The Creation Spirituality Lineage Calling All Social and Environmental Activists, Mystic Explorers, Justice Makers, Cosmic Thinkers, Earth Keepers |
Aquinas on Consciousness, Cosmos, Creativity & Enlarging Our Souls |
Aquinas, like most indigenous and pre-modern thinkers, and unlike
the human-centered philosophers of the modern and industrial era, begins his philosophy with the universe. |
Our work to save Mother Earth flows from our love of the whole of creation, since, as Thomas Berry reminds us, “ecology is functional cosmology.” Aquinas invites us
to welcome cosmology and those who study it! After all, “a mistake about creation results in a mistake about God.” | Astronomy of Aquinas’ era: the Tusi-couple, a mathematical device developed by Islamic astronomer al-Tusi in 1247, providing a solution for the latitudinal motion of
the inferior planets, later used extensively by Ptolemy. Wikimedia Commons. |
Studying creation, cosmology and cosmogenesis grows our souls and this promises more courage and more joy. As Meister Eckhart put it, “God is delighted to watch your soul enlarge.” Our imaginations and creativity know no
limits. What we can accomplish with our hands and our reason is vast for “by these means human beings can make for themselves instruments of an infinite variety and for any number of purposes.” Aquinas marvels that we are capable of such a
reach at all. For him “there is nothing that the human mind cannot understand potentially. It is capable of knowing all things.” |
Co-creating with the Infinite: Jewel
Mathieson recites her poem “We Have Come to be Danced.” | Isn’t it true that no two musicians have composed the same song? No two painters painted the same painting? No two poets composed the same poems? Does this not imply that our creativity is infinite? |
Aquinas elaborates on our immense intellectual capacities when he says that we have “a power extending to the infinite” and our “intellectual natures have a closer relationship to a whole than do other natures.” We “may comprehend the entirety of being through our intellect” and “our intellect never understands so many things that it could not understand more.” Aquinas is talking about what we today call consciousness: There is something that relates to the totality of existing things. The soul is such a being that it is,
as is said in [Aristotle’s’] The Soul, ‘in some way all things.’ |
Adapted from Matthew Fox, The Tao of Thomas Aquinas: Fierce Wisdom for Hard Times, pp. 21-23 And Fox, Sheer Joy: Conversations with Thomas Aquinas on Creation Spirituality, pp. 138, 142 And Fox, Creativity: Where the Divine and Human Meet Banner Image: Communion with Our Relations. Image by Alice
Popkorn on Flickr. |
Queries for Contemplation Do you find science and the awareness of the new cosmology and cosmogenesis growing your soul? Do you find artists and engineers and architects also growing your soul? |
Responses are welcomed. To add your comment, please click HERE
to go to our
website and scroll down to the Comments field. |
The Tao of Thomas Aquinas: Fierce Wisdom for Hard
Times
A stunning spiritual handbook drawn from the substantive teachings of Aquinas’ mystical/prophetic genius, offering a sublime roadmap for spirituality and action.
Foreword by Ilia Delio.
“What
a wonderful book! Only Matt Fox could bring to life the wisdom and brilliance of Aquinas with so much creativity. The Tao of Thomas Aquinas is a masterpiece.”
–Caroline Myss, author of Anatomy of the Spirit | |
Sheer Joy: Conversations with Thomas Aquinas on Creation Spirituality Matthew Fox renders Thomas Aquinas accessible by interviewing him and thus descholasticizing him. He also translated many of his works such as Biblical commentaries never before in English (or Italian or German of French). He gives Aquinas a forum so that he can be heard in our own time. He presents Thomas Aquinas entirely in his own words, but in a form designed to allow late 20th-century minds and hearts to hear him in a fresh way. “The teaching of Aquinas comes through will a fullness and an insight that has never been present in English before and [with] a vital message for the world today.” ~ Fr. Bede Griffiths (Afterword). | |
Creativity: Where the Divine and Human Meet Because creativity is the key to both our genius and beauty as a species but
also to our capacity for evil, we need to teach creativity and to teach ways of steering this God-like power in directions that promote love of life (biophilia) and not love of death (necrophilia). Pushing well beyond the bounds of conventional Christian doctrine, Fox’s focus on creativity attempts nothing less than to shape a new ethic. “Matt Fox is a pilgrim who
seeks a path into the church of tomorrow. Countless numbers will be happy to follow his lead.” –Bishop John Shelby Spong, author, Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism, Living in Sin | |
See Matthew Fox's full calendar
HERE |
Join Matthew Fox and a speaker’s panel for brief Creation Spirituality presentations, music, songs, prayer, and refreshments in a free online and on-site Celebration of Matthew Fox's donation of papers
to the University of Colorado, Boulder. University of Colorado Boulder Libraries – Center for British & Irish Studies – 5th Floor Thursday, September 21, 4:00pm-6:00pm PT RSVP HERE for on-site attendance only. Virtual attendance link will be forthcoming. |
Creation Spirituality Conversations |
Aaron Perry hosts Matthew Fox on the Y On Earth podcast, on “Hildegard von Bingen & Her “Viriditas,” sharing profound wisdom and deep insights about
the essential importance of our relationship with Mother Earth, our celebration of the Divine Feminine, and our connection with Creation Spirituality, drawing upon centuries of knowledge and wisdom from indigenous and mystical traditions world-wide… particularly from the Rhineland Mystic Movement of the medieval European Renaissance, and a most extraordinary woman at its helm: Hildegard von Bingen. | |
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