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Stoic “Reason-Λόγος.”2 In the Old Testament Creation Myth, Yahweh’s spontaneous Word is immanently present; in Philo, God’s λόγος is transcendentally present, yet it acts as the intermediary between God and the cosmos; and in the late Stoics, God’s Λόγος mediates between a transcendental God and His creation, when Hermes, the divine messenger of Olympians, is assimilated as “λόγος.”
When Hermes is allegorized as λόγος, a mesmerizing riddle unfolds. Ever wily, astute and ambivalent Hermes shows little traces of rationality, per se, for he is most notorious for his oracular verb’s incessant flirt with “μῆτις” and “μῦθος” — say. If Hermes, the fabled, wily messenger of the Gods, communicates the will of the Olympians to humans, he is ever announcing, more often than not, their irrational volitions and caprices, neglecting all philosophical traces of λόγος as measure, proportion and reason. If precocious Hermes, too, creates his fabled lyre out of a precious tortoise shell, he does so neither by his “Λόγος” nor his “Spoken-Word,” but by μῆτις and by an inspired Grecian ποίησις, a visionary μίμησις.
Hermes’ wondrous and mellifluous noetic spark, born out of a visionary intuition, creates ingeniously, impulsively, spontaneously. Astutely and strenuously, he transforms pre- existing matter into the astonishing sublime, for a dead tortoise
2 This is posited by Sanders. Sanders, J.N. The Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible. An Illustrated Encyclopaedia. “The Word.” Ed. Arthur Buttrick and Emory Stevens Bucke. Volume 4. Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1962. 870.
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