Dogs, Also, Bark
Of the four Gospels, John’s is the one with the most fascinating ambiguities. It’s the Gospel that shows the most clear influence of Greek thought on the early Christian faith, which is clear from the beginning, where we find “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” The rest of the passage goes on to describe the process of creation through the Word — which is traditionally interpreted to mean the person of Jesus Christ, but that interpretation gets complicated as the first chapter goes on and we find the encounter between Jesus and John the Baptist.
But that’s not what we’re going to talk about here. Here we’re going to focus on that little word, Word. In the original Greek, Word is Logos — a word that was already ancient with philosophical implications at the time of John’s writing. Logos can mean word, but also plan, and also reason (including in the sense of rationality).
The philosophical usage of the term Logos begins with Heraclitus, who declares that the Logos is the principle of order and intelligibility in the universe. Like most of the pre-Socratic philosophers, the Heraclitean writings come to us only in the form of fragments — in which we discover a rather cynical and misanthropic man with a biting wit who loves to employ harsh metaphors along the lines of, for example, “Dogs, also, bark at what they do not know.” But for all his personal unpleasantness, Heraclitus was a sincere thinker who, in the best philosophical tradition, challenged the Greeks of his time to think for themselves — making use of the Logos which is the principle of all things.
Over the next several centuries the concept of Logos becomes more precise and refined, slowly at first, but then with increasing momentum. Our stopping-off point will come two centuries after Heraclitus, the time of Socrates. (We are not at this time going to consider the question of whether Socrates was an actual existing person or the invention of Plato.) In Socrates/Plato we find the first true, and even now possibly the purest, dialectical philosopher. Granted, the dialectical form is always implicit in philosophy, but it was an act of true genius on Plato’s part to express his philosophy in the form of written dramatic dialogues — making the dialogic nature of philosophy explicit by presenting the process of thought as something that takes place between at least two minds. We hear those intolerable platitudes about “The Great Conversation” all the time, but here we see the process of thinking embodied in the dialogue.
Of particular interest to us right now in relation to the Gospel of John, we have the Platonic Theory of Recollection. This is presented in several forms throughout Plato’s writings, but most explicitly in the Meno. The theory, to oversimplify, is that all knowledge was at one time possessed by the human soul, which at some time before birth forgot what it already knew — and that the process of learning is in actuality a process of recollecting what was already known. In which case, teaching would not be a matter of stamping truth onto the mind from without, but instead a matter of eliciting it from within. (Simply consider the etymology of the word education to realize how deeply this concept is embedded in our language.)
The particulars of the Theory of Recollection are not our interest here, however. Instead, let us focus on one specific example Plato uses to illustrate this process. About midway through the dialogue, Socrates speaks to a simple boy, hoping to show Meno the process of recollection at work. To vastly oversimplify the dialogue: Socrates presents the boy with a two-by-two square and asks him what the area is. The boy says the area is twice two: four.
So far, so logical. Next, Socrates asks the boy to imagine a square with lengths twice as long, and then asks him the area. The boy makes a mistake here: he imagines that if the lengths of the sides are double, the area will be double. So he tells Socrates the area is eight. Then, with Socrates leading him along through gentle questioning, the boy finally realizes the area is actually four-by-four, or sixteen.
Again, whether this or any of the other arguments of the Meno actually establishes any weight for the Theory of Recollection is not our present concern. The point that catches our attention is that Socrates is able to lead the boy to the correct answer simply through questioning. Whatever this may mean for our theory of knowledge as such, here we see in action the process of truth coming into revelation by being elicited through sustained questioning. The answer is already present in any act of questioning; it’s simple a matter of following through on the questioning process and allowing the answer to reveal itself.
Truth is not the simple fact that a square whose sides have a length of four has an area of sixteen. Truth is the process of revelation through inquiry — through the Logos.
Now, to return to John’s Gospel. Of the Gospels, John’s account of the Last Supper raises the most urgent questions by virtue of what it does not say — crucial information the account does not give. Borges was neither the first nor the last to suggest that Jesus and Judas may have been working together to bring about the crucifixion — that Judas Iscariot, whose name to this very day lives on as synonymous with treachery, may have been the most agonizingly loyal of Christ’s disciples. Žižek even suggests that the words “Verily, verily, I say unto you, that one of you shall betray me” have more in common with an embedded command than what we’d traditionally call prophecy.
Whatever we finally conclude about Christ’s relationship with Judas, even the most orthodox reader must admit the account of the Last Supper ends with a note of ambiguity:
27 And after the sop Satan entered into him. Then said Jesus unto him, That thou doest, do quickly.
28 Now no man at the table knew for what intent he spake this unto him.
29 For some of them thought, because Judas had the bag, that Jesus had said unto him, Buy those things that we have need of against the feast; or, that he should give something to the poor.
30 He then having received the sop went immediately out: and it was night.