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THE PAGAN “LOGOS” CHRISTIANIZED
Treating at length of the prolific adoption and adaptation by “that new Paganism later called Christianity,” of the terms, rites and ceremonies of Paganism, CE. says: “Always the Church has 134 forcefully molded words, and even concepts (as Savior, Epiphany, Baptism, Illimination, Mysteries, Logos, to suit her own Dogma and its expression. It was thus that John could take the [Pagan] expression ‘Logos,' mould it to his Dogma, cut short all perilous speculation among Christians, and assert once for all that the ‘Word was made Flesh' and was Jesus Christ.” (CE. xi, 392.) And thus Father Lactantius, appealing to Pagan gods and Sibyls for cogent confirmation, deals with the ancient Pagan notion of the “Logos,” converted now into a “revealed” and most holy Christian Mystery and the Son of God:
“For though He was the Son of God from the beginning, He was born again a second time according to the flesh: and this two-fold birth of His has introduced great terror into the minds of men, and overspread with darkness even those who retained the mysteries of true religion. But we will show this plainly and clearly. ... Unless by chance we shall profanely imagine, as Orpheus supposed, that God is both male and female. ... But Hermes also was of the same opinion, when he says that He was ‘His own father' and ‘His own mother' [self-father and self-mother']. ... John also thus taught: ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by Him, and without Him was not anything made.'As there can be no more positive and convincing proof that the Christ was and is a Pagan Myth,—the old Greek “Logos” of Heraclitus and the Philosophers revamped by the Greek priest who wrote the first chapter of the “Gospel according to St. John” and worked up into the “Incarnate Son” of the old Hebrew God for Christian consumption as the most sacred Article of Christian Faith and Theology, I append to the admission of Father Lactantius the culminating evidences of the “Gospel” and the further confession of the Church through the Catholic Encyclopedia. The inspired “revelation” of the Holy Ghost concerning the holy Pagan doctrine of the “Creative, Logos” or “Word of God,” made flesh in Jesus Christ, is thus “taken and molded to his dogma” by the Holy Saint John:“But the Greeks speak of Him as the Logos, more befittingly than we do as the word, or speech: for Logos signifies both speech and reason inasmuch as He is both the speech and reason of God. ... Zeno represents the Logos as the arranger of the established order of things, and the framer of the universe. ... For it is the spirit of God which he named the soul of Jupiter. For Trismegistus, who by some means or other searched into almost all truth, often describes the excellence and majesty of the Word.” (Lact. Div. Inst. IV, viii-ix; ANF. vii, 106-7.)
“In the beginning was the Logos, and the Logos was with God, and the Logos was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by him [i.e. by the Logos]; and without him was not anything made that was made.” (John, i, 1-3.)135The doctrine of the Logos was a Pagan speculation or invention of the Greek philosopher Heraclitus, who lived 535-475 Before Christ, and had never heard of Christ. From it the science of Logic takes its name; and on it the first principle of Stoicism and the Christian doctrine of “The Word” are based. If this startling statement out of secular history is questioned, let CE. bear its clerical witness to the Pagan origin of the Logos and the curious Christian metamorphosis of it wrought by “St. John” and the Church Fathers:
“The word Logos (Gr. Logos; Lat. Verbum) is the term by which Christian theology in the Greek language designates the Word of God, the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity. Before St. John had consecrated this term by adopting it, the Greeks and the Jews had used it to express religious conceptions which, under divers titles, have exercised a certain influence on Christian theology. ... It was in Heraclitus that the theory of the Logos appears for the first time, and it is doubtless for this reason that, first among the Greek philosophers, Heraclitus was regarded by St. Justin (Apol. I, 46) as a Christian before Christ. ... It reappears in the writings of the Stoics, and it is especially by them that this theory is developed. God, according to them, ‘did not make the world as an artisan does his work—[though Genesis ii says he did]—but it is by wholly penetrating an matter—[thus a kind of ether]—that He is the Demiurge of the universe.' He penetrates the world ‘as honey does the honeycomb' (Tertullian, Adv. Hermogenem, 44). ... This Logos is at the same time a force and a law—[How, then, a Second Person Trinitarian God?]. ... Conformably to their exegetical habit, the Stoics made of the different gods personifications of the Logos, e.g. of Zeus and above all of Hermes. ... In the [apocryphal] Book of Wisdom this personification is more directly implied, and a parallel is established between Wisdom and the Word. in Palestinian Robbinism the Word (Memra) is very often mentioned. ... it is the Memra of Jehovah which lives, speaks, and acts. ... Philo's problem was of the philosophical order; God and man are infinitely distant from each other; and it is necessary to establish between them the relations of action and of prayer; the Logos is here the intermediary. ... Throughout so many diverse [Pagan and Jewish] concepts may be recognized a fundamental doctrine: the Logos is an intermediary between God and the world; through it God created the world and governs it; through it also men know God and pray to Him. ... The term Logos is found only in the Johannine writings. ... This resemblance [to the notion in the Book of Wisdom] suggests the way by which the doctrine of the Logos entered into Christian theology.” (CE. ix, 328-9.)Thus confessedly is the Divine Revelation of the “Word made flesh” a Pagan-Jewish Myth, and the very Pagan Demiurge is the Christian Christ—“Very God”—and the “Second Person of the Blessed Trinity”! Here is the evolution of a Pagan speculation into a Christian revelation: Heraclitus first devised “the theory of the Logos”; by the Stoics “this theory is developed” into the Demiurge—“at the same time a force and a law”—which wrought the several works of creation instead of Zeus or Hermes. In the 136 admittedly forged Book of Wisdom,—which is nevertheless part of the inspired Canon of the Catholic Bible,—the Pagan Demiurge becomes Divine Wisdom and “paralleled” with “the Word” of the Hebrew God, and “is the Memra of Jahveh which lives, speaks, acts.” The Jewish philosopher Philo evolved it into “an intermediary—[Mediator]—between God and the world, through which God created the world.” This Pagan notion echoes in: “There is one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus.” (1 Tim. ii, 5.) Then comes the Christian Greek priest who wrote the first chapter of “the Gospel according to John,” and, Lo! “the Logos [Word] was God. ... All things were made by him”! The Pagan speculation is first philosophized, then personified, then Deified into the “Second Person” of a Blessed Trinity which was first dogmatized in 381 A.D.; and the blasphemy laws of England and a number of American States decree imprisonment for ridiculing this Most Holy Mystery of Christian Faith. Yet Christians decry the doctrine of Evolution and pass laws to outlaw teaching it.
Having pursued these incontestable Pagan “proofs” through his seven Books, and so vindicated the truth and divinity of Christianity, the eminent Doctor Lactantius concludes with this strange apostrophe to the near-Pagan Emperor, assuring him of the overthrow now of all error and the triumph of Catholic Truth: “But all fictions have now been hushed, Most Holy Emperor, since the time when the great God raised thee up for the restoration of the house of justice, and for the protection of the human race. ... Since the truth now comes forth from obscurity, and is brought into light”! (Ib. VII, xxvi; p. 131.) Father Lactantius then quite correctly, from a clerical viewpoint, defines truth and superstition, but oddly enough confuses and misapplies the terms so far as respects the Christian religion: “Truly religion is the cultivation of the truth, but superstition is that which is false. ... But because the worshippers of the gods imagine themselves to be religious, though they are superstitious, they are neither able to distinguish religion from superstition, nor to express the meaning of the names.” (Ib. IV, xxviii; p. 131.)
13. Augustine (354-430): Bishop of Hippo, in Africa; “Saint, Doctor of the Church; a philosophical and theological genius of the first order, dominating, like a pyramid, antiquity and the succeeding ages. ... Compared with the great philosophers of past centuries and modern times, he is the equal of them all; among theologians he is undoubtedly the first, and such has been his influence that none of the Fathers, Scholastics, or Reformers has surpassed it.” (CE. ii, 84.) This fulsome paean of praise sung by the Church of its greatest Doctor, justifies a sketch of the fiery African Bishop and a look into his monumental work, De Civitate Dei—“The City of God,” written between the years 413-426 A.D. This will well enough show the quality of mind of the man, a monumentally superstitious and credulous Child of Faith; and throw some light on the psychology of the Church which holds such a mind as its greatest Doctor, towering like a pyramid over the puny thinkers and philosophers of past centuries and of modern times. We may let CE. draw the biographical sketch in its own words, simply abbreviated at places to save space. Augustine's father, Patricius, was a Pagan, his mother, Monica, a convert to Christianity; when Augustine was born “she had him signed with the cross and enrolled 137 among the catechumens. Once, when very ill, he asked for baptism, but, all danger being passed, he deferred receiving the sacrament, thus yielding to a deplorable custom of the times.” when sixteen years old he was sent to Cartage for study to become a lawyer; “Here he formed a sinful liaison with the person who bore him a son (372)—[Adeodatus, “the gift of God”]—‘the son of his sin'—an entanglement from which he only delivered himself, at Milan, after fifteen years of its thralldom.” During this time Augustine became an ardent heretic: “In this same year Augustine fell into the snares of the Manichaeans. ... Once won over to this sect, Augustine devoted himself to it with all the ardor of his character; he read all its books, adopted and defended all its opinions. His furious proselytism drew into error [several others named]. it was during this Manichaean period that Augustine's literary faculties reached their full development.” ...
In 383 Augustine, at the age of twenty-nine, went to Italy, and came to Milan, where he met and fell under the influence of Bishop Ambrose—[he who forged the Apostles' Creed]. “However, before embracing the Faith, Augustine underwent a three years' struggle. ... But it was only a dream; his passions still enslaved him. Monica, who had joined her son at Milan, prevailed upon him [to abandon his mistress]; and though he dismissed the mother of Adeodatus, her place was soon filled by another. At first he prayed, but without the sincere desire of being heard.—[In his “Confessions” (viii, 17) he addresses God: “Lord, make me pure and chaste but not quite yet”! Finally he resolved to embrace Christianity and to believe as the Church believed.]—The grand stroke of grace, at the age of thirty-three, smote him to the ground in the garden at Milan, in 386. ... From 386 to 395 Augustine gradually became acquainted with the Christian doctrine, and in his mind the fusion of Platonic philosophy with revealed dogmas was taking place. ... So long, therefore, as his philosophy agrees with his religious doctrines, St. Augustine is frankly neo-Platonist; as soon as a contradiction arises, he never hesitates to subordinate his philosophy to religion, reason to faith! (p. 86) ... He thought too easily to find Christianity in Plato, or Platonism in the Gospel. Thus he had imagined that in Platonism he had discovered the entire doctrine of the Word and the whole prologue of St. John.” Augustine was baptized on Easter of 387. He did not think of entering the priesthood; but being in church one day at prayer, the clamor of the crowd caused him to yield, despite his tears, to the demand, and he was consecrated in 391, and entered actively into the fray. A great controversy arose “over these grave questions: Do the hierarchical powers depend upon the moral worth of the priest? How can the holiness of the Church be compatible with the unworthiness of its ministers?—[The moral situation must have been very acute to necessitate such a debate]. In the dogmatic debate he established the Catholic thesis that the Church, so long as it is upon earth, can, without losing its holiness, tolerate sinners within its pale for the sake of converting them” [?]—or their property.
In the City of God, which “is considered his most important work,” Augustine “answers the Pagans, who attributed the fall of Rome (410) to the abolition of Pagan worship. In it, considering the problem of Divine Providence with regard to the Roman Empire, 138 in a burst of genius he creates the philosophy of history, embracing as he does with a glance the destinies of the world grouped around the Christian religion, the only one which goes back to the beginning and leads humanity to its final term.” (CE. ii, 84-89.) Let us now admire
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