Now although, following the Gospel of St. John, we have made it a main article of our belief that the Logos, really the Thought plus Speech, of God, became about the year B.C. 4 specially incarnate in the person of Jesus the Nazarene, we ought not to forget that, being the one Power by which all that ever came into existence was created and all that exists is sustained, the Logos in any case ever was, is, and will be, incarnate in every sentient being.
As the Logos of God (or, as the Authorised Version of the Bible into English most inadequately renders it in the first chapter of St. John's Gospel, the Word of God) was by the philosophers called the "Intellectual Sun" and the "Light of the World",[59] being, as a personification of the Thought and Speech of the
All-Father, a personification of Wisdom and Reason (which, in an even more real sense than the emanations of the physical sun, form the "Light of the World," or, as the original text of the New Testament puts it, the "Light of the Cosmos"), the fact that pre-Christian philosophers affirmed that the cross was the symbol of the said "Light of the Cosmos," is obviously one which every writer concerning the cross as a Christian symbol ought in common honesty to deal with.
That pre-Christian philosophers did so affirm, can be seen by turning to the Timæus of Plato, where, referring to the begetting of the Universal Soul (whom Philo, another pre-Christian philosopher, speaks of as the "Second God"; and as God's "Beloved Son," "Image," "Ambassador," "Mediator," and "First-Begotten"), Plato says
"Such was the whole plan of the Eternal God about the God that was to be:—and in the centre he put the soul which he diffused throughout the body:—and he made the Universe a circle moving in a circle. Having these purposes in view he created the world a blessed God:—he made the soul on this wise—joined—at the centre like the letter Χ."[60]
Concerning this pronouncement of the great Teacher he so revered, Proclus wrote as follows
"Two circles will be formed, of which one is interior but the other is exterior. One of these is called the circle of the Same and one the circle of the Different, or of the Fixed and of the Variable, or rather of the Equinoctial Circle and of the Zodiac. The circle of the Different revolves about the Zodiac, but the circle of the Same about the Equinoctial. Hence we conceive that the right lines are not to be applied to each other at right angles but like the letter Χ, as Plato says, so as to cause the angles to be equal only at the summit but those on each side and the successive angles to be unequal. For the Equinoctial Circle does not cut the Zodiac at right angles. Such therefore in short is the mathematical discussion of the figure of the (Universal) Soul."[61]
Even the Fathers of the Christian Church admitted that their ideas of the Son of God and of the cross being his symbol, were more or less derived from pre-Christian philosophers. For we find Justin Martyr remarking that Plato declared that
"The Power next to the Supreme God was figured in the shape of the letter Χ upon the universe."[62]
And in another place this famous Father states that
"Whereas Plato, philosophising about the Son of God,
says God expressed him upon the universe in the shape of the letter Χ, he evidently took the hint from Moses, who took brass and made the sign of the cross and placed it by the holy tabernacle, and declared that if people would look upon that cross and believe they would be saved."[63]
The value of all this evidence is so obvious that its mere parade is almost sufficient.
It should however be pointed out that this cross
