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he who would act rationally, either in public or private life,
must have his eye fixed” (208).
And it was this same Logos, then, according to Tarnas –
reasoning, knowledge, and Reason – that became synonymous with
Jesus Christ, the only begotten son of those very early
Christians’ “one true supreme God.” Of this, Tarnas writes:
Fundamental Platonic principles now found
corroboration and new meaning in the Christian
context[.][…] Despite its having entirely distinct
origins from the Judeo-Christian religion, for many
ancient Christian intellectuals the Platonic
tradition was itself an authentic expression of
divine wisdom, capable of bringing articulate
metaphysical insight to some of the deepest Christian
mysteries. Thus as Christian culture matured during
its first several centuries, its religious thought
developed into a systematic theology, and although
that theology was Judeo-Christian in substance, its
metaphysical structure was largely Platonic. (102)
Further exposing that transformation of the theory of the Logos
of Greek philosophical thought into the body and blood of the
Jesus of Nazareth of the Christian religion, he continues to
explain that, while the former helped offer meaning to the
latter for those early Christians, the reverse was also the case
for those existing in what he refers to as the “Hellenistic
cultural world”:
In their understanding of Christ as the incarnate
Logos, early Christian theologians synthesized the
Greek philosophical doctrine of the intelligible
divine rationality of the world with the Judaic
religious doctrine of the creative Word of God, which
manifested a personal God’s providential will and
gave to human history its salvational meaning. In
Christ, the Logos became man; the historical and the
timeless, the absolute and the personal, the human
and the divine became one. Through his redemptive
act, Christ mediated the soul’s access to the
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