[FROM THE ARCHIVE: November 3, 2022]
We continue our spiritual journey with bell hooks and another philosopher, Thomas Aquinas in the context of current Olympic Games. In this DM from the past, they are interacting on the critical topic of Truth.
Without truth, a community dies. Lies are poison to relationships of any kind. Bell acknowledges that when she says, “the heart of justice is truth telling.” There is no justice without truth or the search for truth. There is only injustice ultimately when truth is ignored and lies flourish.
While president, a previous president became a “commander-in chief of lies.” A reliable source counted over 35,000 lies he told as president. The Biggest of his Lies being that he won an election that he lost. Over sixty courts agreed he lost. That Lie led to the trauma of January 6.
Thomas Aquinas, in league with bell hooks, says that “the proper objects of the heart are truth and justice.” How does all this relate to the Olympic games?
One thing about sports is that they are measurable, and judges or umpires are on the spot measuring the truth of one’s achievements. There is a certain satisfaction achieved when one or another achieves their goal or wins their award. Fairly. We are touched in the heart as both bell and Aquinas agree on.
Cultural critic bell hooks is in agreement with Aquinas who, as we saw yesterday, says that truth and justice lie in the heart. hooks tells us that “the heart of justice is truth telling.” One cannot build justice on falsehoods. Those who are engaged in lies cannot also be engaged in justice-making.
The current election in America is very much about the “Big Lie” and the many implications of it, including the 400+ laws to curtail voting for the disenfranchised to supposedly combat election fraud that never happened.
There must be a reason why Satan is called “the father of lies.”
Our culture seems to be going through a truth crisis with “fake news,” incendiary news, denial of facts like climate change, very often cold indifference to the truth and excitement over crazy conspiracy theories.
Why does Aquinas say that truth and justice reside primarily in the heart?
This underscores how biblical a thinker Aquinas is, for in Jewish thought the intellect is in the heart, not the head. It is a distinctly modern consciousness that has abandoned such understanding and instead rationalized all cognition—as if we don’t learn from our guts and heart as well as our heads. Descartes’s definition of truth as “clear and distinct ideas” is a good example of this modern philosophical bias.
Of course if we live in a myth (as the modern era did) of a “value-free” approach to truth, then the idea that the truth is in the brain alone buttresses such an empty concept of “value.” Science and the HeartMath movement are learning today that the brain is not restricted to the head, but actually operates within the heart itself.
For instance, the heart sends more signals to the brain than the brain sends to the heart. The heart, therefore, directly influences emotional processing and higher cognitive faculties such as attention, perception, memory, and problem-solving.
For Aquinas, moral decision-making resides not in the will but in the passions! This was a very controversial position by Aquinas in the Middle Ages, and it is still controversial today, but it parallels Rabbi Heschel’s teaching on the central role that passions play in the prophetic consciousness. It also explains the emphasis Aquinas puts on compassion as when he says “compassion is the fire that Jesus came to set on the earth.” Compassion, after all, is a kind of passion. It also supports Aquinas’s thinking on anger, that moral outrage is an energy that can be put to very good use.
That truth and justice reside in the heart therefore is biblical, as Aquinas knew well.
Do they also reside in our voting decisions? One hopes so. We shall see. Truth is on the ballot this Fall.
Adapted from Matthew Fox, The Tao of Thomas Aquinas: Fierce Wisdom for Hard Times, pp.101-108, 112-116, 131-136.
Also see bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions (Love Song to the Nation #1) (NY: HarperCollins, 2001), pp. 40ff.
To read the transcript of Matthew Fox’s video teaching, click HERE.
Banner image: Olympic rings and the Eiffel Tower. Image by Nicolas Michaud. Flickr.
Queries for Contemplation
Is there room for moral outrage in your spirituality? And for compassion? And for truth and justice? How are you putting it all to work in this election season?
Recommended Reading
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
4 thoughts on “Olympic Games, bell hooks & Thomas Aquinas on Truth & Justice”
What are the major issues of the day and what is the best priority of them? Let’s not get led astray by the ‘spin’ and emphasis of the issues that politicians will use to get elected. I am interested in politics for bringing a nation together and a way of life forward in some form of equitable fashion that neither caters to the whims of the rich nor ignores the plight of members of society suffering from some form of misfortune or oppression.
Listening to one-sided views and slandering the political adversary is something to distain, and most of any political stripe behave in that manner today, which are funded by outside interests and a biased cross-section of media. With all of this said, we cannot get swept up in passion alone as the ‘destination of our vote’ must be arrived at by using both our brain and our heart working together. – BB.
LOVE this : “Our culture seems to be going through a truth crisis”
In fact it is, as Aquinas and Hooks say, truth has to lie within us these days. While this rings absolutely true for me,
even in my own dear family, there are different truths as to the way we must go toward the future. That’s to say,
while I will stay true to my truth based on biblical and moral measures of right relationship with the world- human and more than human — I must also stay true to my love of family friends, strangers, nations … whose truth is measured differently. Yes, the Olympics with its precision timing and judges makes life easier in the moment. In the long run, I suppose the measure will be a recovering and regenerative planet or not.
It baffles me that so many Americans, mainly Trump/MAGA followers, can be so brainwashed by Trump who so obviously has serious personality disorders and wants to be an authoritarian president to change our American democracy into an autocracy under his rule! German society not long ago allowed itself to became an autocracy under Hitler who wanted to conquer the world, and millions of innocent people died, including our American soldiers and allies who died defending Freedom, Equality, and Justice. I feel moral outrage that there are so many ignorant, racist, and greedy complicit followers of Trump, especially among the majority of Republicans, which no longer can claim to be an American democratic institution!
It is extremely painful to watch the degeneration of politics, far from any notion of the common good, but it is also very human. I keep thinking of Jesus saying from the cross, forgive them for they know not what they do.