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Matthew Fox's book on evil came into print the week of the Columbine killings. Following is the Table of Contents and the Introduction. Table of Contents Introduction: A Species Wanting Attention Part I: Blessings of the Flesh: The Sacred Flesh Chapter 1: Redeeming the Word ‘Flesh’ Chapter 2: Universe Flesh Chapter 3: Earth Flesh Chapter 4: Human Flesh Chapter 5: The Seven Chakras: Further Blessings of our Human Flesh Part II: Sin in Context: The Evolution of Sin and its Meanings Chapter 6: What the Mystics Say about Sin (Including Rumi, Kabir, Julian, Eckhart, Jesus, Paul) Chapter 7: Meanings of Sin from Theologians and Biologists Part III: Sins of the Spirit: The 7 Chakras and the 7 Capital Sins Chapter 8: Misdirected Love in the 1st Chakra (Acedia) Chapter 9: Misdirected Love in the 2nd Chakra (Control, Addiction, "Lust") Chapter 10: Misdirected Love in the 3rd Chakra (Victimization, "Anger" and Violence) Chapter 11: Misdirected Love in the 4th Chakra (Fear, Avarice and Resentment) Chapter 12: Misdirected Love in the 5th Chakra (Gluttony, Consumerism) Chapter 13: Misdirected Love in the 6th Chakra (Rationalism, Reductionism, Pessimism) Chapter 14: Misdirected Love in the 7th Chakra (Envy and Resentment) Conclusion: The Blessings of Flesh and Spirit and the Launching of a Moral Wave for Our Future Bringing Blessed Flesh and Blessed Spirit Together Seven Positive Precepts for Living a Full and Spirited Life Generosity, the Moral Wave of the Future Generosity, the True Meaning of Excellence? The Special Role that Grace Plays in Building Responsibility Appendix A: Hitler as a Religious Figure Appendix B: Synonyms for "Sin" in Our Language Appendix C: Ricoeur on the Evolution of Sin INTRODUCTION: A Species Wanting Attention A year ago a young man approached me with a story following a lecture I gave in Hawaii. "I have AIDS," he said, "and the day I was diagnosed you came to me in a dream wearing the white coat of a doctor and you said to me, 'PWA' does not mean "a person with AIDS." 'PWA' means "a person wanting attention." This dream changed my life," he went on to say. He explained how he was, for the first time, taking care of himself and his heart issues, moved from Boston to Hawaii to live a gentler life style, and was feeling strong and joyful for the journey that lay ahead. I believe this story can be adapted slightly to apply to all of us. The acronym I suggest is: SWA: Our Species Wanting Attention. Our species has been neglecting our heart needs in the wars and violence of the industrial age. We have also neglected the needs of other beings with whom we share this planet. We need to probe more deeply and more communally who we are as a species: Our strengths and our weaknesses, our power and our misuse of power. Paying attention includes going into our capacity for destruction and self-hatred, our resentments and our avarice, our envy and our listlessness, our despair and our cynicism, our addictions and our projections, our arrogance and our malice. In short, for lack of a better word, our sins. This book is an attempt to set out on such an exploration. As our species evolves spiritually, we must take another and harder look at our complicity in evil and at how our spiritual traditions might assist our growing beyond our violence. Spiritual advancement is not restricted to increasing light in the world; we need also to increase awareness of those shadow forces with whom we must wrestle. If we don't we will pay a price. Doctor Scott Peck, in his book, People of the Lie, speaks of the issue at hand when he writes: The major threats to our survival no longer stem from nature without but from our own human nature within. It is our carelessness, our hostilities, our selfishness and pride and willful ignorance that endanger the world. Unless we can now tame and transmute the potential for evil in the human soul, we shall be lost.[1] Yet Peck warns that "the naming of evil is still in the primitive stage."[2] Martin Buber in his book Good and Evil raises the question: What should be the "point of attack for the struggle against evil?" And his reply is: "The struggle must begin within one's one soul--all else will follow upon this."[3] The Methodology for this Book Clearly the issue is not so much "whether" to explore or talk about human malice but how to talk about it. In that regard I have chosen a very specific methodology for this book. First, in Part I, I talk about goodness, specifically the Blessing of the Flesh--all flesh, the flesh of the universe as well as the flesh of earth and finally our human flesh and the seven chakras that name some of the blessing energy inside all of us. Without grounding ourselves in our capacity for goodness we are in no position to consider our capacity for wrongdoing. For this reason I include "Litanies of the Wonder of our Flesh"--cosmic, earthly and human--that the new science is making known to us. Next, in Part II, I explore briefly what the mystics East and West say about human sinning and what theologians and biologists say about the same. And in Part III I choose to focus on an ancient tradition of the "7 capital sins" and the "sins of the spirit" and to relate this mideastern and western treatment of the bases of sin to the eastern tradition of the 7 chakras. The link between the two traditions can be found in the Jewish understanding of sin as "missing the mark" and in Thomas Aquinas' definition of sin as "misdirected love." Is sin, then, not an energy (chakra) that is off center or missing the mark? Is sin not a love energy (chakra) that is misdirected? Might the chakra tradition of the East not shed light on what we in the West call sin? And might our understanding of sin also contribute to a deepening of the meaning of chakra? In Part III, when I discuss the seven capital sins and their "offspring" at some length, I conclude each chapter with a brief discussion of the traditional sacrament that corresponds to the chakra at issue and I offer practical exercises that persons can do to cleanse themselves of the "misdirection" associated with the particular chakra. Rabbi Solomon Schimmel, in his study on The Seven Deadly Sins: Jewish, Christian, and Classical Reflections on Human Nature, argues that "the seven deadly sins--pride, anger, envy, greed, gluttony, lust, and sloth--are with us every day" and that the primary purpose in studying them is to learn "what it means to be human and humane and the responsibilities that we have to fulfill if we want to be considered as such."[4] In this book I adapt slightly the list of the seven cardinal sins and mix them with the sins of the spirit. But I agree with Rabbi Schimmel that these sins "concern the core of what we are, of what we can become, and most importantly, of what we should aspire to be."[5] The great mystic and healer of the twelfth century, Hildegard of Bingen, agrees when she wrote: "the knowledge of good and evil represents, so to speak, the innermost part of the soul."[6] Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn says something similar when he observes that “the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”[7] Sin is a heart issue, a soul issue; to explore the heart and soul is to explore our capacities for sin. Hildegard teaches that the pursuit of true joy implies an understanding of sin, for "we can never find true joy in sinning." In fact, "the soul accomplishes in joy its good deeds of a heavenly nature; in sadness and sorrow it accomplishes evil deeds of an earthy nature."[8] Thus, to explore the seven capital sins is to shed an additional light on our inner lives. Recontextualizing Evil All sin has a history. In this book I try to re-contextualize evil and humanity's complicity in it within a post-modern world view, one that begins with a scientific cosmology and a creation-centered spirituality. Thus the section on the "Blessings of the Flesh" precedes that on the "Sins of the Spirit." The context ought to be set right at the beginning. This century has been marked by the reality of the Holocaust and the reality of technological marvels put to the use of destruction. A culmination of those scientific and technological achievements of the modern era have rendered our species dangerous to ourselves and other beings on this planet beyond any possibility previously imagined. Perhaps the reality of our time was best summarized by Dr. Robert Oppenheimer when the first atomic blast was successfully detonated in the New Mexican desert: "Now we know evil," he said. Yes, we do. The modern age has assured us of a knowledge of evil, yet theology has not kept pace with our demonic powers. We need to examine anew our traditional sources of spiritual insight which might tell us not only about evil but more importantly about ways beyond it. St. Thomas Aquinas warned that one human being can do more evil than all the other animals on the planet--and this because of our immense powers of reason and creativity. Staring into the face of the ecological catastrophe that threatens our existence as a species and many others with whom we share this planet, we need to revision how we lend help, healing and transformation. By returning to the sins of the spirit and the blessings of the flesh, we are paying attention to the wisdom of our ancestors whose awareness of spirit-sin was in many ways far more nuanced and developed than the moral agenda as it has come to us during the modern era. Life in the premodern era was lived closer to the earth and closer to the flesh. The mechanistic consciousness of the Newtonian era effectively removed the living flesh from the universe, assuring us that only humans and the food we ate were flesh. Today's cosmology, on the other hand, reintroduces us to the "fleshiness" of existence--all beings, even stars and galaxies--live, die and resurrect in their fashion and all are made of similar elements or stuff. The new creation story has enlarged the meaning of the word "flesh." Much more is flesh because much more exists and dies than we had ever imagined and all things are connected--animate to inanimate. In a dream I received a year ago, there was a very clear sentence that said: "There is nothing wrong with the human species today except one thing--we have lost the sense of the sacred." To recover the sacred would be to recover our humanity. We are sacred and part of the sacred but we have the capacity to choose and act otherwise. Indeed, rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel defines sin as "the refusal of humans to become who we are." Recently I co-authored a book with British scientist Rupert Sheldrake on The Physics of Angels. A post-modern world view allows angels to return, but to rediscover the angelic is also to rediscover the demonic. Angels or spirits, like humans, have their shadow side and their potential for negativity. At least that is the traditional teaching. Today we don't call angels by names such as Satan and Lucifer and Beelzebub. Rather, the names might appropriately be Anthropocentrism, Racism, Sexism, Arrogance, etc. These realities are spirit-beings that seek to inhabit our souls and, like the parasites they are, feed there. To talk about the sacred is to talk about evil. An appreciation of the former renders one more vulnerable to the latter. It is not unlike the experience of being in love. I remember when I was first deeply in love the reality of death hit me the strongest it ever had. For to be in love is to want never to lose the beloved. But death is such a loss and so death looms great in the context of love. So too with the sacred and evil. Evil looms great as one tries to deepen one's appreciation of the sacred. For the sacred is always in jeopardy, at least when humans are around. French philosopher Paul Ricoeur, based on his extensive study of myths from religious traditions around the world, makes the following observation in his book, The Symbolism of Evil: "It is, in fact, because evil is supremely the crucial experience of the sacred that the threat of the dissolution of the bond between man and the sacred makes us most intensely aware of man's dependence on the powers of the sacred."[9] I disagree with Riceour that evil is the crucial experience of the sacred--I believe that awe is. Yet no one can deny that today with humanity's exploding population, with extinction occurring among species the world over, with the destruction of 26 billion tons of topsoil annually, with the warming of the planet, with the despair and potential violence among the young, with the growing gap between haves and have nots, a "dissolution of the bond between man and the sacred" looms before us. This situation presents us with a need to reexamine our understanding of sin and ways of liberation from it. The Reluctance to Talk about Sin I recall when I was checking out an armload of books on "sin" at the library of the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, a student who was at the check-out desk moaned: "Ugh, sounds dreary." Few people want to talk about sin today.[10] There are many good reasons for this and one of them is so as not to bore one another with the obvious. Some people call sin a disease; New Agers bathe themselves blissfully in the light; certain feminists say evil and good are patriarchal categories (which sounds an awful lot like a new category for sinfulness). Yet most of our news on television and in print is about sins of some kind or other, and our species seems perfectly willing to engage ourselves in sin. The reluctance to talk about sin may be because organized religion has trivialized the concept by ignoring the deep traditions about the sins of the spirit in favor of superficial, even titillating sins of the flesh or by divorcing sin-talk from its appropriate context of goodness. As process theologian Norman Pittinger puts it, "a great deal of Christian talk has been sin-obsessed....The distortion has been appalling."[11] The title and theme of my book, Original Blessing, addressed this awful one-sidedness in the guilt-ridden conscience of western religion. Pittinger believes that the notion of sin has reached such a low point that "either [it] has no meaning at all, save as a piece of religious jargon, or it is almost entirely misunderstood in respect to its basic significance."[12] This irrelevance of much sin-talk may behind the Brazilian feminist theologian Ivone Gebara's observation that "today we are experiencing a world-wide institutional crisis where the old religious sanctions and admonitions are simply exhausted. Nobody listens to them anymore."[13] The exhaustion of western religion certainly is closely connected to its excessive preaching about sin. Morality over spirituality. A fundamentalist theology that ignores the Holy Spirit and the Creator by being overly zealous about redemption and Jesusolatry ends up trivializing sin. Theologians and popular preachers have often vitiated the term "sin." On the right, fundamentalists are running away with the words and concept of "sin" and in the process rendering progressive theologies flat and flaccid. Some on the left say "there is no good and evil," but if that is so then we must empty our prisons of all the rapists, wife beaters, child molesters, murderers and thieves. One needs a theology of spirit, a practice of spirituality, to deal with sins of the spirit and religions may have become so cut off from spirituality and Spirit that they have little to offer about sin or ways out of sin. As a result, the secular media are left "instructing" us about sin and the planet is in profound decline. Cynicism reigns. Churches are emptier and emptier. No battles are waged there any longer. Even sin has become boring. In the Scriptures, sin is not trivial. Sin is about battles. Not sanitized or domesticated as our shopping mall culture has so often rendered everything around us. Another reason for not wanting to talk about sin is that greater visions await our souls than to dwell on the negative. The Sufi mystic poet Rumi puts it memorably when he says: Out beyond ideas of wrong doing, and right doing, There is a field. I'll meet you there. [14] I think most of us yearn for such a field in which to run and play and lie down with the beloved. That field is a soul place, a spirit place, that beckons our deepest selves. It is that call that inspires us and moves us to go beyond ethics to being, to encounters with the beloved. Thomas Aquinas also sees the need to put blessing ahead of bad news when he says, "it is the mark of a happy disposition to see good rather than evil."[15] Nevertheless, even Rumi does not say that there is never a need to discuss wrong doing and right doing--only that we ought not get bogged down in that particular corner of our souls--that something far vaster, far more beautiful, awaits us and beckons us. There is an urgency to meet it heart to heart in the field beyond. In my opinion we need to talk about sin today but not in the same way in which we talked about it in the past. Sin evolves. Culture evolves. Our capacity for destruction and alienation, self-hatred and social resentments, luxury living among gross injustices, evolves. We must talk about sin again because not to do so perpetuates our problems, just as denial invariably creates more complex problems. (Think of an alcoholic who insists he is only a "social drinker." The denial launches still more abuse.) We must talk about sin again because our news is filled with it and we are fools to let our newscasters and journalists be our surrogate theologians; because the earth is dying due to human transgressions; because our hearts are sad and we are without energy; and because elders have a responsibility to show the young where boundaries lie. Indeed, the ecological disasters of our time, whose reality appears daily in our news reports, have reintroduced sin--by whatever other name--to our awareness. Deep Ecumenism and Sin In this book I call on the wisdom of the East by way of the chakra tradition because our times are unique for their pluralism and their bringing together East and West, North and South. No culture is without its insight or experience of sin. No tradition holds all the answers or even many answers. Because we face the precarious future of our planet and of our species together, it seems appropriate to discuss the dangerous side of human nature together and not apart. Thus I write in the spirit of what I call "Deep Ecumenism," wherein we search from the depth of our various spiritual traditions for wisdom in a difficult time. Part of a post-modern cultural context is recognizing diversity and realizing how pluralistic a world we live in. Deep ecumenism[16] is the coming together of world religions around common themes and the drawing out of their deep wisdom to address those themes. Surely sin is such a theme. Surely all cultures, all religions, all spiritual disciplines worthy of the name deal with what the Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Naht Hahn calls the "seeds of violence" and the "seeds of divine peace" in every human. Martin Buber, working out of the Jewish tradition, teaches something similar when he says that humans have "two urges" and that we must "harness both urges together in the service of God." Our task "is not to extirpate the evil urge, but to reunite it with the good."[17] Psychologist Erich Fromm wrote of the "life-affirming syndromes" that include love, solidarity, justice and reason which are in conflict with the "life-thwarting syndromes" of sadomasochism, destructiveness, greed, narcissism and incestuousness.[18] Surely Jesus and Lao Tsu, Buddha and Moses, Chief Seattle and Gandhi, were dealing with such issues. To explore more carefully the deeper traditions we hold about sin, as we attempt to do in this study on sins of the spirit, is to draw us more closely together at a time when the planet is urging us to unite for the sake of common survival and earth survival. Sin is part of what makes us human. Its ambiguity, its hidden attractions (and some not so hidden), its allure and deceits, its false promises and let downs--all are everyday fare for every human being. Sin "excites attention by its very character as a scandal" observes Paul Ricoeur.[19] We are all subject to sin and its wiles. The principle of interdependence--long held true by mystics and only recently approved by western science--would hold that we are all in this together. We are all implicated in evil--we share the negative as well as the positive in life--the pain and the pleasure, the suffering and the joy. Too much distancing of ourselves from evil can in fact contribute to evil, as Erich Fromm warns us. "As long as one believes that the evil man wears horns, one will not discover an evil man. The native assumption that an evil man is easily recognizable results in a great danger: one fails to recognize evil men before they have begun their work of destruction." He warns that to deprive even Hitler of his humanity "would only intensify the tendency to be blind to the potential Hitlers unless they wear horns."[20] Perhaps this is one reason why ancient stories about evil picture evil as faceless. Evil is faceless because it can take over anyone of our beings. No one is exempt from the possibility of evil. The reality of evil calls for alterness. Sin is surely one of the daily happenings we all have in common, something we can all identify with. It is a battle to win or lose. Professor Bloomfield, who wrote the classical work on the Seven Deadly Sins, calls them "the real enemies of humanity."[21] To come together in opposition to these vices to which we are all prone would be to wage a war that matters. Harder than coming together around the reality of sin is coming up with ways out of sin: liberating ways to freedom. These ways constitute the good news and grace found in all spiritual traditions. In drawing on the Western tradition of the capital sins and the sins of the spirit, and today's cosmology, and in drawing parallels between a Western tradition and the Eastern treatment of the seven chakras, I hope to employ the wisdom of deep ecumenism. In the Conclusion Chapter I bring to the fore seven Positive Precepts and a single virtue which our species can gather around today to usher in a new era of human morality. These seven precepts derive from the seven chakras and the seven principles of Creation Spirituality--and they represent the light that shines behind the darkness of the seven capital sins. The virtue of generosity, as I indicate, summarizes our practice of cosmology, creativity and magnanimity. There is a rich tradition in the West of artists wrestling with the seven sins. Not only Chaucer and Dante but Langland's poem Piers Plowman, and Spenser's Faerie Queen all treat these sins. There are numerous instances of satirizing humanity through the instrumentation of the seven capital or cardinal sins. (Somehow the ten commandments do not lend themselves to a rich satirization.) This satire can be found on French cathedrals of the middle ages as well as in English literature. I have often felt that our times deserved much richer satire than it is receiving. Perhaps if humanity could agree on the seven basic sins presented in this book, then our capacity for satirizing them in ourselves and in our institutions and of spreading this satire about the world swiftly by way of common art, entertainment and electronic communication might contribute mightily to lessening the gap between rich and poor, powerful and powerless. In short, to liberation from these very sins. (Surely this effort will generate good work for artists.) Cosmology, the Context for Sin Talk In this book, and especially in Part I on the Blessings of the Flesh, I am attempting to put sin-talk into its proper context. Will acknowledging the proper context for sin-talk allow us to talk about it more honestly and to challenge it more effectively? The context ought to be the following: 1) Cosmology and history. 2) Blessing or goodness including existence and powers and vulnerability that make even sin possible. 3) Creativity. Is not every sin a choice and therefore a certain act of creativity? 4) The quest for goodness and blessing inherent in all our choices--even in sinful ones. (St. Thomas Aquinas believes that every choice we make is in some way a choice based on love.) 5) A socio-political context. Sin does not just rupture personal relationships but also social, ecological and political relationships. What we know of sin is that humans have been at it for a long time--a long time, that is, from our perspective of time. But from the perspective of the history of the universe, we have been at it for only a short time. Humans have been here a brief time, around two million years. Do other animals commit sin? That would be grist for another book, no doubt by an author more schooled in animal behavior than I, but this much can be said: If they do, they aren't very good at it! Their efforts are so minuscule that they pale in comparison to humanity's! We are the experts at sin due, I believe, to our amazing capacity for creativity and imagination, a power that needs bridling if it is to serve the larger purpose of our existence.[22] It is that larger picture that needs to hold and embrace an examination of our capacity for malfeasance. Cosmology is an essential part of an understanding of evil because we must understand goodness if we are to wrestle with evil. Only knowing goodness and blessing unveils the deep pain that evil effects. It is when we cherish someone that we most deeply hurt when that person is threatened or hurting. The Biblical tradition treats sin as a cosmological event. The Jewish scholar Jon D. Levenson points this out in his study on Creation and the Persistence of Evil when he tells us that in apocalyptic literature, Israel's struggle is against "cosmic forces of the utmost malignancy. Their evil reaches everywhere, even into the human heart, and their defeat requires nothing less than a cosmic transformation--a new cosmogony, a new creation."[23] Chaos happens when evil happens; it constitutes the undoing of creation. The Israelites believed that community worship guaranteed the victory of order over chaos--ritual puts creation back together again. Martin Buber proposes that humans need a "bridge" to awaken them to how psyche and cosmos struggle in tandem. "Man knows of the chaos and creation in the cosmogonic myth and he learns that chaos and creation take place in himself, but he does not see the former and the latter together; he listens to the mystery of Lucifer and hushes it up in his own life." [24] The early Christian church also understood the struggle with evil to be a cosmic struggle. The writer of the Letter to the Ephesians warns that "our contest is not against flesh and blood, but against powers, against principalities, against the world-rulers of this present darkness, against spiritual forces of evil in heavenly places." (Eph. 6.12) Mark's gospel begins with setting Jesus' struggle in a cosmic setting and the Essene community of Jesus' time envisioned their struggle as a cosmic one. One reason our culture is so bored with the word "sin" is that we are bored with everything--we are a species made for cosmology and yet our culture has rendered us passive couch potatoes and shopping and entertainment addicts. In short, we have been cut off from the big universe and consequently we are bored, boring and violent. We have even managed to render sin boring! Blessings of the Flesh: A Post-m |
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