Order: Divine Principle of Excellence or Perfect Death for Living Beings?

Abstract

rder is a value highly treasured and deeply embedded in the Western worldview. Since the archaic Greeks gazed up at the night sky and noted the reliable, stable movements of the heavens, order has remained a cherished commodity in the lives of gods and humans. This paper traces the history of that beloved value and then places in question the worth of its rigorous, changeless solidity in the lives of living beings. The words of a people’s language tell much about a people’s worldview: how they find the world; what are the points of significance that come to the fore of their world vision, which fall into obscurity; what they love and find to be beautiful; what they despise and find repugnant; how they envision their gods, where those gods dwell and where they are sadly absent and evil lurks. This is truer of the words of ancient languages than of modern scientific languages. Ancient words tend to be much richer in meaning than the terms of modern languages whose demand for scientific exactness has forced a reductionism that seeks to eliminate ambiguity. In the ancient Greek world, one of the richest terms is logos (λόγος), literally meaning “word” and connecting to the verb logein (λόγeιν), “to say or tell.”1 True to ancient fashion, the word logos denotes meanings far beyond its literal “word,” a richness captured in Liddle and Scott’s secondary meanings: “that by which the inward thought is expressed” and “the inward thought itself.”2 Logos is used to refer to anything the human mind designs. It can mean story, tale, account, argument, a speech or oration, a definition or explanation, reason or rational basis. Logos can refer to the content of human thought in its most dependable aspect, as intuitions of a universal reason that holds true across time and space. Such logoi are captured in logical propositions or mathematical laws and principles. But logos can also be used to refer to the far less reliable content of an individual’s opinions, her account of truth. Logos is part of the ancient Greek word mytho-logein (μυθολογeιν), which means “to mythologize,” to recount a legend or craft a tale that may contain some reliable intuitions of truth but makes no pretense to strict accuracy of content. Logos