I am listening to a lecture from Liberty Classroom called Mythology and Western Civilization. I’m on the 3rd lecture in the last 9 minutes when the professor talks about the pre Socratic philosophers, namely Heraclitus. They notice that nature works in patterns 4 seasons- 1, 2, 3, 4, and never 5, but back to 4 again. They saw the universality of man, that we are born, we grow, we hit middle age, we die. They wondered what animated mankind. They saw earth, wind, water, fire as the 4 elements that animated the world, but that it was fire that animated humans.
They believe that the 4 elements broke apart but that one of the elements is at the beginning or the originator. They couldn’t figure it out and didn’t understand but they asked the question. Later (maybe 100 years?) Zeno another Greek, comes along and founds a type of religion called Stoicism. He does this during a time of Greek change. Classical Greek has fallen and they have lost the polis, or the system of independent city states, and he is caught at this time of upheaval, he forms a popular belief where he lectures from his front porch (that is where the word stoic comes from).
As that world is changing Zeno says that the people will no longer find their identity in the Greek city state, polis, but in the universe. At the heart of Zeno’s teaching is the idea of Heraclitus about fire being the originator element, that word coined by him is Logos, the beginning of all things, the originator of all things, the word.
600 hundred years later St John would use that phrase in the most beautiful 14 word sentence. He writes it in Greek and uses the term that is 600 hundred years old, LOGOS. The word that John uses, the word he baptizes, is word, the primary animator of all matter. It is fire, it is imagination. This fire is the beginning of all matter and will be what consumes and is the end of all matter, Fire, Logos.
Whew! Well when I heard all of that last night I was incredibly struck. I feel like we are in a time of our society that is upheaval and change, that Fire was the message we were talking about from that video from the woman in Paris about Norte Dame. And that maybe it is a shift from identifying ourselves as a religious belief, or maybe even a citizen, and instead as a universal being. Idk. You got any ideas.
Breathings 