Same Word. Different Ending.

Post 2 of a series on Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning.

Frankl did not call it meaning therapy. He called it logotherapy.

At first I chalked it up to Vienna. Everybody in that world reached for Greek when they named something. It looked like a convention, not a clue.

But later, as I read more of the Church Fathers, I saw it appear time and time again. And it changed how I read the gospels, John in particular.

I'll explain.

What Frankl meant by it

Logos is a Greek word. Frankl took it and told you exactly what he meant by it. Meaning. Logotherapy is healing through meaning.

He was building a third school of therapy in Vienna. Freud said we are driven by pleasure. Adler said we are driven by power. Frankl said no, we are driven by meaning, and when a person cannot find any, something in him goes hollow.

He meant meaning. He was not making a claim about Jesus, and I am not going to pretend he was.

But he picked up a word with a very long road behind it.

The road behind the word

Logos does not translate cleanly. It means word. It also means reason, account, argument, the sense a thing makes.

Five hundred years before Christ, Heraclitus used it for the order running underneath everything. The thing that holds the world together and makes it make sense.

The Stoics took that and ran. For them, the logos was the rational order of the universe, and a wise man lives in line with it instead of fighting it.

Which is where I had just come from.

I read Marcus Aurelius before I read Frankl. A Stoic emperor writing notes to himself about accepting what he could not change. So by the time Frankl handed me the word, I had already been carrying a version of it around for a year without knowing its name.

Then there is Philo, a Jew in Alexandria writing around the time of Christ, using logos for how a God beyond everything reaches into the world he made.

A Greek. A Roman. A Jew. All reaching for the same word.

Then Saint John

Then John opens his gospel.

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

Word there is logos. John takes the term every educated person in the Mediterranean was already using for the order behind the world, and he says it has a face. It has a name. It was born, and it was killed, and it got up again.

That is not a small move. It is one of the boldest sentences anyone has ever written.

And here is what I had missed about the word. Greek is not Latin. When the West translated John, it chose verbum, which just means word. The Greek East never had to translate it, so it kept the whole thing. Reason. Order. The sense a thing makes.

The part that stopped me

There is a teaching in my tradition from St. Maximus the Confessor, a monk who wrote in the seventh century. He says every created thing has its own logos. Its own little word. The purpose God had in mind when he made that specific thing, and no other.

A tree has one. A river has one. You have one.

And all of those small words are held together in the one Word.

Now read Frankl again. He says every person has a meaning that belongs to them and nobody else, a task only they can do, and the work of a life is finding it and answering it.

I do not know how to read those two side by side and feel nothing.

The honest part

I want to be clear. This is not proof of anything.

Frankl chose logos because it is the ordinary Greek word for meaning. That is all he was doing. The fact that John used the same word does not make Frankl a secret Christian, and building a case on a shared dictionary entry is the kind of thing that makes careful people stop trusting you.

So I am not building a case. I am telling you what I saw. More importantly, what I felt.

I was exhausted by a shallow faith that blamed God. Or at least laid the bad things we do to each other at his feet.

I wanted something deeper. Something more honest. Something with roots.

Because it was not one angry man. It was everyone I trusted, all saying the same thing.

Where we part

Here is the actual seam between Viktor and me.

Frankl says the question is backwards. Do not ask what the meaning of your life is. Life is asking you, and you answer it with how you live.

I love that. It got me off the floor.

But Frankl stops there, and he stops there on purpose. He built logotherapy so that a believer and an atheist could both walk in the door. He said a therapist should be an eye doctor, not a painter. Widen what the person can see. Do not paint your own picture on their eyes.

I respect that more than I can say. It is why the man is trustworthy.

I just cannot stop at the same place he does.

Because if life is asking me a question, somebody is asking. A question does not come from nowhere. And I think I know his name.

Seeds

There is an old idea for this. St. Justin Martyr, writing in the second century, said the Word scattered seeds everywhere, and that whatever has been said truly by anyone belongs to us.

Not because we own it. Because it is true, and truth has one source.

That is the only reason I can read a Jewish psychiatrist and a Stoic emperor and come away with more of Christ instead of less. They were not detours. They were seeds.

I was looking for the order underneath my life at the worst moment of it. Three men in three centuries handed me the same word for it.

One of them told me it had a name.

Next: the why and the how, and an old name for a modern emptiness.