Speak What Is: A Meditation on Predication, Logos, and the Human Vocation

To begin the week—or simply the next hour—with intention.

There is something we do a thousand times a day that we hardly notice. We say things. We speak. We declare that something is the case. “It’s cold today.” “She is kind.” “That was unfair.” Words, strung into sentences, forming judgments about the world. We do this so instinctively that we rarely pause to ask: What must be true for us to say anything at all?

Philosophers call this act predication: to say something about something. It is the joining of subject and predicate in the form of a sentence. “The rose is red.” “God is love.” “I am tired.”

But predication is no mere grammatical trick. It is a metaphysical wonder. For it presupposes that:

• There is being—something rather than nothing.

• Being is intelligible—not mute chaos, but shaped and knowable.

• We, finite and fragile as we are, can somehow grasp that being and say what is.

Plato struggled to explain how it was possible to say something false: how can we speak of what is not? Aristotle refined predication into the architecture of logic and science. Aquinas wrestled with how we can predicate anything of God without presuming to know Him. Kant and Hegel saw predication as revealing the structure of the mind itself. And Schelling—perhaps the most metaphysical of them all—saw predication as an event of genesis, the moment when possibility becomes form.

But long before any of these thinkers, the Scriptures declared:

“And God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light.” (Genesis 1:3)

Here is predication as creation. Divine speech brings forth the cosmos. God’s words are not mere descriptions. They are reality-shaping acts. And when the Gospel of John opens, it reaches even deeper:

“In the beginning was the Logos, and the Logos was with God, and the Logos was God… and the Logos became flesh.” (John 1:1,14)

Logos: word, reason, pattern, structure. The very logic of being. That which speaks and is spoken. In Christ, the eternal Logos becomes human, so that we, made in His image, might speak truthfully—might live in the resonance of that divine speech.

And so we arrive at the present moment. Monday morning. Or Tuesday afternoon. Or the quiet threshold before an email is written, a conversation begun, a message sent.

We live in a digital sea of speech: headlines, pings, alerts, posts, messages. The artificial logos of our devices whisper and demand. They predicate endlessly: “This is trending.” “That is false.” “You should care about this.” “You must respond to that.”

But perhaps—not for a week, not even a day, but for this next hour—we might stop. We might ask:

• Am I speaking, or being spoken?

• Am I using language, or is language using me?

• Am I tuned to the Logos that creates, or to the counter-logoi that divide, distract, and distort?

To predicate is to participate in creation. To speak truly is to echo the voice that called light from darkness.

And yet, perhaps even more primary than speaking is silence. Not the silence of suppression or apathy, but the virtue of silence—the cultivated interior stillness that discerns whether a word is necessary, true, and good before it is spoken.

Silence is not the absence of speech, but the precondition of meaningful speech. The desert fathers kept silence not because they had nothing to say, but because they wished to say only what was rooted in God. In silence, we tune our ears to the Logos. In silence, we purify our desire to speak so that what we say participates in truth.

In a culture driven by commentary, outrage, immediacy, and distraction, the practice of silence is not merely a discipline—it is a resistance. It is a refusal to let the artificial logoi dictate the rhythm of your inner life.

So for this hour:

• Say what is necessary.

• Speak what is true.

• Name what is good.

• And before all, listen—to the silence in which the Word was spoken.

Not because you must, but because in doing so, you reflect the One who made you in His image. To predicate with love, humility, clarity—this is to be human, fully.

Start now.

Speak what is. Or be silent, until you can.