cover image Sins of the Spirit, Blessings of the Flesh: Lessons for Transforming Evil in Soul and Society

Sins of the Spirit, Blessings of the Flesh: Lessons for Transforming Evil in Soul and Society

Matthew Fox. Harmony, $25 (400pp) ISBN 978-0-609-60087-0

In the early 1970s, psychiatrist Karl Menninger wondered, Whatever became of sin? At the end of the millennium, mystical theologian Fox (Original Blessing) declares that sin is such an overwhelming part of our cultural context that it is imperative to decide how we are going to talk about it. In spirited and engaging prose, Fox presents his thesis: that we have focused far too long on the sins of the fleshthe titillating sexual peccadilloes of our politicians, for exampleto the exclusion of the sins of the spirit. Quoting medieval theologian Thomas Aquinas, Fox defines sin as misdirected love. He contends that thinking of sin in this way enables us to think anew about what the Catholic Church called the seven cardinal sins: sloth, pride, lust, wrath, envy, avarice, gluttony. Believing that we are not in a position to consider sin unless we first understand our capacity for goodness, Fox argues in the first part of the book that our flesh is good. He does not restrict the term flesh simply to the traditional sense of human weakness; he also affirms the fleshiness of the earth and the universe and demonstrates our human connectedness to the cosmos. In the second part, Fox examines the many definitions that Eastern and Western mystics, theologians and biologists have given to sin. In the third section, he combines the chakra tradition of the East with Aquinass idea of misdirected love to offer a rethinking of the concept of sin: Is sin not a love energy (chakra) that is misdirected? In a final section, the author asserts that the chakras teach us to direct the love-energies we all possess and proposes seven positive precepts for living a full and spirited life, including Live with moral outrage and stand up to injustice. Fox tries to take a hard look at the magnitude of evil in the world, yet his focus on directing our love in more positive directions offers little more than sweetness and light. (May)