Living with Other Creatures: Green Exegesis and Theology

9. Creation Mysticism in Matthew Fox and Francis of Assisi

9. Creation Mysticism in Matthew Fox and Francis of Assisi In this chapter we shall study and compare two examples of ‘creation mysticism’ in the Christian tradition. The work of Matthew Fox provides probably the best-known contemporary example, while Francis of Assisi is without doubt the greatest nature mystic in the Christian tradition, and some would say the first.1 I shall argue that Francis’s form of creation mysticism is a more authentically Christian form than that of Fox, who moves away from elements central both to the Christian tradition in general and to Francis’s spirituality in particular . Matthew Fox Matthew Fox, former Dominican friar, is well known as the proponent and exponent of what he calls ‘creation-centered spirituality’ (or, more briefly, ‘creation spirituality’ or, sometimes, ‘creation mysticism’). We can appropriately call this a form of mysticism, partly because Fox’s thought is deeply inspired by several of the medieval Christian mystics, especially Meister Eckhart, Hildegard of Bingen and Mechtild of Magdeburg, but also because he believes that ‘creation spirituality liberates the mystic in us all’.2 ‘A basic teaching of all in the creation mystical tradition,’ he claims, ‘is this: everyone is a mystic’.3 The mystical is the repressed 1 Sorrell, St. Francis, ch. 4. 2 Matthew Fox, Creation Spirituality (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1991), p. 105. 3 Matthew Fox, The Coming of the Cosmic Christ (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1988), p. 48. shadow side of the western personality, which only the recovery of a sense of belonging to a sacred cosmos can liberate. Thus Fox is not interested in a mysticism that is only attained by a spiritual elite, as the great mystics of the Catholic tradition have sometimes been seen, and certainly not in a mysticism which offers mystical experience only as the culmination of a long and arduous process of ascetical practice. Much as he looks to some of the great Christian mystics, those he sees as creation mystics, for inspiration, his concern is with a mysticism that can be experienced and lived by ordinary people in experience of the cosmos, in new and revitalized forms of meditation and ludic ritual, in all forms of artistic creativity and imagination, and which is inseparable from the practice of prophetic justice in relation to the earth and to the poor. When he speaks of his extensive experience that ‘all kinds of persons are waking up to the mystic within them today’,4 we can easily recognize the cultural reality to which his understanding of mysticism corresponds. Essential to mysticism as he sees it are awe and playful wonder and celebration in relation to a cosmos seen as sacred.5 Also definitive of mysticism for him are the themes of unity and wholeness: Our mystical experiences are unitive experiences.They may occur on a dark night with the sparkling stars in the sky; at the ocean; in the mountains or fields; with friends or family; with ideas; in lovemaking; in play; with music and dance and art of all kinds; in work; in suffering and in letting go. What all mystical experiences share in common is this experience of nonseparation, of nondualism . . . [As] Julian of Norwich put it, ‘Between God and the soul there is no between’ . . . Here Julian is celebrating the end of the primary dualism – that between humans and divinity. The mystics promise that within each of us there is a capacity – the experience of the ‘no between’ – to be united and not separate . Mysticism announces the end of alienation and the beginning of communion, the end of either/or relationships (which form the essence of dualism) and the beginning of unity. Yet the unity that the mystics celebrate is not a loss of self or a dissolution of differences, but a unity of creativity, a coming together of different existences.6 This view of ‘nondualism’ is central to Fox’s thought and we must return to it. Not unconnected is the definition of mysticism, borrowed Living with Other Creatures 186 4 Fox, Coming, p. 42. 5 Fox, Creation Spirituality, pp. 29–30; cf. Coming, p. 51. 6 Fox, Coming, pp. 49–50. from Josef Pieper, as ‘an affirmation of the world as a whole’. This is ‘to embrace a cosmology’ which, in spite of human degradation of the world, affirms the goodness of the cosmos as a whole and therefore finds the cosmos a source of sustenance.7 Fox’s creation...