The ordering principle of reality—and why it has a face.
En archē ēn ho Logos.
“In the beginning was the Word.” — John 1:1
For a long time, that sentence didn’t mean much to me. It sounded like a poetic way to start a gospel, a nice phrase for a church banner.
But the word Logos would have stopped John’s first readers in their tracks. They were steeped in Greek philosophy, and they knew exactly what Logos meant, and it wasn’t just “word.”
For six centuries before Christ, Greek thinkers had been asking a question: Why is the world ordered instead of chaotic?
Look around. Trees branch in predictable patterns, seasons cycle, and mathematics works. The universe is not random noise; it is intelligible. Something holds it together, and the Greeks wanted to know what.
They called that something the Logos.
The word doesn’t have a clean English translation. It means word, but also reason, order, pattern, the principle that makes things intelligible. It is the reason things hold together instead of flying apart.
Heraclitus, writing around 500 BC, proposed that a universal Logos governed all change, an ordering principle in the cosmos analogous to the reasoning power of the human mind.
The Stoics expanded on this. They defined the Logos as an active, rational, spiritual principle that permeated all of reality. They called it providence, nature, god, and the soul of the universe.
Then came Philo of Alexandria, a Jewish philosopher writing in the first century. He taught that the Logos was the intermediary between God and the cosmos, both the agent of creation and the means by which the human mind can reach toward the divine.
By the time John sat down to write his gospel, Logos was loaded with six hundred years of philosophical weight. It meant: the invisible, rational, ordering principle behind everything that exists.
Here’s what makes the Logos more than philosophy. You can see it.
Look at a tree in winter. The trunk splits into branches, each branch splits into smaller branches, and each twig splits again. The small part looks like the whole thing: a branch is a small tree, and a twig is an even smaller tree.
Now look at your lungs: one airway branches into smaller airways, into smaller ones, down to millions of alveoli, the same branching pattern. Or look at a river system from above, with tributaries feeding into larger streams, feeding into the main channel. The same shape again.
Trees. Lungs. Rivers. Lightning. Root systems. Blood vessels. The same pattern at every scale.
Or consider a seed. It falls into the ground and appears to die, but from that death, new life emerges: a plant, a tree, fruit, more seeds. Death and resurrection. You see it in seeds, in seasons, in stories, and in civilizations that collapse and are reborn. The same pattern at every scale.
Or consider the relationship between the one and the many. You are one person, made of many cells. Your family is one, made of many members. Your city is one, made of many neighborhoods. Your body is one, made of many organs. Everywhere you look: unity holding multiplicity together.
These patterns are not accidents or coincidences. They are the signature of something, and the Greeks had a name for it: the Logos.
In the 7th century, a Christian theologian named Maximus the Confessor took this further. He taught that every created thing has its own logos, its own reason, its own pattern, its own divine principle.
The branching pattern of an oak tree is that tree’s logos. The death-and-rebirth cycle of a seed is that seed’s logos. The way your body holds trillions of cells together as one living person is your body’s logos.
And all of these small logoi (the plural) are held together in the one Logos.
Think of it this way: every pattern you see in creation is a word in a sentence. Every sentence is part of a paragraph. Every paragraph part of a chapter. And the whole book is spoken by one Voice.
That Voice is the Logos.
When you see order in nature, you are seeing the Logos at work, not as a proof or an argument, but as an appearance. As Jonathan Pageau puts it: “The Logos IS the ordering principle. When you see order, you see Logos.”
Chesterton noticed the same structure from the outside. He observed that Christianity had always kept seemingly opposite virtues fully alive at once, holding them together without letting them blur into each other.
The historic Church has at once emphasised celibacy and emphasised the family… It has kept them side by side like two strong colours, red and white, like the red and white upon the shield of St. George. It has always had a healthy hatred of pink.
G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
Pink is what you get when the tension collapses into compromise. The Logos is the shield that holds justice and mercy, transcendence and presence, death and life, each at full intensity, without letting any of them blur into the others.
Now read John 1:1 again with all of this in mind.
In the beginning was the Logos, and the Logos was with God, and the Logos was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made.
John is not inventing a concept; he is hijacking one.
He’s telling his Greek-educated readers: That ordering principle you’ve been talking about for six hundred years? That invisible reason behind all reality? That ground of intelligibility? It’s not an abstraction, and it’s not a force. It’s a person, and he has a name.
And then, fourteen verses later, the line that changed everything:
And the Logos became flesh and dwelt among us.
John 1:14
The ordering principle of the universe, the pattern behind all patterns, entered the pattern it created — the author walking into his own story, becoming a seed, buried, and rising.
In the Christian story God descends to re-ascend. He comes down; down from the heights of absolute being into time and space, down into humanity… But He goes down to come up again and bring the whole ruined world up with Him.
C.S. Lewis, Miracles
Lewis saw the death-and-resurrection pattern written everywhere, in seeds, in seasons, in the moral life, and traced it to its source. The pattern is in nature, he argued, because it was first in God. Every seed that falls into the ground and rises is a minor-key transposition of the divine theme. The myths of dying gods, Adonis and Osiris, were not inventions that Christianity copied. They were dim portraits derived from the facts of nature, and the facts of nature from her Creator.
Here is where most explanations of the Logos stop: they treat the Incarnation as a rescue mission, God’s backup plan after humanity sinned. But the Christian tradition says something far stranger.
The Incarnation is the original pattern that creation was always pointing toward, written into the world from the beginning. As Revelation puts it, Christ is “the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world.”
The pattern of death and resurrection that shows up everywhere, in seeds, in seasons, in stories, is not a coincidence that happens to resemble the gospel. The gospel is the source of the pattern. Creation echoes it because creation was made through the Logos.
Here is one way to picture it. When light passes through a prism, everything that emerges on the other side bears the prism’s signature, the specific colors, the specific distribution. The prism doesn’t create the light, but it shapes everything that comes through it. Nothing reaches the other side without being marked by it.
The Logos is that prism. Everything that exists came into being through him, and the patterns stamped on creation, the branching, the death-and-rebirth, the one holding the many, are the marks he left. They appear everywhere because everything passed through the same source.
He is before all things, and in him all things hold together.
Colossians 1:17
This is not poetry, but rather, a metaphysical claim. The Logos is the underlying logic of all being, the reason mathematics works, why stories resolve, and why a cell knows how to divide and a seed knows how to die and rise.
The renewal of creation has been the work of the self-same Word that made it at the beginning. For it will appear not inconsonant for the Father to have wrought its salvation in him by whose means he made it.
St. Athanasius, On the Incarnation (§1)
Athanasius’s logic is airtight: the Logos made the world; therefore only the Logos can remake it. It would be, he says, “not worthy of God’s goodness” to let his creation dissolve back into non-being. So the Word who spoke the world into existence entered it from within, as the original author rewriting the story from the inside.
If the Logos is what holds things together, there is also a force that tears them apart.
It’s a very small word: just.
“It’s just molecules.” Suddenly food is no longer a family meal. The meaning vanishes. What’s left is a pile of atoms.
“It’s just a piece of paper.” A marriage becomes nothing.
“It’s just a game.” Your team becomes people running around a field.
“It’s just random branching.” The tree loses its grammar.
Every time you hear “just,” someone is swinging an axe, severing the invisible logos of a thing from its visible parts, chopping meaning off of matter and turning something real into a pile.
You can touch the wheels, the seats, the engine, but you can’t touch “car” — and yet “car” is the most real thing about them, the invisible pattern that makes the parts a vehicle rather than a heap of metal.
The modern world swings this axe constantly. It tells us that the physical parts are all that’s real, and the pattern that holds them together is “just” a concept in our heads. The Logos tradition says the opposite: the pattern is the most real thing. The parts participate in it.
At the heart of the two sides, physics and biology, it’s word-based. And that’s my big problem with the naturalistic worldview. There’s no believable generator of word-like information that any of us know about. It always is associated in our experience, at least, with a human intelligence.
John Lennox, mathematician and philosopher of science
Lennox sees the same pattern from the scientific side. DNA is not merely complex; it is linguistically complex, a 3.4 billion-letter word in a chemical alphabet. The universe is not merely described by mathematics; it is saturated with intelligibility. Physics gives us a word-based cosmos. Biology gives us word-based life. And the biblical claim, written millennia before the discovery of DNA, is that all of it was spoken into existence by a Word.
The Logos is not a footnote in theology; it is the main idea.
It answers the question: Why is reality intelligible? Because it was made through a rational, ordering principle. It answers the question: Why do patterns repeat at every scale? Because everything shares the same source. It answers the question: Why does the death-and-resurrection pattern show up everywhere? Because the Logos who made the world entered the world and lived that pattern.
It also reframes Christianity for people who have only heard the moral version. Christianity is not primarily a set of rules for being good; it is a claim about the structure of reality. As one writer put it, Christianity is not a story inside reality; it is a story about why reality exists at all.
The Logos is the reason there is something rather than nothing, and the reason that something is ordered rather than chaotic. And the astonishing Christian claim is that this ordering principle is not an impersonal force or an abstract idea.
It is a person, it has a face, and it entered the pattern.
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Here are some entry points if you want to explore further: