Fox Matthew - Passion for creation: the earth-honoring spirituality of Meister Eckhart

PASSION

FOR

CREATION

The Earth-Honoring

Spirituality of

Meister Eckhart

MATTHEW FOX

INNER TRADITIONS
Rochester, Vermont

To my creation-centered brother, Meister Eckhart, exiled for six hundred and fifty years, welcome home! And thank you for your spirituality of passion and compassion, for your reminding us of our divine birthright and responsibility to create, for your humor and your capacity to let go, for your prophetic outrage and your imaginative outreach.

FOREWORD to the new edition

Meister Eckhart and the Spiritual Agenda for the Nineties

Carl Jung once said that it is to the mystics that we owe what is best in humanity, and farmer/poet Wendell Berry says that it is necessary to fight the worst with the best. If both these thinkers are correct, then it is clear that Meister Eckhart provides significant weaponry for the mystical and prophetic agenda that the human race faces in the nineties. Some may object to my using the military term weaponry. However, I believe that one of the important items in the resuscitation of our species must be a spirituality which takes back the essentially spiritual archetype of the warrior from the militarism of our nation-state war departments. Meister Eckhart and indeed the whole spiritual tradition of the messiah as warrior (see page 306) need to be reseized by an awakened mystical tradition. Into the heart of a doomed land the stern warrior leapt, we are told in Scripture (Wisdom 18:15). Notice that it is into the heart of the land that the messiah leapsthe mystic opens the heart. And Eckhart surely does that. The male liberation movementso logical and so necessary an outgrowth of the feminist movementwill find a champion in Meister Eckhart, a truly liberated male. (Consider, for example, his discussion of fatherhood in pages 400f. )

In addition to taking back the warrior archetype we must also retrieve the archetype of eros. A pious and impotent religiosity has turned over the power of eros and passion to the pornography industry, fanned as it is by a thoroughly uncritical consumerist systemwhat Eckhart analyzes as the merchant mentality (see pp. 45off.). Eros, which is essentially love of life and passion for living, belongs to the Godhead itself according to Eckhart (pages 76, 151) and, since all the names which the soul gives God, it receives from the knowledge of itself (page 175), it follows that by reunderstanding Gods delight and passion for creation we allow ourselves permission for the same.

The issue of reexciting passion for creation, of rediscovering the mysticism of wonder and delight at creation, resists what philosopher Josef Pieper calls the essence of bourgeois mentality, namely that of taking for granted. And this refusal to take for granted lies, it seems to me, at the core of the ecological struggle and awakening in our time. How readily we have been taking for granted healthy rain forests, proper ozone protection, the wellness of soil and waters and air, and the immune systems of our bodies and of earth! Green activist Jonathan Porritt of England rightly speaks of the environmental crisis as being in fact a spiritual crisis. And scientist Peter Russell writes of how it is the spiritual aridity of the West that must be addressed in the environmental era if the true genius of the human species is to shine in the world. Meister Eckharts earth-based mysticismhis celebration of the equality of being among all creatures (see Sermon Five)awakens us to the deep truth of animal liberation, of our need to recover reverence for being and thus to work our way out of our ecological malaise.

An era of ecology is necessarily a cosmological era since oikos means home in Greek and our home is the cosmos itself. Few mystics have celebrated the cosmos with the passion and awareness that Eckhart has (see Sermons Two and Three), and his love of the cosmos can help usher in an era like ours when a new creation story is unfolding. God is always in the beginning, Eckhart insists (pages 111f.), and so as we learn more of the wonders of our shared beginnings as a species and as a planet, we teeter on the edge of an amazing God-awakening. This is why so many scientists today are publishing first-class mystical works. Mysticismbeauty and mysteryis returning to our stories of our cosmos.

Furthermore, an environmental consciousness is an around or rounded consciousnessone of panentheism, finding God roundabout us completely enveloping us, as Eckhart puts it (see page 73). Eckhart becomes a master indeed in the issues of rediscovering cosmology and in carrying on an ecological and environmental awakening.

The pressing issue of addiction that overwhelms so-called first world cultures is also addressed by Eckharts teaching of Letting Go and Letting Be (see Sermons Fourteen to Eighteen). His instruction that we are all on a spiritual journey and all can be mystics is something that AIDS patients and caregivers, among others dealing with ultimate journeys, can understand. Persons undergoing such journeysincluding persons in prisonsdeserve to be nourished with the teachings of mystics of the caliber of Eckhart. They will understand one another.

Finally, the struggle for justice that Eckhart so aligned himself with and the deeply felt trust in the creative powers of our species as representing the divinization experience challenge religion and culture alike to birth anew the Cosmic Christ, the Divine One imaged in every creature. Instead of referencing ourselves externally, Eckhart tells us to become aware of what is in you (page 70) and announce it, pronounce it, produce it and give birth to it (page 70). There is hope here. And there is challenge to the young, in particular, to find the mystic that they arethat inward person as distinct from the outward person (page 71)and then to birth anew our lives and religions and to celebrate this birth unceasingly. There is a special invitation in Eckharts work that reinvites the artist back to our midst in education, in worship, in all prayer, and in spirituality. No sentimentalism will do; the era of cynicism as well as of ego-based art is ended. The artist and the mystic are one, just as the mystic and the prophet are one. The spritiual agenda for the nineties is a rich one. Eckhart, among all our ancestors, is one of our finest guides.

The Good News goes on, namely that the path is beautiful and pleasant and joyful and familiar (page 165).

Matthew Fox
University of Creation Spirituality
www.creationspirituality.com

This, then, is salvation, when we marvel at the beauty of created things and praise the beautiful providence of their Creator or when we purchase heavenly goods by our compassion for the works of creation.

Meister Eckhart

(Sermon Thirty)

INTRODUCTION: Meister Eckharts Influence/The Purpose and Nature of This Book/Eckharts Times and Our Own/Eckharts Life/Theological Influences on Eckharts Spirituality/Principal Themes in Eckharts Spirituality/How to Read This Book/Acknowledgments

Meister Eckhart of Hochheim (c. 1260c. 1329) is a spiritual theologian whose time has come. Condemned posthumously by a papal decree issued on March 27, 1329, his profoundly this-worldly spirituality went underground where it fed many of the most significant movements of Western cultural and intellectual history.

Meister Eckharts Influence

In Germany, his disciples and brother Dominicans Henry Suso and John Tauler drew extensively from his thinking even after his condemnation. Nicholas of Cusa in the fifteenth century commented on Meister Eckharts works and Martin Luther in the sixteenth drew heavily from Eckhart by way of John Tauler, whom, as Hoffman points out, Hindu scholar Ananda Coomaraswamy compares Eckhart to Vedantist traditions. Quaker mystic Rufus Jones acknowledges a debt to Eckhart as well he should, for Quaker founder George Fox is in many ways Eckhartian-influenced (for example, his notion of the spark of the soul seems more than coincidentally like Foxs inner light). Josiah Royce and Rudolf Otto also revived Eck-hartian studies outside of Christian theological circles. Psychologist C. G. Jung confessed that Eckhart offered him the key to opening the way to grasp what liberation means in a psychological context. Wrote Jung: