Meditation with the St. John Gospel

Here is an initial point of reference, from Georg Kühlewind: Becoming Aware of the Logos, pp. 31-32, copyright 1985 and published by Lindisfarne Books/SteinerBooks.

THE WORD IN THE BEGINNING

...At this point, the word is born in man: the principle, the primal beginning of healing. For all suffering is caused by forgetting the word, by our failure to become aware of it. This failure is cognitive naiveté; that worldview which allows no reality to cognition, to the Logos, even though all reality is recognized through cognition. As far as this goes, materialism and traditional spiritualism are in agreement with each other. They are only apparently contradictory. Basically, they represent the same disease of the human spirit, while healing lies in the primal beginning, in the intuition of the Logos. The Logos teaching is a cognitive teaching, the only possible one, since the primal reality is cognition. Therefore John, in his first sentences, immediately indicates the source which makes possible the healing of the most bitter human sickness: blindness and deafness to the Logos, to God’s voice—from whom, after the fall, the first couple wanted to hide, and which thereafter disappeared from men into its concealment. St. John’s text points the way to what it announces; and along this way our common blindness is healed. Man can turn back to the primal beginning. With the Gospel’s first sentences, what was hidden to man for aeons comes into the open, into alétheia, into truth:

• “In beginning was the Logos, and the Logos was with God, and God was the Logos (1).
• The same was in the beginning with God (2).
• All things became through it, and without it not one thing has become that became (3).
• In it was life, and the life was the light of men (4);
• and the light appears in the darkness; and the darkness has not received it into itself (5).
• There came a man, sent from God, whose name is John (6).
• The same came for a witness, that he might bear wit¬ness of the light, in order that all men through him might believe (7).
• He was not the light, but was sent to bear witness of the light (8).
• lt was the true light, that illuminates the whole man, coming into the world (9).
• It was in the world, and the world became through it, and the world did not know it (10).
• It came into individual being, and individual beings have not received it (11).
• But to those who received it, to those who believed in its name, it gave the ability to become children of God (12);
• who were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God (13).
• And the Logos became flesh, and made his tent within us, and we have seen his radiance, as the radiance of the self-born (monógenes, born of one) son of the father, full of grace and truth (14).”

Labels: getting started, john gospel, kuhlewind, logos