A Spirituality Named Compassion: Uniting Mystical Awareness with Social Justice by Matthew Fox. Paperback (Inner Traditions, 1999). $14.95. 284 pp.

As many writers have observed, spirituality and compassion--in other words, inner-directed, soul-centered meditation and outer-directed concern for society as a whole--are often regarded as polar opposites in the religious world. In the Jewish or any other tradition, one does not often find the mystic seeker and the social activist united in one personality, and thus those individuals like Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel who can successfully meld them are truly singular.

In A Spirituality Named Compassion, radical Christian thinker Matthew Fox attempts to unite these disparate approaches, as his title implies, and to show that religion and spirituality are utterly empty without compassion. Compassion occupies the central place in Fox's scheme of thought. For Fox, compassion is not pity, condescension, or sentimentality, all of which are distortions of compassion; it involves knowing the pain of others (not merely knowing "about" the pain), as well as "entering into it, sharing it and tasting it in so far as that is possible." Compassion cannot be fully achieved by asceticism, nor is it aided by the dismissal of the rational component of human nature and the embrace of pure mysticism.

All of this sounds remarkably Jewish, and in fact, Fox draws extensively from Jewish tradition in developing his ideas. Fox, a former Dominican priest, repeatedly invokes the biblical concept of hesed--which, he reminds us, involves action, not mere pity or condescension--as a notion that inherently combines love and justice. He regards this concept as superior to most contemporary Christian views:

In the Biblical tradition all experience of God is to lead to creative compassion to neighbor. Being alone with the Alone is not a Biblical ideal. Nor is pining with the divine a la the sentimental spiritualisms that have racked Christian mysticism for centuries. (p. 10)

Fox's Jesus is the vehicle of ultimate compassion, the ultimate social activist, if one wishes to use the term. Fox is dismissive of much that has been done in the name of Christianity and laudatory of the Jewish prophetic tradition.

"To know Yahweh is to do justice," warns the prophet Jeremiah, whereas even to use the word "justice" in some introverted meditation groups today results in stares of unbelief and shock. The inner peace sought for in introvert meditation is a very puny part of Christian living. For spirituality is meant to be a peace based on justice which often must be carved out from society that so reluctantly and begrudgingly allows its birth. There is another kind of meditation called Extrovert meditation. It is centering by way of creating. (p. 132)

Again, creativity is commanded, not by the New Testament, but by the Torah, according to Fox. God is the Creator, and since humankind was created in God's image, humans are creators as well. Creativity can be found in whatever people do as "carpenters, lovers, cooks, gardeners, teachers, thinkers, dancers, musicians, story-tellers, laughers, counselors, or some combination of all these or of others." (p. 108)

Fox's chief metaphor is rooted in the Torah as well. He wants human beings to reject "Jacob's ladder," the term he uses for hierarchy, sterile competition, and strife, and to substitute the concept of "Sarah's circle," an invented biblical construct that to Fox implies egalitarianism, love, celebration, and human cooperation in the "global village." (But where is "Sarah's circle" mentioned in Genesis, a reader familiar with the text may rightly ask. Fox merely infers it, with little textual support, from Sarah's laughter after God's messenger tells her that she will have a son at age 90. For Fox, Sarah becomes "a symbol of laughter and creativity. One might say, of Shalom." Call this a modern-day midrash, or an instance of theologian's license.)

As a religious thinker, Fox points to compassion as the touchstone for human activity. And in the spirit of God, "whose compassion extends over all his works" (as Jews say every day in the prayer Ashrei, Psalm 145), compassion must extend to the less fortunate among us, to animals, to the entire world ecological system.

The problem is that as a set of political prescriptions, this book is sadly dated. The new 1999 paperback version is apparently identical with a 1990 update of a 1979 original. But the 70s rhetoric and the outdated news headlines remain in the second half of the book: the economic stagflation, the oil shocks, the arms race between the U.S. and the USSR, the built-in obsolescence of consumer products, the uselessness of advertising, the aimlessness of suburban housewives' lives, and so on.

This is not to say that compassion isn't relevant today. Far from it. As the economic boom continues, the needs of those who are left behind because of educational deficits, chronic illness, residual racism, or plain bad luck must become priorities of a prosperous society. But this book needs updating, quickly. God's nature does not change, but history moves on, as do the immediate needs and wants of God's creatures.