The Thoroughly Modern Mysticism of Matthew
Fox by Wayne G. Boulton
Wayne G. Boulton is professor of religion at Hope
College in Holland, Michigan. This article appeared in the Christian
Century, April 28,
1990 pp. 428-432, copyright by the Christian Century Foundation
and used by permission. Current articles and subscription information
can be found at Christian
Century. This material was prepared
for
Religion Online by Ted & Winnie Brock. Also, Matthew
Fox
Mysticism: it begins with mist, centers on "I" and ends
in schism. Or so I was taught in my conservative Protestant upbringing
and then at a Presbyterian seminary. I also recall learning that
mysticism was vaguely medieval and Roman Catholic. Not until 1970
-- late in
my graduate school training -- was a profound and intellectually
stirring side of mysticism presented to me, thanks to the work
of Evelyn Underhill
and the Quaker Douglas Steere. Since that time, Christians have
renewed their interest in spirituality and matters mystical, with
popular writers
such as Thomas Merton, William Johnston and Henri Nouwen leading
the way.
Into this changing situation has come Matthew Fox,
a Dominican scholar promoting a modern and accessible mysticism.
Director of the Institute
of Culture and Creation Spirituality at Holy Names College in Oakland,
California, and guru of the creation spirituality movement, Fox
is on the road much of the time giving lectures and leading workshops
(or "playshops") around the world. Fox is author of a number
of books on "creation-centered mystics," including Original
Blessing: A Primer in Creation Spirituality (Bear, 1983) and his new
book, The Coming of the Cosmic Christ: The Healing of Mother Earth
and the Birth of a Global Renaissance (Harper & Row, 1988) Fox
is such an eclectic and elusive thinker, still in midcareer, that a
fair summary of his thought may not be possible. But I am certain that
Fox is a mystic. (Happily, he’s certain of it too.) The sort
of mysticism he expresses can be significant for (particularly
Protestant) Christians today.
What exactly is mysticism? Fox’s definition
is marked by a commendable range together with a stress on ordinary
experience.
Mysticism is that
form of religious practice centering on firsthand experience
of the divine. Mystic practices belong to the core of all religions,
for
believers retain vital belief in a transcendent reality only
as long as they
can communicate with that reality by direct experience. Insofar
as everyone is potentially religious, one could say that there is
a
mystic in all of us.
The practice of mysticism, Fox argues, has two essential
elements that correspond to two meanings of the Greek word mystikos:
to "shut
one’s senses" and to "enter the mysteries." The
rhythm in all mysticism springs from the fact that these two meanings
are related. To be more fully open to the mysteries requires the purification
or shutting down of one’s senses -- pulling the plug on the
television, going out into the woods, or calling a halt to marathon
reading. The
mystic shuts down the senses not because they are evil, but because
they are such blessings that they deserve a periodic rest and cleaning
to be renewed and restored.
Fox focuses on what he calls the "primal sacraments":
sea, land, wind, fire, life -- the universe itself. The great
passion of
mystics, he writes, is to enter the awesome mystery of the universe
and our existence within it. By returning to what he believes is
the foundation of all religions, Fox hopes to return sacramental
liturgy
to its proper setting, to the source of its energy. This move further
serves to remind the church that its own tradition points to natural
mysteries no institution could possibly control or manage.
Fox’s favorite illustration of a mystic entrance into the mysteries
is the experience of astronaut Rusty Schweikert in 1969. While temporarily
stranded outside his Apollo capsule high above the earth, in complete
silence, this typical macho fighter pilot had a shattering and transforming
encounter with his home planet. Looking back on the earth, "a
shining gem against a totally black backdrop," Schweikert was
so overcome he wanted to "hug and kiss that gem like a mother
does her firstborn child." The political divisions on our planet
that meant so much to him before he entered space faded away entirely.
The rivers didn’t seem to pay any attention to them; the clouds
didn’t stop at the border between Russia and Europe; the oceans
served communist and noncommunist worlds indiscriminately. Schweikert
had never read Tolstoy, but from his perch in space he didn’t
need to: there are no nations.
The theological tilt in Fox’s mysticism is toward creation.
His project is not only to be creation-centered in his spirituality,
but to warn the world about any version of Christianity in which creation
appears as an afterthought, versions he calls "fall/redemption" or
ascetic spirituality. In slightly different terms, Jurgen Moltmann
makes a similar point in God in Creation. As I’ll say later,
I’m not at all certain that Christians should center themselves
as Fox does, but his understanding of creation strikes me as wise.
His work provides the clearest possible example of how a lively
sense of divine creation blocks both the sex-negativism and the
indifference
to public life that have bedeviled the mystical tradition through
the centuries.
Fox’s mysticism issues in a new quest -- not for the historical
Jesus but for the Cosmic Christ. The new quest is for the divine pattern
that connects, say, the crab nebula in the sky with crawfish on earth
-- personalizing the connection by grounding it in the joy and suffering
of the historical Jesus. For precisely in Christ, Fox says, one becomes
connected with the entire world in a new way. On the cross, a cosmic
upheaval follows the most violent possible disruption between humanity
and divinity: the Father withdraws, letting the Son cry, "My God.
my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" But this leads. paradoxically
to connection as sin’s power is broken and God raises Christ
from the dead. Through this New Man or Cosmic Christ, Christians are
reconnected not only to their places, their races, their social classes
and their political friends, but to everything -- to the animals (who
surrounded Christ’s birth) , to the sick, to the outcasts,
to the little and forgotten ones, to the land.
For Fox, this is the Christ of Colossians, "the first-born of
all creation . . . in him were created all things in heaven and earth:
everything visible and invisible . . . he holds all things in unity" (Col.
1:15-17) This Christ is "the radiant light of God’s glory
and the perfect copy of God’s nature, sustaining the universe
by God’s powerful command" (Heb. 1:3) This is the cosmic
ruler to whom "every knee should bow in heaven and earth and under
the earth" (Phil. 2:10) Only the quest for such a Christ, Fox
believes, can free the church from its captivity to a truncated, anthropocentric "personal
savior Christianity."
If the Cosmic Christ is so evident in the New Testament,
why is the concept so foreign to most Christians today? Fox’s answer: the
Enlightenment. The individualism of the Enlightenment and the industrial
age, combined with Isaac Newton’s theory of a desacralized, machinelike
universe, convinced Christian theologians that they should put aside
their living cosmology, symbolized religiously by the "Cosmic
Christ," and focus on personal salvation. Capitulating to a culture
driven increasingly by scientific investigation, industrial development
and medical advances, the Christian West became more interested in
itself than in God or the fate of God’s nonhuman creation.
The brilliant New Testament scholar Rudolf Bultmann is perhaps
typical
in the way he shifts the interpretive focus of theology to anthropology,
the doctrine of the person. As even a brief visit to an Eastern
Orthodox cathedral will make clear, the Western church lost its
Cosmic Christ.
This is not to say that the Enlightenment’s quest for the historical
Jesus was a waste of time. According to Fox, any theology of the Cosmic
Christ must be grounded in the historical Jesus -- in his words, his
life and his liberating deeds. Fox simply means that it is time for
a new quest that builds on the old, but goes in a different direction:
it reimagines a living cosmology for Christians in our time. Fox writes: "The
holy trinity of science (knowledge of creation) , mysticism (experiential
union with creation and its unnameable mysteries) , and art (expression
of our awe at creation) is what constitutes a living cosmology."
Such a direction would signal a dramatic shift in the way seminaries
train students. Science courses would be mandatory, because to understand
the dynamic character of the Cosmic Christ we must first understand
20th-century scientific revelations about the creative and vibrant
nature of our universe. Sustained attention to the spiritual disciplines
and to mysticism in the broadest sense would become integral to the
curriculum: We could not teach theology without art as meditation or
without laboratories in painting, music, dance, poetry and other activities
that Fox claims allow students to listen to the cosmos within and around
them, and to give birth to a creative theology.
Though he uses psychology in his work, Fox is not
at all happy with the overt dependence on psychological data in Christian
ministry courses.
He sees "psychologism," or the reduction of spirituality
to psychological categories, as a pathological pseudo-mysticism rampant
within U.S. seminaries today. Psychologized religion is religion that
has lost its mystic center. In seminaries where more attention is given
to clinical pastoral education than to mysticism, Fox argues, an entire
generation of potential spiritual leaders is often sacrificed to the
God of counseling. To use a Foxian image, perhaps it is time to back
huge moving vans up to our seminaries, load up all those "practical
theology" books and pamphlets cluttered with psychological
jargon, and channel our educational resources in a different direction.
Not that Fox is preoccupied with the state of our seminaries or with
church curricula. His sweeping proposals for change include but go
far beyond the institutional church. A few examples:
Deep Ecumenism. Because the Cosmic Christ is rooted
in the witness of the New Testament, this Christ permeates or at
least lies dormant
in all churches and groups that call themselves Christian. Moreover,
the Cosmic Christ connects us to all people ("he holds all things
in unity") and can be discerned within the wisdom traditions of
all world religions. Fox terms the movement to unleash this wisdom
for the common good "deep ecumenism." The heart of the
Cosmic Christ is the figure of Jesus as Sophia or Wisdom -- for
Fox the perfect
bridge between Christianity and other faiths.
Why, one might ask, should we expect a deeply ecumenical
era to begin now? Sustained and often mass contact between Christians
and
other
religions has been going on for some time. If the Cosmic Christ
has been there all along, why hasn’t this era already begun? Once
again, Fox’s answer is simple: the Enlightenment tradition is
too powerful. The West is thoroughly out of touch with its own mystical
heritage. The Western church can’t engage in dialogue with
the East about mysticism or wisdom when it does not know its own
mystical
roots. Yet authentic and profound contact between Christianity
and other religions may lie ahead. The great encounters between
Christianity
and native people and between Christianity and Eastern religions
have occurred only during the past few centuries -- during precisely
that
period in the West when Newton, Descartes and the Enlightenment
deposed the Cosmic Christ.
The Greening of the Religious Life. In biblical language, Fox is anticipating
a new Pentecost, a great outpouring of the Holy Spirit on the entire
human race. For Christians of European heritage, this will often involve
self-criticism of a deep and painful sort. They will have to let go
of liberal, Enlightenment-sponsored worldviews that deny mysticism
and lack a cosmology. They will have to accept instruction from the
same religions of the earth they customarily dismiss as primitive and
superstitious. They will be required to enter a global religious awakening
without trying to control it. According to Fox, the color of the coming
religious transformation of contemporary culture must be green. In
and through the Cosmic Christ, after all, everything in heaven and
on earth is created. And Mother Earth is dying before our eyes.
From the Mediterranean to Alaska to the Soviet Union
to the California coast, we encounter news of ecological disaster.
But this is only the
tip of the iceberg. Topsoil is being destroyed around the world
at an alarming rate -- 6 billion tons per year in North America alone.
It is estimated that Iowa, a state traditionally rich in topsoil,
will
be a desert by the year 2020 if the current rate of soil depletion
continues. The world’s forests are disappearing -- largely to
satisfy First World appetites -- and in these forests dwell incredibly
diverse species of plants, animals and birds. As forests go, species
go. We are currently in the midst of an "extinction spasm
of immense proportions. Ordinarily, a species of plant or animal
dies out about
every 2,000 years. Currently, species are disappearing at the rate
of one every 25 minutes. If this rate continues, we will eliminate
10 percent of the remaining species (100,000 per year) in the next
ten years. Some believe that the only parallel to this pace of
extinction is found in major geological and climatic upheavals
in the ancient
past.
In this global crisis, Fox argues, political programs and voluntary
activity will not be enough. A spiritual response is also required
-- the enormous resources of our religious heritage. The earth will
continue to bestow its blessings of soil, forest and rain, but are
we responding as we should -- with gratitude, restraint, appropriate
reverence and the proper rites?
Worship. The end of Fox’s new book contains the most intriguing
program for liturgical renewal I’ve ever seen. His primary concern
is to arrest "the anthropocentric deterioration of worship in
the West" through renewed attention to the Cosmic Christ.
Fox finds that worship on the part of non-Christian peoples often
possesses
a trait Western churches need: a cosmological sense. Native peoples
do not worship anthropocentrically. In their dances, ceremonies
and rites, they see themselves as members of a mysterious and sacred
universe.
Fox peppers this section of the book with stories (I could add to
them) of priests and ministers reading richly cosmic biblical texts,
creeds or traditional prayers and then completely ignoring the cosmological
dimension in their exposition or commentary. What might happen to worship
if church leaders were retrained in a cosmological context? What if,
for example, brides and grooms at weddings were encouraged to explore
and express the mysterious cosmos of their own bodies by reading parts
of the Song of Songs to each other, with the congregation playing the
role of the chorus? Fox is usually right in claiming that he is not
abandoning Christian traditions but delving deeper into them.
Most standard criticisms of mysticism simply don’t stick to
Fox. For example, Fox doesn’t wallow in subjectivism, making
it up as he goes along. Any fountainhead of ideas like Fox is bound
to appear subjectivistic, particularly when some of these ideas
are, well, unlikely. But there is a personal element in all theology.
Recall
also that Fox is second to none (perhaps only to James Gustafson)
in attacking anthropocentrism. But the most telling answer to the
charge
that Fox is too subjective is that he consistently works out of
a coherent tradition alongside Francis of Assisi, Hildegaard of
Bingen, Julian
of Norwich, Nicholas of Cusa, Teresa of Avila, John of the Cross,
Roger Williams, George Fox, John Woolman and others.
Nor is Fox’s mysticism quietistic, wasting its substance in
playful aestheticism and luring us toward a religious withdrawal from
public affairs and social issues. Dip into any Fox book, and you will
meet a man pervasively and consistently engaged in political questions.
Fox would concede that his tradition displays dualistic and quietistic
tendencies, which is a major reason for his tilt toward creation. But
Fox’s supreme test for distinguishing authentic from inauthentic
mysticism is "justice-making and compassion as Jesus taught."
It is more likely that the opposite is true: with
leftist sympathies visible on every page, Fox could be accused of
politicizing the gospel,
a temptation that Donald Bloesch identifies in Essentials of Evangelical
Theology as ‘the principal challenge to the evangelical church
in our time." Yet Fox is simply too mystical in the classical
sense, too interested in the inner life, to reduce Christianity to
a scheme for social and political transformation. His call for a change
of heart, for a "resurrection of the human psyche," is clearly
a prerequisite for social change, which makes Fox as "conversionist" as
any Christian evangelical.
Other criticisms, however, are not as easily, dismissed.
Fox’s
work reminds us why the church has never been completely at ease
with its mystics. For one thing, his evaluation of the institutional
church
is almost entirely negative. His writings reflect no interest
in Christian institutional practice -- a trait that appears to me
to
be characteristic
of most Christian mystics. It is not clear how the church might
be authoritative for him, even in a proximate or penultimate sense.
On the other hand, Fox is obviously and deeply interested in
movements
of all kinds -- Christian and non-Christian, artistic, philosophical,
social, political, economic, literary, scientific and spiritual.
Another bothersome yet historically predictable feature
of his work is its idiosyncrasy. In his newest book Fox calls Christianity
to a
rebirth and a new quest that would entail some of the most cataclysmic
changes in its history. And then he writes, "A Cosmic Christ who
does not accomplish the renaissance I speak of is not the true Christ." Such
a line will strike most readers as perhaps a tad overstated. Indeed,
what does Fox think has been happening for the past 20 centuries, when
nothing even approaching his "renaissance" has taken place?
As others such as William Thompson in Commonweal (June 16, 1989) have
noticed, this trait in Fox may be linked to a certain theological vagueness
throughout his work concerning the difference between the creator and
the creator’s deeds and effects.
But all these shortcomings tend to be limitations
of mysticism as a historical movement within religions, and we would
be hard-pressed
to find any significant movements displaying no theological limitations.
Furthermore, we need more Christian mysticism today, not less.
Dead liturgical formalism together with doctrinal or biblicistic
rationalism
are so strong in some quarters of the church that some sort of
a recovery, of the mystical side of faith is an absolute necessity.
Protestants
in particular have much to learn from the contributions of Fox’s
inner circle -- the great mystics of catholic Christianity.
Fox’s most damaging flaw is that in Christian
terms he is not mystical enough. He presents us with a Christianity
so worldly
-- so
wedded to his own time, so confident of the superiority of post-Enlightenment
categories -- as to be almost religiously incoherent. The New
Testament, after all, is hardly silent about heaven (as opposed to
our time
and place) , an afterlife and a severe judgment on this world.
Fox is silent
about these things; his creation-centered spirituality excludes
them. There is nothing even approaching world-suspicion in the man
-- a
trait common among Christian mystics from St. Anthony in the
third century
to T. S. Eliot in our own. To be sure, he is suspicious of the
religious and political right wing, but this is suspicion of a different
kind.
Fox subscribes to the "common factor" school of mysticism,
which helps him but doesn’t help us. It helps him because
it accepts the notion that the most diverse spiritualities all
have a
common basis; only subsequent interpretations distinguish one mystic
experience from another. Thus Fox can draw freely from religions
as archaic as Taoism and as primal as Lakota Indian spirituality,
since
their insights are assumed to be ultimately compatible with Christianity.
But why should we assume that interpretation is always extrinsic and
subsequent to the mystic experience? Such a view eliminates the cognitive
dimension of the experience, reducing it to sensation. Discerning a
certain family resemblance between, say, Shinto and Christian mystical
experiences hardly establishes that they share a common foundation.
Is it not at least as likely that even mystical experience has a specific
ideal content of its own, and that therefore there is no such thing
as mysticism in general, but only Jewish mysticism, Buddhist mysticism
and so on?
Nothing more clearly reveals Fox’s accommodation to modernity
than his rejection of original sin. I admire his candor. Since 1983
he has been completely open about his intention drastically to shift
the traditional Christian paradigm from original sin to original blessing.
Fox’s target appears to be the Manichaean notion of sin without
creation, the idea that we come into this world despised, worthless,
ugly and powerless. This state of low self-esteem is then easily and
too often displaced onto a scapegoat, such as racial minorities, women
or homosexuals. As damaging now as it was in the ancient world; such
a mind-set is indeed a worthy target for criticism. But Fox throws
out too much. Creation spirituality needs a profound sense of sin.
Without it, his grasp of evil -- not to speak of his impact on orthodox
Christianity -- is severely compromised. Creation and redemption are
brought so close together in Fox’s work that his programs for
social transformation are almost inevitably simplistic. And in his
call for personal transformation ("a resurrection of the human
psyche") he can sound faintly like a Robert Schuller of the
left.
The good news is that nothing in creation spirituality
requires these shortcomings. My troubles with Fox -- the blurred
distinction
between
creature and creator, the diminished sense of the church and sin,
the absence of world-suspicion -- stem in the end from his wholesale
and
catastrophic rejection of Augustine, the great bête noire of
the Foxian version of church history. Augustine is Fox’s honorable
opposition, like Barth’s Schleiermacher. But Fox has yet
to learn from Augustine as much as Barth learned from Schleiermacher,
and herein
lies his eminently soluble problem. Plunge more deeply, Father
Fox, plunge more deeply.
No good reason remains for Protestants to continue
to ignore Christian mystics. Blessed with an agile mind, Fox has
more range and creativity
than any mystic writing in English today. His stress on individual
freedom in eligious matters, on ethics and on ecumenical concerns
will appeal to many Protestants. But perhaps his greatest contribution
will be to awaken us to "sacred spaces" that go unrecognized
in our hectic, distracted lives -- meetings and places where time
is suspended in the midst of time, where space "fills" with
Christic experience of the Eternal Now, an experience that has
always been the highest promise of the peculiar tradition known
as mysticism.
