Matthew Fox: "Ecology Is Practical Cosmology"

Tähenduse teejuhid (Maps of Meaning) is an Estonian language monthly newspaper that is distributed with the country's largest daily Postimees. The first issue came out in September 2020. The centre of gravity of each number is a ca 4000-word interview. This interview appeared in the 17th issue of the paper.
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Matthew Fox (1940) is an American theologian. I discovered him from the book by Rupert Sheldrake “Ways To Go Beyond” that I translated into Estonian two years ago. Sheldrake introduces in it another seven spiritual practices in addition to those he wrote about in his previous book “Science and Spiritual Practices”. In the last chapter of “Ways to Go Beyond” Sheldrake discusses why do spiritual practices work. In the section about panentheism he writes: “Fox says he has met many serious spiritual seekers who describe themselves as atheists. “Yet I have come to realise that most atheism is a rejection of theism and most atheists are persons who have never had panentheism or mysticism named for them… I do believe that if the only option I was given by which to envisage creation’s relationship to divinity was theism, then I would be an atheist, too.””
Sheldrake and Fox are talking about the re-enchantment of the world. It is the reaction against Cartesian dualism which explains the reality at two levels: matter and spirit. This leaves, however, open a hard question, how do ghost (spirit) and machine (matter) relate to each other? There are two answers to that problem, both equally unsatisfactory. Philosophical monists give up on the second substance. Idealists retain the ghost, materialists the machine. According to our governing world view, the nature resembles a gigantic machine, it is unconscious. We live in an universe, where everything is determined by blind natural forces, randomness and a kind of hydraulic causality. This take on the world goes under name of mechanistic materialism.
Charles Eisenstein, Jeremy Narby, Richard Tarnas, Mark Vernon and David Abram - to mention a few thinkers who have appeared in our newspaper so far - go in the other direction and try to bring back the third level of reality (assumed away by Descartes at the outset of 17th century) - the soul. To the extent that the S-word carries a whole baggage of historical and religious connotations and is thus fairly vague, it is paramount to clarify the terms. We are not talking about mysterious aspects of afterlife here, for we take the word “soul” in Aristotelian terms as an immanent nonmaterial formative principle. “In most respects, fields have replaced the souls of classical and medieval philosophy,” writes Sheldrake in his book “The Science Delusion”. In his view the Aristotelian soul has surreptitiously made his way back to natural sciences - this time under the label of “field”. This is an aspect of the re-enchantment of the world that comes from the modern physics. There are other two, says Sheldrake, one from psychology, the other from theology.
As far as the first of them is concerned, the behavioural efforts in animal breeding have a new rival of consciousness studies with its focus on near-death experiences, mediation and psychedelic experiments. Here we have an important milestone in 2018 with Michael Pollan’s “How to Change Your Mind”, which made it to the of The New York Times bestseller list. The subtitle of Pollan’s book is long and informative: “What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence”.
Panentheistic revolution in theology is according to Sheldrake the third nail in the coffin of mechanistic materialism. In panentheistic theology God is in nature and nature is in God. In this way panentheism is different from both pantheism - God and nature are one and the same thing (God is thus immanent) - and theism in which God is outside nature (hence transcendent). Explains Matthew Fox: “Healthy mysticism is panentheistic… Panentheism means “all things in God and God in all things”. This is the way mystics envisage the relationship of world, self and God… Panentheism melts the dualism of inside and outside - like fish in water and the water in the fish, creation is in God and God is in creation.”
In February 2022 I had an unique opportunity to ask Matthew Fox a few questions on panentheism and other key problems of the contemporary theology. We started our conversation from his book „The Tao of Thomas Aquinas: Fierce Wisdom for Hard Times“, which came out in 2020.
With best wishes,
Hardo

[@AivarRuukel]

Väga hea!