Logos: the Word made Flesh.

The implication here is that the Word is co-existent

with the Flesh – and yet superior because it is the act of “the Word made Flesh”
that hails the incarnation of the Spirit. But this separation or chorismos of Word
and Flesh is untenable because the two inter-penetrate each other: no concept
of the Word is possible without the content of the Flesh; and no concept of the
Flesh is admissible without the affirmation of the materiality of the Word. To put
it with Kant, concepts are empty without content and contents are blind without
concepts. Both emptiness and blindness imply materiality. Word and Flesh co-
exist because Being cannot be imagined as a sub-stance or per-manence or pre-
sence. Nothing “stands” beneath Being, just as nothing “remains” before or after
its manifestation. The “Is” of Being is a nunc stans; Being is “now” in that it is
neither before nor after. Everything, as it were, happens at once. Time is not
(pace Don Patinkin) “a device to ensure that everything does not happen at
once” – because absolutely everything does happen at once – it happens now. To
envisage Time and Being otherwise is to negate the Becoming-of-Being. Being is
being-there: it is instantaneous happening and, as such, it is pure contingency,
pure “thrown-ness”, de-jection, and therefore Being is com-prehensible only as
ec-sistence, as mere possibility, as “being before death”.
The notion of Being-as-Becoming originates in Nietzsche and is later elaborated
in far more systematic detail by Heidegger as Da-sein, as being-there, as ec-
sistence in opposition to Being-as-Substance or Presence or Permanence. This
avulsion of the notion of Being from that of Substance arises already in the
Middle Ages in the work of Duns Scotus where the timeliness of Being, its
materiality, is distinguished from the time-lessness or eternity of the Deity, of
God. In turn, the notion of God is the avulsion of Substance from its timeliness or
materiality, its reduction to sheer pre-sence or spatiality, to vapid Spirit. The
mediaeval Church had sought to immortalize its political supremacy over the
feudal lords and knights through the separation of Spiritual and Temporal power
– as the representative of God on Earth. The supremacy and prerogative of the
Word representing the Spirit over that of the Sword representing worldly power
and the Plough symbolizing the menial class of servants was sealed by the
widespread tripartite categorization of feudal society as divided into oratores,
bellatores and laboratores. Yet this neat classification fixing the precedence of
the Word, and therefore of the deductive intellectual power logic and grammar,
over the belligerence of worldly power and the subjection of inferior humans to
the necessity of labour (“in the sweat of thy brow”) could not survive the growing
expansion of human productivity and commerce through new developments in
tools and technologies. The rapid rise of an urban bourgeoisie of merchants and
artisans had to result in a switch of emphasis from a priori rational Thinking to
scientific empirical Doing. The organicist conception of human society as a
Corporation, as a Body with different organs and limbs – the Mind, the Arm, the
Stomach -, could not outlive the powerful re-orientation of late feudal society
toward more individualistic pursuits such as material possessions and personal
spiritual redemption and salvation. (Cf. O. v. Gierke, The Political Thought of the
Middle Age. Also, J. LeGoff, The Age of Cathedrals, and G. Duby, The Three
Orders.)