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Spanakopita is why Greeks (pronounced “gdiks”) are as strong as Popeye.

From the beginning of Romans and since my earliest days of pondering this stuff, I have always tended more to Justin Martyr's view than to Tertullian’s. It was he who famously demanded, “What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?”

For: What OTHER than Logos shall we use to discuss the question of the place of Logos in the Christian proclamation?

And I think it no accident that Tertullian ended up a Montanist. If reason is discarded, what is left but ecstasy (bogus or not) and passion? We may disagree about reinen Vernunft (pure reason), but we will carry out that disagreement either with reason or with insults and stones.

There is a KIND of QUASI-dualism in monotheism, but if we are going to claim ONE God and then claim the Son is rightly called Word and Truth, then to study Logos itself is to come at least as close as the woman who touched the fringe of our Lord's garment.

And when she did so, He asked, “Who touched ME?” not, “Who touched my clothes?” I think, always assuming grace and election, that the sincere and humble quest into Logos can bring one within healing distance of Jesus.

Now, it seems clear to me that one can make an idol of Reason as easily as one can of a certain collection of feelings. And just as our feelings are disordered -- so that some feel guilty when they aren't or don't feel guilty when they are, so reason is weak in many ways. It is too subject to passion, so that judiciousness is a virtue, a habit of excellence, helped or not by disposition. And even judicious people err. (Not ME, of course, but I have seen others err.)

But it is humans IHS came to save. He came to perfect, not obliterate, their nature, even if the perfection comes through death. So I cannot see the total rejection of the Greeks or even some of the more recent thinkers, including the scoundrel Heidegger, as implied in accepting and receiving IHS as God's perfect self-disclosure.

P.S. It might be helpful for me to add that I think poetry is the highest form of human discourse.