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Judaism, both its effective universality – its success in
propagation – and its philosophical universality owed much to
the Greco-Roman milieu of its birth” (98). About this, he
further explains:
[The] Christian world view was fundamentally informed
by its classical predecessors. Not only did there
exist crucial parallels between the tenets and
rituals of Christianity and those of the pagan
mystery religions, but in addition, as time passed,
even the most erudite elements of Hellenic philosophy
were absorbed by, and had their influence on,
Christian faith. (100)
And one of the most critical of those “erudite elements” of
Greek philosophy which Tarnas refers to which defined
Christianity’s fundamental perception of reality and “truth” as
a way of testifying to the certainty of the word of God was in
fact “Logos,” something that roots the then still-infant
religion, very curiously for me, in the realm of rhetoric.
Along with Ethos and Pathos, Logos was one of the three “modes
of persuasion” of classical rhetoric as expounded by Aristotle
in Rhetoric, his seminal fourth century B.C.E.-treatise on the
titular subject. Defining rhetoric as the “faculty of observing
in any given case, the available means of persuasion” (2155),
while Ethos had to do with the reputation of the would-be
speaker or writer and Pathos had to do with the emotions of his
or her intended audience, Logos was an appeal or proof based
upon what Aristotle referred to as “the words of the speech
itself” (2155), or, perhaps less abstractly put, the logical
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