Justified True Belief

(●) The first Greek known to have said that one Word runs through the whole world, nearly six centuries before a Gospel opened with the same word. + Somewhere around 500 BC, in a Greek city on the coast of what is now Turkey, a man walked into the largest temple in the Greek world and left a book there. The building was the temple of Artemis at Ephesus, later counted one of the seven wonders. The book was short, it was the only one he wrote, and no copy of it survived antiquity. What survives instead is roughly a hundred and twenty sentences, quoted by other people for their own purposes. That is the strange fact to hold on to about Heraclitus. Plato quoted him, Aristotle argued with him, a Roman emperor copied him into his private notebook, and a churchman in Rome transcribed a long run of him in the course of refuting a heresy, which is the only reason a great many of his sentences exist at all. The Stoics built a whole philosophy out of him, the Stoics being the Greek school that taught that a rational order runs through the world and that a man’s business is to live in agreement with it. He belongs on a Christian apologetics site because of one word. He took the Greek word logos, an ordinary word meaning a word, an account, a reckoning, the sort of thing you would say to explain something, and made it the name for an intelligent order running through everything that happens, the same for everyone, whether or not anyone notices. Six centuries later John’s Gospel began, "In the beginning was the Word." What exactly the second use owes to the first is one of the more interesting questions in the history of ideas, and the honest answer is more complicated than either the enthusiasts or the debunkers usually allow.

(●) c. 540 BC: He was born at Ephesus, heir to the oldest office in the city, in the years Persia was swallowing the Greek coast. + Nobody wrote down the year Heraclitus was born. What we have is a note in Diogenes Laertius, a Greek compiler of philosophers’ lives writing in the first half of the third century AD, that Heraclitus flourished in the 69th Olympiad (Lives ix. 1). Both halves of that note need unpacking before it will give up a date. Greeks kept time in Olympiads, the four-year stretches running from one Olympic games to the next, and the 69th of them covers 504 to 501 BC. A man’s flourishing, meanwhile, was not a good season or a burst of productivity; it was a convention, his fortieth year, the age at which an ancient biographer reckoned a thinker had come into his own. Run the convention backward and the note yields a birth around 540 BC, and since Diogenes also reports that he died at sixty, a death around 480. Reference books sometimes print c. 535 to c. 475 instead, which is the same reckoning with the flourishing set a few years later. Neither rests on a document, so every date in his life carries a "c." and means it. His father was named Bloson, or possibly Heracon; Diogenes had two versions and passed on both. The family was the first family of Ephesus, descended, so the city believed, from Androclus son of Codrus, the Athenian prince who had led the Ionian settlers across the Aegean and founded the place. Ionian is simply the name for those Greeks who made that crossing from the mainland to the coast of Asia Minor and the islands lying off it, and Ionia is the strip of country they settled. Strabo the geographer, writing more than five centuries later, says the line was still there in his own day and still called kings, with the right to front seats at the games, a purple robe, a staff in place of a scepter, and charge of the sacrifices to Eleusinian Demeter. The Ephesus of his boyhood had recently changed masters. Cyrus of Persia took the kingdom of Lydia around 546 BC, and the Greek cities of the coast went with it. Heraclitus grew up a subject: a rich port, a foreign empire, and the greatest temple in the Greek world standing at the edge of town.

(●) c. 505 BC: He handed the hereditary kingship to his brother and never took another public office. + The office had long since stopped being a throne. By his time the Ephesian kingship was ceremonial and priestly, the robes and the precedence and the sacrifices Strabo describes. It was still the most honorable thing a man in that city could inherit, and Heraclitus gave it away. Handing it over could look like humility and it could look like contempt, and the sources do not settle which it was. Antisthenes, an ancient writer on the succession of philosophers, offered the act as proof of how high-minded he was, and it is nearly the only episode in the whole life that the sources report without embroidery. Later the Ephesians asked him to draft laws for them. He refused, Diogenes says, on the ground that the city was already too far gone under a bad constitution to be worth the trouble. There is a scene from the same source that has stuck to him ever since. He would go up to the temple of Artemis and play knucklebones with the boys on the steps, knucklebones being a children’s dice game played with the ankle bones of sheep. When a crowd of Ephesians gathered to stare, he asked them what they were so astonished at: was this not better than taking part in public life with them? The story may well be shaped rather than remembered. It is at least shaped out of the right man.

(●) c. 500 BC: Ephesus drove out the one man he admired, and he answered with the harshest sentence in Greek philosophy. + His friend Hermodorus was banished. Greek cities did this routinely to anyone who rose too far above his neighbors, and Ephesus did it to the man Heraclitus thought was the best of them. What he wrote in reply is preserved word for word, and it is worth reading slowly: "The Ephesians would do well to hang themselves, every grown man of them, and leave the city to beardless lads; for they have cast out Hermodoros, the best man among them, saying, We will have none who is best among us; if there be any such, let him be so elsewhere and among others." That is fragment 121 in Burnet’s English, and both Strabo and Diogenes Laertius copied it out. You might think that is simply the fury of a man who has lost a friend. It is more than that. A city that removes its best man on the ground that he is best has decided that no standard above the majority exists, and Heraclitus spent his life insisting that a standard above the majority is exactly what there is. His politics run straight out of his physics, which is why he could also write that the people must fight for its law as for its walls. Hermodorus, if the ancients had the right man, landed on his feet. Strabo says he wrote laws for the Romans, and Pliny the Elder reports that a statue of Hermodorus of Ephesus stood in the Comitium at Rome, the open assembly ground beside the Forum where citizens gathered to hear business argued, put up at public expense, honoring him as the interpreter of the laws the decemvirs were drafting: the code the Romans called the Twelve Tables (Natural History xxxiv. 21). The decemvirs were the board of ten men Rome appointed to get its law written down for the first time. You may already be doing the arithmetic, and it is worth doing. The decemvirs did their drafting in 451 and 450 BC, half a century after the banishment, which makes the identification an ancient tradition rather than a settled fact. Taken as it stands, it means the man Ephesus could not tolerate was hired by a city on the other side of the Mediterranean to help write its constitution.

(●) c. 500 BC: He read the famous names of his age and concluded that not one of them had understood anything. + Heraclitus had no teacher and said so. "I have sought for myself" is one of his fragments (101), and Diogenes adds that he learned everything from himself. He had read widely, though, and the reading left him unimpressed with nearly everyone. The verdicts, in Burnet’s English, run this way. - Homer, who functioned in Greece roughly as the Bible would later function in Christian Europe, "should be turned out of the lists and whipped, and Archilochos likewise" (fragment 42). The lists are the public contests where poems were recited in competition, and Archilochos was the other poet a Greek boy grew up reciting, which tells you what company Homer is being put in. - Hesiod, the other great authority, "is most men’s teacher. Men are sure he knew very many things, a man who did not know day or night! They are one" (fragment 57). - Pythagoras, the revered sage of numbers and souls, "practised scientific inquiry beyond all other men," and then made of it "a knowledge of many things and an imposture" (fragment 129). - And the general verdict, aimed at Hesiod, Pythagoras, Xenophanes and Hecataeus by name: "The learning of many things teacheth not understanding" (fragment 40). That last line is the key to his temper, and it is not a sneer at learning. He is not saying facts are useless. He is saying that a man can hold an enormous number of facts and still have missed the one thing that would arrange them, and that the arranging thing is not esoteric at all. It is public. It is common to everyone. And that, he thought, is exactly why nobody bothers to look for it.

(●) c. 500 BC: He put his whole thought into one short book, left it in the temple of Artemis, and no copy of it survived antiquity. + Later readers called the book On Nature, though other titles circulated, including The Muses. Diogenes reports that it was one continuous treatise divided into three discourses: one on the universe, one on politics, one on theology. He deposited it in the temple of Artemis, which in the ancient world served as bank vault and public archive at once. It was famously hard. Antiquity nicknamed him ho Skoteinos, "the Obscure," and one ancient report says the difficulty was deliberate, so that only serious readers would get in and familiarity would not breed contempt. Diogenes tells a story, in his life of Socrates, about Euripides handing the book to him and asking what he made of it (Lives ii. 22). Socrates answered that the part he understood was excellent, and he dared say the part he did not understand was excellent too, but that it needed a Delian diver to get to the bottom of it. A Delian diver was a professional sponge diver from the island of Delos, the man you sent down when nobody else could reach. The obscurity is not decoration and it is not a stylistic tic. Heraclitus writes sentences that hold two things at once because he believes reality holds two things at once, and a smooth sentence would have falsified what he was trying to say. Whether that is profundity or evasion has been argued over for twenty-five centuries, and the argument is not settled.

(●) c. 480 BC: He died at about sixty, and the stories of his death say more about his readers than about him. + Diogenes gives two accounts and both are grotesque. In one, Heraclitus withdrew to the mountains, lived on grass and herbs, came down with dropsy (an old name for the swelling caused by fluid building up in the body), and put a riddle to the doctors instead of a question: could they make a drought after heavy rain? When they could not, he buried himself in cow dung, hoping the warmth would draw the moisture out, and died. In the other he was left lying in the sun plastered over, could not get free, and was eaten by dogs. Almost certainly none of it happened. The pattern is easy to see once you know the fragments. He had written that it is death to souls to become water (fragment 36), and that corpses are more fit to be cast out than dung (fragment 96), and ancient biographers had a settled habit of manufacturing a man’s death out of his own sayings. The mountain diet and the misanthropy come from the same workshop. What can be said is that he seems to have died around 480 BC, at about sixty, in the city he had spent his life scolding. What became of the book is not in doubt. Not one copy outlived antiquity. Everything anyone now knows of Heraclitus arrives through other men’s quotations of him, and the largest single block of those was copied out around AD 225 by Hippolytus, a churchman in Rome, who was trying to prove that a Christian heresy was really Heraclitus in disguise.

What He Taught

(T1) One Word runs through all things, it belongs to everybody, and almost nobody hears it. + Two people watch the same football game. One of them sees large men running into each other. The other sees a shift in coverage, a decoy, and a defense breaking down in a way that was set up four plays earlier. Nothing was hidden from the first man. It all happened in front of him, in daylight, in full view. He simply had no idea what he was looking at. Heraclitus thought that everyone alive is the first man, and that the game is the world. His name for what the second man sees is logos. In ordinary Greek logos means a word, a statement, an account, a reckoning; it is the root of our "logic" and the tail end of every "-ology." He stretched it to mean the intelligible pattern by which things actually happen, the account the world would give of itself if it could speak. He is careful to say the account is not his own invention: "It is wise to hearken, not to me, but to my Word, and to confess that all things are one" (fragment 50). Two features of the Logos matter for everything that follows. The first is that it is common. It belongs to everyone, like the air, which is why he treats missing it as a fault rather than a misfortune: "So we must follow the common, yet though my Word is common, the many live as if they had a wisdom of their own" (fragment 2). He runs the same thought down into law and politics in a fragment that later Christian writers on natural law would have recognized at once. Those who speak with understanding, he says, must hold fast to what is common to all as a city holds fast to its law, "for all human laws are fed by the one divine law" (fragment 114). The second feature is that the Logos hides in plain sight. He is impatient with people who go hunting for depth somewhere exotic, and his line "nature loves to hide" (fragment 123) is not about a curtain with mysteries behind it. It is about how the obvious works. The pattern is right there in the ordinary running of things, doing its work in public, and being missed in public.

(Q) "Though this Word is true evermore, yet men are as unable to understand it when they hear it for the first time as before they have heard it at all. For, though all things come to pass in accordance with this Word, men seem as if they had no experience of them, when they make trial of words and deeds such as I set forth, dividing each thing according to its kind and showing how it truly is. But other men know not what they are doing when awake, even as they forget what they do in sleep." + Source: Heraclitus, fragment 1 in the Diels-Kranz numbering, fragment 2 in Burnet’s (Burnet translation, Early Greek Philosophy, 3rd ed., 1920). Two numbers, because the scattered sentences have been gathered and numbered more than once. Diels and Kranz settled the numbers scholarship now cites, arranging the fragments by the ancient author who quotes each one rather than by any recovered order of the lost book, and Burnet, whose English carries the quotations in the (Q) rows, had numbered them on a plan of his own. Sextus Empiricus quotes it in Against the Mathematicians vii. 132 and says it stood at the very opening of the book. Aristotle had already remarked, in the Rhetoric, that the first sentence is ambiguous: the word rendered "evermore" can attach either to the Word being always true or to men always failing to understand it, and Greek word order will not decide between them. The sleeping and waking image at the close is one Heraclitus returns to, in a fragment saying that the waking share one world while sleepers each turn aside into a world of their own (T1).

(T2) The world was made by nobody; it is an everliving fire, and its burning is measured. + Watch a candle for a minute. The flame keeps its shape while nothing in it stays put: wax rises, gas burns, heat leaves, and the thing you are pointing at turns out to be a process rather than an object. It is the same flame at the end of the minute, and not one particle of it is the same. That is the picture. Fire is Heraclitus’s first principle, the way water had been for Thales and air for Anaximenes in the generations before him, but he means something by it the others did not. Fire is the one element that exists only by consuming and changing. He chose it because he thought the world is like that all the way down: not a collection of things that occasionally alter, but an altering that occasionally looks like things. All things, he says, are an exchange for fire and fire for all things, as goods are exchanged for gold and gold for goods. He has one sentence about the world-order that carries the whole picture, and two phrases in it repay slowing down over. The first is that the world-order was made by no one, neither god nor man, and always was. The second is the word "measures." The fire kindles in measures and goes out in measures, which is to say that the change is not chaos. It is proportioned, lawful, held to an account. A modern reader tends to think of conservation laws here, and the comparison is not silly, though Heraclitus had no way of making it precise. For a Christian reader the fragment cuts both ways at once, and it is worth being clear about which way is which. A measured, law-governed cosmos is what Genesis 1 also describes and what the natural sciences would later take for granted. A cosmos that no god made, that simply always was, is the flat contrary of the Bible’s first sentence.

(Q) "This world, which is the same for all, no one of gods or men has made; but it was ever, is now, and ever shall be an ever-living Fire, with measures of it kindling, and measures going out." + Source: Heraclitus, fragment 30 in the Diels-Kranz numbering, fragment 20 in Burnet’s (Burnet translation, Early Greek Philosophy, 3rd ed., 1920). Clement of Alexandria preserves it, in the Miscellanies v. 104, while arguing that the Greeks had taken their best ideas from Moses. The Greek behind "world" is kosmos, which does not mean the lump of matter but the arrangement of it, the order; it is the same word that gives us "cosmetic." Heraclitus is not claiming that stuff has always existed. He is claiming that the ordering has (T2).

(T3) All things are in flux, and a thing lasts by changing rather than by standing still. + This is the one everybody has heard, usually in the form "everything flows," or in Greek panta rhei. It is worth knowing at the outset that the phrase is not a fragment. It is a summary made by later writers, and Plato is the earliest we have: in the Cratylus 402a he says Heraclitus holds that all things move and nothing stays, and likens the things that exist to the current of a river. What Heraclitus actually wrote were the river sentences, and they are subtler than the slogan. Stand on a bank and name the river. You can do it easily: it has a name, it is on maps, your grandfather fished it. Now try to say what it is you have named. Not the water, which was in the mountains a week ago and will be at sea by Friday. Not the banks, which the water is quietly rearranging. The river is perfectly real, and it is real precisely by not standing still. Take away the flowing and you do not have a river at rest. You have a ditch. Which raises the question a reader ought to be asking by now. If everything is sliding like that, how does anything hold still long enough to be named? There is a live scholarly dispute on exactly that point, and it deserves naming honestly. Plato and Aristotle read Heraclitus as teaching a flux so total that nothing can be truly named at all, and one of his followers, Cratylus, is said to have concluded that speech was useless and taken to pointing with his finger instead. Many modern scholars think that reading overshoots, and that the weight falls on the measures: the world changes constantly and changes lawfully, which is exactly why anything is stable enough to have a name. The fragments will support either reading, which is one reason the man is called the Obscure. The theological cost is real on either reading. If everything without exception is in flux, then nothing is fixed enough to be relied on, not truth, not the self, not whatever is highest. Christian theology puts the unchanging exactly where Heraclitus put the fire, and Scripture is blunt about it: "For I the Lord do not change" (Malachi 3:6).

(Q) "You cannot step twice into the same rivers; for fresh waters are ever flowing in upon you." + Source: Heraclitus, the river fragments, 91 and 12 in the Diels-Kranz numbering, 41 and 42 in Burnet’s (Burnet translation, Early Greek Philosophy, 3rd ed., 1920). Burnet made one English sentence out of two ancient ones, and it is worth knowing which is which. "You cannot step twice into the same river" comes from Plutarch, On the E at Delphi 392b. The other half, that different and again different waters flow upon those who step into the same rivers, reaches us through Cleanthes the Stoic, quoted by Arius Didymus and copied out by Eusebius in the Preparation for the Gospel xv. 20; that one is the fragment most scholars regard as Heraclitus’s own words. Three later writers, in other words, stand between him and the half sentence that is most likely his, each of them copying the man before, and that is the ordinary condition of nearly everything he wrote. A third form, "We step and do not step into the same rivers; we are and are not" (fragment 49a, quoted by Heraclitus the Allegorist in the Homeric Problems 24), puts the paradox where Heraclitus liked to put it, in the second half of the sentence, and turns it on the reader as well as on the water (T3, T4).

(T4) Opposites are not enemies; the pull between them is what holds a thing together. + Pick up a bow. The wood is bent one way and the string pulls the other, and for every moment the bow exists it is a standoff between two forces each trying to undo the other. Cut the string and the fight is over. So is the bow. You are left holding a stick. This is Heraclitus’s favorite kind of example, and he thought it held for nearly everything. The road from the village up to the temple and the road from the temple down to the village are one road; whether it is an ascent or a descent depends on which way you happen to be walking. Sea water is the purest and the foulest water there is, drinkable and good for a fish, undrinkable and destructive to a man. Day and night are not two things but one thing seen from two sides. You might well say that this is only a trick of standpoint, that the road has not changed and only the walker has, and for the road you would have a point. The bow is another matter. The pull in it is not in anybody’s eye. It is in the wood and the string, and when it stops the object stops with it. His conclusion is stated as flatly as he ever states anything: "War is the father of all and the king of all" (fragment 53). He does not mean that violence is admirable. He means that opposition is productive, and that things come to be and hold together through tension rather than in spite of it. Here a reader should slow down, because this is the teaching that made Christian writers nervous, and they were right to be nervous. Heraclitus is willing to run the unity of opposites all the way up: "God is day and night, winter and summer, war and peace, surfeit and hunger" (fragment 67), and the sentence goes on to say that he takes various shapes, as fire does when it is mingled with spices and named for the savour of each. Read generously, that is a claim about God transcending our partial views, which is a thoroughly orthodox thought and one Christians have often made. Read as it stands, it makes the divine the sum of every pair, good and evil included, and a God who is genuinely both terms of that pair is not the God of Scripture. Hippolytus of Rome built a whole refutation on exactly this point.

(Q) "Men do not know how what is at variance agrees with itself. It is an attunement of opposite tensions, like that of the bow and the lyre." + Source: Heraclitus, fragment 51 in the Diels-Kranz numbering, fragment 45 in Burnet’s (Burnet translation, Early Greek Philosophy, 3rd ed., 1920). Hippolytus preserves it, in the Refutation of All Heresies ix. 9. "Attunement" translates harmonia, which in Greek is not a chord but a joining, the way a carpenter fits two boards. The bow and the lyre are the same object in two moods: each is a frame with a stretched string, one made for killing and one for music, and each works only so long as the pull is maintained. Plato takes the image up again in the Symposium 187a, where the doctor Eryximachus quotes the line and objects that it makes no sense to call a thing an attunement while the parts of it are still at odds (T4).

(T5) A man’s character is his fate, and the soul is deeper than any road can reach. + A man loses a job, then another, then a marriage, and he explains each one by what the other people did. Everyone around him can see the single thread he cannot see, because the thread is him. Heraclitus put that in three Greek words, and they are among the most quoted he ever wrote: ethos anthropoi daimon, "Man’s character is his fate" (fragment 119, Burnet translation, preserved by Stobaeus). To feel the force of it you have to know what a daimon was. In ordinary Greek religion a daimon was a spirit assigned to you, an allotted portion, the thing that explained why one man’s life went well and another’s badly. It came from outside and you did not choose it. Heraclitus takes the word and moves it indoors. Your allotted spirit, he says, is your settled disposition: not what happens to you but what you habitually are. That is a moral revolution in three words, and it is a great deal closer to "a tree is known by its fruit" than to anything in Homer. The same turn inward lies behind his remark about the unreachable depth of the soul, and a warning travels with it: it is hard to fight with one’s heart’s desire, because whatever the desire wants, it buys at the cost of soul. Heraclitus has no doctrine of sin and no doctrine of grace, and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise. What he does have is the observation that a man is not transparent to himself, that the inside of him is larger than he can survey, and that his wants are purchases charged to an account whose bottom he cannot see. Augustine, eight centuries later, would recognize the territory even while drawing a different map of it.

(Q) "You will not find the boundaries of soul by travelling in any direction, so deep is the measure of it." + Source: Heraclitus, fragment 45 in the Diels-Kranz numbering, fragment 71 in Burnet’s (Burnet translation, Early Greek Philosophy, 3rd ed., 1920). Diogenes Laertius quotes it in his life of Heraclitus, Lives ix. 7. The Greek word behind "measure" is logos again, the same word as in (T1), which is why other translators render the last clause "so deep an account does it have." The soul is not merely large. It is large because the account that runs through the world runs through it as well (T1, T5).

(Q) "The wise is one only. It is unwilling and willing to be called by the name of Zeus." + Source: Heraclitus, fragment 32 in the Diels-Kranz numbering, fragment 65 in Burnet’s (Burnet translation, Early Greek Philosophy, 3rd ed., 1920). Clement of Alexandria preserves it, in the Miscellanies v. 115, and quotes it approvingly. One wise thing governs everything; it is emphatically not the Zeus of the poets, with his affairs and his thunderbolt, and yet "Zeus" is the nearest name the Greek language has for whatever is highest, so the name half fits and half insults. Five and a half centuries later Paul stood on the Areopagus in Athens, the rocky rise below the Acropolis where the city’s old council met and a new teaching got its hearing, and did something formally similar, taking an altar inscribed to an unknown god and telling the Athenians whom it was they had been groping for (Acts 17:22–31).

What Christian Thinkers Made of Him

(†) The Stoics made him their ancestor, and by the time Paul preached in Athens his Logos was ordinary Greek. + Around 300 BC a man named Zeno of Citium began teaching in a painted colonnade in Athens, and the school took its name from the porch: the Stoa. What Zeno took from Heraclitus was the whole frame. The world is a living fire; a rational order, the Logos, runs through it; wisdom is living in agreement with that order. Zeno’s successor Cleanthes wrote a commentary on Heraclitus in four books, and four centuries later the emperor Marcus Aurelius was still copying Heraclitean lines into the private notebook we call the Meditations. The result is that by the first century AD the word logos was educated common speech all round the Mediterranean. It meant the rational structure of the world, and a Jew in Alexandria named Philo, a contemporary of Christ, had already put it to work as a bridge between Greek philosophy and the God of Genesis. So when the earliest Christians said Logos, every Greek within earshot heard something. You have probably met the next claim already, from a pulpit or from a skeptic: that John took his Word from the Greeks. It gets overstated in both directions, and it needs a qualification that matters. John’s Logos does not descend from Heraclitus. Its main roots are Hebrew: the word of the Lord by which the heavens were made (Psalm 33:6), God speaking creation into being in Genesis 1, the Wisdom who was beside him at the beginning in Proverbs 8. What Heraclitus and the Stoics after him did was to prepare the Greek word, so that "In the beginning was the Word" landed on ears that already knew a world could have an account running through it. The overlap is real, and it stops well short of derivation.

(†) Justin Martyr counted him among the Christians who had lived before Christ. + Justin was a philosopher who converted around AD 130 and went on wearing the philosopher’s cloak afterward, and around AD 155 he wrote a defense of the faith addressed to the Roman emperor. In its forty-sixth chapter he faced an obvious objection: if Christ is the only way, what about everyone who died before he was born? Justin’s answer names two Greeks. "Those who lived reasonably are Christians," he writes, "even though they have been thought atheists; as, among the Greeks, Socrates and Heraclitus, and men like them" (First Apology 46, Ante-Nicene Fathers translation). That sentence stops most readers the first time they meet it, and it should. The reasoning behind it is what Justin elsewhere calls the seeds of the Word. The same divine Logos who became flesh in Christ had been scattering seed all along, so that a man who lived by reason was living, without knowing it, by Christ. Theologians later gave the general principle a name: general revelation, the knowledge of God available to any human being through creation and conscience, as distinct from the special revelation given in Scripture. Paul assumes it on the Areopagus, quoting Greek poets back to Greeks (Acts 17:28), and again in Romans, where what can be known of God is said to be plain from what has been made (Romans 1:19–20). Justin was not saying that philosophy saves, and he was contradicted almost at once. Tertullian, writing in North Africa half a century later, asked what Athens had to do with Jerusalem and thought the answer was nothing at all. The argument between those two instincts has never entirely stopped, and both sides are represented in every Christian generation since.

(†) Most of his surviving words exist because a churchman in Rome quoted them to bury a heresy. + Around AD 225 Hippolytus of Rome wrote a long book called the Refutation of All Heresies, whose method throughout was to show that each heresy was really some pagan philosophy in Christian dress. His target in the ninth book was the teaching of Noetus of Smyrna, carried to Rome by his pupil Epigonus and by Epigonus’s pupil Cleomenes: that Father and Son are not two persons at all but one person under two names, so that it was the Father himself who was born and suffered. The view is called modalism, and the church rejected it. Hippolytus’s argument was that this teaching does not come from Christ; it comes from Heraclitus, whose God is day and night, war and peace, one thing that is at the same time its own opposite. To prove the parentage he had to produce the evidence, so he copied out a long run of the fragments in order, more of them consecutively than any other ancient source preserves. The irony is worth sitting with. A Christian writer trying to discredit Heraclitus is the reason we can still read him. He was not the only churchman handling the text. Clement of Alexandria quoted him warmly and often, in the opposite spirit, as a Greek who had glimpsed the truth. Between the two of them the fathers preserve a large share of everything that survives. And Hippolytus was not simply wrong about the danger, either. Christian theology does hold that God exceeds our categories; it does not hold that God is the sum of every pair of them. The doctrine of the Trinity, one God in three persons, is a distinction of persons within one being, not a coincidence of opposites, and the difference is not a quibble.

(†) Where the gospel parts company with him: a Word who is a person, a world that was made, and a God with no night in him. + Whatever Christians took from him, they had to unlearn at five points, and each of the five is worth stating at full strength rather than softening. - The Word. His Logos is a pattern, not a person. It does not choose, forgive, or love, and there is nothing anyone could say to it. John takes the same word and does with it what no Greek had done: "the Word became flesh and dwelt among us" (John 1:14). Augustine said that he found in the books of the Platonists that in the beginning was the Word, and did not find there that the Word became flesh (Confessions vii. 9). The same is true of Heraclitus, and more sharply. - The world. "This world, which is the same for all, no one of gods or men has made" (fragment 30). Scripture’s first sentence says the contrary, that God created the heavens and the earth (Genesis 1:1), and John adds that nothing which exists came into being apart from him (John 1:3). An uncreated order and a created one are not two descriptions of the same thing. - Light and darkness. "God is day and night, winter and summer, war and peace, surfeit and hunger" (fragment 67). That is a real theology, seriously held, and it is not the Christian one: "God is light, and in him is no darkness at all" (1 John 1:5). - Change. If the flux goes all the way up, nothing is fixed, including whatever is highest, and there is nothing to trust and nobody to keep a promise. Scripture puts the unchanging where Heraclitus put the fire: "For I the Lord do not change" (Malachi 3:6); "Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever" (Hebrews 13:8). Where he says the world is held together by fire in measures, Paul says of Christ that "in him all things hold together" (Colossians 1:17), which is the same job description handed to a person. - Strife. "War is the father of all" (fragment 53). As physics that is a serious proposal, and it has done real work in the history of thought. As the last word about the world it is the opposite of what the prophets were given: swords beaten into plowshares (Isaiah 2:4), and a child born to be called Prince of Peace (Isaiah 9:6). None of this makes him a smaller thinker. It makes him a particular kind of witness. Working from a river, a bow, and a fire, with no Scripture anywhere in front of him, he concluded that the world is held together by an account rather than by an accident, and that the account is public and nearly everyone is missing it. He was right about the account. What he had no way of guessing is that it had a face.