"[Rupert Sheldrake's] at least as crazy in science as I have been in theology."
—Matthew Fox

"The being (of things) is God."
—Meister Eckhart


The Rev. Matthew Fox, an Episcopal priest and founder of the University of Creation Spirituality in Oakland, was a Catholic priest of the Dominican order for thirty-four years. "I wrote books," he tells us in this new collaborative work, "and...the Vatican objected to my teaching; in March 1993 I was expelled from the Dominican order...But this is a policy in the present Vatican. It's getting to be less and less extraordinary to be attacked by this regime."

Fox entered the Dominican order after high school and two years at college. His purpose was "to explore spiritual experience." "That was about 1960," he writes, "and John XXIII was pope—quite a different human being from the fellow who's running things these days. John XXIII moved me. He moved me as a human being; he moved everybody I think who knew him or knew of him. It was to his vision that I committed myself."

Advised by Thomas Merton to go to Paris, Fox there met his mentor, Père Chenu. "It was he who identified by name the creation-centered spiritual tradition...He cleared the way for me by naming this spiritual tradition of the West that combined mysticism and prophecy, spirituality, art, and social justice. For this was the single most pressing question I brought with me to Paris: How, if at all, can we relate spirituality and social justice?"

Fox asserts in The Coming of the Cosmic Christ that there are "two spiritual traditions of the West, that of fall-redemption or ascetic spirituality, and that of creation-centered or original blessing spirituality." Fox's "creation spirituality" centers in the notion of "panentheism" (not "pantheism"), which "teaches that all things are in God, God is in all things, and God works through all things." "There is a shift we see in theology today from theism to panentheism," he writes. "The West has not developed a theology of the spirit. We talk about a trinitarian divinity, but in fact in an excessively redemption-oriented and Jesus-oriented theology we leave out God the Creator who is per se life, who is present in all living things and therefore is understood more deeply when we understand the mystery of the living things." A moment later Fox states unequivocally, "[D]ivinity is in creation."

Notoriously in our time, "the mystery of the living things"—Nature—has been explored by science, and Fox's co-author, Rupert Sheldrake, is an innovative and highly imaginative scientist. Author of several books, including Seven Experiments That Could Change the World, Sheldrake is a former Research Fellow of the Royal Society and was Director of Studies in biochemistry and cell biology at Clare College, Cambridge University, England. Like his friend Matthew Fox, Sheldrake wishes to recover—and to rename—a sense of the sacred. "One of my main concerns is the opening up of science," he writes. "Another is exploring the connections between science and spirituality."

Between them, Fox and Sheldrake have created a challenging and fascinating book—one that is unlikely to give much pleasure to the current Vatican regime. Natural Grace covers a lot of ground. "We both share an interest in going beyond the current limitations of institutional science and mechanistic religion," the authors state in the preface, "and we both believe that as a new millennium dawns, a new vision is needed which brings together science, spirituality, and a sense of the sacred. Their separation underlies our present crises of ecological devastation, despair, and disempowerment...We need a new cosmology that speaks to our hearts as well as our minds."

There are chapters on "Living Nature and Creation Spirituality," "Grace and Praise," "The Soul" (imaginatively represented by Sheldrake as an electromagnetic field), "Prayer," "Darkness," "Morphic Resonance and Ritual," and "Revitalizing Education." "The sins of the institutional church are clearly encouraged by a theology of grace scarcity, an ideology that separates Nature from grace," writes Fox. The Dominican "Meister Eckhart in the fourteenth century said simply, ‘Nature is grace.' He represents the culmination of the creation mystical tradition that began with Hildegard of Bingen in the twelfth century, then Francis of Assisi in the early thirteenth, then Thomas Aquinas, then Mechthild of Magdeburg, then Eckhart." "St. Augustine in the fourth century not only gave us the term original sin, which is not one of my favorite theological categories," Fox goes on, "but he also split Nature from grace. That dualism, that wound, has haunted Western religion for sixteen hundred years." For Fox, Eckhart "heals what Augustine took apart."

Following Eckhart's example, Fox distinguishes between "God" and "the Godhead": "Eckhart says, ‘The ground of the soul is dark'...Really there are two faces to divinity. God is the God of light: ‘Let there be light,' the God of creation and of redemption who works in the light, you might say, and history. But the Godhead is the God of mystery...The Godhead is pure being." Fox is particularly eloquent on the relationship of the Godhead to darkness, nothingness, and the via negativa, which includes "despair as a spiritual path":

The Creator, Redeemer God is active and the results are visible. But the Godhead from which all things begin is supremely dark. It's "a not-active superessential darkness that will never have a name and never be given a name." It's the great mystery...

The via negativa is really about developing what I call the muscles of receptivity. Our Western culture which is famous for its activism has very underdeveloped muscles of receptivity. We tend to fill this hole with junk because we're afraid of the dark or, if you will, afraid of nothingness. Nothingness may be the bottom-line effort to name this unnamable mystery. No thingness. We have a need to experience nothingness and learn to be at home with it. Meditation practices are one such avenue, and suffering is another...I think we are starved for darkness today...It's time to start praying with the Godhead instead of just with God. The results with God are not really impressive since we keep turning out banal prayers. Is God banal or are we banal? Maybe we should begin at the beginning, which is darkness. Let go of all the prayer books and get into the dark.

One thinks of poetry—of Wordsworth's "wise passiveness," of the climactic moment of Yeats's play, The Unicorn from the Stars ("Where there is nothing, where there is nothing—there is God"), even of Mallarmé's "Je dis: une fleur! Et...musicalement se lève...l'absente de tous bouquets" ("I say: flower! And...musically there arises...the one that is absent from all bouquets").

Sheldrake gives us a succinct history of the secularization and de- animization of Western thought from the seventeenth century onwards and of the deal struck between science and religion whereby "All nature was secularized": "Science was concerned with the objective realm of facts, religion and the arts with the subjective realm of values, aesthetics, morality, and belief." Both men point out our cultural over-emphasis on "individuality." Sheldrake insists that "our... psyche is extended, it's not just confined within our brains":

We live in a world of overlapping mental fields, of a shared space which is not just a so-called objective material reality but is encompassed by innumerable minds or psyches, including those of animals. The idea that there is an objective reality, totally free from any kind of psychic influence, is an extraordinary illusion from this point of view. And yet that's the view that science has been based on...Our souls are bound up with those of others and bound up with the world around us. The idea of the mind being inside our heads, a small, portable entity isolated in the privacy of our skulls, is extraordinary. No culture in the past has had this idea....

The idea of the soul as "field" is extremely important in Natural Grace; it is equally important in twentieth-century poetry. Charles Olson's "field theory" of poetry is based on the metaphor of the electromagnetic field. Honoring Olson's concept, Robert Duncan named one of his books The Opening of the Field. But Duncan also extended Olson's concept: punning, he insisted on "field" as meadow. Interestingly, the same thing seems to occur here. Sheldrake consistently refers to field as electromagnetic field; Fox consistently answers him in terms of meadow.

Fox speaks of "recovering our original radiance" and outlines the four paths of creation spirituality: via positiva, via negativa, via creativa and via transformativa. Sheldrake points out that "diabolical" is etymologically "throwing apart" (which would mean that the etymological opposite of "diabolical" would be "symbolical"!). Fox distinguishes between "pusillanimity" ("a puny soul") and "magnamimity" ("a great soul"), all the while insisting that "The soul is not in the body but the body is in the soul." Etc. It is a wonderfully exhilarating ride.

Natural Grace allows us to learn something about the thought of both men, but we come away from the book with a stronger impression of what Matthew Fox has to say. It's not that Rupert Sheldrake doesn't say interesting things: his concept of "morphic resonance" ("the regularities of Nature are more like habits than laws") is of considerable importance. But Natural Grace is less an introduction to the work of Rupert Sheldrake than it is to the work of Matthew Fox.

Fox has called himself "a postdenominational priest in a postdenominational era." He is not a "Protestant" in the sense of someone who asserts his own individual experience of revelation and who cares little about the claims of others or of "tradition." Rather, he is a deeply scholarly man who wishes to function within the framework of a tradition, a church. (Ceasing to be Roman Catholic, he became Episcopalian.) At the same time, Fox is deeply aware of the social, political, and ecological devastations of the late Twentieth Century—"the century of horror," Kenneth Rexroth called it—and he wishes to do something about them.

This "radical theologian" (the phrase is in a way a contradiction in terms) who preaches "original blessing" is, I suspect, a deeply divided man whose personal experience of division is the key to his perception of division in the world at large. Fox wishes not only to heal himself but, as much as he can, to heal the world. Where but in a church would such depth of healing be possible? Yet in The Coming of the Cosmic Christ Fox deliberately raises Gregory Bateson's question: "Is the human race rotting its mind with slowly deteriorating religion?" Fox's answer to that question is a qualified "yes." His work is not a call to revolution ("It is important to work within the system") but a call to radical reform. A true child of the sixties, he seeks for an alternative tradition, but he seeks for it in the deep regions of Catholic thought. Meister Eckhart, after all, was another Dominican: "It's the original sin versus original blessing mentality...[T]he human mind is original grace or original blessing...the mind yearns to know and will do so if it's led to the right waters."

References to Carl Jung show up fairly frequently in Natural Grace, particularly in Sheldrake's sections. Fox denies much influence by Jung, saying he preferred Rank. Like many Jungians, however, Matthew Fox has a tendency to think in binary oppositions ("It's the original sin versus original blessing mentality") and like many Jungians, he has great faith in "images," which, he writes, "are closer to the mystical experience than words are." (Conversely, he also refers to "the radical letting go of all images.") My point here—and Fox would probably agree with it—is that the Jungian mode, with its emphasis on polarity, healing and imagery, is not the only way to think. (James Hillman, himself a Jungian, tries to get beyond the concept of polarity in Healing Fiction: "No longer polarity but plurality," "psyche...released...into many worlds." And Hillman no longer believes that he can "heal.") Yet if we are to take the Western tradition seriously, if we are to find ways to use it, then it very much behooves us to listen to the insights of people like Matthew Fox, a fascinating, scholarly and (in all senses) careful man. Like the great poet Charles Olson—and, again, there are ways in which Fox's work connects to poetry—Fox might be called "an archaeologist of morning." He is someone who takes Ezra Pound's directive, "Make it New" into all sorts of unexpected contexts:

But that's it, the temptation to freeze novelty and newness instead of keep inventing newness. And this is where the mystics are so powerful—Eckhart saying, God is novissimus, the newest thing in the Universe. That's why the Bible begins with the words "In the beginning." God is always "in the beginning"...Eckhart says, "The first gift of the spirit is newness."

*

We must educate in awe again.

Jack Foley