth the history of the literature and tradition that has grown up around it and to accept (if you like, to be obliged to accept) the record as a historical fact, not because of the authority of the Church, nor by any process of ratiocination but rather because it fitted so inevitably with the other facts as he had already found them. Rather because he felt, in the utmost humility, that if he had never heard of it through the Scriptures, he would have been obliged to try his best to invent something like it as a hypothesis to save the appearances.5
By “saving the appearances,” Barfield is referring to the cognitive act of reconciling observation with theory. Specifically, Barfield’s attempts to discern the inner logic behind the historical evolution of meaning led him to the insight that those changes in language testify to an evolution of consciousness, of which the life of Christ was the “linchpin,” or “crux,” as it were. For those with interest, I am currently co-authoring an introduction to the topic, tentatively titled What Barfield Thought and expected for publication in 2023. I have also attempted to flesh out Barfield’s views in this article in the Cosmos and History journal, in this short essay for the Owen Barfield Literary Estate, and in my 2019 dissertation, republished in 2020 as The Redemption of Thinking.
Good Friday blessings to all of my readers.
Plato, Republic III: 394d 9–10
Matthew 18:20
John 1:1
John 14:6
The Rediscovery of Meaning, and Other Essays. (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1977), 370.
Thankyou Max. Both yourself and Owen Barfield I find challenging and rewarding