Summary: A lecture that talks about the need to recover a mystical faith as a means to puch back against the problems of the age, particularly a lack of care for the enviroment.
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. From other context clues, particularly speaking about the Chernobl disaster as recent, I think this was likley recorded in the late 1980s or early 1990s.
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 this article on the CIA’s website. I also found this 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 decide to muscle through.
The main lecture was a bit over an hour. And then following the lecture was a question and answer period. When it is just Fox 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 this 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.
There are a couple of helpful points that 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. In that he strongly suggests that fundametnalism is a type of false mysticism that bring certainty and political ideology into a distortion of mysticism. 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 psycological and emotional work into recovering childlkeness (not childishness) is helpful in recoving 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 that I heard a lot about in the late 90s. He quotes Kuhn as saying that things 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 post-modern 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 illistutation 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 as much as it is 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 and 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.
Hildegard and Echhart by Mathew Fox Purchase Links: Audible.com Audiobook