If we comprehend the fundamental meaning of λόγος as gathering and gatheredness, we must firmly establish and firmly hold to the following:

Gathering is never just driving together and piling up. It maintains in a belonging-together that which contends and strives in confrontation. It does not allow it to decay into mere dispersion and what is simply cast down. As maintaining, λόγος has the character of pervasive sway, of φύσις. It does not dissolve what it pervades into an empty lack of opposites; instead, by unifying what contends, the gathering maintains it in the highest acuteness of its tension.

This is the place to return briefly to the question of the Christian concept of logos, particularly that of the New Testament. [103|143] For a more precise account we would have to distinguish here between the synoptic gospels and the Gospel of John. But in principle we can say: in the New Testament, from the start, logos does not mean, as in Heraclitus, the Being of beings, the gatheredness of what strives in opposition, but logos means one particular being, namely the Son of God. Furthermore, it means Him in the role of mediator between God and humanity. This New Testament representation of logos is that of the Jewish philosophy of religion which was developed by Philo, in whose doctrine of creation logos is determined as the μεσίτης, the mediator. Why is the mediator λόγος? Because λόγος in the Greek translation of the Old Testament (Septuagint) is the term for word, “word” in the particular meaning of an order, a commandment; οἱ δέκα λόγοι are the ten commandments of God (the decalogue). Thus λόγος means: the κῆρυξ, ἄγγελος, the messenger, the emissary who transmits commandments and orders; λόγος τοῦ σταυροῦ is the word of the Cross. The announcement of the Cross is Christ Himself; He is the logos of salvation, of eternal life, λόγος ζωῆς. A world separates all this from Heraclitus.