[FROM THE ARCHIVE: JUNE 2, 2023]
In yesterday’s DM we continued our meditations on the Opening Ceremony of this year’s Olympic Games in Paris. We also addressed the mistaken understanding of a scene depicting a Dionysian Grecian feast and not—as reported—the Last Supper. (American TV for some reason left out the key character in that depiction.)
Also, we cited a major insight from bell hooks about the “next (and non-violent) revolution” which she predicted would be an “aesthetic one” that would bring humanity together. Beauty and excellence and sport and art can do that—if we allow that and not war to fill our minds and hearts.
In recognition of bell hooks’ wisdom, we offer this meditation from a previous DM. Clearly, she is not alone in her insight.
The awakening to beauty and awakening to justice often go together. After all, what is more ugly than injustice?
The injustice being perpetrated in Uganda, for example, where just yesterday a gay person was beaten practically to death by several citizens acting on recent presidential and congressional declarations condemning homosexuality as a crime against the state—is that not just plain ugly?
And what is more beautiful than the organizing of moral outrage and overthrowing of systems of injustice that raged when colonialism ruled in India or Jim Crow laws ruled in America or a dictator ruled in the Philippines?
No wonder Gandhi said, “real beauty is my aim.” And those who say religion has nothing to do with politics do not know what religion means.
Gandhi was not alone in connecting beauty and justice, beauty and politics.
Audre Lorde put it this way:
The dichotomy between the spiritual and the political is false, resulting from an incomplete attention to our erotic knowledge. For the bridge which connects them is formed by the erotic….the passion of love in its deepest meanings.
In an article on postmodern blackness, bell hooks proposes that the “next revolution will be a revolution in aesthetics” and it is aesthetics that will bring the “black underclass” and others in society together.
Arturo Paoli was an Italian priest who during the Second World War worked overtime to save Jews from the fascists. He lived to be 102, and in a book he wrote in 1997, he said:
To be religious is to give your life so that the world may be more beautiful, more just, more at peace; it is to prevent egotistical and self-serving ends from disrupting this harmony of the whole.
There is a harmony of the whole. The universe is such a harmony. Earth is such a harmony. Human communities ought to be such harmonies.
Simone Weil proposed that “beauty constitutes the only finality here below….Beauty is eternity here below.”
Buddhist poet Kenji Mayasawa said:
We ordinary people must forge our own beauty. We must set fire to the greyness of our labor with the art of our own lives. In this kind of creation, every day becomes a pure enjoyment.
Yes. Beauty and justice go together. Balance and harmony, justice and beauty are built into the macrocosm of the universe and the microcosm of human communities. If we work at it.
Adapted from Matthew Fox, Original Blessing: A Primer in Creation Spirituality, pp. 293, 278, 201, 229, 202.
Also see Fox, The Tao of Thomas Aquinas: Fierce Wisdom for Hard Times, pp. 101-108.
See also Fox, Creativity: Where the Divine and Human Meet.
To read the transcript of Matthew Fox’s video teaching, Click HERE
Banner Image: Mercy, Justice, Beauty – LGBTQ+ banners at Old South Church, Boston, MA, USA. Photo by Jonathan Deamer on Wikimedia Commons
Queries for Contemplation
What are your experiences of beauty and justice in microcosm and macrocosm going together?
Recommended Reading
Original Blessing: A Primer in Creation Spirituality
Matthew Fox lays out a whole new direction for Christianity—a direction that is in fact very ancient and very grounded in Jewish thinking (the fact that Jesus was a Jew is often neglected by Christian theology): the Four Paths of Creation Spirituality, the Vias Positiva, Negativa, Creativa and Transformativa in an extended and deeply developed way.
“Original Blessing makes available to the Christian world and to the human community a radical cure for all dark and derogatory views of the natural world wherever these may have originated.” –Thomas Berry, author, The Dream of the Earth; The Great Work; co-author, The Universe Story
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
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
4 thoughts on “bell hooks & Others on Beauty, Politics and Justice”
Contemplatives add to making the duality between inner and outer knowledge come together to make knowledge whole and universal. It is the inner world of the universal self that has been held captive by the trickery of the outer world’s ideal self.
The teaching in today’s DM remind us that many Social Spiritual Warriors throughout human history have taught and inspired us by their lives and teachings that integrating our Divine and human natures with-in the Spirit of Divine Love~Truth~Peace~Justice~Healing~
Creativity~Beauty~Joy~Compassion~Diverse ONENESS with one another daily in community, with Beautiful Sacred Mother Earth/Her creatures/Her essential graceful abundance, and with all All Our physical and nonphysical Evolving Spiritual Creation~Cosmos is the mystic and prophet with-in All of Us as sacred children of Our LOVING SOURCE~CREATOR on the Eternal Spiritual Journeys of Our SOULS….
There can be no justice without recognition of the essential beauty of all creation, including even the most “ugly” of human beings. Whether it is an individual or a community/political manner, beauty calls forth love and the desire to nourish and protect–whether the environment or oppressed peoples.
“Platonism is dualism” is an insult (again) to all Mysticism, especially regarding a Mystical “ideal” that supposedly “only” St. Aquinas taught, vs. a “dualism/world-rejection” by (Neo)Platonism via (St.) Augustine. Augustine was an actual (neo-Platonic) mystic. Then he converted to Christianity. But Augustine lived in an extremely dualistic society, was deeply neurotic, and had converted from Manichaeism, an extremely dualistic religion. His dualism was NOT “from” (Neo)platonism, but from his own clinging to his dualistic roots.
Nor did (Neo)Platonism “divide” society from mysticism. Both Plato and Plotinus created plans for “ideal societies,” where all people could live WITHIN ACTUALIZED MYSTICAL IDEALS.
THAT’S WHAT NEOPLATONIC MYSTICISM DOES and IS– IT ENACTS ITS HIGHEST TRUTHS INTO EVERYDAY LIFE.
Non-dualistic Truths create non-dualistic, egalitarian societies.
JESUS *WAS* NEOPLATONISM-IN-ACTION.
And Aquinas, for his part, misunderstood the PRIME DIRECTIVE of Mystics: MYSTICISM IS A DIRECT EXPERIENCE: To *KNOW* it, YOU MUST *BE* IT, NOT JUST HAVE THOUGHTS ABOUT IT.
Aquinas made a false image, a collage of HIS intellectual impressions of mystics’ (deliberately vague) texts and poetry about the Mystical Revelation, and created his “God-THOUGHT-form” (= intellectual/dualistic). He made God into a safe, dualistic “other” that the Church loved.
Mystics were too potentially subversive. Like Jesus.