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9 One of the most intriguing aspects of Greek patristic thought about nature is the concept of the logoi of beings. The logoi are the “inner essences” of things, the value and significance they have in the eyes of the Creator rather than in our faulty human estimation. To perceive the logoi in beings is the act known as theōria phusikē, the second of the three stages of the spiritual life distinguished by Evagrius and the tradition that followed him. A full discussion of theōria phusikē would require situating it within its role in the ascetic life—as, on the one hand, the outgrowth of praktikē (ascetic and moral practice) and, on the other, the gateway to theologia (pure or imageless prayer). My aim here is the more modest one of understanding the concept of the logoi of beings itself. I wish to identify the philosophical sources of this concept and in the process to notice both some of its pitfalls as well as the promise it offers for Christian thought about nature. Although the notion of the logoi of beings has important biblical resonances , its immediate origin lies in the confluence of two strands within Greek philosophy. The first is Plato’s account of the creation of the world in the Timaeus. Plato writes that God created the world as an image of the “absolute Living Being” that “contains within itself all the intelligible living beings, just as our world is made up of us and all the other visible things” (30c–d). Each entity in the sensible world is an image of a Form present in the absolute Living Being. The precise identity of the “absolute Living Being ” remains rather mysterious, but the salient point for our purposes is that the Forms are here presented not as discrete and unconnected (as they seem to be in Plato’s middle dialogues) but as parts of an integral living whole. The Logoi of Beings in Greek Patristic Thought David Bradshaw 10 D AV I D B R A D S H AW Although Plato does not describe the absolute Living Being further, later Platonists, recognizing the needless duplication in positing an intelligible model separate from the creator and taking note that the model is alive, identified it with the content of the divine mind. One of the earliest examples of this approach was the treatise On the Making of the World by Philo of Alexandria, the first-century Jew whose works influenced Clement of Alexandria and Origen. Philo presents God as like an architect who first sketches out beforehand in his mind the city he is going to build. This “intelligible cosmos” present within the divine mind contains the “Forms and measures and patterns and seals” of the objects in the sensible world. Notably, Philo refers to the divine mind itself as the Logos. By this he means not a separate hypostasis, as in Christian thought, but God himself considered in his rational aspect. Thus Philo presents a view in which each type of creature is created in accordance with a paradigm existing in the divine Logos. Significantly, the relationship here is between types of creatures and their paradigms. There is not a paradigm of each individual—although later Platonists such as Plotinus did posit such individual paradigms in the case of intellectual beings. Another current within ancient philosophy presented a quite different way of understanding the relationship between God and creatures. The Stoics too spoke of the Logos, but in their case Logos is simply a name for God himself, whom they understood as the divine mind or reason that governs the world. Unlike Plato or Philo, however, they thought of God as a material being. They identified the Logos with a particularly ethereal substance called pneuma that permeates all things, giving them form and order and directing them in accordance with divine wisdom. Although God creates the world, he is himself part of the world he creates, shaping it from within. Here is how the process is described by Diogenes Laertius: God is one and the same with Reason (nous), Fate, and Zeus; he is also called by many other names. In the beginning he was by himself; he transformed the whole of substance through air into water, and just as in animal generation the seed has a moist vehicle, so in cosmic moisture God, who is the seminal reason (spermatikon logon) of the universe, remains behind in...

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