Logos Rising: A History of Ultimate Reality
Logos Rising: A History of Ultimate Reality
There has never been a time when there was nothing, because if there were ever nothing, there could never be something. There has never been a time when there was nothing but chaos. Order cannot come from chaos, because that which is cannot come from that which is not.
There has never been a time when man was not aware of an ultimate reality upon which he depended for his existence.
The first name man gave to that ultimate reality was God. In every language and culture, God was a father who lived in the sky. But if God was a father, did he have a beard? If God was a father, did he have a wife? The first attempt to deduce the characteristics of God from the world man knew, ended up in the dead end known as mythology, whose best expression was Homer’s Iliad. At around the same time that Homer’s epic went from oral to written form, a group of Greeks in Ionia on the coast of Asia Minor abandoned mythology and began to look for some substance in nature as the basis for ultimate reality. Thales of Miletus said it was water. Anaxamines said it was air, and Heraclitus said it was fire, but fire was an expression of something more basic, and he claimed that the most basic principle of all was Logos.
Five hundred years later, St. John the Evangelist brought this discussion full circle when he said that in the beginning there was Logos, and Logos was God. God, it turns out, was a father, but he didn’t have a beard or a wife. God was Logos.
Logos wasn’t simply an abstract principle like geometry or physics, although it certainly was both of those things. Logos was a person who had the power to bring that plan into fulfillment over the course of human history. Time was no longer just the number of motion, as Aristotle claimed. Time was a drama with a beginning, a middle, and an end. It was like the Greek plays Aristotle described in his Poetics. And because we were creatures of Logos we could now understand that plan in the same way that the Greeks of Athens understood Oedipus Rex. The history of logos found its culmination in the logos of history. Logos is rising.
Logos Rising: A History of Ultimate Reality describes the tragic and yet ultimately triumphant progress of Logos in human history, from the beginning of everything, to the emergence of the concept, to the Democratic primary of 2020.
784 Pages - Hardcover Book w/ Dust Jacket
ISBN: 978-0-929891-26-2
Reviews of Logos Rising:
With a subtitle like A History of Ultimate Reality, and a somewhat lengthy (although, by Jones’ standards, restrained) page count pushing the nine-hundreds, it’s hard to stifle one’s first impressions: “ambitious!” But the ambition is met by the author’s competence. Jones is no stranger to dense, seemingly convoluted, and historically complicated subject matter; his last major work, Barren Metal, was a dissection of usury both in theory and in practice, cutting a path through the history of medieval Europe all the way up to the last financial crisis. Prior to that, he published a history of revolution that got him effectively blacklisted from polite, respectable society; he learned the hard way that naming your book The Jewish Revolutionary Spirit, and then writing at length upon the theological identity of contemporary Judaism, is a good way to have figures you considered friends stop returning your calls.
E. Michael Jones has proved to be one of the most brilliant Catholic authors writing today. In this epochal volume ‘Logos Rising : A History of Ultimate Reality’, Jones explores the fascinating history of that metaphysical concept of Logos which alone explains the intelligibility of the universe and man’s rational nature. It is the astonishing achievement of Christianity via the Apostle John to identify Logos/Word with the divine Person of Jesus Christ, declared equal to God, co-eternal with God, and God Himself.
Jones once again has brought his wide-ranging knowledge of the history and philosophy of Logos to bear and presented his explanation as to why Logos is actually rising in a prose that is elegant, accessible, modest, and convincing. Logos Rising is a tour de force. One can say that Logos Rising is one of Jones’ most ambitious works…
Having written several groundbreaking tomes of intellectual and cultural history, E. Michael Jones already has a place among the great Catholic historian-philosophers and philosopher-historians writing today, thinkers like Glenn Olsen, Charles Taylor, Alasdair MacIntyre, John Rao, and Brad Gregory. But with Logos Rising, Jones has truly joined the ranks of the Greats…
This is the most important book of the twenty-first century. E. Michael Jones has thrown down an intellectual gauntlet that cannot honorably be ignored…
.... it will surely not be long before the startling, incendiary ideas expressed in this book reach the ideological mainland. The questions raised here cannot be ignored or dismissed.
Everyone should read this book. Many people should read it twice.