Hildegard and Eckhart

De: Matthew Fox

Narrado por: Matthew Fox

Author Matthew Fox has stated, "If Hildegard had been a man, she would be well known as one of the greatest artists and intellectuals the world has ever seen." It is a credit to the power of the women's movement and our times that this towering genius of Western thought is being rediscovered in her full grandeur and autonomy.

Meister Eckhart’s deeply ecumenical teachings were in many ways modern. He taught about what we call ecology, championed artistic creativity, and advocated for social, economic, and gender justice.

©2019 Matthew Fox (P)2021 Better Listen

On Fire

Matthew delivers an impassioned presentation of the Cosmic Christ and Creation Spirituality. The audio recording of the lecture is very good.

A lecture and Q and A

I picked this up as part of a 2 for 1 sale at audible. When I picked it up there was not any reviews. I assumed it was a lecture but did not know anything about it other than the description. I don’t think the description is accurate to the content. The description suggests that it is about Hildegard and Echart. I read a historical fiction book about Hildegard earlier this year and I read about Eckhart in seminary. I would like to learn more about both.

The opening comments of the lecture suggest that it is primarily going to be about the environment, but I do not think that the intro was any more accurate than the Audible description. I do not think I have read anything by Matthew Fox previously. In that introduction, he talks about coming from Ireland and being with youth and the problem of youth hopelessness. He suggests that youth unemployment in Ireland was 90%. I have to assume that what he meant was that youth unemployment in the particular area, not the country, was high. There is not a date on the lecture, but it was published to Audible in 2021. In 2012, Irish youth unemployment was at a historic high of almost 31%, but it is about 10% now. I think this was likely recorded in the late 1980s or early 1990s from other context clues, particularly speaking about the Chornobyl disaster as recent.

And then, soon after that Irish youth claim, he casually suggests that Thomas Merton was assassinated by the CIA, a claim I have never heard. When I googled, I found an article on the CIA’s website and a short article where Matthew Fox says that a CIA agent confessed to him that Merton had been assassinated by the CIA. There is a full-length book that argues that Merton was assassinated. After a casually asserted conspiracy theory, a likely unclear and inaccurate statement of statistics, and a statement in the introduction that was very different from the description of the audiobook, I seriously considered returning the audiobook and listening to something else. But the lecture was short, and I haven’t finished a book recently, so I decided to muscle through.

The main lecture lasted a bit over an hour. Following the lecture was a question-and-answer period. When Fox is speaking, the sound is fine. But the question-and-answer period has very uneven sound, and I am tempted to suggest that if you do listen, you may want to stop when the Q-and-A starts.

I have a hard time recommending this to most people. It is not very focused. Fox is a mystic and studies mysticism. Mystics are notorious for not being very concerned with orthodoxy. I think that Fox is a real Christian, but he is not particularly interested in sounding like an orthodox Christian.

One of the main points is that he wants to recover the Cosmic Christ, a concept that is a more robust imago dei. You can get a sense of what he is arguing for in the description of his book about the Cosmic Christ. I do think that Christians need to recover the importance of the imago dei for a variety of reasons. I think Nicholas Wolterstorff has a very helpful book about the relationship of justice and love that is really centered on a recovery of the imago dei. I don’t have any issues with the Cosmic Christ, and I think that both imago dei and mysticism are very important going forward, But had I read the description of cosmic Christ, I would have skipped this because, despite his critique of modern liberal Protestantism, I think it mostly sounds like modern liberal Protestantism.

A couple of helpful points made me glad I listened to it.

First, I think he was right early in the lecture that many movements today are trying to fill the holes that Christian mysticism would better fit. He strongly suggests that fundamentalism is a type of false mysticism that distorts mysticism by combining certainty and political ideology. When he talks about mysticism, I think he is describing something like Durkheim’s understanding of religion.

I also think that he is right that some of the psychological and emotional work into recovering childlikeness (not childishness) is helpful in recovering healthy mysticism. That is part of the argument in Lacy Flynn Borgo’s book Faith Like a Child.

Fox also cites Kuhn’s ideas about Paradigm Shifts, which I heard a lot about in the late 1990s. He quotes Kuhn as saying that things that were small aspects in a previous paradigm will become central in a new paradigm. Fox is suggesting that mysticism and wisdom literature will become central to the future postmodern world.

There really was very little about Hildegard or Echart that I found helpful. One image from Hildegard that I like is that she suggests sunlight’s rays are all part of the sun but a part that touches us. Fox says that she uses this illustration to model how she thought that we are all made in the image of God and therefore god-like in a similar way. This is not a denial of original sin but a recovery of an older idea of what imago dei is doing in us.

Again, I do not really recommend this. The main lecture was just over an hour. The question and answer portion could be skipped. If I had not purchased in a 2 for 1 sale, I would have probably returned it. It certainly wasn’t worth a credit.