Bahá’í World/Volume 16/Essays and reviews

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[Page 633]PART SEVEN

LITERARY AND MUSICAL WORKS

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ESSAYS AND REVIEWS

1. THE SUFFERINGS OF BAHA’U’LLAH AND THEIR SIGNIFICANCE

GEORGE TOWNSHEND, M.A.

THE Prayers and Meditations by Bahd ‘u 7113/: which the beloved Guardian has given us is in large measure an intimate remembrance of the Redeemer’s sufferings. And Baha’u’llah wished us to meditate on these sufferings. In the Tablet of Ahmad He says: ‘Remember My days during thy days, and My distress and banishment in this remote prison.’

In a great poem known as the Fire Tablet He records at length the tale of His calamities and writes at the close:

‘Thank the Lord for this Tablet whence thou canst breathe the fragrance of My meekness and know what hath beset Us in the path of God.’ He adds: ‘Should all the servants read and ponder this, there shall be kindled in their veins a fire that shall set aflame the world.’

True religion in all ages has called on the faithful to suffer. On the one hand it brings to mankind a happiness in the absolute and the everlasting which is found nowhere but in religion. No unbeliever knows any joy which in its preciousness can be compared to the joys of religion. ‘The true monk,’ it has been said, ‘brings nothing with him but his lyre.’

On the other hand Heaven is walled about with fire. This bliss must be bought at a great price. So it has ever been in all religions of mankind.

An ancient hymn of India proclaims a truth as real now as it was in distant times:

The way of the Lord is for heroes. It is not meant for cowards.

Offer first your life and your all. Then take the name of the Lord.

He only tastes of the Divine Cup who gives his son, his wife, his wealth and his own life.

He verily who seeks for pearls must dive to the bottom of the sea, endangering his very existence.

Death he regards as naught; he forgets all the miseries of mind and body.

He who stands on the shore, fearing to take the plunge, attains naught.

The path of love is the ordeal of fire. The shrinkers learn from it.

Those who take the plunge into the fire attain eternal bliss.

Those who stand afar off, looking on, are scorched by the flames.

Love is a priceless thing only to be won at the cost of death.

Those who live to die, those attain; for they have shed all thoughts of self.

Those heroic souls who are rapt in the love of the Lord, they are the true lovers.

All the founders of religions have had to endure rejection and wrong, and as mankind grew more and more mature and the victory of God nearer, these wrongs, these sufferings have grown more and more severe continually.

We read little if anything of martyrdom in the Old Testament. But the New opens with Herod’s slaughter of the innocents, his beheading of J ohn the Baptist; its central figure is a Man of Sorrows acquainted with grief. The Gospels close with the agony in Gethsemane and with the Cross, the Nails, the Spear, and history follows with the martyrdom of all the eleven apostles. The Báb Himself was martyred and His followers gave up their lives for love of Him, not by dozens only but by hundreds and by thousands. In establishing

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the victory of God Baha’u’llah and ‘Abdu’l-Bahá drank the cup of suffering to the dregs.

It is said there are three kinds of martyrdom: one is to stand bravely and meet death unflinchingly in the path of God without wavering or under torture denyin g for an instant one’s faith. The second is little by little to detach one’s heart entirely from the world, laying aside deliberately and voluntarily all vanities and worldly seductions, letting every act and word become a speaking monument and a fitting praise for the Holy Name of Baha’u’llah. The third is to do the most difficult things with such self—sacrifice that all behold it as your pleasure. To seek and to accept poverty with the same smile as you accept fortune. To make the sad, the sorrowful your associates instead of frequenting the society of the careless and gay. To yield to the decrees of God and to rejoice in the most violent calamities even when the suffering is beyond endurance. He who can fulfill these last conditions becomes a martyr indeed.

None can attempt to delineate the variety or to analyze the nature of the afflictions which were poured upon Baha’u’llah. Repeatedly He has Himself summarized them in a few brief powerful sentences. In one place He calls our particular attention to the fact that it was not the Black Dungeon of Tihran, for all its horrors and chains, which He named the Most Great Prison. He gave that name to ‘Akká. We are left to surmise why, and we reflect that in the Black Pit His sufferings were chiefly personal and physical; His enemies were external foes, the hope of redeeming the Cause was still with Him. But when He went down to ‘Akká in 1868, the traitor Mirza Yaḥyá had done his deadly work; the kings and leaders had definitely rejected the Message, He was definitely cast out and silenced. Not He Himselfalone but the Cause of God was in prison.

We can never imagine what numberless possibilities of immediate redemption the mad, sad, bad world had wantonly flung away; nor can our less sensitive natures know what the anguish of this frustration must have been to the eager longing of a heart as divinely centered, divinely loving as His.

But this much is abundantly plain; that the pains, the griefs, the sorrows, the sufferings, the rejections, the betrayals, the frustrations which were the common lot of all the High Prophets reached their culmination in Him.

THE BAHA‘l WORLD

Yet through all He remained calm, confident, His courage unshaken, His acquiescence forever radiant.

No one is to imagine that the excess of His tribulations means that at any time the power of evil had prevailed against Him. Pondering as He would have us to do, over the significance of these afflictions, we are shown that the truth is quite otherwise. He reveals:

‘Had not every tribulation been made the bearer of Thy wisdom, and every ordeal the vehicle of Thy providence, no one would have dared oppose Us, though the powers of heaven and earth were to be leagued against Us.’ He writes that God had sacrificed Him that men might be born anew and released from their bondage to sin. He praises God for His sufferings, He welcomes them, and even prays that for God’s sake the earth should be dyed with His blood and His head raised on a spearpoint. He continually protests that with every fresh tribulation heaped upon Him He manifests a fuller measure of God’s Cause and exalts more highly still God’s Word.

How bitterly felt were His tribulations, how acute His anguish, how real His grief and pain is shown a hundred times in His laments. His high divinity did not protect Him from human sensibility, but never did He quail nor blanch, never did He show resentment.

Many of His laments are not over His woes themselves but over the effect they produce on the faithful whose hearts they sorely shook or on the enemies of the Cause whom they fill with joy Nothing could exhaust His patience nor dampen His spirit. ‘Though My body be pained by the trials that befall Me, though it be afflicted by the revelation of Thy decree, yet My soul rejoiceth.’ He affirms that the tribulations that He and the faithful are made to endure are such as no pen in the entire creation can record, nor anyone describe. Yet ‘We swear by Thy Might, every trouble that toucheth us in our love for Thee is an evidence of Thy tender mercy, every fiery ordeal a sign of the brightness ofThy light, every woeful tribulation a cooling draught, every toil a blissful repose, every anguish a fountain of gladness.’

How then is it that ‘by Thy stripes we are healed?’

It is because the intensity, the magnitude, the volume of the sufferings of Baha’u’llah called

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forth the fullest possible expression and outpouring of the infinite mercy and love of God.

Wrongs done to the founder of a religion have two inevitable effects: one is that of retribution against the wrong done—the severity of which we may judge from the two thousand year exile of the Jewish people. The other is that of reward to the High Prophet whom they enable to release fresh powers of life that would have otherwise lain latent, to pour forth Divine energies which in their boundlessness will utterly overwhelm the forces of evil and empower Him to say: ‘Be of good cheer. I have overcome the world.’

The suflefings of Baha’u’llah enable us in some degree to measure the immensity of His love for mankind, to appreciate the sacrifice He made for love of us. The story Ofthem enables us to keep in remembrance the heinous blackness and cruelty of the world of man from which He saved us; it enables us to realize the meaning and the need ofDivine redemption, it proves to us the invincibility of God and the lone majesty of God’s victory over evil.

It is for the sake of learning more fully the love and the glory and the might of God that we contemplate this story of Bahá’u’lláh’s tribulations.

In that spirit we are to read it, and as a proof of His triumphant inviolable love He keeps the picture before us in many forms that we may be fortified and uplifted in our poor human struggle with the tests and afflictions of life.

The Fire Tablet adds all the poignancy and impassioned power of divine poetry to the story of the boundless suflering He and His beloved followers had to endure. In language of torrential eloquence He tells of the longing Of the faithful for reunion with God being ungratified, He tells of the casting out of those most near to His heart, of dying bodies, of frustrated lovers left afar to perish in loneliness, of Satan’s whisperings in every human ear, of infernal

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delusions spreading everywhere, of the triumph ofcalamity, darkness, and coldness of heart. He tells of the sovereignty in every land of hate and unbelief while He Himself is forbidden to speak, left in the loneliness of His anguish, drowning in a sea of pain with no rescue ship to come and save Him. The lights of honour and loyalty and truth are put out; slander prevails and no avenging wrath of an outraged God descends to destroy the wicked and vindicate God’s messenger.

He calls to God for an answer. And the answer comes, showing the inner significance of God’s seeming to forsake His righteous ones.

Man’s evil sets off God’s goodness. Man’s coldness of heart sets off the warmth of God’s love.

Were it not for the night, how would the sun of the Prophet’s valour show forth the splendour of its radiance? Through His loneliness, the unity of God was revealed; through His banishment, the world of divine singleness grew fair.

‘We have made misery,’ said God to Him, ‘the garment of Thy glory, and sorrow the beauty of Thy temple. O Thou treasure of the worlds! Thou seest the hearts are filled with hate, and shalt absolve them, Thou Who dost hide the sins of all the worlds! Where the swords flash, go forward, where the shafts fly, press onward, 0 Thou victim of the worlds.’

In that battle which we—all of us—wage with pain and suffering and sorrow, those are God’s last words to us:

‘Where the swords flash, go forward; Where the shafts fly, press onward.”

For love is a priceless thing, only to be won at the cost of death. Those who live to die, those attain; for they have lost all thoughts of self. Those heroic souls who are rapt in the love of the Lord, they are the true lovers.

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THE Bahá’í WORLD

2. THE FRAGRANCE OF SPIRITUALITY: AN APPRECIATION OF THE ART OF MARK TOBEY

ARTHUR LYON DAHL

ART has long been one of the highest expressions of human culture, and particularly of its religious and spiritual dimensions. The cave paintings of early man, the temples and tombs of the Egyptians, Greeks, Hindus and Buddhists, the churches, cathedrals and mosques of more modern times, are so often the greatest examples of a culture’s artistic heritage, and still communicate their spirit to us today, Yet what survives is generally the reflection of a mature culture ; there is seldom any trace of those creative attempts in periods of rapid cultural change and in particular in the early days of a new religious dispensation to break free from the confines of a traditional heritage and to seek fresh means of expression for the new beliefs.

Mark Tobey, the American painter who died in 1976 at the age of85, lived and worked in what will probably be judged by history to be one of those periods of social and cultural transition. As one of the first Bahá’ís to achieve world recognition for his artistic accomplishments, especially for the creativity with which he sought to express the intangible and spiritual in human experience, it is appropriate to examine his contribution to art, with particular reference to the influence of the Bahá’í Faith.

Mark Tobey’s development as a painter involved a slow maturation marked by many stages of creative synthesis and discovery as he explored new concepts and drew on new experiences. His rural childhood and almost complete lack of formal training isolated him from the customary European artistic heritage. Early success as a portraitist demonstrated his innate talent, and his evolution from figurative through symbolic to abstract forms of expression resulted more from his intense inner motivation and his cumulative life experiences than from any attempt to follow the trends of modern art. Since he was neither geographically nor emotionally in the mainstream of cultural fashion, his accomplishments were slow to be

generally recognized, particularly in his own country where, in the artistic capital New York, it was inconceivable that an outsider could indeed be ahead of its own avant-garde. A few perceptive individuals supported his efforts, but the general reaction was one of vague interest, indifference or contempt. Tobey’s first real acclaim ,came at an age when most people are ready for retirement. The first prize for painting at the Venice Biennale in 1958 (when he was 67), major retrospective exhibitions at the Louvre (Musée des Arts Décoratifs) in Paris in 1961 and at the New York Museum of Modern Art in 1962, and many other awards and exhibitions demonstrated the growing recognition of his accomplishments and the widespread acknowledgement that he was probably America’s greatest living artist.1 In the most significant study of Tobey to date, William Seitz calls him ‘the most internationally—minded painter of importance in the history of art.’2 Yet this recognition failed to divert him from his dedication to art. He resented the demands of fame which distracted him from his painting, and indeed continued to produce major works and to explore new forms of expression nearly to the end of his life.

In 1918, Tobey was already a fashionable portraitist in New York when he was introduced to Juliet Thompson, who arranged for him to travel to Green Acre and to meet the Bahá’ís gathered there. It did not take long for the spirit of the Faith to touch his heart, and he became a Bahá’í, a step that profoundly altered his life and art. He immediately began a lifelong search for means to express his beliefs andexperiencesin his paintings, a search that led him to abandon the glitter and tinsel of New York society for the quieter climate ofSeattle, with extensive periods

‘ See for instance Alexander Watt, ‘Paris Commentary', The Studio, December 1961, pp. 222~224 and 235.

3 William C. Seitz, Mark Tobey, New York, The Museum of Modern Art, 1962. p. 53.

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of travel and residence in Europe, the F ar East, and elsewhere. He attended Bahá’í classes with a teacher sent to America by ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, and all his life was active in his service to the Cause, teaching, giving lectures, writing articles for World Order magazine, serving on administrative bodies, deputizing a pioneer to Europe in the second Seven Year Plan, and eventually moving himself to Basel, Switzerland, where he served as chairman of the Local Spiritual Assembly. His poems, letters, and the quotations frequently included in exhibition catalogues reflect a deep understanding of Bahá’í principles and contain many references to the Faith.

Indeed, he struggled with the often difficult choices involved in balancing his responsibility to his art and his direct service to the Bahá’í Faith, sometimes abandoning his painting for months at a time to undertake Bahá’í activities. Yet Baha’u’llah wrote : The possessors ofsciences and arts have a great right among the people of the world,‘ and ‘Abdu’l-Bahá has added: . . . when the studying of art is with the intention ofobeying the command of God this study will certainly be done easily and great progress will soon be made therein ; and when others discover this fragrance of spirituality in the action itself, this same will cause their awakening.2

It is at this level that the Bahá’í Faith has had the most profound and pervasive impact on Tobey’s paintings. His dedication to art was reinforced by his beliefs. Indeed, his entire approach to art was conditioned by this potent combination. He wrote : ‘This universal Cause of Baha’u’llah which brings the fruition of man’s development, challenges him and attracts him to see the light of this day as the unity of all life; dislodges him from a great deal of automatic and environmental inheritance; seeks to create in him a vision which is absolutely necessary for his existence. The teachings of Baha’u’llah are themselves the light with which we can see how to move forward on the road of evolution.’3

Tobey was dislodged from his surrounding artistic inheritance by his discovery of the Bahá’í Faith, and launched a new direction in the evolution of art. For him, ‘my whole idea of my painting is experiencing my life in paint,’4 and 1 Bahá’u’lláh and ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, Bahá’í World Faith, Wil mette, Bahá’í Publishing Trust, 1956, p. 189.

2 ibid., p. 377. 3 Mark Tobey, ‘The Dot and the Circle‘, World Order, Vol. 14,

no. 12, pp. 412—416, March 1949. ‘ Tape-recorded conversation with Arthur L. Dahl, 1962.

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this of course included the new spirit he had found, a spirit which he felt had died out of the art world,5 ‘To me an artist is one who portrays the spirit ofman in whatever condition that spirit may be. We can’t expect too much of him when the rest is negligent of spiritual values such as today.’6 He spent his life in a quest for means of expressing this new spirit, a spirit reflected not only in his Faith but also in the dramatic changes being wrought by science in society. ‘At a time when experimentation expresses itself in all forms of life, search becomes the only valid expression of the spirit. . .’7 ‘I am accused often of too much experimentation, but what else should I do when all other factors of man are in the same condition? Shall any member of the body live independently of the rest? I thrust forward into space as science and the rest do. My activity is the same, therefore my end will be similar. The gods of the past are as dead today as they were when Christianity overcame the Pagan world. The time is similar, only the arena is the whole world.’8 He tried to balance his external and internal experiences: ‘One is so surrounded by the scientific naturally one reflects it, but one needs (I mean the artist now) the religious side. One might say the scientific aspect interests the mind, the religious side frees the heart. All are interesting.’9 Yet this was not basically a conscious process, but a reflection of the whole man. ‘The development of my work has been I feel more subconscious than conscious. I do not work by intellectual deductions. My work is a kind of self—contained contemplation.’10 The Bahá’í Faith also gave Tobey a world view, an openness to the diversity of human experience both in the subjects he depicted and in the cultural traditions which he searched for techniques and inspiration. His openness to Oriental art and his synthesis of elements of that art into his own were some of the early creative achievements underlying his later development,

5 Tobey, ‘The Dot and the Circle’.

5 Letter to Arthur and Joyce Dahl, 26 April 1957, in Mark Tobey: Paintingx from the Collection ofJoyce and Arthur Dahl, Stanford,Ca1ifomia, Stanford Art Book 7, 1967, p. 15.

7Exhibition catalogue, Willard Gallery, New York, 1949, quoted in Seitz, pp. 13-14.

9 Mark Tobey, 'Statement by the Artist’, Paintings by Mark Tabey, Portland Art Museum, San Francisco Museum of Art, Detroit Institute of Arts, 194571946.

9 Stanford Art Book 7, p. 15.

1" Mark Tobey, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, 1966, Catalogue no. 393.

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leading some critics to consider this the fundamental aspect of his art. To this he responded: ‘as to the content of my own work, well, in spite of the comments regarding my interest in Zen, it has never been as deep as my interest in the Bahá’í Faith.’1 He was particularly attracted to cultural periods where the expression of faith or inner spiritual states was important, not only in Oriental art but also in the earliest Christian art (Byzantine and medieval) and that of the American Indians, and he frequently drew on themes from such art in his own work.

There is also in the Bahá’í Writings a new perspective on the history of man, the evolution of human society, and the particular point at which we find ourselves today, and this too helped Tobey to place his own accomplishment. ‘New seeds are no doubt being sown which mean new civilizations and, let us hope, cultures too. If I do anything important in painting some age will bring it forth and understand. One naturally looks forward to the time when absolutes will reign no more and all art will be seen as valid. . . . Shall we, as we view the increasingly darkening sky, not hope for a Byzantium, some spot to keep alight the cultural values? For what else shall we live?’2

It is almost impossible to summarize Mark Tobey’s accomplishments in art. He has treated such a wide range of subjects in an incredible diversity of styles and media that for every generality there are immediately exceptions. Most of his paintings are relatively small, intended for an intimate rapport with the viewer. Recognizable figures or forms become less and less evident as his art has evolved, yet there is still a strong feeling of ‘representation’ in the majority of his paintings. He was capable of selecting the most visually significant elements of a scene and concentrating them onto the paper in a way that would re-create in the viewer a more complete experience. It might be the colour and movement of blades of grass in a field, the flash of lights in night traffic, or stars and mists in an evening sky. He would search out striking visual impressions and natural beauty of every kind, the surface of a squashed tin can, radio beacons, old walls of buildings, the veins of a leaf, often noting similarities between disparate elements in a leap of creative recognition.

1 Conversation with Arthur L. Dahl, 1962. 2 Tobey, ‘Statement by the Artist'.

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After an experience imagining himself to be a fly moving around a room, he was able to develop a kind of multiple space, a personal version of cubism, in which the viewer has no fixed perspective, but finds that his eyes wander through the painting as though viewing a threedimensional object from many angles. This can be most easily understood in a painting like Gothic, in which the architectural elements are so concentrated that one wanders visually through the painting discovering new perspectives as though walking through a Gothic cathedral.

In his explorations of Oriental art, he learned the subtleties of expression of which the brush is capable in calligraphy, the art developed from Oriental writing in both the Far East and in the Arabic and Persian cultures associated with the early Bahá’ís. This discovery gave him freedom of form in artistic expression, and he first applied it to express what especially interested him in the life of cities, ‘the lights, the electric cables of the trolleys, the human streams directed by, through and round prescribed limits.’3 This was the beginning of his ‘white writing’ and of a concentration on the many characteristics of light which developed a larger symbolism. ‘White lines in movement symbolize light as a unifying idea which flows through the compartmented units of life bringing a dynamic to men’s minds, ever expanding their energies toward a larger relativity.’4 He could capture certain qualities of light, soft moonlight or the bright lights of a carnival, and would often use this to convey a larger message. It is interesting to note the parallel with the frequent symbolic use of light for spirit in the Bahá’í Writings.

Tobey also developed the technical means for expressing space, energy and motion. His paintings can represent an empty, infinite depth as in Void, or burst with explosive energy as in New Genesis, a work that may well express the creative force of the new Manifestation. They often contain multiple layers of elements, charged with movement or submerged in a placid calm.

With this new artistic vocabulary at his disposal, Tobey was able to create, on his twodimensional surface, images communicating normally non-visual concepts and even emo 3 Retrospective Exhibition Mark Tobey, Whitechapel Gallery, London, 1962, pp. 11—12.

4 Mark Tube , California Palace of the Legion of Honor, San Francisco. vol. 8, no. 11—12, MarchA April 1951.

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tions. In Edge of August, for instance, the shimmering heat and saturated greenish light of summer fades out into a nearly empty autumn in a potent depiction of the changing seasons. ‘Edge of A ugust is trying to express the thing that lies between two conditions of nature, summer and fall. It’s trying to capture that transition and make it tangible. Make it sing. You might say that it’s bringing the intangible into the tangible.’1 Remote Field (1944) conveys the emptiness and desolation of war, while a lighter touch is evident in such pictures as Calligraphic Still Life #3, a humorous play on normal concepts of perspective.

He explained his lack of a regular progression in his work in a 1955 letter. ‘Over the past 15 years, my approach to painting has varied, sometimes being dependent on brush-work, sometimes on lines, dynamic white strokes in geometric space I have never tried to pursue a particular style in my work. For me, the road has been a zigzag into and out of old civilizations, seeking new horizons through meditation and contemplation. My sources of inspiration have gone from those of my native Middle West to those of microscopic worlds. I have discovered many a universe on paving stones and tree barks. I know very little about what is generally called “abstract” painting. Pure abstraction would mean a type of painting completely unrelated to life, which is unacceptable to me. I have sought to make my painting “whole” but to attain this I have used a whirling mass. I take up no definite position. Maybe this explains someone’s remark while looking at one of my paintings: “Where is the center?”.’2

Since there were no precedents for him to follow, the creation of a successful painting was often a matter of trial and error under appropriately-creative conditions, and Tobey’s letters often refer to many paintings wiped off or discarded as failures, and to periods when conditions were not right for advancing his work. ‘A State of Mind is the first preparation and from this the action proceeds. Peace of M ind is another ideal, perhaps the ideal state to be sought for in the painting and certainly preparatory to the act.’3 ‘What matters most is ‘ Mark Tobey in Sclden Rodman, Conversations will: Artists.

New York, Devin-Adair, 1957, p. 17, quoted in Seitz, pp. 39—40. 2 Extract from a letter dated 1/2/55, Whitechapel catalogue, p.

13. 5 Mark Tobey, Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Palais du Louvre,

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keeping the eyes open for experience in new directions. Perhaps the Orient is inclusive of what we term the accidental. The accidental can lead one back toward the conscious again if accepted and used; it can lead to art.’4

A key to appreciating Mark Tobey’s painting is a recognition of the effort he expected on the part of the viewer. He described his own experience in learning how to approach Oriental art: ‘When I resided at the Zen monastery I was given a sumi—ink painting of a large free brush circle to meditate upon. What was it? Day after dayI would look at it. Was it selflessness? Was it the Universe—where I could lose my identity? Perhaps I didn’t see its aesthetic and missed the fine points of the brush which to a trained Oriental eye would reveal much about the character of the man who painted it. But after my visit I found I had new eyes and that which seemed of little importance became magnified in words, and considerations not based on my former vision.’S For him, understanding art meant exchanging human experiences: unless the person is willing to go through some of the actual experiences of the living artist and of those whose paintings are left behind in art museums all over the world as living symbols of their own experience, they remain as persons uninitiated.’6 But he knew that the result could be highly enriching. ‘The old Chinese used to say: “It is better to feel a painting than to look at it.” So much today is only to look at. It is one thing to paint a picture and another to experience it: in attempting to find on what level one accepts this experience, one discovers what one sees and on what level the discovery takes place. Christopher Columbus left in search of one world and discovered another.’7 Indeed, Tobey’s friends and critics have often likened his paintings to the more emotional arts of poetry and music: ‘Like poetry and music, his pictures have the time element, they unfold their contents gradually. With an active imagination they have to be approached, read, and their symbols interpreted. They reveal their tenor if one listens

Pavillon dc Marsan, Paris, 196], (dehitechapel catalogue, pp. 18—19.

4 Mark Tobey in Colette Roberts, Mark Tobey. New York, Grove Press and London, Evergreen Books, 1959, p. 41.

5 Louvre catalogue and Whitechapel catalogue pp. 18719.

" Mark Tobey, ‘Art and Community', Worldorder, vol. 5, no I. pp. 33—34, April 1939‘

7 Tobey in Roberts, pp. 41—42.

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with the inner ear, “the ear of the heart,” as Jean Paul calls it.’1

The most fundamentally significant of Mark Tobey’s artistic accomplishments, underlying and indeed motivating much of his technical development, is his depiction of the spiritual dimension of man. For many years this side of his work was not understood and was either ignored or attacked, but it is now beginning to be appreciated. It was only natural that he should express his Bahá’í experiences and emotions both explicitly and implicitly in his paintings, and during the long development of his artistic career he returned again and again to Bahá’í themes.

In Conflict of the Satanic and Celestial Egos (1918), painted shortly after he became a Bahá’í, he uses the artistic language of William Blake and Michelangelo to convey the struggle between man’s physical and spiritual natures. As in the past, human forms are used to represent spiritual realities.

The 19305, when he was making the major breakthroughs in his artistic development, saw a number of Bahá’í works produced. Rising Orb (1935) symbolically depicts the coming of a new Revelation. ‘When we wake up and see the inner horizon light rising, then we see beyond the horizon (and) break the mold of men’s minds with the spirit of truth. Then there will be greater relativity than before. This light will burn away the mist oflife and will become very very great.”2 The Seekers, probably done in this period although dated 1950, shows nine figures gathered on either side of a fountain of flowing waters, while another figure looks on.

The martyrdoms which so marked the early history of the Bahá’í Faith provided a recurring subject for Tobey, even though, as he put it, ‘I know that martyr subjects aren‘t popular . . .’.3 Day of the Martyr (1942) captures in its enclosed spaces, sombre reddish coloration and restrained figures, the anguish and oppression yet spiritual calm that must have surrounded the martyrs and their families. The Red Tree of the Martyr (1940), long one of Tobey’s favourites,

1 Julia and Lyonel Feininger. 'Comments by a fellow artist‘, Paintings by Mark Tobey, Portland Art Museum. San Francisco Museum of Art, Detroit Institute of Arts. 1945—1946.

3 Mark Tobey in Betty Bowen, ‘lntroduction‘, Taber’s 80, A Retrospective, Seattle Art Museum, Seattle and London, University of Washington Press. 1970

5 Letter to Marian Willard, October 1947. Louvre catalogue.

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communicates the reverence and respect that the Bahá’ís feel for those who have given their lives for their Faith. ‘It has the same inner spirit as the Emerald Hill (see below) but clearer—in beautiful dark warm reds. . . . The rise of the grey wall behind is beautiful. Two Bahá’ís bow on either side. It is certainly expressive of the beauty of the Bahá’í Religion . . f.“

A similar historical foundation, but viewed in a different spirit, can be found in The New Day (1945?), in which scattered architectural elements and figures in nineteenth century Persian dress are enmeshed in a white writing based on Persian calligraphic motifs. Since Tobey has said that ‘multiple space bounded by involved white lines symbolize higher states of consciousness, or dimensions spoken of in the Father’s Kingdom,’5 the white writing may represent the enveloping power of the Word of God as brought in the Bahá’í Revelation, while the scenes seem derived from The Dawn-Breakers (Nabil’s Narrative). The result concentrates the spirit of the early years of the Bahá’í Faith. The Retreat Of the Friend (1947) seems similarly based on events associated with the early history of the Faith. Even in a less representational work like Extensions from Baghdhd( l 944), the spirit of Bahá’u’lláh’s declaration in Baghdad is suggested in the ‘fragments of the East, elements Which writhe and coil, drawn into the western zones and evoking, for eternity, the unity of the human spirit."’

A broader scope, that of the cultural development that comes with progressive revelation, is condensed into Arena of C ivilization (1947). ‘The idea of layers of cultures or strata of civilizations existed from the moment of the picture’s conception: this idea being that such layers break up and are disclosed so that the next layer can expand. This painting is a kind of miniature and for this reason is connected with the art of the Near East, but the subject uses material of both the east and the west : east in origin and west in manifestation (‘Abdu’l-Bahá). In the same way one religion originates in the cradle of another religion, Christianity in that of Judaism, Buddhism in that of Hinduism, and reaches maturity with time and exerts an influence accordingly. The new makes its appearance and

4 Letter to Arthur L. Dahl, 28 July 1966. Stanford Art Book 7, p. 12.

5 Whitechapel catalogue, p. 16.

" Whitechapel catalogue, p. 21.

[Page 643]ESSAYS AND REVIEWS

is liberated; the old founders and becomes exhausted with time.

‘The draped forms of the East symbolize the spirit of Bahá’í which I believe to be the religion of our time and of the future, even if it is little known at the moment. . . .

‘The upper part of the painting symbolizes the new and higher forces of our age, those which we call modern; for this reason they are less formed but will take shape in the course of growth. These symbols do not only refer to the efficient machines of our modern age, but also to the spiritual and mental concepts connected with material progress. “Everything becomes evident by degrees.” (‘Abdu’l-Bahá). It is the same with civilizations, and I personally think that man always ends up experimenting with truth. In Bahá’í the stress on “the unity of human beings” is something new, it is even the crux of the matter if we are to have peace. This is an age of new communications which necessitate a fresh kind of perspective or a new kind of eye with which to see. And so I have composed this picture from the richly loaded Writings of Baha’u’llah and His son ‘Abdu’l-Bahá

The Bahá’í view of the dangers of material civilization carried to excess is graphically depicted in Void Devouring the Gadget Era (1942), in what might be termed a spiritual interpretation of the effects of war. It represents an interesting development of Tobey’s earlier paintings of the forms associated with modern material society.

In a more positive vein, Concourse (1943) symbolically depicts the ‘army of light’, the rank upon rank of the Supreme Concourse marshalled by the saints and prophets of bygone ages, waiting to come to the aid of those who arise to serve the Cause. An even more joyful and harmonious heavenly celebration is captured in the warm colours and active brushstrokes of Celestial Concert (1954).

The subdued coloration of The Emerald Hill of Faithfulness (1952) reinforces the calm strength of the clustered forms seemingly anchored in place and bowed but not broken, set on a vast plain under an energy-charged sky. The faithful appear even more solidly placed than the green hill on the horizon in the distance. The four scenes of New WorldDimensions I, II, III and I V (1954), with their strong composition and

1 Whitechapel catalogue, p. 22.

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harmonious colours, suggest states of society in a new world brought to fruition by the observance of the Divine teachings for today. They radiate a dynamic peace in which the human forms and their surroundings are dimly perceived, as becomes our images of the future society.

One of the most difficult subjects for a painter would seem to be prayer and meditation, yet even here Mark Tobey has succeeded in capturing a profound sense of a spiritual state, particularly in his Meditative Series of 1954, of which William Seitz has said: ‘Visual prayers, these small, profound communions with God, nature, and the self transcribe the activity, as distinct from the subject matter, of meditation.’2 Of Meditative Series VIII, Tobey said it ‘can suggest so much—cosmic or just minute forces of nature.’3 ‘I try to make of each picture a world in itself, and perhaps this one seems uninteresting however much one looks at the variations in the relations of lines and in the accents of touch which I have used in the center. A much vaster world can be found here than would appear at first glance. The use of many entwining rhythms indicates my search for height and depth. One must search while one is contemplating or else there will be no reward." In the exquisite Lovers ofLight (1960), painted when Tobey was 70 years old, the ‘white writing’ with which he has depicted both physical and spiritual light is refined to a crystalline delicacy and clarity, while being condensed into an unbelievably small space (the painting measures 12-2 x 172 cm; 4% x 6:} in.). The technical perfection of the extremely fine brushwork creates a complex of interconnected space and line that absorbs the viewer into an intimate spiritual communion.S

It was only natural that Tobey’s interest in spiritual subjects would go beyond the explicitly Bahá’í to draw on the great periods of spiritual expression in earlier cultures. He once wrote: ‘I wouldn’t mind revisiting the old beauties of Europe although my tendencies tend toward the Orient, or if in Europe, to the medieval where the two strains and attitudes meet in the abstraction of the human and divine ideas,’6 and referring to a 12th century sculpture, “somewhere in this

1 Seitz, p. 31.

3 Letter to Arthur L. Dahl.

“ Whitechapel catalogue, p. 24.

5 When at one point a portfolio of reproductions of Tobey’s work was proposed for distribution to Bahá’ís, this was the one painting that be specifically mentioned for inclusion.

" Letter to Marian Willard, February 1953, Louvre catalogue.

[Page 644]644

spirit I’d like to find an art which would represent the age to come; . . .‘1 He frequently painted Christian and Biblical subjects such as the Last Supper, Adam and Eve, Jacob and the angel, or the dormition of the Virgin, drawing often on Byzantine or Gothic sources. He said with reference to one such painting: ‘I have used some of the identical forms in improvisation similar to musicians using a motif by earlier or contemporary musicians. I did not have any specific painting in mind, rather more or less the feeling of these paintings upon and into which I built a modern complex structure.’2 Tobey‘s experience here would seem to parallel that of many Bahá’ís; his new Faith clarified and purified his understanding of the spiritual realities of earlier religious traditions as expressed in his own field of art.

Even beyond the obviously religious themes in Tobey’s work, almost everything that he has done can be seen as an expression of the joy of discovering the beauties and attributes of God reflected visually as well as spiritually in the entire creation. As he himself wrote in World Order magazine in 1935, ‘When we attempt to contemplate the One Spirit we come to an abstraction unknowable in any manner akin to our three-dimensional state of being or existence. So we look to Its manifestations, numberless pluralities of Its rich reflections, Its valleys of grandeur, the powers of Its exuberance as forms flow from forms—expressing this same richness in massive rocks or opening to us in some delicate blossom, as though an eye of extreme beauty had opened, fresh on its birth from harder and less reflecting substances but fed and related to them by some secret stream of life.’3

It is generally agreed that Mark Tobey was a unique figure in contemporary art, standing aloof from yet often pioneering in the trends and directions of twentieth century painting. The distinctive character of his work is obviously due not only to his innate talent and sensitivity, but also to his experience of the Bahá’í Faith, which provided him with a philosophical basis and approach totally different from that of his contemporaries. Indeed, even his move towards abstraction came from a different motivation,

‘ Letter to Arthur L. Dahl, 7 May 1957, Stanford Art Book 7, p. 12.

2 Whitechape1 catalogue, p 16.

3 Mark Tobey, ‘The One Spirit’, World Order, vol. 1, no. 5, pp. 174—176, August 1935.

THEBAHNiWORLD

the search for an artistic language capable of expressing the spiritual and intangible.

He knew that only time could decide how his life and work related to history and human society, and how much influence the Bahá’í Faith exercised on his painting. ‘I can only say that it has brought a tremendous impulse to me which I have tried to use without propaganda. . . 74 He believed there would never be a ‘Bahá’í art’, but rather an evolution towards an acceptance of all art and a universality of expression. ‘Of course we talk about international styles today, but I think later on we’ll talk about universal styles . . . the future of the world must be this realization of its oneness, which is the basic teaching as I understand it in the Bahá’í Faith, and from that oneness will naturally develop a new spirit in art, because that’s what it is. It’s a spirit and it’s not new words and it’s not new ideas only. It’s a different spirit. And that spirit of oneness will be reflected through painting.’5 Mark Tobey pioneered in the expression of that oneness and thus endowed his work with the ‘fragrance of spirituality’.

4 Conversation with Arthur L Dahl, 1962.

5 Conversation with Arthur L. Dahl, 1962, Stanford Art Book 7, p. 15.

NOTES Mark Tobey Paintings Cited Collection pl 640 GOTHIC 1943 Mrs. Berthe Poncy

widely reproduced, colour plate in Tobey’s 80, A Retrospective Seattle Art Museum, 1970

Jacobson, Seattle

pp 640, 641 von) 1960 two versions exist EDGE OF AUGUST 1953 The Museum of Modern widely reproduced Art, New York REMOTE FIELD 1944 The Museum of Modern

widely reproduced Art, New York

Joyce and Arthur Dahl, Carmel (perhaps recently sold)

CALLIGRAPHIC STILL LIFE # 3

p. 643

CONFLICT OF THE SATANIC AND CELESTIAL EGOS 1918 Seitz, no. 1, p. 10

RISING ORB 1935 colour plate in Tobey’x 80. A Retrospective, no. 16

Seattle Art Museum

THE SEEKERS 1950? Joyce and Arthur Dahl,

StanfordArtBook7,no.11,p1.7 Carmel M. Knoedler catalogue, 1976, no. 17 DAY OF THE MARTYR 1942 Joyce and Arthur Dahl, Stanford Art Book 7, no. 7, pl. 5 Carmel

[Page 645]ESSAYS AND REVIEWS

645

“Movement Round (1 M arr yr’, (1 painting by Mark Tobey bequeathed to {/10 National Spiritual Assembly oflhe United K ingdom by Mrs. Commute Lungc/on-Davim.

p. 642

mmmormmm 1940 Stanford Art Book 7, no. 2, colour plate 3

THE NEW DAY 1945? widely reproduced, colour plate in Knoedler catalogue, no. 12

THE RETREAT OF THE FRIEND 1947 Seitz, no. 51, p. 13

EXTENSIONS FROM BAQHDAD 1944 Whitechapel catalogue, p1. XIX

ARENA or CIVILIZATION 1947 widely reproduced, colour plate in Colette Roberts, Mark Tobey, also available as postcard

p. 643

von) DEVOURING THE GADGET ERA 1942 Scitz, no. 14, p. 11

CONCOURSE 1943 Knoedler catalogue. no. 11, colour plate, p. 26

CELESTIAL CONCERT 1954 colour plate in Mark Tobey by Schmied, (Abrams, New York)

Arthur Lyon Dahl, Noumea

Joyce and Arthur Dahl, Carmel

Marian Willard. New York

Mrs. Martha Jackson, New York

artist

Joyce and Arthur Dahl, Carmel

THE EMERALD HILL 0F FAITHFULNFSS 1952 Stanford Art Book 7, no. 12, pl. 8 Knoedlercatalogue, no. 18, p. 29

NEW WORLD DIMENSIONS] 1954

NEW WORLD DIMENSIONS 11

NEW WORLD DIMENSIONS 111

NEW WORLD DIMENSIONS IV Knoedler catalogue, nos. 25—28, pp. 36—37

MEDITATIVE 55mm VIII 1954 widely reproduced, colour plate in Knoedler catalogue, no. 30, p. 39

MEDITATIVE SERIES IX 1954 colour plate in Colette Roberts, Mark Tobey and postcard, Le Musée de Poche, G. Fall, Paris

from the MEDITATIVE SERIES 1954 colour plate in Schmied, Mark Tobey (Abrams, New York)

LOVERS OF LIGHT 1960 Stanford Art Book 7, no. 46, colour plate 21

Joyce and Arthur Dahl, Carmel

Joyce and Arthur Dahl, Carmel

Joyce and Arthur Dahl, Camel (perhaps recently sold)

Miss Darthea Speyer, New York

Arthur Lyon Dahl, Noumea

[Page 646]646

3. EXCERPTS FROM

THE BAHA’l WORLD

‘BEYOND EAST AND

WEST’1

BERNARD LEACH

IT was at Dartington Hall, in Devonshire, that a warm friendship began with Mark Tobey, which grew closer over the years. He was the resident artist; I came as a potter. We talked of everything—all arts, all beliefs, and especially that one to which he adhered through all vicissitudes. He spoke of a Persian Prophet, Baha’u’llah (The Glory of God), Who declared Himself in 1863 in the garden of Riḍván in Baghdad, Whose claim was no less. than that of the return of Christ. After my loss of faith at about the age of eighteen, following a long period of uncertainty, this was more than I could take. Yet I read the books Mark lent me and often went to the meetings of Bahá’íshfollowers of Baha’u’llah. I was deeply challenged. Buddhist thought and life in J apan, and ten years of inter-religious thought through Mitrinovic in London, not to mention the writings of mystics of both East and West, had certainly widened my mind.

Oins message of unity Baha’u’llah wrote, ‘A new life is, in this age, stirring within all the peoples of the earth . . . The fundamental purpose animating the Faith of God and His religion is to safeguard the interests and promote the unity of the human race . . . The well-being ofmankind, its peace and security, are unattainable unless and until its unity is firmly established . . . Sopowerful is the light of unity that it can illuminate the whole earth.’

My friend Reginald ‘Reggie’ Turvey2 came up from St. Ives later. As well as coming to Mark’s classes, Reggie, with his wife, Topsy, shared my interest in Mark’s religious conviction and went to all the Bahá’í gatherings. Both he and Topsy accepted this Faith some years before I could. Looking back, the quiet strength of Mark‘s beliefhad its effect, but the idea of a new revealed religion was too much for my acceptance whilst he remained at Dartington. It was not until after

‘ From Beyond East and West, Faber and Faber Ltd., Publishers, 3 Queen Square, London; 1978. Reprinted by permission.

2 See ‘In Memoriam'. The Bahá’í World, vol. XIV, p‘ 385.

he and I made our journey by ship to the East in 1934 that, left to my own judgement, I later realized that the Central Figures of the Bahá’í Faith—the Báb, the Forerunner; Baha’u’llah, the Founder; and ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, the Interpreter—were totally without egocentricity. I found myself convinced, almost against my will, that the absence of self implied the presence of Truth—the Universal ‘1 am that I am’. This new apprehension was like the click of a ward in a lock. A new door opened, not only betweenBuddhism and Christianity, but also between East and West. I asked a knowledgeable Persian believer if it was sufficient to consider Baha’u’llah as a spiritual genius. He paused; then said, ‘Yes’. Perhaps his pause may have indicated that this was a minimal part of the reflection in the Mirror of God which is our concept of a Manifestation.

This volume is not intended to be what might be called a ‘religious’ book, but to be silent about one’s gropings for meaning and truth is not my intention either. Throughout life, friendsliving and dead—have been my educators, opening the doors of perception. Mark Tobey was one of a succession all down the years. How fortunate I have been!

The following is quoted from a paper by Mark which he read at his first drawing class at Dartington in 1930:

‘What I am seeking in you, and endeavouring to help as much as I can, is the furthering towards the realm or identity of being; so that we may be better equipped to know of what a real unity is composed—not uniformity, but the unity of related parts. I have no hesitancy in including philosophical colourings, any more than I would hesitate to say that back of any person, and I mean each person, there must be his or her metaphysics.

‘First of all I want the desire to create; for therein lies the will to continue to live in a new way—to add to your house more vistas of being. For I believe that back of all great achievement is richness of being.

[Page 647]ESSAYS AND REVIEWS

‘There will be for all of us in this class—and myself not excluded—periods of disintegration and of integration. Many avenues will open up, all at once. Perhaps there will appear too many before the bewilderment of our astonishment will cause us to integrate in a new way.

‘For me, a person is constantly being educated—at home—with friends—on journeys—alone with oneself—at all times and at every odd moment that he may be conscious. We are constantly receiving many impressionssome of which we can become conscious of and accept, or exclude, as the case may be. What is wrong with finding a voice of our own? I should say fear. Fears governed by public opinion, by ideas of friends, by accepted patterns of traditional modes of thought. From where can the release from all this rigidity of pattern come ? To me it must come from the Creative Life. That life which, drawing upon the vital forces within us, gives us power to begin to think and to feel for ourselves, in our own individual way. The beginning of the creative life is the beginning of faith in oneself; the will to experience and order the phenomena about us.

‘Now, why should a class like this-a so—called drawing class—enable us, in any way, to do this, or set us on the road? I think: First, because we are taking the creative point of view, however puny or weak the results—and to me, the immediate results should not be dwelt upon too long—they are like steps on a ladder, experiences through which we grow and move onwards to the next stage.

‘Many are afraid to begin: but the start must be made somewherevsome time. How subtle the forces are that pull against a keeping of our vision clear. I am sure that if we were able to look deeply within ourselves, as well as to observe the effect of many things and people upon us, we should reach for the first weapon available and try to clear away these obstacles that prevent us seeing with ever greater clarity.

‘Again I want you to feel that in this class you are, through making an effort to express your ideas on paper, freeing yourself—opening up greater powers for living the life of the artist within us all, and can see and know greater subtleties of colour and of form and wider experiences in other dimensions than you have ever known before. To me all the phenomena we observe should result in a heightening of consciousness—of your imagination; you can

647

recall them, touch them, hear them, and see them, but they are in a world far more subtle than the one immediately around you. The future, as soon as you have experienced it, will, may I say, become the raw material of your consciousness.

‘No doubt I am seeming to some of you to be far from the object of your presence here. Very well, but the things you create here will in the end help create new and other states of consciousness within yourself.

‘I may perhaps have travelled a little further than you on this particular road, but I am also undergoing similar experiences to your own and I am attempting to readjust this mechanism of my own so as to let in more light; for that to me is the object of life—the enlargement of consciousness; and without light and more light, how shall we see ?’

Mark Tobey, Reg Turvey and I made a promise to meet, come what may, in 1963 on the centenary of the Declaration of Baha’u’llah’s Prophethood. During the intervening years I often doubted the possibility or likelihood, nevertheless it did come to pass. For five days representatives of the Bahá’í Faith from every corner of the earth met in the Albert Hall in London in an incredible unity, despite lack of a common language, demonstrating before our eyes the possibility of the meeting of all men in common faith and love. Speeches were instantaneously translated into four languages. There came a moment when Amatu’l—Baha Rúḥíyyih Khánum, the wife of the Guardian of the Bahá’í Faith, the late Shoghi Effendi, recalling her memories of him, broke down in tears, and the whole of that great hall became utterly silent. Slowly, spontaneously, the Africans seated in the centre began to sing gently in their rich voices ‘Alláh-u-Abhá’; gradually the volume increased to include everybody present—all were one. Rúḥíyyih Khánum, uplifted, continued her talk unperturbed. I recalled the Guardian’s words to me, ‘See the heart of humanity in the iris of the eye of the African.’ At that moment came the conviction that we were passing through the end of one epoch into another—the beginning of the unity of mankind in adult maturity; the prophecies of a long past out of the Old and New Testaments and the Qur’án of Muhammad were being fulfilled before our eyes.

I had come to know Rúḥíyyih Khánum when I

[Page 648]648

Bernard Leach at work ,' San Francisco, [950.

visited the World Centre of the Bahá’í Faith in Haifa, on the way home from Japan in 1954. Every evening of my ten days’ stay was spent with her and Shoghi Effendi, the great grandson of Bahá’u’lláh, who listened to my many questions with an open mind. One concerned Bahá’í architecture—the point I made being that it was not specifically Bahá’í, but either derived from the Near East or from Greece. His answer was of importance because it made clear that architecture, as well as other art forms expressive of a new great religion, takes centuries to blossom. Despite this, for the African Temple to be erected in Kampala, he asked me to select the best architect I could recommend from England, with whom he communicated, but when I later saw the plans I found, as did Shoghi Effendi, that they were neither expressive of this new Faith nor, for that matter, good architecture. The spiritual wholeness of mankind was absent. One evening an older Persian Bahá’í, Luṭfu’lláh Ḥakím, asked if he might show me the interior of the Holy Shrines, and I gladly assented. He unlocked a very large room covered with Persian carpets ; one light was over that area where the remains of the Báb lie. He invited me to come nearer, but such a sense of awe overwhelmed me that, laying aside my shoes at the

THE Bahá’í WORLD

door, I knelt down and poured out my heart with irrepressible tears.

Later I climbed high up the steep slopes of Mount Carmel and sat amongst the wild white and purple autumn crocuses, in meditation. I still have my written thoughts:

‘I am sitting on a rock on Mount Carmel just above the tombs of the Báb and ‘Abdu’l-Bahá. The sun is shining upon olives and cypresses and the golden dome of the Shrine, upon the town and harbour of Haifa six hundred feet below, upon the blue end of the Mediterranean and the prison fort of Acca (St. Jean d’Acre of the Crusades), where Baha’u’llah was imprisoned for so many years and from which He spread the Gospel of the Father—the unity of man and the maturity of the human race.

‘For the second time I have entered that carpeted room with its bare walls and arches, and again been overcome and beaten down to my knees in tears, with my lips to the floor in adoration of God, through the power of that Young Man Whose martyred remains lie below that red and central rug . . .

‘We were driven this morning up to the western promontory near the cave of Elijah, over which stands the Carmelite church and monastery, and to the acres of the crest where the Bahá’í Temple is to be built: from of old these heights were known as the “Mountain of God”. We stood in the sun on the summit, and read some prayers written by Bahá’u’lláh.’

Rúḥíyyih Khánum one afternoon accompanied a group of us round the bay to the prison at ‘Akká in which the Holy Family were incarcerated. It was being used as an asylum for the insane. On one side of the room occupied by Bahá’u’lláh a small window from which He was only permitted to wave a handkerchief to pilgrims who had come from Persia on foot, looked across the bay to Haifa and Mount Carmel.

The whole of the experience at the heart of this new world Faith was a turning point in my life. This was Reality—no dream.

From time to time whilst writing this book, more particularly as it closes towards an end, I have been increasingly aware that in the background of my life there have been two vocations. The first began at the age of six when I became conscious of a persistent love for drawing, nor did I ever waver in my desire to become an artist. The second from about the age ofseventeen, after

[Page 649]ESSAYS AND REVIEWS

reading William Blake, was the search for truth, which grew stronger in the Buddhist background of Japan. There was even a question whether the latter might not swallow up its predecessor. Gradually this fear disappeared, and I later discovered that instead of having to abandon one in favour of the other, it was simply an expansion of the search for a meaning of life and what the East called enlightenment, which I have here called stepping stones towards belief.

In this final chapter my object is to summadze the conclusions arrived at during the footsteps of my life at the deepest level of which I am capable. Who am I? Who are you? Are we not the ‘fruits of one tree“? ‘I think, therefore I arn.’2 I am, therefore I think; two sides of one coin! We choose; with five or more senses connected to a central brain, we seem to be at the apex of life on this planet. What then is life? What can we say of life itself but that it exists? We are part of it—it must contain all that we are; within it we may choose. The night sky and the hedgerow seem to tell of infinity, so does William Blake:

‘To see the world in a grain of sand

And Heaven in a wild flower,

Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand

And Eternity in an hour’.

Infinity: with our minds can we reach it ? With ever—growing expansion we desire it. As to our means of knowing, there seem to be two approaches—intellect and intuition—the first dualistic, the second direct and absolute. Both are at the root of our thought and consequent action from day to day—the one measures by inches and calipers; the other by instantaneous recognition of inherent truth. The genuine artist requires and uses both all the time, and finds that to place intellect above intuition is simply to misguide his footsteps : count your footsteps and you may fall down the stairs. Again Blake said ‘What is now proved was once only imagined’, thereby indicating the precedence of intuition. Intellect is a very good servant but a very bad master.

‘The Word of God is the storehouse of all good, all power and wisdom. It awakens within us that brilliant intuition which makes us independent of all tuition, and endows us with an all-embracing power of spiritual understanding.’3 1 Bahá’u’lláh Z Descartes 3 ‘Abdu’l-Bahá

649

What is the oil of the wheel of life—is it love? What is love? Attraction, harmony, the great plus. By contrast its apparent opposite, hate, is the minus which nevertheless makes this world possible, like shadow the light. Thus we learn the relation of these and all oppositesthe right tension, strung as we are on a tightrope between agony and ecstasy: thus only are they harmonized. The scientist will tell you with faithfulness that nothing can be utterly destroyed. How then can we destroy the flower of living, or, if I may call it so, spirit—spirit over matter—eternal life?

I hope that my readers will have from time to time noted that in the search for the meeting place of aspirations between two hemispheres, has lain the further unification of our concepts of truth and beauty. I do not mind whether it is called philosophy or religion, but a growing feeling in later years has convinced me steadily of the need of communication and understanding as the ambience of a united world. A clearer comprehension between all peoples is essential, to raise a spiritual protection against disaster of a kind never hitherto experienced by man.

It is only ten years since that young American President J ohn Kennedy, during a ghastly three weeks of tension, averted the possibility of a Russian attack with rockets from Cuba on the United States, which might well have precipitated a world war. People just don’t know what to do about it. The majority don’t even dare to think about it, and yet there is an unrest all over the world, especially amongst the ‘opt-out’ young. By recent public acknowledgement there is now in two parts of the globe stockpiling of atomic bombs sufficient to destroy all life on this earth. What have we learned from two world wars? What have we learned but greater fearnow the only deterrent to the ending of life on earth? When did fear change the hearts of men? Ordinary human wisdom seems unequal to this task. Love on such a scale we have not hitherto conceived. From what other source should we receive assistance and guidance than from those Beings Whom I have called inspired spiritual Geniuses? The only hope lies in the field of intuitive perception and understanding possessed alone in full measure by these Divine Mirrors ofTruth. Is it possible that in this hour of greatest need such a Being should not be born to this end?

If ever the human race needed help it is now. It

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has barely begun to realize the responsibility of either achieving its own unity or reaching intelligent maturity on this planet. In Heaven’s name why should we spend so much concentration on exploring outer space and at the same time as much or more on stockpiling of atomic weapons, when one-third of the human race has not enough food to live on and by far the greater part has no idea of its destiny ? It is almost impossible to believe that in our own spiral nebula there are not far more developed intelligent beings than ourselves. What can they think of the antics of man on this obscure planet? If they have observed us during infinite time, no wonder they are not in any particular hurry to make our acquaintance—unless perchance through the Manifestations of God.

The reader may well ask who then are the Manifestations of God? The Shepherds, the Healers, Who have led, Who have enlightened. Founders of the world’s religions, interpreting God to man. At no previous time in history has there been such a need of Divine guidance—of the great wisdom and insight of one of these Beings.

This time the call came out of ancient Persia, in the East where all great Prophets have been born, where three continents meet in exchange and intercommunication. Bahá’u’lláh, Who knew and knew that He knew, taught unity as the fulfilment of creation and justice as its means and that the object of evolution is to glorify God, the Essence of Being, with one voice. With the discovery of instantaneous means of communication a bond of spiritual unity around the globe has become possible—love and understanding replacing hate and rejection.

The story of ‘Ali-Muhammad, the Báb, the Forerunner of Baha’u’llah, as told in close detail by Nabil in his book called The Dawn-Breakers, attracted me from the first days when in close contact with Mark Tobey at Dartington Hall. The lone figure of the Báb upholding both Jesus and Muhammad makes clear how Islam had fallen into decay as the Mosaic teaching had done at the time of Christ and as Christianity had done in our time. The similarities of J esus and the Bab—their ages—the Báb announced His mission at the age of twenty—four and He was killed after only six years’ ministry-the common purpose of both to re-vivify the spiritual purpose of a new age. The complete and innate courage and authority of each shook me into

THE BAHA’l WORLD

acceptance and brought me to a first realization of the Oneness of all search for truth and beauty in human life. These were the footsteps in the line of great Prophets called Adamic, which ushers in the long-awaited culmination of that One referred to by Jesus as the ‘Son of Man’ who ‘shall come in the glory of His Father’ and Whose Day has been described by Muhammad as the ‘Day of God’, the ‘Day when mankind shall stand before the Lord of the world’.

The full implication had come upon me on Mount Carmel, that there had been in my lifetime a new revelation, a new leading forward, towards the unification of all men, in a single embracing ecumenical teaching. What else could heal our desperate need? Consider what saved the world after Roman Nero. With the memory of the slaughter of Christians in the Coliseum, who could have guessed the development of Christianity to its height through the clarity of platonic Greek thought meeting with the heart of Christianity in the first great Gothic building of Chartres Cathedral, when Europe was afire with faith and Counts and Countesses worked alongside the villagers pulling the carts of stones from the valley below? I stood there in 1929 with Hamada, Yanagi, and our first American friend, Henry Bergen, gazing upwards—silent; twin towers and pointed arches, elongated figures reaching to Heaven‘; flying buttresses; the Old and New Testaments in glass and stone for the simple who could not read. Out of the quiet came Yanagi’s voice: ‘That is what you have lost . . . You need a new gospel.’

Did Jesus Christ ever claim to be the only Son of God? He referred to prophecy continually, particularly to Moses, to the fulfilment of the scriptures and to His own return at the time of the end. He said: ‘I have yet many things to say unto you but ye cannot bear them now, howbeit when He the Spirit of Truth is come He will guide you into all truth.’

2 June 1974: Now in old age when sight is leaving my eyes, there is no loss, only gain. This early morning I peeped into another world, comparing the expanding vision of the great Prophets: the ten commandments of Moses; Gautama the Buddha, ‘There is no East, there is no West, where then are North and South?’; Christ’s Sermon on the Mount and His prophecy, ‘When He the Spirit of Truth is come He

‘ Twelve were carved by the genius Suger.

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will guide you into all truth’, in fulfilment of all previous prophecies; the whisper from the Upanishads, ‘That Thou art’; Muhammad’s raising of the wild Arabs to the status of a great culture and its contribution to the development of European progress; the nineteenth century words of Bahá’u’lláh, ‘Ye are the fruits of one tree’. Thus all roads meet on the Mountain of God. There all opposites are solved in perfect tension; there we are in the presence of the Master of Infinities; words fail, yet the everexpanding Vision grows.

Where is journey’s end? There can be no end. What matters it to the Master of Infinities whether from above or below? In the West, Christ reaches down from Heaven. In the East, the perfected man Gautama Buddha reaches

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upwards to Heaven—Buddhists do not even speak of God. What is the difference between their ‘Thusness’ and the ‘I am that I am’ of the Bible? The barriers are down. The oneness of mankind is the kingdom of God on earth, when man will meet man in happiness, joy and love from end of this our world. The time is about to come. Bahá’u’lláh was the foretold return of Christ to complete His work on earth.

The time fore-ordained unto the peoples and kindreds of the earth is now come. The promises of God, as recorded in the holy Scriptures, have all been fulfilled . . . This is the Day whereon the unseen world crieth out: Great is th y blessedness, 0 earth, for thou hast been made the foot-slool of thy God . . .1 ‘Bahá’u’lláh

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4. LA FOI MONDIALE BAHA’IE: RELIGION PLANETAIRE DE L’AVENIR?1

JACQUES CHOULEUR

SUR une planéte que les autoroutes, les jets, le petit écran et les satellites dc télécommunication ont considérablement rétrécie au cours des derniéres décennies, le probléme d’une religion universelle, d’une religion pour l’ensemble de l’espéce humaine, doit forcément se poser un jour ou l’autre. Certes, de nombreux individus, ainsi que plusieurs écoles de pensées philosophiques, nient la nécessité et méme l’utilité d’une quelconque religion, et l’image ternie qu’ofirent aujourd’hui d’elles-mémes les grandes confessions traditionnelles ne peut guére que renforcer un tel jugement. Le Christianisme, notamment, donne de plus en plus l’impression d’étre parvenu au terme de son efficacité historique, d’étre atteint par cette ‘limite d’ége’ aprés laquelle tout mouvement s’épuise en de vaines commémorations de ses gloires disparues, ou de non moins vaines cures de rajeunissement et séances de réanimation. L’entreprise mcuménique, pour louable qu’elle soit, arrive bien tardivement. On peut d’autre part se demander légitimement si une addition de faiblesses constituera jamais une force nouvelle et régénératrice. D’un autre cété, le besoin d’une religion, d’une nourriture spirituelle, apparait chez les hommes comme aussi fondamental et éternel que le besoin qu’il om de l’air, de l’eau, du pain et du soleil. 11 y a sans doute quelque chose de ‘religieux’ dans les philosophies athées et humanistes, religions du progrés, religions de l’homme . . . Elles exigent de leurs partisans une foi pure et dure telle que la société de consommation occidentale parait bien incapable d’en susciter chez les siens. Elles se donnent également pour éthique la recherche d’une civilisation juste ct fraternelle. Il n’y a cependant pas de vraie fraternité sans commune paternité, aurait dit Monsieur de la Palice, et c’est justement l’absence de ce pére commun qui met en péril les structures de la famille humaniste. Les religions, elles, proposent 51 tous les hommes

‘Publié par Lex Annales Universitaires de la Faculté des Lettres ex Sciences Humaines d’Avignon; No. 2, Novembre 1975.

une fraternité effective fondée sur l’acceptation d’un pére commun, et peu importe qu’on l’appelle Jéhovah ou Alláh ou d’autres noms encore. Les églises nai'vement modernistes qui s’efforcent de minimiser cette ‘dimension verticale’ pour ne retenir que celle, horizontale, du service du prochain, se brisent sur la fatale contradiction d’une fraternité sans paternité commune. Elles se défont de leurs attributions et attributs sacrés, abaissent 1a religion au niveau de la politique, et la communauté ecclésiale au rang de la société de bienfaisance, du syndicat, ou du parti.

Il est par ailleurs évident que l’aecuménisme ne parviendra pas £1 fondre les diverses églises existantes en une organisation unique. Chaque organisation, pour déclinante et usée qu’elle soit, tend naturellement 2‘1 persister dans son étre et 2‘1 se crisper sur son identité propre. Il est également évident qu’une vague alliance de confessions que leurs vues théologiques, leurs traditions culturelles, leur histoire ont jusqu’ici engagées sur des voies divergentes ne saurait tenir lieu de véritable religion universelle, d’une religion créatrice d’une civilisation nouvelle 21 1a dimension planétaire. Il est enfin évident qu’aucune des grandes religions actuelles n’a les moyens d’absorber toutes les autres. Les J uifs, les Chrétiens, les Musulmans, les Hindouistes et les Bouddhistes demeurent attachés 2‘1 leurs bergeries respectives parce que les autres n’exercent sur eux qu’une attirance trop limitée pour justifier en conscience une conversion qui serait aussi une trahison. Bien plus que dans l’association ou la fusion des églises existantes, c’est dans l’adhésion dynamique é um: formule vraiment neuve que la formation d’une éventuelle religion planétaire doit étre recherchée. L’Evangile lui-méme ne dit-il pas que les vieilles outres ne conviennent guére au Vin nouveau?

Mais cette religion du futur, cette religion pour toutes les femmes et tous les hommes de demain, existe-t-elle déjz‘i? Dans l’affirmative, et puisqu’il ne saurait s’agir des organisations majoritaires actuelles, quelle minorité agissante

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serait donc susceptible de prendre 1a reléve? Notre époque est caractérisée par un étonnant pullulement de sectes de toute sorte. Certaines, comme les Adventistes du Septiéme Jour ou les Témoins dc Jéhovah, ont leurs racines dans le fondamentalisme biblique anglo-américain du XIXéme siécle, et il est manifeste que leur littéralisme étroit, leur hérédité puritaine, leur vision quasi médiévale du monde ne les prédisposent guére 21 um: conquéte spirituelle de notre globe, quels que soient par ailleurs la sincérité et le zéle missionnaire de leurs adeptes. D’autres rameaux originaux du Christianisme, tels que le Swedenborgianisme ou la Science Chrétienne, paraitraient a priori mieux qualifiés, car ils se situent sur un plan intellectuel élevé et proposent une explication rationnelle dc no‘tre univers, mais leurs ambitions en matiére de prosélytisme sont 2‘1 peu prés nulles. Les Mormons, nombreux, modernes, dynamiques, fortement organisés, disposant de ressourccs financiéres impressionnantes et mfis par une volonté d’expansion sans limites, paraissent capables de s’imposer en de nombreux pays. A leur actif, il y a la doctrine de l’unité éternelle du couple conjugal et de la cellule familiale, et celle de la progression éternelle des esprits des justes, aboutissant 2‘1 leur conférer dans l’au—delz‘i un statut véritablement divin, ce qui ne dispense nullement les hommes de chercher 2‘1 bétir dés icibas la Nouvelle Jérusalem de droiture, de lumiére et d’équité dont révaient les vieux prophétes. A leur passif, il y a le fondamentalisme biblique aggravé par la présence d’Ecritures supplémentaires purement mormones, aux origines incertaines, 1a croyance obligée aux visions et révélations assez problématiques des dirigeants de l’Eglise, 1e spectre de la théocratie musclée, et sans doute aussi 1e caractére trop nettement yankee de cette phalange des Saints des Derniers Jours. Quant aux multiples courants religieux importés de l’Inde ou de l’Extréme-Orient, de la Soka Gakkai 2‘1 1a Méditation Transcendantale de Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, du Bouddhisme Zen (311a ‘Lumiére Divine’ de l’adolescent richissime et joufflu Gourou Maharaj Ji, ils difi‘érent considérablement entre eux par le sérieux ou le manque de sérieux qui les caractérisent. Tous sont néanmoins trop prisonniers d’une culture particuliére, d’un folklore national ou régional particulier, pour prétendre 2‘1 l’universalisme. En Occident, 2‘1 qui fera-t-on croire qu’il faille se

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raser le crane (en préservant une longue touffe pileuse au sommet de la téte), s’affubler de robes safran et psalmodier sans fin ‘Hare Krishna, Hare Rama . . .’ en frappant un tambourin et en agitant des clochettes pour mériter la vie éternelle?

Une religion ‘nouvelle’, la Foi Mondiale Bahá’íe, me parait en revanche assez bien placée dans la compétition pour l’accession au statut de religion universelle du futur. Le mot religion n’est d’ailleurs pas totalement exact en l’occurrence, puisque les responsables de ce mouvement lui ont préféré celui de foi, moins exclusif et plus dynamique. Devenir Bahá’í ne signifie nullement renier sa religion d’origine. Bien au contraire, les Bahá’ís fondent leur philosophic tout entiére sur le principe de la vérité et de l’identité fonciére de toutes les religions. Il ne s’agit pas de simple ‘tolérance’, mais d’une reconnaissance raisonnée du caractére divin de l’inspiration manifestée aussi bien dans les synagogues, les temples, les chapelles, les mosquées, les pagodes aux quatre coins de la planéte. Pour les Bahá’ís, 1a religion est Une, parce que Dieu est Un, et que l’humanité est Une. A l’Hindouiste, au Bouddhiste, au Zoroastrien, au Juif, au Catholique, au Protestant, au Musulman, le Bahá’í ne dit pas: «Votre religion est fausse; 1a nétre est vraie; i1 faut vous convertir!» Il leur dit: «Votre religion est vraie, du moins dans son essence et sous sa forme d’origine, mais elle est maintenant dépassée. Elle était valable pour une tribu, un peuple, une ethnie, dans un certain contexte culture] et a un certain moment de l’histoire, mais i1 faut maintenant faire craquer les barriéres pour parvenir 2‘1 une perception globale de l’unité sousjacente. Votre religion est vraie, mais elle n’est pas 1a seule vraie. Elle n’exprime qu’une parcelle de la vérité, et cette vérité n’est une vérité que pour une période donnée de l’histoire des civilisations. Voyez au-delz‘i des préjugés et des frontiéres! Voyez au-delé du siécle présent! Construisez avec nous 1a religion planétaire, la religion de la race humaine tout entiére, la religion de notre temps et des temps 2‘1 venir». C’est 21 um élargissement de notre horizon religieux, non 2‘1 une apostasie, que nous convie 1a Foi Mondiale Bahá’íe.

Comme nous 1e verrons bientét, c’est en terre d’Islam que la Foi Bahá’íe a vu 1e jour. Dans l’immédiat, ceci importe peu, pour la simple raison que les Bahá’ís reconnaissent comme

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prophétes véridiques des personnages aussi divers que Zoroastre, Abraham, Moise, Jésus, Mahomet, Ils n’excluent pas non plus Krishna et Bouddha, sans toutefois se prononcer avec la méme assurance, et n’écartent pas l’hypothése de prophétes ignorés des temps antiques, dont l’humanité aurait perdujusqu’au souvenir. Pour les Bahá’ís, tous ces prophétes sont des ‘Manifestations de Dieu’, des étres d’élite envoyés en ce monde 2‘1 intervalles plus ou moins réguliers pour enseigner ou rappeler aux hommes les grandes vérités essentielles. La premiére de ces vérités est l’amour. Tous les fondateurs de religions authentiques ont préché 1a compassion, 1a tendresse, 1a charité, l’entraide, le pardon, la justice, la fraternité. A la loi éternelle fondamentale: «Tu aimeras le Seigneur, ton Dieu, de tout ton coeur, de toute ton éme, et de toute ta pensée . . . Tu aimeras ton prochain comme toi-méme(1), les prophétes ont pu ajouter des ordonnances valables pour une certaine fraction de l’humanité 2‘1 un certain stade de son évolution historique. Les successeurs des prophétes, les prétres, les théologiens, les églises ont pu multiplier :31 plaisir les décrets relatifs 2‘1 l’organisation ecclésiastique, 2‘1 l’organisation sociale, aux rites, aux mosurs, etc., aboutissant de ce fait 2‘1 creuser sans cesse davantage le fossé entre des peuples difl‘érents et des confessions différentes. C’est ainsi que les J uifs pratiquent la circoncision et s’abstiennent de viande de porc, deux commandements ignorés des Chrétiens; que les Musulmans s’abstiennent de boissons alcoolisées, commandement ignoré des Chrétiens comme des Juifs; que les Chrétiens sont baptisés et participent é l’Eucharistie, deux rites ignorés des Juifs comme des Musulmans. Les uns prient 2‘1 genoux, les autres se prostement. Les uns prient tournés vers 1a Mecque, d’autres vers Jérusalem. Certains se recueillent le vendredi, d’autres le samedi, d’autres encore 1e dimanche. Toutes ces différences sont, selon les Bahá’ís, mineures et superflcielles. Certaines ont cu leur raison d’étre, géneralement d’ordre symbolique, dans un contexte donné, alors que d’autres ne sont que des excroissances stériles et ridicules dont l’arbre de la religion a été progressivement afliigé au cours d’une longue croissance aux mille péripéties. Il faut préserver l’arbre, non ses branches mortes, ou les verrues qui enlaidissent son écorcc. D’autre part, les véritables enseignements des prophétes ont pu étre censurés, infléchis, modifiés, dénaturés dans

THE Bahá’í WORLD

une certaine mesure par les fidéles des générations ultérieures. De ces successives Manifestations de Dieu, le message qui est parvenu jusqu’é nous a pu étre altéré, déformé, amputé, compliqué. D’ou cette nécessité de nouvellas Manifestations, lorsqu’une religion entre dans ce que les Bahá’ís appellent sa saison d’hiver, lorsquelle a dépassé son ége d’or ct ne produit plus de fruits. On pense aux célébres versets de la Bhagavad—Gité:

«Chaque fois que le dharma s’efface et que monte l’injustice, alors Je prends naissance.

Pour la libération des bons, pour la destruction de ceux qui font 16 mal, pour mettre sur le tréne la Justice, Je prends naissance d’ége en age.» (2)

Et, si la Bhagavad—Gité parait trop exotique ou trop ésotérique 51 nos esprits cartésiens, citons alors Balzac.

« . . . Si les cultes ont eu des formes infinies, ni leur sens ni leur construction métaphysique n’ont jamais varié. Enfin l’homme n’a jamais eu qu’une religion ...... Pour qui sejette dans ces fleuves religieux, dont tous les fondateurs ne sont pas connus, il est prouvé que Zoroastre, Moise, Bouddha, Confucius, Jésus—Christ, Swedenborg ont eu les mémes principes, et se sont proposé 1a méme fin.» (3)

Les Manifestations diverses ne sont que des étres humains, mais l’Esprit les habite et les illumine. Ce sont les messagers de Dieu, les interprétes de sa volonté parmi les hommes. Pour les Bahá’ís, les deux derniéres Manifestations de Dieu sont, dans l’ordre chronologique, Siyyid‘ Mirzá ‘Ali-Muhammad, surnommé 1e Báb (c’est-é-dire 1a Porte) et Mirzá Husayn“Ali, qui prit le titre de Bahá’u’lláh, 1a Gloire de Dieu. Ils étaient tous deux Persans, élevés dans la religion musulmane, branche Shi'ite. Le premier de ces deux personnages fut un réformateur religieux, hardi et plein de générosité, qui s’insurgea contre le ritualisme stérile et le fanatisme chauvin de ses corréligionnaires. Le flab el 1e clergé s‘inquiétérent de l’agitation susciléc par les ‘Bábis’. comme on zlppelait les disciples du Báb. [1 y eut d’abominables persécutions, au cours desquelles des milliers de personnes furent massacrées aprés d’horribles tortures. Le Báb fut arrété, condamné 2‘1 mort et finalement exécuté en 1850. Il mourut criblé de balles, fusillé par un bataillon entier de l’armée

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impériale, aprés avoir été miraculeusement laissé indemne par une premiére salve. Dans la perspective Bahá’íe, 1e Báb n’etait que l’annonciateur et le précurseur de ‘Celui que Dieu devait manifester’, é savoir Bahá’u’lláh (1817—1892). 11 mm son successeur ce que Jeari' le Baptiste fut a Jésus, celui qui prépare 1a voie. Bahá’u’lláh, fils d’un haut fonctionnaire duflu’ih 2‘1 Téhéran, avait manifesté une nette sympathie pour la personne et l’action du Báb. Cela lui valut d’étre arrété en 1852, et jeté dans une afi'reuse prison sans air et sans lumiére, en compagnie de dizaines d’autres victimes entassées en ces lieux dans des conditions d’hygiéne épouvantables. 11 y resta quatre mois, le cou cerclé d’un anneau supportant une énorme chaine, les jambes égalemcnt entravées, attendant chaque jour son exécution. Mais les persécutions s’apaisérent quelque peu, et Bahá’u’lláh fut finalement tiré de son tombeauet exilé. Ernest Renan a plusieurs fois manifesté son admiration et sa compassion pour les Bábis, et leurs successeurs les Bahá’ís. Le Comte de Gobineau a exprimé des sentiments analogues 2‘1 leur égard.

Expulsé de Perse, Bahá’u’lláh entreprit une longue marche qui, par Baghdad, Istanbul et Andrinople, le conduisit 21 St. Jean d’Acre, en Palestine, 01‘1 il arriva en 1868. A Baghdád, i1 avait hautement proclamé qu’il était 1a nouvelle Manifestation de Dieu, une certitude qui lui était venue au cours de sa captivité. Les autorités turques, soupgonneuses, et d’ailleurs prévenues contre cet ‘agitateur’ par celles de Téhéran, emprisonnérent 5‘1 nouveau Bahá’u’lláh, sa famille et quelques disciples dans la caserne de la lugubre cité de St. Jean d’Acre. Au long des années, cependant, la rigueur de la détention s’atténua. Le prophéte persan fut autorisé 2‘1 résider dans une maison particuliére, et 2‘1 recevoir 2‘1 peu prés librement les visites de ses partisans, sans cesse plus nombreux. Parmi ses hétes, il faut mentionner le Professeur Edward Granville Browne, un orientaliste anglais réputé, Fellow du Pembroke College 51 Cambridge. 11 fit beaucoup pour faire connaitre la personnalité de Bahá’u’lláh et les doctrines bahé’ies en Occident. Par la suite, des personnalités aussi éminentes et diverses que Léon Tolsto'l', Auguste F orel, Helen Keller, le Président Masaryk, 1e Président Benes, devaient exprimer publiquement leur sympathie pour le vénérable opprimé et la cause qu’il défendait. La reine Marie de Roumanie alla

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méme jusqu’é adhérer ofliciellement 2‘1 1a Foi Bahá’íe.

De sa résidence forcée ct surveillée de St. Jean d’Acre, non loin de ce Mont Carmel célébré dans toutes les Ecritures Saintes comme le lieu prédestiné de la victoire des forces du bien sur les ténébres, Bahá’u’lláh vit grandir et se fortifier l’armée pacifique de ceux qui croyaient en sa mission. Cette armée il l’organisa, 1a dirigea, l’inspira de ses multiples ‘Tablettes’ (ou Epitres) et surtout de l’exemple de sa propre vie, toute de dignité, de modération et de bonté. Les nombreux complots de ses ennemis, dont certains (et ceci est trés oriental ...) étaient d’ailleurs de ses proches parents, 56 brisérent tous sur son tranquille courage.

A sa mort, survenue en 1892, son fils ‘Abdu’l-Bahá lui succéda a la téte de la communauté bahé’ie. ‘Abdu’l-Bahá qui un visage trés noble et une longue barbe blanche donnérent dans sa vieillesse une allure trés biblique et patriarcale, se révéla un chefen tous points remarquablc. Il fut, lui aussi, un prisonnier perpétuel, assigné 2‘1 résidence 21 St. Jean d’Acre par les Turcs. Pendant 1a premiére guerre mondiale, la soldatesque turque, exaspéréc par une succession de revers militaires, décida de se débarrasser de l’hérétique en 1e crucifiant avec toute sa famille! Heureusement, l’avance trop rapide des troupes britanniques les empécha de mettre 2‘1 exécution ce sinistre projet. ‘Abdu’l-Bahá fut ensuit anobli par les Britanniques, en hommage a sa bienfaisante autorité morale, et devint Sir ‘Abdu’l-Bahá. Il mourut en 1921. Dans les derniéres années de sa vie, i1 avait profité de sa liberté retrouvée pour aller porter personnellement jusqu’en Europe et en Amérique la bonne parole. Cette semencc rencontra surtout aux EtatsUnis un terrain fertile, et les Bahá’ís américains furent bientét 2‘1 la pointe avancée de l’expansion du mouvement, gréce 2‘1 leur dévouement d’abord, mais aussi 2‘1 ces vertus trés américaines que sont 1e sens de l’organisation et le souci d’eflicacité. A la mort d‘Abdu’l-Bahá, son petit fils Shoghi Effendi devait présider aux destinées de la Cause. Il avait fait ses études chezles J ésuites frangais de Haifa, puis au Collége Américain de Beyrouth, et enfin a l’Université d’Oxford (Balliol College). Par rapport 2‘1 ses prédécesseurs, i1 avait donc été davantage marqué par les influences occidentales. C’est sous sa direction compétente que la Foi se répandit dans la plupart des pays du monde. 11 y eut

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bientét des Bahá’ís jusque chez les Esquimaux, les Indiens d’Amérique et les Polynésiens. Shoghi Effendi quitta ce monde en 1957. Personne ne lui succéda, la direction du mouvement étant devenue collective, assurée par une ‘Maison Universelle de Justice’ qui est l’émanation démocratique de la communauté internationale bahé’ie tout entiére.

Il est diflicile d’évaluer avec précision l’importance numérique du mouvement bahé’i. Les autorités bahé’is se refusent é fournir des statistiques sur le nombre d’adhérents 2‘1 1a Cause. S’agit-il de modestie, de timidité, ou plus vraisemblablement de prudence? L’ére des persécutions n’est peut-étre pas absolument close, et les Bahá’ís doivent se faire invisibles dans la plupart des pays d’Islam, notamment. Les derniers massacres de Bahá’ís en Iran 116 remontent qu’é 1955! Les Bahá’ís préférent dresser des listes des ‘territoires ouverts 2‘1 la Foi’, et aussi de Ieurs ‘Assemblées Spirituelles’. Une politique de présence absolument universelle, impliquant l’existencé d’au moins une cellule bahé’ie dans la moindre des iles du Pacifique, le plus désolé des territoires du Grand Nord Canadien, le plus sous-développé des pays du Sahel ou du Sud-Est asiatique, leur parait préférable é une action de recrutement ponctuel massive. 11 y a des centaines de milliers de Bahá’ís, peut-étre méme plusiers millions, et ils sont disséminés sur toute la surface de la planéte. La seule exception est celle des pays communistes, depuis la fermeture et la confiscation, en 1928, du premier né de tous les Temples Bahá’ís, celui d’Ishqábád, dans le Caucase, en territoire russe.

La communauté bahé’ie est avant tout une communauté multi—nationale, multi-raciale, et profondément anti-raciste. Bahá’u’lláh avait proclamé en son temps l’égalité totale et la fraternité inconditionnelle de toutes les races humaines. Mais au lieu de manifester l’antiracisme par des défilés, des tracts vengeurs, des protestations solennelles et autres procédés tapageurs, les Bahá’ís s’efforcent calmement de vivre en groupes multi-raciaux. Apprendre 2‘1 vivre ensemble, é surmonter les réflexes racistes dont chaque étre humain est malheureusement capable, leur parait plus courageux et plus réaliste que de dénoncer bruyamment le racisme des autres. Une des grandes vertus bahé’ies réside justement dans l’absence d’accusations, de condamnations, de sarcasmes

THE Bahá’í WORLD

8 l’égard du prochain, que ce soit un parent, un ami, un voisin, un collégue, un inconnu dans la rue ou un homme politique apparaissant sur l’écran de la télévision. Bien sfir, on peut toujours déplorer ou critiquer certains actes d’autrui, mais i1 ne faut 1e faire qu’avec mesure et courtoisie, en cas de nécessité seulement, et en conservant présent 2‘1 l’esprit le dicton de la paille et de la poutre ! Pour en revenir 2‘1 1a question raciale, remarquons qu’un groupe bahé’i typique est constitué de personnes appartenant 2‘1 des groupes ethniques diflérents. Aux Etats-Unis, par example, le groupe comprendra non seulement des ‘Caucasiens’ (c’esta‘t-dire des Blancs, dans le jargon administratif américain) et des Anglo-Saxons, mais aussi des Noirs, des Porto-Ricains, des J aponais Nisei, des Chicanos, etc. . .selon le peuplementloca1.Une égalité absolue caractérise la répartition des téches et des responsabilités. La cellule bahé’ie tend ainsi 2‘1 constituer la maquette, le modéle Vivant du type de société que le mouvement voudrait promouvoir pour les siécles futurs. Les mariages inter-raciaux, loin d’étre découragés, sont considérés avec sympathie, et volontiers encouragés. En méme temps, les Bahá’ís insistent sur l’idée que chaque ethnic doit conserver son identité propre, la diversité des apports ne pouvant qu’étre bénéfique 2‘1 l’édifice total. Une telle attitude est certainement facilitée par la foi religieuse en un Pére commun. Lutter sans tréve contre les préjugés, repousser les tentations de la haine et du mépris, tels sont les premiers devoirs d’un Bahá’í. Les Bahá’ís s’opposent aux discriminations selon la richesse et le rang social tout autant qu’a‘l celles du racisme. Ils s’abstiennent de prendre parti dans la controverse capitalisme-socialisme, mais affirment qu’une société saine devrait abolir les inégalités criardes, les «extrémes de la richesse et de la pauvreté». Ils se refusent par ailleurs é entrer dans les luttes politiques. Un Bahá’í n’a pas le droit d’appartenir 2‘1 un parti, puisque 1e concept méme de parti implique forcément l’idée de fraction, de division, d’opposition . . . Les Bahá’ís reconnaissent l’autorité du pouvoir civil, quelle que soit la forme de gouvernement du pays, démocratique ou autoritaire, populaire ou aristocratique. Ils essaient cependant de propager leur idéal de justice, de tolérance et de paix. Le chauvinisme, 1e nationalisme agressif, le bellicisme sont aux antipodes de la pensée bahé’ie. On conseille aux jeunes Bahá’ís de

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solliciter leur incorporation militaire uniquement dans les unités non-combattantes, mais cette attitude ne va pas jusqu’a‘l l’insoumission, qui serait en contradiction avec le principe de l’obéissance aux autorités légales du pays. Sur un autre plan encore, les Bahá’ís oeuvrent pour l’égalité des étres humains: ils proclament en effet l’égalité absolue des droits de l’homme et de la femme. Qu’ils l’aient fait dés 1e milieu du XIXéme siécle, et en pays musulman, est une preuve de leur originalité, de leur sincérité et de leur audace. 11 y avait une femme dans 1e premier cercle des partisans du Báb. C’était une poétesse persane appelée Télhirih (121 Pure). Elle eut 1a premiére l’audace de paraitre 2‘1 visage découvert, sans 1e voile musulman traditionnel, dans une assemblée d’hommes. Ce geste lui valut d‘étre l’une des premiéres martyres des persécutions de 1852. Elle fut étranglée, et son cadavre fut jeté dans un puits. Les femmes bahé’ies jouissent dans les assemblées de la Cause des mémes priviléges et de la méme autorité que les hommes. Cette égalité vraie n’a rien é voir avec les attitudes excessives et hargneuses de cette fraction du ‘Women’s Lib’ qui préne :31 la fois la haine de l’homme et . . . la masculinisation de la femme. Les Bahá’ís considérent le mariage comme une noble institution, et l’amour conjugal comme la plus admirable des choses. Ils admettent le divorce, mais le déplorent, et imposent une année de réflexion 2‘1 ceux des leurs qui font part de leur intention de divorcer. L’éducation des enfants, d’autre part, est un souci majeur de la Foi Bahá’íe, et le droit 2‘1 une véritable éducation pour tous, femmes et hommes, est hautement revendiqué.

La théologie bahé’ie, pour autant qu’on puisse parler de théologje, est d’une grande simplicité. 11 y a un Dieu unique. 11 est le Pére de tous les hommes. Il est inconnaissable, et pourtant, selon Ia formule de Coran «. . . plus prés de l’homme que me l’est sa veine jugulaire». Il est le Dieu d’Abraham et de J acob, de Moi'se et de Jésus, mais aussi celui de Mahomet. Comme Allah. il est éternel, tout-puissant, miséricordieux et plein dc sagesse. Il est 21 1a fois transcendant ct immanent, pour employer 1a terminologie chrétienne, mais les Bahá’ís ne s’attardent guére a discuter de ce genre de probléme métaphysique. Dieu est le soleil spirituel de l’univers. Il rayonne d’amour pour tous les étres, mais exige en retour un amour non moins ardent. Il agit sur le monde par 565

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Manifestations. Les Chrétiens s’irriteront sans doute de constater que la seconde personne de leur Trinité n’a pas chez le Bahá’í de statut privilégié, que ceux-ci n‘acceptent les mots de ‘Fils de Dieu’ que dans un sens figuré, sans faire aucune mention d’une naissance et d’une résurrection miraculeuses. Les Bahá’ís sont peu tentés par le ‘merveilleux’ des miracles et des prodiges. Ils n’ont pas de mythologie. Ils croient en la Science. Pour eux, Science et Religion ne devraient jamais étre en conflit. Selon les paroles du prophéte bahé’i, elles sont les deux ailes de l’envol humain vers le progrés, et.. on vole trés mal avec une seule aile . . . Pas de superstition, pas d’obscurantisme, pas d’attachement morbide 51 1a lettre des Ecritures. Les Ecritures de toutes les grandes religions humaines sont d’ailleurs également lues dans les Temples bahé’is.

Les Bahá’ís sont nombreux en Iran, mais doivent user de prudence dans l’exercice de leurs droits religieux, reconnus par la Constitution mais souvent menacés par la frange fanatique de la population musulmane, dans les campagnes surtout. De nombreux Iraniens expatriés sont Bahá’ís. 11 y en a en Angleterre, en France, en Suisse, en Allemagne . . . 11 y a {:galement de nombreux Bahá’ís en Egypte et en Inde. En Afrique, c’est surtout en Ouganda qu’ils sont concentrés. Peu nombreux en Europe, ils voient sans cesse croitre leurs effectifs en Australie, en Nouvelle-Zélande, au Canada, en Amérique Latine et surtout aux Etats-Unis.

Les Bahá’ís n’ont pas de clergé. Dans chaque localité ou région 01‘1 ils sont représentés, les Bahá’ís élisent une ‘Assemblée Spirituelle’ de neuf membres, renouvelée chaque année. Les délégués des Assemblées Spirituelles Locales élisent les membres de l’Assemblée Spirituelle Nationale. Les Assemblées Spirituelles Nationales, a leur tour, déléguent certains membres éminents £1 l’organe supréme de la pyramide, 1a ‘Maison Universelle de Justice’, '51 Ha'ifa, en Terre Sainte. Le processus est donc parfaitement démocratique, mais sans les tares habituelles de la démocratie: en effet, i1 n’y a mi campagnes électorales, ni factions, ni rivalités de tendances et de personnesu 11 y a priére, concertation amicale, vote, et acceptation sereine, par tous, du verdict majoritaire.

N’ayant ni églises ni mosquées, les Bahá’ís prient chez eux, trois fois par jour obligatoirement, mais toute leur vie est en fait une priére. Il

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existe des Temples bahé’is, cependant, dont certains sont fort beaux, mais ce sont des péles de rassemblement mystique, des témoignages symboliques de la présence bahé’ic plus que des lieux de culte au sens habituel du mot. On peut s’y recueillir (ils sont ouverts 2‘1 tous), y prier silencieusement, y méditer, mais on n’y entend ni sermons ni musique instrumentals. En 1975, on les trouve 2‘1 Wilmette, prés de Chicago; 2‘1 Panama en Amérique Centrale; é Kampala, en Ouganda; 2‘1 Sydney, en Australie; et enfin 2‘1 Francfort, en Allemagne. Le premier objectif a done visiblement été 1a construction d’un Temple par continent, mais ce n’est qu’un premier pas. Certains temples sont d’une architecture classique, d’autres, comme é Francfort et 2‘1 Panama, résolument modernes. Mais tous ont un déme, évocateur des origines islamiques de la Foi, et tous son construits autour d’un cercle brisé en neuf cétés de longueur égale. Chaque cété posséde une porte, chaque porte symbolisant l’une des grandes religions de l’humanité. Les fidéles péne’trant par ces portes convergent tous vers un centre unique, et le symbolisme de cette marche convergente vers 1a Religion Unique, 1e Dieu Un de l’Humanité Unifiée, est immédiatement apparent. A cette série de Temples, i1 faut ajouter les divers sanctuaires bahé’is de Palestine 2‘1 Haifa. Ce sont les fameux ‘J ardins Persans’ signalés par les guides touristiques, et 01‘1 s’élévent notamment 1e Mausolée du Báb et le bétiment des Archives bahé’ies, qui ressemble {1 un temple grec.

La vie des Bahá’ís est soumise 2‘1 un rythme particulier, du fait de l’existence d’un calendrier particulier 2‘1 cette religion. A intervalles réguliers (tous les dix-neuf jours . . .), les Bahá’ís d’une localité ou d’une région donnée se rencontrent amicalement en ce qu’il est coutume d’appeler une ‘Féte des 19 Jours’. La réunion est en trois parties: un temps consacré 2‘1 la priére et 2‘1 1a lecture des Ecrits Saints (c’est-zi-dire de Bahá’u’lláh et de ‘Abdu’l-Bahá), un temps consacré 2‘1 1a discussion (165 affaires spirituelles et matérielles de la communauté, un temps enfin pour la récréation, les chants, la musique, les jeux, les rafraichissements. En pays chrétiens, les Bahá’ís profitent des week-ends pour organiser des sorties, des excursions, des repas ou des pique-niques en commun, dans une atmosphere joyeuse ct détendue. Signalons qu’il n’y a pas de tabous alimentaires, mais que les boissons

THE Bahá’í WORLD

alcoolisées sont cependant interdites. Bahá’u’lláh avait également proscrit les drogues et le tabac, mais l’interdiction du tabac s’est reléchée par la suite, alors que celle des drogues demeure absolue.

On devient Bahá’í sur simple demande. On le reste en s’efiorgant de vivre selon les principes de la Cause, et le mouvement se montre trés tolérant envers ceux de ses membres qui ne progressent que lentement vers la perfection visée par ces principes. On cesse d’étre Bahá’í par simple démission. Quitter les rangs bahé’is ne se traduit par aucun ostracisme, aucun anathema, et les amis restent les amis. La démission est jugée préférable 2‘1 1a subversion intérieure. Ceux qui complotent pour infléchir dans le sens de leurs ambitions ou désirs personnels les enseignements de la Cause sont appelés les ‘Covenant-breakers’ (briseurs de I’Alliance Divine) et évidemment exclus.

Les Bahá’ís ignorent les sacrements. Il n’y a pas de baptéme, pas de communion. Le mariage bahé’i est d’une grands simplicité, et personne ne ‘marie’ les Bahá’ís: les fiancés annoncent simplement qu’ils se donnent l’un é l’autre devant Dieu. Chaque année, les croyants observent une sorte de Ramadan, un jefme de diX-neuf jours 2‘1 1a maniére arabe, pendant lesquels aucune nourriture liquide ou solide n’est absorbée entre le lever et le coucher du soleil. La fin du jefine est marquée par une féte spéciale, un grand festin et des réjouissances diverses.

11 us m’appartient pas de dresser un bilan moral de la Foi Bahá’íe. Le bilan que je proposerai serait plutét celui des attraits et des écueils présentés par cette formule religieuse, attraits ct écueils qui influenceront certainement les destinées de la Foi clans son projet d’expansion universalle. Les écueils, d‘abord. Une théologie trop simple, trop imprécise, peut rebuter les adeptes des dénominations trés ‘théologiques’ comme 1e Catholicisme romain. Certains déplorent que 16 sort de l’homme aprés sa mort soit trop vaguement indiqué dans la perspective bahé’ie, 01‘1 l’on se contente d’affirmer l’immortalité de l’éme et la récompense‘des justes, sans plus de détails (mais la résurrection physique semble exclue). L’affirmation de l’unité des religions, et de la similitude des enseignements des envoyés de Dieu, peut laisser réveur ceux qui comparent d’un peu prés les paroles attribuées é Jésus, 51 Mahomet 011 a Gautama Bouddha. Le Christ

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tendait l’autre joue, Mahomet préchait 1a Guerre Sainte. Jésus était (vraisemblablement . . .) célibataire. et le prophéle de l’Islam polygame, alors que Bouddha conseillait de s’éloigner des femmes, créatures selon lui inférieures. . .Jésusenseignaitla Résurrectionet la Vie Eternelle, alors que l’Hindouisme parle de Réincarnation, et que le Bouddhisme considére la vie comme un malheur auquel l’extinction définitive dans le Nirvana est hautement préférable. L’affirmation de l’égalité qui régnerait entre les diverses Manifestations dc Dieu peut choquer ceux qui jugent, non sans raison peut-étre, que tel on tel de ces grands fondateurs était supérieur 51 tel autre par l’élévation de ses principes ou la ferveur de son sacrifice. Si toutes les ‘Manifestations’ sont venues dire 1a méme chose, pourquoi alors aller a Bahá’u’lláh, puisqu’il n’a pu que répéter ce que disait Jésus, ou Mahomet, ou Moi'se? Comment, d’autre part, accepter sans réserves la qualité de prophéte, d’envoyé de Dieu, que s’attribue Bahá’u’lláh? Sa vie fut pleihe de courage et de dignité, sa personne rayonnait de bonté et de générosité, mais sont-ce 1a des preuves suffisantes? OL‘I sont ses miracles, ajouteront certains, mais l’absence de ‘miracles’ spectaculaires me semblerait plutét militer en faveur de Bahá’u’lláh! Les historiens pourront s’interroger sur la filiation réelle entre le Ministére du Báb et celui de Bahá’u’lláh. Les deux hommes ne se sont jamais rencontrés, en effet, et il n’est pas impossible de voir dans l’entreprise de Bahá’u’lláh une tentative de récupération illégitime du mouvement Bábi. Sur un autre plan, le calendrier bahé’i, loin d’étre une source d’unité, peut apparaitre comme une complication inutile. Les écrits bahé’is, notamment les textes rédigés par Bahá’u’lláh lui-méme, témoignent certes d’une indéniable grandeur d’éme, mais leur style, trés fleuri, trés alambiqué, trés solennel, trés précieux £1121 maniére orientale, risque d’agacer beaucoup de lecteurs occidentaux. 11 y est sans cesse question d’effiuves embaumés, d’aubes radieuses, des chants mélodieux du rossignol, de brises délicieuses, etc. etc. . . . , et Juifs et Chrétiens préféreront sans doute 1a sobriété des versets bibliques. Enfin, 1a crédibilité de la Foi Bahá’íe en tant que religion universelle majeure reste contestable. Une poussiére de croyants, une poignée de ‘Pionniers de la Cause’, parviendront-elles 2‘1 constituer un jour une majorité, ou méme un ensemble

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minoritaire assez fort et assez considérable pour jouer un r616 déterminant dans la création d’une civilisation supérieure?

D’un autre cété, l’actif du bilan est assez remarquable. L’unité de l’humanité est un 0bjectif exaltant. C’est un objectif susceptible d’enflammer les enthousiasmes de la jeunesse. L’unité religieuse et spiritualle des peuples est aussi une idée dynamique qui ne peut que rencontrer des échos favorables. L’idée d’une religion sans clergé, sans rites, sans sacrements, sans églises, sans mythologie, sans superstitions, sans arguties théologiques est séduisante. Elle rejoint les conceptions des Quakers, qui eux aussi avaient fait de la Lumiére Intérieure, de la tolérance et de la fraternité des hommes leurs principes directeurs. La F oi Bahá’íe, malgré son rejet des dogmes et des Iiturgies, est néanmoins une véritable foi en un Dieu vivant et vrai, en une fime immortelle, en une Vie transformée par la conscience de sa signification profonde. Elle donne un sens 2‘1 la vie ; elle en nie l’absurdité. Que l’humanité entiére ne soit qu’une seule et méme famille, et les hommes «les gouttes d’un méme océan, les feuilles d’un méme arbre . . .» selon les paroles poétiques et, espérons-le, prophétiques de Bahá’u’lláh, voici ce 2‘1 quoi tout humaniste, méme religieusement incroyant, ne peut que souscrire en son éme et conscience. La Foi Mondiale Bahá’íe a done ses chances de s’imposer unjour. D’un point de vue simplement humaniste, reconnaissons que notre petite planéte n’aurait vraisemblablement qu’ai s’en féliciter . . .

NOTES

(1) Matthieu, 22. verset 37 5 40.

(2) Bhagavad-Gitfi. Editions Albin Michel (Paris, 1970, 369 pages) commemée par Shri Aurobindo (Paris, 1970, 369 pages). Chapitre 4, page 99, versets 7 et 8.

(3) Balzac. Louis Lambert, pages 134 at 135 de l’édition Broceliande (Strasbourg, 1959).

BIBLIOGRAPHIE SOMMAIRE

BAHA’U'LLAH: Le Livre de la Certitudc (Kitáb-i-iqén) Presses Universitaires de France‘ 1965. BAHA’U’LLAH: Les Sept Vallées (et autres écrits). Maison d’Editions Bahá’íes. Bruxelles 1972. ‘ABDU‘LBAHA: Les Legons de Saint Jean d’Acre. Presses Universitaires de France 1954. HIPPOLYTE DREYFUS: Essai sur le Bahá’ísme, son hisloire, sa porlée sociale. Presses Universitaires de France 1962. J. E. ESSLEMONT: Bahá’u’lláh at l’Ere Nouvelle. Maison d‘Editions Bahá’íes‘ Bruxelles 1972 SHOGHI EFFENDI: Dieu passe prés de nous. . . Maison d‘Edit. Bahá’íes. Bruxelles 1973‘ WILLIAM SEARS: Voleur dans la nuit. Maison d‘Edil. Bahá’íes. Bruxelles 1973,

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THE BAHA’l WORLD

5. THE FLOWERING OF THE PLANET1

GUY MURCHIE

IF you look around you in the world, at the countryside, the cities and the highways, you may get the impression that things are going along as usual, that nothing is happening today very different from what happened in times past, although of course most educated people have been taught that mankind changes and evolves slowly from century to century, from age to age. But the world isn’t what it seems and I would like to speak of something drastic that is happening here on Earth right now that never happened before and may never happen again. One could call it the flowering of the planet, although ‘germination’ may be a better word than ‘flowering’ because it is more fundamental and perhaps easier to believe since the coming blossoms of Earth have not yet convincingly revealed themselves to many of us. All viable worlds must eventually germinate and flower, moreover, and to future historians it could well be that this twentieth century will become known as the century of the Flowering of the Earth.

I am referring to this century, and this period in history, because Baha’u’llah said in His clear voice that this is the day when all the atoms of the earth will attest to its greatness and that this is the day for which mankind has so long and so patiently been waiting. Prophets of old must have had some age in mind when they spoke, as recorded in the Bible, of ‘the latter days’ and ‘the time of the end.’ So why shouldn’t we believe Baha’u’llah, the Prophet of today, when He tells us they meant now, our very own time? I know there are many people in the world not convinced of this, and some are still awaiting ‘the second coming’ which, they suppose, may yet be centuries ifnot millennia away. And they haven’t noticed anything special happening in these socalled ‘troublous times’ that seem to be just a continuation of the troublous times of all ages.

But I have some facts I would like to present to you on the subject. My scientific studies and the thirteen years I have just spent in writing a book lAuthor's note: This is a talk based on a chapter called ‘The

Germination ofWorlds‘ that describes the Sixth Mystery in a book entitled The Seven Mysteries ofLife, by Guy Murchie; Houghton Miffiin Co., Boston, 1978. Reprinted by

permission. (This condensation first appeared in United States Bahá’í News. October 1974‘)

about life on this planet may have given me awareness of a few things some of you may have missed. Specifically, I would like to tell you about fifteen evidences of the germination of Earth, which Baha’u’llah must have intuitively known would lead to her future flowering. All of them, as you will see, are unique historical events.

1. The first of my fifteen evidences of the germination of Earth is the explosion of man’s population in the twentieth century. To put it in perspective, visualize the human species a million years ago as composed of something like 100,000 inquisitive furry creatures living in the most fertile parts of Africa, Asia and perhaps Europe. There was land enough for the average family to occupy an expanse as big as Long Island2 all by itself. But naturally most of them gravitated into the valleys favored with the best water and game, leaving other regions almost empty. They did not live in villages though (for villages had not been invented) but rather roamed about in small groups hunting meat and gathering vegetables to feed themselves.

After another 990,000 years, which would bring us to 8000 BC, this species, with its newly evolving brain and growing awareness that it was basically different from other creatures, had multiplied to an estimated three million people and was steadily, if slowly, increasing in numbers, stimulated by such developments as farming and its forthcoming discovery that cattle, horses and buflalo could be persuaded to plow, the wind to sail a ship, or a river to grind grain—miracles never before seen on planet Earth. And yet man’s unprecedented growth in the past few thousand years is as nothing compared with his veritable explosion today. What I am coming to is that our population has suddenly spurted after growing at a leisurely long-range rate of -002 percent per year for millions ofyears. For now we wake up to find it growing at the rate of 2 percent a year or about 1,000 times faster than before agriculture.

2 Island, southeast of New York and south of Connecticut, lying between Long Island Sound on the north and the Atlantic Ocean on the south: “8; miles long. 23 miles at greatest width.

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Of course explosions of population happen among animals too. You must have heard of the lemmings exploding in Scandinavia and swimming in the sea, of locust plagues, of blackbirds in Maryland suddenly exceeding the human population of a small town by an alarming thousand times! But the human population change, which directly affects us all, far exceeds in importance anything the animals have ever done, partly because of the extraordinary elfects of its by—product in human pollution. These I call the three B’s: for babies, bombs and blight. Did you know that cars are multiplying three times as fast as the people who drive them and five times as fast as the roads they move upon ? That there is something called mental pollution in publications, books and ideas, a phenomenon we will come to again presently? Of course pollution is so much discussed these days that I hardly need describe it further.

2. So let’s move on to my second evidence of germination, which is man’s winning of the tournament of evolution which has now for the first time given him clear dominance over all other creatures on Earth‘ A century ago if you went to Africa you would have been in real danger of being killed by the wild beasts, but today it is the beasts who are in even greater danger of being killed by the humans. Most of the big animals now are under some kind of control in zoos, game preserves, national parks or (in the case of certain fish and whales) international treaties. Even insects and microbes are coming more and more under human control. In many cases, as you know, man’s competition has led to the extinction of other species of life in recent centuries or millennia: notably of a dozen kinds of mammoth and mastodon and the woolly rhinoceros, followed by the quagga, the aurochs and such birds as the dodo, the moa, the passenger pigeon, the heath hen and the great auk.

But before that, more than 999 percent of all the species that ever lived on Earth had already disappeared (presumably naturally) with only the meagerest fossilized trace left to prove it. For species are not static but come and go and flow like waves on a river. Indeed out of billions of species estimated to have foliated Earth in her five billion years of evolution to date, only a couple of million exist at any one time because each lasts scarcely a fleeting million years before it finally branches, withers or in some way loses its

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identity. Nor are we running out of them since scientists continue to discover new ones: bird species at the rate of one a week, mammals at the rate of one every two weeks, insects and new smaller species by the dozens every day, the overall rate of gain in species exceeding the loss by a good two hundred times. And if you look closely into this bubbling river of evolution, you can see that man is influencing it more and more, not only usurping the breeding of dogs and other domesticated animals and vegetables, but in this century virtually taking over the main burden of it, including very soon the breeding of himself!

3. The third of my fifteen factors of germination is man’s virtual completion of the exploration of his planet in this century. Only 500 years ago the map makers knew nothing of what was on the other side of the earth, or even if it had another side. America was unknown even to itself and the extent of Africa was a wild conjecture. Explorers presumed the tropics were made of fire and the earth flat so that ships would risk falling off its edge if they ventured out of sight of shore. The Dutch did not discover Australia until the seventeenth century and the ocean depths and polar regions remained largely unknown even up to the beginning of the twentieth.

In the first decades of this century when I was a child and young man, nobody had been to the North Pole or the South Pole or to the top of the highest mountain or the bottom of the sea. But all these goals have been attained in this century and man has charted not only every detail of every land and ocean deep, not missing the inner heart of the atom, but flown through the whole atmosphere and into space and beyond it, including in person to Earth’s satellite, the moon—with rocket cameras to the neighbouring planets and hundreds of sophisticated new telescopes, spectroscopes and other instruments to the very horizon of the freshly conceived Universe. What could more dramatically demonstrate Baha’u’llah’s declaration that this is the day when something unprecedented is

happening to the little world called Earth?

4. My fourth evidence of germination is that man’s speed of travel has increased a thousandfold in less than a hundred years. After about five millennia during which the fastest a human could go was at the gallop of a horse, what might be called an oats barrier was passed in 1839 when a railroad locomotive hit 59 miles an hour,

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decisively beating the horse, and a succession of locomotives held the record until I was born in 1907. As a matter of mystic coincidence, I recently found out that it was indeed the very day I was born, January 25, 1907, that the record finally left the rails and passed to automobiles when a man named Frank Marriott drove a Stanley Steamer 150 miles an hour on Ormond Beach in Florida. And that record stood for more than 10 years until airplanes surpassed it in World War I. From then on airplanes held the record continuously for over 40 years until Yuri Gagarin, the Russian, went into orbit April 12, 1961 , at a speed of better than five miles a second. And it was less than eight years later that Frank Borman, going to the moon for the United States in 1968, went almost seven miles a second. Such translunar speed (slightly exceeded in later Apollo flights to the moon) will probably remain man’s approximate limit for quite a while because one doesn’t need much more speed to go anywhere in the solar system, which is as far as we are likely to go until we head for the starsand that is untold centuries ofl‘.

5. The fifth in this series of evidences is man’s speed of communication which, in case you hadn’t noticed, has increased even faster than his speed of travel, multiplying itself ten million times in a single step upward in 1844 when the first ‘instantaneous’ message was sent on Earth, in one leap raising the speed of the railway mail pouch to that of the telegram flashing along wire at 186,282 miles a second! There was something divinely mystic about this event which, as most of you know, coincided with the announcement of the coming of the Bahá’í Faith by the Báb in Shíráz, Persia, on May 23 of that historic year which was likewise the day ‘Abdu’l-Bahá was born and the thousandth anniversary of the disappearance of the Twelfth Imam of Islam. And the engineering miracle has been firmly consolidated by successive development of the telephone, radio and television during the ensuing germinal century in which, although these later inventions have not increased the transmission velocity (speed of light), they have suddenly for the first time made Earth capable of communicating with outside worlds, particularly since powerful television waves began to be broadcast regularly from America and Europe shortly after World War II, resulting in the planet’s radiating out a continuously expanding sphere of TV waves—an abstract

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bubble of radiation with current radius of 30 light years that already reaches beyond some thousand of the nearer stars and their planetary systems.

6. The sixth evidence is the explosion of knowledge. The earth’s Tree of Knowledge has burst into bloom in this century and Earth can never again be the same. Man’s mind is, you might say, the fovea of this planet’s consciousness, the fovea being the part of the retina that is keenly focused on a book when one is reading it. An example of this sudden change in man’s mind might be that in the first decade of this century The New York Times published an editorial saying: ‘The flying machine which will really fly might be evolved by the combined and continuous efforts of mathematicians and mechanics in from one to ten million years.’ The date was 1903, the very year in which two unknown bicycle mechanics named Wilbur and Orville Wright completed a seemingly harebrained experiment at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, news of which The New York Times did not deem fit to print.

Within a few decades of course things began to look very different and it became evident that any good engineering firm, even in 1903, given a million dollars to research and develop a flying machine, might have done as well as the Wright boys. Some believed better. But the fact is that no one in 1903 had thought flying was worth a million dollars or, for that matter, a thousand, even though in a few decades almost every big corporation and government on Earth would be putting a major portion of its budget into research and development.

Meanwhile, during and after World War 1, flying developed at an accelerating pace and knowledge germinated explosively all over the planet while fundamental revolutions occurred in most of the main branches of science. And this sudden pooling of knowledge was measurable statistically as an outburst of information that greatly exceeded the increase in population. Indeed in terms of books, pamphlets, journals, maps, photographs, etc. housed in the world’s libraries, the accumulation is already estimated to total something like a billion items and to be growing at the rate of 3 percent per year and therefore rapidly pulling away from the people who are multiplying at only 2 percent.

One of the consequences of this interrelation is that, by the time a baby born today finishes

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college, the amount of information available to him will have quadrupled. This imposes an unprecedented strain on twentieth century children comprehensible only in light of the volatility of the knowledge now overflowing upon Earth, knowledge that is accumulating so much faster than it is evaporating that a major task of the next century may well be man’s taming and harnessing it in the service of his newly germinated world.

7. A major offshoot from the Tree of Knowledge of course is automation, which in one generation has revolutionized the management and technology of the world. At its heart is the computer, whose relation to the Earth’s explosions in speed and information is obvious in the fact that man now not only doubles his computation rate (a blend of speed, complexity and accuracy) every year but, through electronic miniaturization, annually halves its equipment size and (to some degree) its cost. Thus the mental work of multiplying two 14-digit numbers, which took a trained mathematician with pencil and paper twenty minutes in World War II, can now be done electronically in less than 1 / 100th of a second and with much less chance of error.

Predicting the future of automatic computation is admittedly difficult and controversial but it is interesting to contemplate the extravagant extrapolation of a leading authority, Marvin Minsky of MIT’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, who predicted in 1970 that in a decade or so ‘we will have a machine with the general intelligence of an average human being. . . . a machine able to read Shakespeare, grease a car, play office politics, tell ajoke, have a fight.’ He added that ‘at that point the machine will begin to educate itself with fantastic speed. In a few months it will be at genius level’ and, not long after, ‘its powers will be incalculable.’

8. The eighth factor of germination is the sudden shift of poverty towards prosperity on Earth. At the beginning of this century only 1 percent of humanity, called the ‘haves’, had an annual income as high as a few hundred dollars. Today half the world’s population averages $2,000 annually and, by the year 2000, the ‘haves’ (even with inflation) should reach 90 percent of the world’s population. Although a serious problem has so far persisted throughout the worldwide industrial revolution of an

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‘ineradicable‘ disparity between the wealth of the ‘haves’ and the ‘have-nots’, the overall average wealth has been steadily growing. Thus while the average American has increased his consumption of energy a hundredfold in one hundred years until he is now using fifty times as much of it as the average Hindu in India, the Hindu has also increased his consumption by at least five or ten times and, when education enables him to take advantage of his proliferating opportunities, he may well begin to close the gap.

Another aspect of the surging wealth is the abrupt, almost cancerous, growth of cities on this planet that never had a Village until a dozen millennia ago, hardly a real town before the fifth century BC, and as recently as 1800 AD. only fifty cities with populations as big as 100,000 people. But in the nineteenth century came the ignition point when industry, machines, plumbing, transport, electricity and the telephone really germinated the urban seeds so that by 1970 Earth was rich enough to have more than fifteen hundred cities of over 100,000 and a good hundred between 1,000,000 and 10,000,000. In the United States now, in consequence, country land is being paved over and urbanized at the unheard of rate of 5 square miles a day and it appears that the majority of all humans will be living in cities by 1990.

9. Evidence number nine of germination is that during the past century a great movement to liberate the captive people of Earth has swept the planet and now, for the first time, women are being given equal rights with men almost everywhere and not only slaves but exploited races and minorities of nearly every sort are progressively gaining equal status with other citizens in all but a few totalitarian states.

Slavery is an ancient social perversion that goes back further than history, even into animal and vegetable orders like the ants, but it evidently evolved among humans only with agriculture, villages, property ownership, animal domestication and particularly the invention of war which, after all, is what provided the prisoners who became the first slaves. It reached peaks in the days of Solomon who built his temple with 153,600 slaves (Chronicles 11, 2, 17—18) and in Roman times when it was so widespread it necessitated constant raiding into ‘barbarian’ countries and began to be abused with distressing con [Page 664]664

sequences like gladiatorial exhibitions and the revolt of Spartacus, the slave who trained and led an army of 90,000 slaves against Rome. Indeed it seemed such an ingrained aspect of nature that the great philosophers of the day accepted it, including Socrates, Plato (rather reluctantly) and Aristotle. Even Christ is not known to have spoken against it for, as Paul wrote to the Corinthians: ‘Every man has his own calling;1et him keep to it.’

In the nineteenth century, however, almost like magic, slavery, which had become big business, especially among seafaring nations, was abolished and Virtually disappeared from democratic societies. At the same time enslaved women were removing their veils, led by such heroic pioneers as Táhirih, the great woman martyr of the early days of the Bahá’í Faith in Persia, and increasingly they demanded the right to own property rather than be property. So not much longer would they rank below pigs socially in New Guinea. Nor would it continue to be possible to buy a wife for $4.00 as was still being done in West Africa when I was there flying cargoes in World War 11. Even racial prejudice, notably difficult to purge from peoples’ minds after millennia of injustice between races, is steadily diminishing this century, aided by improved education and legislation for human and civil rights throughout much of the world.

10. My tenth evidence of germination is the sudden great increase in literacy and education all over our planet. As a result, more than 60 percent of humanity can now read and write and the proportions of that majority are increasing about one percent a year as the illiterate elderly die. Predictably the change is accompanied by no little struggle, for literacy is not yet every man’s dish. When an Arab in Algeria was approached recently about letting his wife join a reading and writing class, he asked in astonishment, ‘You mean my wife should write letters? To whom?’

Yet somehow, little by little, the new ideas take hold, often aided by radio or movies. and the new teachings are having their subtle but profound effect on evolution, particularly on the mental and cultural evolution they are part of .

ll. Standardization, the eleventh factor in germination, is rapidly uniting Earth by permeating all science and all nations. For not only does mankind as a whole already use the twenty—four-hour day, the seven-day week, decimals in mathematics, standard scientific

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criteria from market scales to atomic energy and common traffic rules in shipping and flying, but soon the metric system will undoubtedly become universal, highway signs similar everywhere and, sooner or later, all countries driving on the right.

12. A universal language that all educated humans can speak and understand is my twelfth factor in this series, which also seems on its way to becoming a reality on Earth. Although about fifty artificial languages such as Esperanto have been devised, which offer the advantages of phonetic regularity, simplicity, and universality, no one of them has yet been officially adopted as the world language because they all bear the heavy initial disadvantage that there is no considerable population speaking them, no government or large institution promoting them and no literature to give them a tradition. So we are left with the natural evolutionary process of the roughly 4,000 known ancient tongues which fortunately are slowly filtering and amalgamating toward fewer and more universal modern languages with large vocabularies and literatures such as English, German, Spanish, French, Mandarin Chinese, Hindustani, Russian, Hebrew and Arabic.

Of these, English in the last century or two seems to have moved to the forefront as the one with the best chance of becoming a truly universal tongue, most of all in the last few decades. And today more than 60 percent of all scientific papers are published in English, work on simplifying it is being done, and it is the standard language of airports all over Earth.

13. My thirteenth evidence is the movement toward a world government which, although appropriately unlucky, has become such an obviously essential step in Earth’s present development that it must be considered one of the factors in planetary germination even though it hasn’t yet happened. Indeed should man’s narrow nationalism or heedlessness continue to block the establishment of any sort of world political federation for many decades more, humanity’s very survival will be increasingly threatened!

In the eyolution of the many millennia just past, starting with families and clans that slowly combined into villages and city states that eventually became nations, federations, empires and superpowers, the custom known as war evolved along with political organization in a

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parallel, feedback interrelation. Of the 14,550 wars fought since history began to be recorded in 3600 BC. at the rate of one every 140 days, however, they were relatively local until this century, indeed generally conducted like sporting events with participants consisting of professional soldiers following traditional rules and led by individual heroes. And it is only now that suddenly something entirely new has emerged with the advent of nuclear weapons and intercontinental missiles which makes war not only all-out but so impersonal and instantaneously lethal on such a scale that the ‘victor’ must almost surely be destroyed along with the ‘Vanquished’. Not to mention all large cities and possibly half of mankind vaporized in a day.

How Earth will become federated or otherwise united under a world government strong enough to disarm the nations and guarantee peace and order is not yet clear, but the absurdity of continuing the present international anarchy is so obvious that perhaps the majority of all educated people already favor some form of world federation, including the sacrifice of national sovereignty essential to making it work, so it has a chance of finally coming into existence without too catastrophic a birth struggle.

14. The fourteenth factor of germination is the rise of the human spirit which must be swiftly, if invisibly, evolving—along with man’s more obvious material and mental progressand must, Baha’u’llah tells us, soon unite all people in a common bond of empathy that will bring such harmony and peace as was never before known on Earth.

This of course is not a scientific statement, nor is it provable nor (I presume) even believable to most people. Yet it is at the heart of the germination of the planet and must be, in some sense, measurable. I mean that it deals with a profound question, that seems to disturb many serious thinkers: is our world getting better or worse? Are we passengers on Earth evolving as we should? Or are corruption and pollution (with its 3 B’s) overtaking us as we slide hopelessly down the drain?

The answer is not easy. At the very least, it calls for spiritual comparison between life on Earth today and life as it was on Earth a hundred or a hundred-thousand years ago—and it is a comparison bound to be controversial, both because no one lives long enough to gain first 665

hand perspective over such spans of time and because spiritual things are so utterly intangible and elusive.

Nevertheless one can look at Stone Age life on Earth today which may be comparable to the pre-Eden days when man was a hunter and knew nothing of farming, his morality presumably on the level of the increasingly clever beast he had found himself to be and whose sense of right and wrong, if it could be called that, depended, as with other animals, on his instinctive urges to hunt, kill, eat, mate and defend the territory he regarded as his. Then as man settled into tribal and village life with all it involved in common defense measures, laws of property, adaptability to authority (including gods, devils and chiefs), inevitably disputes became louder and more frequent, leading to more laws that resulted in more violations as crimes became sins—and the evolution of virtue slowly advanced, significantly changing the killing of a rival from a noble deed to a shameful murder.

Ofcourse it took a long time with innumerable ups and downs and inspirations and errors. The Dark Ages and the Middle Ages came and went with their interminable killings, often in the name of piety as when Bishop Peter Arbues (1441—1485) burned 40,000 ‘heretics’ at the stake and was canonized as a saint for it.

But perhaps observation of a typical city scene would be enough to show the spiritual temper of the times—so let me say that a poor old man who fell down in the street in 1750 was likely to be left there unaided and, when Horace Walpole saw it happen outside White’s colTee house in London that year, he recorded that the customers inside placed bets on whether the fellow were dead or not. And, when a passerby suggested he should be bled (standard first—aid treatment of the day), they loudly protested that this would interfere with the fairness of the betting.

At the same time, any well-dressed stranger, particularly if foreign—looking, was liable to be jeered at as a ‘French dog,’ have dead cats or worse thrown at him and, if he retaliated, he might well be mobbed and killed. And taunting victims in the pillory, staring at the inmates of ‘mad houses,’ or baiting animals, were favorite pastimes, only recently replaced by going to ball games or watching TV.

By such glimpses of history we can measure in a feeble way the unfolding of spirit through the centuries—noting that in enlightened England

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there remained 223 offenses punishable by death in 1817, the year of Bahá’u’lláh’s birth, while the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals was founded in 1824, something that a historian was to call the first consciously organized action taken by any species of life on Earth solely for the benefit of another.

By the time Baha’u’llah had lived His life, however. and established the Bahá’í Faith as the first truly global religion on Earth, the concomitant germin‘ation was well under way, and the twentieth century unreeling its wonders. And since World War 11, while the membership of most of man’s religious organizations has been growing about twice as fast as his population, the speed of the Bahá’í Faith to virtually every corner of every country has exceeded all the others.

15. The final evidence of germination on my list is the very profound but hard—to-detect transcendence of the organism man into the superorganism mankind. This also involves the consciousness of mankind which is swiftly unfurling a new dimension as Earth becomes aware of herself for the first time, one might say turning (on a world scale) self-conscious!

It could be usefully compared, I think, to a fish in a school or a bird in a flock engaged in mass maneuvering. For such a fish or bird inevitably loses his individuality and independence and, to some degree, becomes a ‘cell’ in a greater ‘body’. He must also, in effect‘ submerge his ‘self’ beyond the equivalent of an ant or bee in order to resurface collectively as an anthill or a beehive. And this means, in the case of man, that he not only transcends individually, each in his own mind and soul from finitudc toward Infinitude, but he also transcends collectively from men and women to mankind while Earth herself (whose consciousness is primarily the mind of man) must ultimately transcend (beyond space—timeself) into what may be described as the divine essence of the Universe.

The philosophical message of Mr. Murchie’s The Seven M ysteries ofLife is summarized in his poem which follows:

I—ABSTRACTION

What’s in an egg? A song is there, in chemical notation, Invisibly packed into the genes;

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Also detailed instructions for nest building, A menu or two, and a map of stars All in the one cell that multiplies into many, All put at the disposal

Of the little feathered passenger

So, once hatched and fledged,

He will have more than a wishbone

To launch his life.

What’s an ocean wave made of ?

At first glance nothing but salt water;

But keep your eyes on it ten seconds . . . twenty seconds . . .

You’ll notice the water is roused

Only momentarily by the wave

Which passes it by,

That the wave leaves the molecules and bubbles behind,

That the wave in essence is a kind of ghost

F reed from materiality by the dimension of time,

Made not of substance

But energy.

And likewise with living bodies

And rocks, and all metabolizing matter From atoms to stars,

Which all flow through space-time Uttering the abstract nature

Of the Universe.

II—INTERRELATION

What relation is a white man

To a black man?

A yellow man to a red or brown? Closer maybe than you’d think,

For all family trees meet and merge Within fifty generations, more or lessIn round numbers a thousand yearsWhich makes all men cousins, Brothers in spirit, if you will,

Or, to be genetically precise,

Within the range of fiftieth cousin.

But relations don’t stop here:

Man also has ancestors in common With the chimpanzee and other apes, Back twenty million years or so, Plus all the mammals farther backHis ten millionth cousins

If you’ll abide my candor.

Still farther, the billionth cousin span Takes in the whole kingdom.

And many vegetables, and trees;

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The trillionth must include rocks and worlds.

There is no line, you see, between these cousin kingdoms,

No real boundary between you and the universe For all things are related,

Through identical elements in world and world,

Even out to the farthest reaches

Of space.

III—OMNIPRESENCE

Where did life begin?

In the festering ooze of a primeval swamp? In a submicroscopic virus?

In a stone? A star?

Strictly speaking, in none of these. For, truthfully, the question is wrong. Life did not literally begin. Life is. Life is everywhere everywhen,

At least in essence,

And of course

It depends on your definition.

Did you ever meet a living stone,

A stone that stirs, that travels,

That eats, grows, heals its wounds,

A stone that breeds its kind?

Yes, all stones are alive

Essentially, potentially;

At least they move around

When weather and circumstances permit, Going mostly downhill,

Sometimes waiting centuries

In a deep pool in some stream

For a torrent wild enough to drive them on.

And stones are crystals,

Rock crystals that grow, molecule by molecule, Filling their own cracks or wounds, Reproducing themselves slowly

But perfectly.

One'kind is even magnetic and attracts iron. The ancient Chinese called it

‘The stone that loves.’

Larger mineral-like organisms also live

In their patient, plodding way:

Dunes drift and glaciers creep,

As do mountains, islands, volcanoes and rivers—«that are born in the clouds and die in the sea—and lakes and storms,

All moving as is their wont,

Even fires on Earth

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And whirling spots on the sun.

In fact there is compelling evidence

That the earth lives as a superorganism,

Along with moons, planets, comets, stars, galaxies

And other celestial bodies,

And that, most of all,

The Universe itself

Is a growing, metabolizing supersuperBeing

In very truth alive.

IV—POLARITY

Do you think matter is made of particles?

Waves? Or what?

Where is the line between body and mind?

How could God,

Presumably the epitome of goodness,

If He exists,

Create a world harboring as much evil, pain, ugliness,

Disease and war as we find in this world?

How could He?

These are enigmas, paradoxes,

Seemingly unsolvable;

Yet somehow, if one relaxes one’s heart

And opens one’s mind,

And wonders the right wonders,

They become resolvable.

Take Saint George and his dragon.

If Earth is a good world, one asks oneself,

Why the dragon?

Obviously because he was needed.

Can you, in fact, imagine

Any way George could have made it to sainthood

Without him?

There is a polarity about good and evil, you see.

To a baby, getting spanked for trying to climb out of his cradle

Is a dreadful experience: an ‘evil.’

But to his anxious mother, trying to tell him NO

In sign language, it is a constructive deed and ‘good.’

The same act thus has two poles

Expressing opposite aspects of good and ill.

Similarly, to mankind as a whole, war is evil,

A spanking of civilization,

Something to be outlawed at all costs.

Yet, for all we know, in the perspective

Of spiritual or cosmic forces far beyond man’s understanding

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War could possibly serve some useful Maternal purpose as a sign language, A challenge to try our souls!

Even perhaps, relatvely speaking,

A constructive, spiritual purpose.

For polarity is part of the symmetry of nature That brings a relativity, a complementarity To many qualities in this life,

To cause and effect, to predator and prey, Male and female, Creator and creature, Concrete and abstract, science and religion, Mortality and immortality, yin and yang. And other seeming opposites.

Free will, one of the most puzzling of these, Has for its counterpart, predestination, Which turns out to be really its expanded aspect, A sort of bird’s-eye view of the familiar scene Beheld from one dimension more.

And so it goes

With body and mind,

The first enmeshed in space, in time,

The second free of both,

Like poles of Earth and other paradoxes Which are, in a sense,

Really just different sides

Of the same thing.

V—TRANSCENDENCE

Have you ever wondered

Why each year you live

Seems to pass faster than the year before?

There’s a law at work here

Called Transcendence,

Influencing time and space and consciousness of self,

For each year lived has to be a smaller portion

Of one’s experience to date.

To the year-old baby a year is a lifetime,

To the ten-year old a tenth as much,

To the centenarian but one percent of his experience

While people he knows appear, bloom and die

Like flowers in a garden.

The same is as true of space as time. The baby learns the inch and foot Before he knows the yard,

Then, as his horizon expands,

The mile, the acre . . . the light—year . . . Progression from the finite

Toward the Infinite, you see.

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Yet as you gain the mile, you do not lose the inch,

Nor as you gain the year do you lose the minute or the hour,

For finitude is a tool of learning,

Learning the little before the big,

The simple before the complex.

Transcendence affects the self too,

For one begins as a fertile egg,

The seed-soul, stirring, seeking,

Becoming a pupil in the Soul School of Earth,

Growing in consciousness,

In awareness of other beings,

Using the tools of finitude,

The self in space and time,

The while developing spiritually

Through life, through death Death, which evolved only later in evolution because it had

Survival value for the multicelled organisms Death that we cannot live without.

VI—GERMINATION

A nova is an exploding star,

Climax in the life of a blazing world,

An example of the cyclic vitality of all worlds That grow and mature, ferment, germinate. Germination happens only once per world,

A crucial event amid the unfolding phases of life That develop mind, speech and spirituality

In ways still scarcely known to history,

To science, to philosophy.

Earth, for example, third planet Of a modest star called Sun, Is germinating right now. After five billion years of slow, quiet evolvement Plus a few quick centuries of writing, printing, Industrial revolution, technological bloom And improved communication, Enabling her emerging mind for the first time To pool its knowledge, Suddenly in the twentieth century Earth, with her human population, Is practically exploding!

Man has won the planetary tournament of evolution

By dominating all competing forms of life,

Speed of travel has climbed a thousandfold

From the gallop Of the horse

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To the whoosh of the space rocket.

Revolutions have occurred in nearly every branch of learning,

Man has explored not only his planet’s entire surface

But penetrated from the atom to the sky

And into outer space.

He is now seriously trying to unite his home world

Politically and culturally, through standardization,

Liberalization, free compulsory education for all.

Even spiritual unity must soon loom as an attainable goal,

An aspect of Earth’s flowering into a mature superorganism All this in fulfillment of the natural,

The inevitable, evolutionary process

Of planetary germination.

VII—DIVINITY

Who or What runs the Universe?

Is there a plan behind the daisy, the hummingbird,

The whale, the world?

Who conceived the eye back in the primeval darkness

Of early evolution?

Who designed the fish’s air bladder in the ancient deep

As if foreseeing its future as a breathing lung

Upon the dry land?

And out of what beginning evolved the mind?

By any stretch could mind have been mindlessly created?

Does science have an answer

To the Voice out of the Whirlwind which asked Job

‘Who hath put wisdom in the inward parts ?’

Is the world really drifting along without pilot,

Steering itself automatically,

Running its own affairs at random?

Could the Universe, just conceivably,

Have created Itself?

Surely there is Mystery in this Universe,

Not only somewhere and somewhen but everywhere everywhen

And far, far beyond the scope of man’s feeble

Capacity to comprehend.

For man, puny, mortal and finite,

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As he is in this nether phase,

Is permitted to visualize neither an end to space

Nor space without end;

Nor can he even grasp a start or a finish of time,

Nor any sort of beginning that hath no beginning

Nor any end that hath no end.

Hence the Mystery,

The abiding, pervasive, universal Unknowability

That many call by the name of God.

But what matters it what you call It?

It is abstruse, bewilderingly abstruse, and remains so

Whether or no we accept that somehow by Its agency

Out of utter nothingness is arisen

Everything in the Universe.

Its station plainly implies intelligence,

Indeed Intelligence so far beyond the human

As to justify the adjective ‘Divine.’

And this seems to be relative.

If a human adult represents divinity to a baby or an animal,

So must the animal be divine to a vegetable,

The vegetable to a mineral . . .

Likewise, as wrote Paul to the Corinthians,

‘The foolishness of God is wiser than men.’

And there is presumably a hierarchy in Divinity above

As well as below us Even as the doings and thoughts of humanity and of Earth

Are but a negligiblejot

In the eternal consciousness of God.

Even as the horizon of knowledge expands outward from our planet

Accompanied by the inexorable horizon of Mystery

Which expands even faster and farther than knowledge,

Leading man’s consciousness

To new dimensions.

Thus doth Divinity

Embrace all the other six mysteries of life Even though callow man comprehendeth it not, Even though the Mystery remaineth

So far beyond earthly finitude

That no eye but God’s Own Eye

Hath the capacity to see

GOD.

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6. SOME THEMES AND IMAGES IN THE WRITINGS OF BAHA’U’LLAH

BAHiYYIH NAQJAVANi

S trive, Opeople, to gain admittance into this vast Immensity for which Godordainedneither beginning nor end, in which His voice hath been raised, and over which have been wafted the

sweet yavours ofho/iness and glory.

IT is impossible for the reader of such words to remain detached, for he is a seeker as soon as he begins to read. Faced with the vast immensity of the written Revelation of Baha’u’llah, he responds like a lover to its imagery, like a servant to its exhortations, and like a passionate believer to its message of Divine Unity. Indeed, the Writings of Bahá’u’lláh are some of the mightiest gates through which the seeker can strive to gain admittance into the courts of God, for here one can clearly catch the accents of that voice and can sense the sweet savours of understanding from its melodies; here one can discover, through the mysterious affinity shared by Books and Gates in this Dispensation, the symbolic archetype of the many metaphorical and literal gates that stand wide open in this Day, summoning mankind unto them.

From its inception this Cause has taught man the ways of worship through the medium of language which is alike the channel of his praise and the expression of his service: the Báb, through His Name ‘The Primal Point”, is both the Gate and the Initiatoroflanguage, in its most profound sense of divine revelation, and from the Bayén, ‘the Mother Book’, proceeds the inspiration that forms the Letters of the Living, those motions of spirit and sacrifice in the world of creation. The mystical harmony between the language of pen and spirit disclosed in the Writings is possible ofexpression between word and deed in the lives of men:

I render Thee thanks . . . that Thou hast taught Thy servants how to make mention of Thee and revealed unto them the ways whereby they can supplicate Thee through Th y most holy and exalted tongue and Thy most august and precious speech.

The reconciliation of word and deed is likewise reflected in the mingling of justice and

Gleanings from the Writings of Bahá’u’lláh.

mercy in relation to the Writings, for while a single letter from the mouth of God is the mother of all utterances and the begetter of all creation, it can also decide between all created things, causing them who are devoted to T hee to ascend unto the summit of glory and the infidels to fall into thelowest abyss. At the same time words are the repositories of God’s infinite grace; the sheer abundance and poetry of Bahá’u’lláh’s language is an affirmation of the statement that from eternity the door of Thy grace hath remained wide open. Such words are tokens of His immeasurable bounty:

Through the power released by these exalted words He hath lent afresh impulse and set a new direction to the birds of men 's hearts and hath obliterated every trace of restriction and limitation from God’s Holy Book.

0 Comrades, He cries to those who whether reading or seeking stand before the vast immensity of His Cause, the gates that open on the Placeless stand wide . . . This, He attests, is verily an evidence of His tender mercy unto men.

To enter such gates requires both strength and submission: the strength of dichotomies and the submission to the widening wonder of paradox. The angels are of fire and snow; the food of them who haste to meet Him is the fragments of their broken hearts; the true believer is both a river of life eternal and a flame of fire. He must at one moment be consumed and also rise phoenix-like from the flame to become the source ofanother’s attraction. The reader struggles against the limitations of antithesis in his mind in order to resolve them through action, and yearns like the angels, the lovers and the believers, to translate these words into acts of praise and dedication, to sing aloud of His glory, to circle with deeds of love around Him and stand in servitude before His throne. The traditional dichotomy between

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words and deeds is strangely transformed so that words become deeds, for the reader cannot remain static in this vast immensity but must be characterized by the forward striving of a life as well as a mind. The understanding and insight he receives from the language of Baha’u’llah demands expression in his acts. Anything less would belittle the nature of the initial invitation to strive; anything else would indeed be blasphemy.

0 miserable me! Were I to attempt merely to describe T hee, such an attempt would itself be an evidence of my impiety, and would attest my heedlessness in the face of the clear and resplendent tokens of Thy oneness.

Since limitation is the hallmark of any human endeavour, it might be in keeping with the nature of this article to begin with a necessarily limited consideration of dust as a symbol of that state in the Writings. Again and again the circumference of the human heart, like the surface of earth, is stressed as a fixed condition, one that may not be transcended. Baha’u’llah writes unequivocally that men can neverhope to pass beyond the bounds which by Thy behest and decree have been fixed within their own hearts. We are children of dust, weeds that spring out of that dust, moving forms of dust and sons of earth. Easily overwhelmed by shades of utter loss, man keeps turning and returning to water and clay. Content with transient dust he sinks into the slough Of heedlessness ; the meadow of his heart too readily becomes a pasture of desire and passion. His hands are too easily soiled by the dust of self and hypocrisy. Within him and about him threatens the abyss of his limitations as he moves with stumbling slowness across the dust-heap of a mortal world.

The possibilities within these limits, however, are boundless. Once the reader recognizes his kinship with it, the metaphor invites him further. He realizes that both in the language itself and in the reality of his own being there lies a path across his earth-nature that beckons him beyond those gates he has already seen shimmering before him, a path upon which the particles of dust appear to gleam like gems. His dusty limitations become the expression of his most perfected virtues along these paths of service and ways of sanctity; his humility is his diadem on this highway of love and this pathway of Thy loved ones. The essence of his being is moulded and sustained by the clay of love and grace, and

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words—the written expression of man both as mystery and limitation—like atoms of dust hold within them a door that leadeth . . . t0 the station of absolute certitude. Through such words the rivers of Divine utterance have flowed and caused the tender herbs of wisdom and understanding to spring from the soil of his heart, and from such soil the hyacinths of a greater knowledge may also grow. Indeed, such a heart is not merely a garden of eternal delight but a throne sanctified for His descent, a Sinai upon which His mysteries are vouchsafed, a place whose loftiness and dignity should never be defiled.

At the heart of this lofty station, however, lies the paradox of humility, for the earth can only be of such a transcendent nature when ennobled by the footsteps of T hy chosen ones in Thy Path. To be a martyr in My path and shed thy life-blood 0n the dust are fragments of the ideal evinced by the earth itself: witness with what absolute submissiveness I allow myself to be trodden beneath the feet of men. The actions of men must be of such humility that every atom of dust beneath their feet may attest the depth of their devotion and their words be of such quality that these same atoms of dust will be thrilled by its influence. Humility, therefore, is the station towards which one strives in approaching the immensity of service.

Having stepped forward onto this path and recognized the paradox inherent within the very dust upon which one treads, the motion forward both for the reader and the seeker is most simply conveyed by the imagery of courts and thresholds, steps and portals, canopies and shelters. The progress (if one can convey so multitudinous an approach by so flat a word) guides the reader through courts of ever increasing beauty and gardens of intoxicating nearness, like the worshipper in his approach towards the Shrines. Shoghi Effendi, in his creation of these literal gardens was not only providing a protection and establishing a respect around the holy places, but was also interpretating exquisitely the Words of Baha’u’llah; for these gardens reflect with haunting accuracy the shimmering presence of inner and outer courts, of marble steps that ever rise, and gates that ever open to the seeking spirit of the reader in his parallel progress through the language of Baha’u’llah. It is a language that is replete with the concept of kingship. This is the underlying theme that reverberates within the splendid architecture of courts and finds its nearest

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resolution in its references to the awe, the beauty and the fragrance of the King Who occupies them. Both His Person and His courtly surroundings are metaphors of approach, degree and perspective by which the reader can comprehend the nature of attainment in this Cause.

To begin with he finds himself among those who stand(s) at the gate of the city of Thy nearness and is granted the inestimable bounty of approaching the courts of His presence, the canopy of His majesty and the precincts of His mercy. By the light of God concealed in the wellhidden pavilions he is able to see the path clearly enough before him and watch as it ascends into the loftiest chambers of paradise. With his whole being poised to follow in the direction of this insight, he sets himself towards the adored sanctuary of Thy Revelation and of Thy Beauty and is able to draw nearer the habitation of Thy throne. Finally,in his blessedness, he finds that he has entered Thy presence and caught the accents of Thy voice. It is here, in this dazzling proximity where he can cling to the hem of His Robe, smell the musk-scented perfume of His hair and hear the Words that flow from His sugar-shedding lips, that the reader confronts another paradox. He realizes that his considered proximity is nothing but remoteness in relation to the magnitude beyond the metaphor:

Now that Thou hast made them to abide under the shade of the canopy of Thy mercy, do Thou assist them to attain what must befit so august a station. Sufler them not, O my Lord, to be numbered with them who, though enjoying near access to Thee, have been kept back from recognizing Th y face, and who, though meeting with Thee, are deprived of Thy presence . . .

It is by now a familiar paradox and has been met before, but the relative simplicity of its presence in a single word such as ‘dust’ is further enhanced and its orbit of association and implication widened as the complexity of the language forces the reader to reconsider his original discovery through the application of a whole metaphor. Then again, within the image itself, are a number of layers of comprehension which the reader might approach. The topical allusions alone, with their disturbing reference to the treachery and egoism which constantly surrounded the Blessed Beauty both from within and without His household, are a disconcerting

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enough interpretation of this paradox. But there is also an uneasy immediacy in these words which applies to the present instant in which they are being read, and implicates the reader as he stands preoccupied by his reading and is equally threatened by his preoccupation from having near access to Thee and from attaining the court of Th y glory.

An abrupt return to a reconsideration of one’s abject limitations seems a necessary prerequisite to the motion of ‘circling’ that must accompany any step towards proximity along this path. The gulf of separation that yawns between the servant and his King, the lover and his Beloved, the reader and the Goal of his desire, is a measure of this process:

Others were able to approach T hee but were kept back from beholding Th y face. Still others were permitted in their eagerness to look upon Thee, to enter the precincts of Thy court, but they allowed the veils Of the imaginations of Thy creatures and the wrongs inflicted by the oppressors among Th y people to come in between them and Thee.

Separation also has its own perverse architecture, for below the ascending tiers of court and pavilion that provide the pedestrian mind of the reader with a measure of the proximity of his Goal, there is a converse motion possible, down into this darksome well which the vain imaginations of T hine adversaries have built, down farther into this blindpit which the idlefancies of the wicked among Th y creatures have digged. Sufl'ocated by remoteness in the stale and cavernous dungeons of his separation from God the reader might also be dwelling in a place within whose walls no voice can be heardexcept the sound of the echo, a place of thick darkness in which the creaking Of the raven obliterates the melodies of the very Words he reads. The Most Great Prison and the Siyah-Qal become symbols of the contingent world bearing down upon the soul aspiring towards God. J ust as gates were the means of literal and metaphorical approach and were always open, always beckoning, so prisons and the constraint of chains and veils are also always present, threatening and denying the seeker access to his Beloved. This separation, whether imposed from within or from without, is significantly felt at the instant when proximity seems imminent. This is the Day, Baha’u’llah states, when every atom of the earth hath been made to vibrate and cry out .' ‘O Thou Who art the

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Revealer of signs and the King ofcreation ! I verily perceive the fragrance of Thy presence . . .' But within the same passage this very atom declares: ‘I know not, however, O Thou the Beloved Of the world and the Desire Of the nations, the place wherein the throne of Thy majesty hath been establishednor the seat which hath been made Th y footstool and been illumined with the splendours Of the light of T hy face. '

The ‘unknowing’ that must always impose itself between the reader and the Writings of Baha’u’llah is an ancient formless tradition in mystical poetry and finds its most tangible expression in the imagery of this Revelation. What was a cloud in an earlier dispensation is transformed by Baha’u’llah’s pen, and through the metaphors of separation, becomes an intensely felt, almost physical anguish. At the instant that the reader grasps the significance of the Words he reads, he becomes overwhelmed by his devastating unworthiness to approach such meaning. He realizes, moreover, that the meaning he has grasped is necessarily puny and pathetic, a play of shadows, a feeble echo of the Kingdom of Thy Names which is far above his comprehension and is itself created through the movement of Thy fingers and tremblethforfear of T hee. The burst of praise that rises to his lips is a mere reflection of those same limitations against which he has striven with such zeal:

Whatsoever hath been adorned with the robe of words is but Thy creation which hath been generated in Thy realm and begotten through

the operation of T h y will and is wholly unworth y

of Thy highness and falleth short of Thine

excellence. And finally this anguish is stretched to its limits through the added dimension afforded to the reader of the presence, within the Words, of the Author Himself. He is not only, through His bounty and grace, speaking on behalf of man as his advocate with words of tender compassion that can be echoed; He is also speaking in His Own capacity, with His Own personal anguish, so that the separation experienced is that of the Manifestation from the source of His light: And at whatever time my pen ascribeth glory to any one of Thy names, methinks I can hear the voice of its lamentation in its remoteness from T hee, and can recognize its cry because of its separation from Thy Self.

To the frail reader standing on the furthest

shores of this vast immensity, dazzled by orb

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within orb oflight, it might seem that his initial presumption to strive can only set him adrift without direction on this luminous ocean, for he seems only able to measure his attempts by means of his progressive failures. Even when he thinks he has finally grasped, on the most superficial level, the rise and fall of the metaphors and can at least stay afloat upon the waves of language, he discovers that:

It should be remembered in this connection that the one true God is in H imself exal ted aba ve proximity and remoteness. His reality transcends such limitations. H is relationship to H is creatures knoweth no degrees. That some are near and others are far is to be ascribed to the manifestations themselves.

And with this new paradox, this new return to a contemplation of limitation as a means of reaching towards his Goal, the reader draws nearer than he ever has before to an understanding of the nature of Baha’u’llah’s language.

Since God must remain unknowable and above all degree, and since the language of limitation is the only means whereby man can either know or express his unknowing, it becomes clear that the Manifestation becomes the spiritual reality of words, of metaphors and of language. He is the Word, the Primal Point, the song of the Nightingale; He holds within Him both extremes of proximity and remoteness in their most perfect balance; He is the vivid and acute stillness at the heart of all the polarities experienced by the reader, the seeker, the lover and believer. The palpable remoteness that lay couched in the imagery of dust all the way from the path through the gates to the Placeless, the play of attraction that resonated in the language of the lover, the tangible space that existed throughout the vast architecture of courts and kingship, all compel the reader to recognize his reliance on language as his only means of understanding, and recognize at the same time that any language other than that of the Manifestation, any word other than that most mighty Word, and any name that is not the King of Names, cannot hope to transcend the limitations of dust. This recognition or confession of the reader’s powerlessness to strive beyond the limits of his understanding, or travel further than the Words themselves will go, constitutes

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the utmost limit to which they who lift their hearts to Thee can rise; it is the highest station afforded both reader and seeker. for in this condition they come closest to discovering the hidden gift in the written storehouse of the Manifestation of God, and admit to their impotence to attain the retreats of Thy Sublime Knowledge. It is so intrinsic to the original desire of the reader to strive towards the unknown that he finds the intimate voice of the Manifestation uttering his most poignant thoughts:

Where can separation from Thee be found, 0 my God, so that reunion with Thee may be clearly recognized at the appearance of the light of Th y unity and the revelation of the splendours Of the Sun of Thy oneness?

Now, as the reader is responding to the Words of the Manifestation as his most wished-for reunion while the Words themselves are giving voice to an experienCe of the uttermost separation, he is transfigured by the thrust and force of the hyperbole and ambiance into something comparable to angels, those embodiments of balance and conflict, who hang suspended above their own extremes of sorrow and joy by the grace of God. In this condition of helplessness and dependency upon the Words, the reader finds himself, like the angels of snow and fire, protected again from both extremities of reunion and separation by the merciful structure of Bahá’u’lláh’s language. Instead of extinguishing his precarious being by the expression of a climax, by an arrival as it were at the furthermost reaches of his understanding, Baha’u’llah controls the reader’s inward state by presenting this climactic discovery not as an end in itself but rather as a means towards an end that, for his own protection, must still remain out of sight. In other words, instead of the powerlessness of man, his limitation, his weakness, his dependence upon grace being the focal point of the prayer, it becomes the grounds for his beseeching:

1, therefore, beseech Thee, by this very powerlessness which is beloved of Thee, and

THE Bahá’í WORLD

which Thou hast decreed as the goal of them

that have reached and attained Thy court

. . .not to deprive them that have set their hopes

on Thee of the wonders of Thy mercy, nor to

withhold from such as have sought Thee the treasures of Thy grace.

Part of the mysterious subtlety and power of Baha’u’llah’s language lies in the contrapuntal relationship between the grounds of His beseeching and its appeal. Often, as in the beautiful Dawn Prayer for the Fast, one cannot comprehend the object for which one is beseeching without listening more closely to the grounds on which one’s appeal is raised. In this case the reader calls for grace to support and protect his limitations by this very powerlessness which is beloved of Thee. He seems to have come full circle. The limitations against which he struggled earlier now become the means of his attainment. Here in the vulnerability of his essence is couched the ageless Covenant of God; here in the midmost heart of his humility reposes the eternal promise of the Beloved, assuring him that he will be graced, he will be visited again and again, in spite of his weakness and because of his unworthiness. Here as he stands, small and insignificant on the edge of the vast immensity of his relationship with the Writings of Bahá’u’lláh, the reader finds himself protected from utter loss by the promise that within this immensity may be found His footsteps also, and may be seen the lineaments of His blessed Face. And here again the cherished sweetness of this Covenant becomes the grounds of his beseeching and resolves the original exhortation that had challenged the reader to set out on this endless discovery:

I entreat Thee, by Thy footsteps in this wilderness, and by the words ‘Here am I. Here am I.’ which Thy chosen Ones have uttered in this immensity, and by the breaths of Thy Revelation and the gentle winds of the Dawn of Th y M anifestation, to ordain that I may gaze 0n Thy Beauty and observe whatsoever is in Th y Book.

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7. BAHA’U’LLAH’S MODEL FOR WORLD UNITY

DOUGLAS MARTIN

The following is the text of an address delivered under the title ‘Baha’u’llah’s Model for World Fellowship’ at the fortieth anniversary meeting of the World Congress of Faiths, at Canterbury, England, 26—30 July 1976. The Congress was founded in 1936 by the British writer and explorer, Sir Francis Younghusband, and a group of like-minded thinkers from various religious backgrounds. Its purpose is to encourage greater harmony and understanding among the followers of all Faiths. In response to an invitation from the organizers, the Guardian asked Mr. George Townshend to present a paper on the Bahá’í Faith at the inaugural meeting in 1936. During the years which followed, Bahá’ís participated in various ways in the affairs of the Congress, and at the fortieth anniversary meeting were invited to provide one of the six major addresses, outlining the Bahá’í contribution to ‘inter-Faith fellowship’. The Universal House of J ustice arranged for Mr. Douglas Martin, secretary of the National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of Canada, to prepare and deliver the address which follows. Other papers discussed the contributions,

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respectively, of Buddhism, Judaism, Islém, Christianity and Hinduism.

IT is a great privilege to have the opportunity of addressing the World Congress of Faiths on this important anniversary. It is a great pleasure as well, and especially so for a Bahá’í speaker, conscious of the remarkable extent to which the central theme of the Revelation of Bahá’u’lláh, enunciated over a century ago, finds itself reflected in the concept and purpose of the Congress.

Resting on the conviction that divine revelation is universal and that mankind is one family, the World Congress of Faiths seeks to find and share spiritual truths which are so transparently clear that anyone, in the words of Sir Francis Younghusband, ‘would see that what we prayed to was what they prayed to, and what we worshipped was what they worshipped.’1 The phrase which seems to have best stood the test of time in summing up this great purpose is ‘spiritual fellowship.’2 Such an ideal is not 1Sir Francis Younghusband, address to the Conference of

Some Living Religions within the British Empire, 1924: Transaczions of the Conference ofSome Living Religions in the British Empire (London: Messrs. Duckworth & Co. Ltd.. 1925), p. 18. Younghusband, cited by K. D. D. Henderson in Francis Younglmsband and the M ysticism of Shared Endeavour, 1976 Inaugural Younghusband Memorial Lecture (London: World Congress of Faiths, May 1976).

2 Marcus Braybrooke, Faiths in Fellowship (London: World Congress of Faiths, 1976). pp. e7.

merely in harmony with the Bahá’í teachings but lies close to their very heart. Over a century ago Bahá’u’lláh wrote: Gather ye together, and for the sake of God resolve to root out whatever is the source of contention amongst you. Then will the eflulgence of the world's great Luminary envelop the whole earth, and its inhabitants become the citizens of one city . . . There can be no doubt whatever that the peoples of the world, of whatever race or religion, derive their inspiration from one heavenly Source, and are the subjects of one God.3 My aim in the remarks which follow, therefore, will be to share with you the contribution which the Bahá’í Cause has made to the work to which the Congress has committed itself and to suggest some implications for the next stage in the prosecution of the task handed on by Sir Francis. I do so with some diffidence. Apart from my awareness of the spiritual and intellectual credentials of the group which has gathered together this weekend here in Canterbury, I am conscious, as I am sure all of us are, of the hopes which those who have gone

3Baha'i'u’llz'ih, Gleanings from the Writings of Bahd'u'llzilz, trans. Shoghi Effendi, rev. ed. (Wilmette, Ill.: Bahá’í Publishing Trust, 1952), p. 217.

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before us must hold for this fortieth anniversary meeting: Sir Francis himself, Sir Herbert Samuel, Dr. Radhakrishnan, Sir ‘Abdu’l~Qadir, Baron Palmstierna, Lady Ravensdale, Lord Sorenson, and a galaxy of others.

Beyond this, I am keenly sensible of my inadequacy before the standard set by my Bahá’í predecessor in this forum at the inaugural Congress in Queen’s Hall in 1936. The organizers of the Congress had invited His Eminence Shoghi Effendi Rabbani, Guardian of the Bahá’í Cause, to deliver one of the major addresses. Although it was not possible, for a number of reasons, for Shoghi Effendi to take part in person, he placed very great importance on the work of the Congress and commissioned a paper which was prepared and presented by one of his closest Bahá’í collaborators here in Europe, Mr. George Townshend, formerly Archdeacon of Clonfert and Canon of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin.‘ I will want to return in a moment to the subject of that paper.

Before moving into my theme, however, I would like to preface my remarks with digressions into two areas which seem to me to be essential to providing an intelligible context. The first concerns the history of the interfaith movement throughout the world; the second relates to the method which those of us who are interested in the subject must, I feel, pursue if we are to contribute effectively to it. The first may be dealt with briefly, as our friend Marcus Braybrooke has so concisely covered a part of the ground in the introduction to his recent and very interesting history of the Congress.2

It is to our credit here in the West that the first approaches to the study of other faiths were initiated in Europe and America. The reason no doubt has less to do with our particular religious background, which of course was JudeoChristian, than with the fact that the West had become the most highly developed, the most expansionist, and the most self—conscious expression of material civilization. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries the attention of a few enlightened minds in the West began to turn sympathetically toward the major sources of Asiatic philosophical and religious

1 ‘Bahá’u’lláh's Ground Plan of World Fellowship,‘ in Proceedings of the World C ongress ofFaiths (London: World Congress of Faiths. 1936). pp. 299—3l l.

2 See Braybrooke, Faiths in Fellowship

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thought, and translations appeared of such Indian classics as the Bhagavad Gita, Ramayana, and sections of the Upanishads, as well as of the major Islamic poets, Rt’imi, Hafiz, and Sa‘di.3 These new resources deeply influenced the romantic renaissance in my own part of the world and in time attracted widespread popular interest, both in Europe and America.4 The comparative study of religion became a serious and respectable intellectual pursuit. A literature impressive both in its quantity and in the quality of its scholarship rapidly grew up, producing such classics as J. F. Clarke’s massive Ten Great Religions and Max Miiller’s Introduction to the Science ofReligian.S By 1873 Boston University had established the first chair of comparative religion ; and Princeton, New York, Cornell, and Chicago followed this lead over the next two decades. In 1890 the American Society of Comparative Religion came into being. Similar developments were occurring in Europe.6

The event which dramatically introduced the subject to the general public, however, took place in neither the academic nor the publishing world. On the morning of September 1 1, 1893, in the Hall of Columbus at the World’s Fair in Chicago, representatives of the ‘ten chief religions of the world’ gathered in the first ‘Parliament of A11 Religions”.7 No words at this late date can suggest the thrill of discovery which swept through the Parliament and through the reading public. It was this intense expectancythe belief that mankind was poised on the threshold of a new age of human brotherhood and spiritual discovery~which accounts for the extraordinary scenes that took place in Chicago.

3 Arthur Christy, The Orient in American Tranxcanden/alixm:

A study of Emerson, Thoreau, and Alcott (New York:

Octagon, 1963). A survey of the original transcendentalist

contacts with specific Oriental religious classics may be found

in Farhang Jehanpur, ‘Oriental Influences on the Work of

Ralph Waldo Emerson,’ Dissertation, University of Hull,

1965.

Louis Henry Jordan, Comparative Religion: [Is Genesis and

Growth(Edinburgh:T.&T.C1ark, 1905). Stow Persons, Free

Religion: An American Faith (New Haven: Yale University

Press, 1947). Joachim Wach, The Comparative Study of

Religion, ed. Joseph M. Kitagawa (New York: Columbia

University Press, [958).

James Freeman Clarke, Ten Great Religions: An Essay in

Comparative Theology (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1887)‘

Max Miiller. Introduction to the Science of Religion (privately

printed, 1870).

” Jordan, Comparative Religion, pp. 383, 389—90.

‘ Forthe complete collection of the papers delivered anda brief _ historical introduction see Neeley's History of the Parliament ofRe/igiam‘. ed. W. R. Houghton (Chicago: F. T. Neeley. 1893).

a

M

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One thinks, for example, of the storm of emotion which greeted the innocent salutation of a then obscure Hindu monk Vivekananda when he opened his address with the words ‘sisters and brothers of America !’, an emotion which swept the audience of four thousand participants to their feet, applauding uncontrollably, many of them in tears.1

I mention this feature of the Parliament because no mere recital of the program and the list of participants can suggest the impact the Parliament had on North American consciousness. Beyond this spirit of enthusiasm the papers which were delivered make interesting and instructive reading in themselves. Although there were ample expressions of dogmatism and bigotry, and although a number of the participants apparently saw the study of comparative religion chiefly as another tool for proselytism, the great majority of those who took part clearly felt that a historical breakthrough had occurred in terms of human brotherhood. Marcus Braybrooke has traced some of the subsequent efforts to capitalize on this widespread sentiment, of which efforts the World Congress of Faiths has been the most impressive, the most consistent, and the most organized.2

However discouraging the struggle since then may often have seemed, and however difficult it may be to draw connections between the work of the Congress and developments in the world at large, there is no doubt that the vision of a handful of men and women in the latter half of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries now enjoys widespread public sympathy throughout the world among people of all faiths and is served in varying ways by impressive educational, cultural, and ecumenical agencies at the national, the international, and even the local levels. We could well wonder whether activities such as this Congress may not be in danger of becoming the victim of their own success.

Any such concern quickly dissolves when we examine the modern condition against the background of the nineteenth-century hope. How far short of the vision has the achievement actually fallen! The early Transcendentalists who discovered Rumi and the Gita, and the masses of people who eagerly followed the sessions of the great Parliament did not hope merely to deepen their understanding of their

1 ibid., p. 64. 2 Braybrooke, Faiths in Fellowship. pp. 173. 3~9.

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own and of other faiths or to overcome religious prejudices, important as these goals are. Nor did the impulse which moved them see itself as being fulfilled through interfaith dialogues or even through interfaith services of prayer, precious as are such experiences. The organizers of the Parliament summed up their vision in the following words: “Believing that God is, and that He has not left Himself without witness; believing that the influence of religion . i . is the most vital force in the social order of every people; and convinced that of a truth God is no respecter of persons, but that in every nation he that feareth Him and worketh righteousness is accepted of Him, . . . [we propose] to consider the foundations of all religious faiths, . . . and thus to contribute to those forces which shall bring about the unity of the race in the worship of God and the service of man.’3 The dream of these nineteenth-century idealists found one of its most articulate heirs and most able prosecutors in Sir Francis Younghusband. It is clear that Sir F rancis saw fellowship amon g the followers of all faiths not merely as an end in itself but as the primary force contributing to the unification of the human race: ‘A new world order is now the dream of men, but for this a new spirit is needed. This is the special concern of men of religioninonChristians as well as Christians—all combined to create a world consciousness, a world conscience, a world loyalty, and a sense of world fellowship, and to provide the spiritual impetus, the dynamic and the direction to statesmen and economists whose business it is to give it bodily expression.’4 And it is this which brings me to the second part of the context in which I would like to set my remarks on the Bahá’í Cause. As you know, Bahá’ís have taken a very lively interest in the work of this Congress from the time of its inception. If it is not an impertinence for me to say so, we have been deeply impressed by the way in which the Congress has consistently avoided what Teilhard de Chardin has called the blind alleys of evolution which have so enticingly opened for you at every hand: the pressures to concentrate energies primarily on an examination of the minutiae of theological differences in a vain attempt to resolve them ; the tendency to

3 Neeley's History, p. 24. “ Cited in Braybrooke, Failhx in Fellowship, p. 14.

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see this universal forum as a platform for proselytism in the interests of this or that member faith; and the greatest lure of them all, the temptation to ‘fill in the gap’ in the divine scheme by seeking to create a synthetic universal religion.1 In this respect the Congress clearly represents an important advance over the Parliament of Religions and over any of its other successor movements; to this integrity of purpose I know my fellow Bahá’ís around the world would expect me to pay particular tribute on this historic occasion.

The work of the Congress which has won our warmest admiration is that which can, I think, be fairly characterized as scientific in its general spirit and method, if by scientific method we mean the systematic, directed, and conscious application of our mental faculties t0 the phenomena of existence.2 The method is universal in scope. Man’s experience over the past century and a half indicates clearly that it can be applied to all phenomena, visible or invisible. The truths it yields are admittedly always relative—never absolute—proofs, but rather the most probable statements on given subjects which human effort has been able to produce, and in every case considerably more probable and acceptable than such a statement’s negation. But these relative truths have also been the keys to the transformation of the conditions of life on our planet.

It is surely significant that intellectual history reveals a process in which the scientific method has been progressively applied to increasingly complex phenomena. Thus it is that, building upon the foundation which mathematics had earlier laid, physics, chemistry, biology, and anthropology each in turn emerged as a discrete and mature intellectual discipline. Nor is it surprising that in time the method should have been applied to the emotional, intellectual, and social aspects of human life and that we should see the painful development in our own day of psychology, psychiatry, and sociology, which are clearly destined in time to take their places as mature and responsible sciences in every sense of that word.

The work of the World Congress of Faiths

1 Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. The Phenonwmm ofMan, [trans Bernard Wall] (New York: Harper. 1959), p. 237.

3 I am indebted to my friend Dr. William Hatchet. professor of mathematics at Université Laval, for his insights and guidance in the preparation of this section of the paper.

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seems to me to lie directly in this great tradition. From its very beginning the interest in the underlying nature of all religions involved an attempt to apply the principles of scientific study to those phenomena which extend beyond even the social and emotional aspects of human life.3 I am speaking, of course, of the systems of spiritual and moral truth which the great majority of those most familiar with them have insisted are dimensions of the historical phenomenon they call Revelation.

The effort represents the most ambitious scientific undertaking which man has ever attempted or can ever attempt, since it aims at penetrating the most subtle, the most complex, and the most comprehensive aspects of existence, aspects which profoundly influence and perhaps determine those other phenomena which the social sciences seek to grasp. My point is that true science views all existence as a single continuum and recognizes, to use the marvelous words of Sir Julian Huxley, that humanity is ‘evolution become conscious of itself.’4

The problem is compounded by the fact that it is difficult or impossible to establish the features or in some cases even the existence of the original impulses which gave rise to the cluster of cultural forms and forces we group under the heading ‘World Religions. ’ The real nature of the original teachings of the Buddha, the events of J esus’ life, the era in which Zoroaster lived and the nature of His influence, and even the historical existence of Krishna—all of these present the most serious problems to the student of the history of religions. The life and person of Muhammad are, of course, much more accessible, as is the Qur’án, but even here disagreements so serious as to produce many conflicting schools of thought testify to the magnitude of the problems which the sources present. Let me say in passing that, much as we must respect the pioneer work done by Professor J ames and by his modern imitators, I do not see how the ‘varieties of religious experience’ can be realistically and profitably studied, as such, outside the scriptural and historical context of the great Revelations which gave rise to them. Pierre Teilhard’s comment seems applicable to the study of all of

3 I am thinking here of Miiller's work in comparative religion, William James' studies of the phenomena of mystical experience. the rise of the so-called Higher Criticism, and so on.

" Cited by Teilhard de Chardin, Phenomenon of Man, p. 221.

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the religious life of man: ‘it is beyond our souls that we must look, not the other way roumz'.’1

I trustI have said enough to convince you that I do not underestimate the difficulties. Yet the challenge is both inescapable and urgent. I need hardly underline for this audience how late is the hour and how appalling the catastrophe which threatens to engulf mankind unless we can find a common humanity and a practical basis for world order, and do so very soon. All who are believers have no doubt that ultimately God’s Will shall be done on Earth and His Kingdom established. But far from relieving us of responsibility such an awareness makes only the more pressing our responsibility to contribute to the process in whatever way it has been given to us to do. How much greater still is the challenge facing those of us who have been singled out for the gift of the conviction that God has revealed Himself in all ages, to all peoples, and to all religions.

Nor do I anticipate serious disagreement when I say that we hardly suffer from a shortage of ideas in this vast field of work. Rather the opposite. We run a serious risk of suffocating in a surfeit of ideas which are either so vast, so self-evident, and so urgent as to generate intense anxiety, or so esoteric and divisive as to preclude any unified approach to their examination and even to discourage any general interest. However important religious ideology may be, therefore, I do not feel that a discussion of it can ever be anything other than one aspect of the study of a given religion. If the disappointments and frustrations of the past century have taught us anything, they have surely proven beyond any possible doubt that an approach to religious truth which is not phenomenologically oriented is doomed to sterility.

Let me briefly recapitulate, then, the context in which I feel my remarks on the Bahá’í Cause must be set. For a century and a half now the feeling has steadily grown among people everywhere that the revelation of God is in some sense universal and not confined to any one of the historical religions. Those who were earliest, most intimately, and most strongly convinced of the truth of this idea also passionately believed that in it lies the secret of the unification of mankind and the establishment of world peace. But, as in all things, the hypothesis alone, no

1 ibid.. p. 260.

679

matter how beautiful or how ardently held, is not enough. Real progress has always required, to use the words of the definition which I earlier offered, ‘the systematic, directed, and conscious application of our mental faculties” in testing our hypotheses against the phenomena of life. What I am arguing, therefore, is that the challenge facing the World Congress of Faiths, at this critical moment in its history, and in the history of mankind, is the task of applying such study to promising religious phenomena in an even more intensively responsible and self-sacrificing way than ever before. I am emboldened to make this suggestion because of the inescapable fact that our world is now gripped in the final stages of a historical crisis which, long before another such anniversary as this present one has arrived, will most certainly have removed from our hands the opportunities and the instruments which, even at this late hour, we still possess.

In discussing the Bahá’í Cause in this context it is not my primary purpose to present it as a religion urging a claim on the sympathy and the understanding of this Congress. The Bahá’í communities around the world are not yet, at this early stage of their history, sufficiently large and influential, nor are they entangled in longstanding historical controversies so as to require this kind of attention (which this Congress can in any event ill afford to spare). Doubtless a proper education of the public and clergy in the origins, purpose, and teachings of the Bahá’í Cause would be of great assistance in some countries where it would serve to remove misunderstandings and relieve the members of the Cause ofsome of the serious and often tragic disabilities under which they are presently forced to live.2 That, too, however, is not the primary concern of this Congress.

Rather, I have accepted your invitation, on behalf of my fellow Bahá’ís around the world, because I believe that the Bahá’í Cause has a vital contribution to make to the major work of this Congress, a contribution to the search for world unity. Its central theme was enunciated over a century ago in a remarkable series of letters which Baha’u’llah, Founder of the Bahá’í Faith, addressed from His prison cell in the Turkish 2 These misunderstandings and the abuse of the Bahá’í Cause

and its adherents are sadly most apparent in areas of the world where traditional religious systems still retain great influence See 'International Survey of Current Bahá’í

Activities: Efforts Toward the Emancipation of the Bahá’í Faith'. pp 136 10 I38 ol‘this volume of The Balm"! World.

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penal colony of ‘Akká, to the temporal and spiritual leaders of His day. To these nineteenthcentury monarchs Bahá’u’lláh declared that the world they knew was about to be burst apart by the emergence of a world civilization. The letters warned that God had set in motion historical forces which no man could resist and which would in time compel universal recognition of the truth underlying all existence, the organic oneness of the human race:

This is the Day in which God’s most excellent favours have been poured out upon men, the Da y in which His most mighty grace hath been infused into all created things. It is incumbent upon all the peoples of the world to reconcile their diflerences, and, with perfect unity and peace, abide beneath the shadow of the Tree of His care and loving-kindness.

0 Kings of the Earthl. . .Ifyepay no heedunto the counsels which, in peerless and unequivocal language, We have revealed in this Tablet, Divine chastisement shall assail you from every direction. On that day ye shall have no power to resist Him, and shall recognize your own impotence. Have mercy on yourselves and on those beneath you . . .

It is not for him to pride himself who [oveth his own country, but rather for him who [oveth the whole world.1

Baha’u’llah’s appeals were i gnored by those to whom they were addressed, and mankind moved into its long struggle with the enormous new social and material forces of which He had warned, not in the context of a search for unity, but rather in one of attachment to the sectarian, political, nationalistic, and racial loyalties of the past. The result is the world we live in.2 Forty years later the leaders of thought and the general public throughout the major nations of Europe and America were the recipients of yet another appeal, this time on a scale which has no parallel in religious history. ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, the Son of Bahá’u’lláh, upon His release from years of imprisonment and house arrest in ‘Akká, undertook an epic journey to the West, during ' Bahá’u’lláh. The Proclamation of Bahá’í4 7151/1 to [he Kings and Leaders of the World(Haifa: Bahá’í World Centre. 1967). pp 121. 7—9, 116.

1 Individual Tablets were addressed to Emperor Louis Napoleon, Queen Victoria, Pope Pius IX, Kaiser Wilhelm 1,

Emperor Franz Josef, Tsar Alexander 11, Sultan ‘Abdu’l‘Aziz. and Nasiri'd-Din glean

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the course of which He presented the essentials of Baha’u’llah’s message to university faculties, church congregations, labor unions, statesmen, ecclesiastics, a host of societies for peace and reform, vast public audiences, and virtually all of the maj or newspapers in the cities He visited.3 In these addresses He said:

Today the world of humanity is walking in darkness because it is out of touch with the world of God. That is wh y we do not see the signs of God in the hearts of men. The power of the Holy Spirit has no influence. When . . . divine instruction and guidance appear, then enlightenment follows, a new spirit is realized within, a new power descends . . .

I now wish you to examine certain facts and statements which are worthy ofconsideration. My purpose and intention is to remove from the hearts of men the religious enmity and hatred which have fettered them and to bring all religions into agreement and unity. . . . For the foundation of the divine religions is one foundation.

The mission of the prophets ofGoa' has been to train the souls of humanity and free them from the thraldom of natural instincts and physical tendencies. They are like unto gardeners, and the world of humanity is the field of their cultivation If all should be true to the original reality of the prophet and his teaching, the peoples and nations of the world would become unified and these diflerences which cause separation would be lost sight of. To accomplish this great and needful unity in its reality, His Holiness Baha’u’llah appeared in the Orient and renewed the foundations of the divine teachings. . . .expressed in principles and precepts applicable to the needs and conditions of the modern world ; amplified and adapted to present day questions and critical human problems.4

Despite the widespread attention and respect which ‘Abdu’l-Bahá received on both sides of the

~‘ ‘Abdu‘I-Baha entered ‘Akká in 1868, as a young man of Iwenty-four, together with His Father, His family, and a number ofcompanions. He remained under various forms of imprisonment and arrest until His release with other prisoners of State during the Young Turks revolution of 1908.

‘ The excerpts quoted are from ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, The Promulgation of Universal Peace: Discourses by ‘Abdu’l-Bahá during His Visit to the United States in 1912, [rev. ed.] in 1 vol. (Wilmette, [11,: Bahá’í Publishing Committee, 1943), pp. 299, 402, 304, 308, the collected addresses of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá in Europe and America, 1911—1912.

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Atlantic, His appeal cannot be said to have elicited significantly more response from the leaders of thought and the public at large than had that of Baha’u’llah Himself. Before His return to His home in Palestine in 1912, He predicted quite explicitly and repeatedly, on public platforms and in newspaper interviews, the world war which followed, as He said it would, less than two years later.1 It was therefore in this long tradition that ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s grandson and Guardian of the Bahá’í Cause, Shoghi Effendi, responded to the invitation of the inaugurators of the World Congress of Faiths in 1936. The paper, prepared and read on his behalf at that time by Mr. Townshend, made reference to its source in the Writings of Baha’u’llah and the work of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá but expressed Their vision in the form of a ‘Plan for World Fellowship’: This plan, in every feature, plainly implies that nothing less than a concerted effort on a world scale, with the spiritual energies of mankind informing its practical energies, will now suffice to awaken the spirit of fellowship and secure deliverance from danger . . . In all its faculties the human race is passing from childhood and ignorance towards maturity; towards the tasks that befit manhood . . . It is called on to put into practice the lessons of moral principles and human fellowship in which it has been instructed for so long. . .We have accomplished enough to convict ourselves of being fitted for a better social order . . . and of lacking the resolution to put our ideals into effect. There is enough of good in our recent record to incriminate us, but not enough to deliver us . . . Since the whole world as a unit is involved, the ideals which are to guide this movement must be given definite shape. If there is to be concerted action towards a single goal, some map of the journey must be made. Vague sentiments of good will, however genuine, will not suffice. Some explicit agreement on principles will be required for any co-ordinated progress.2 Mr. Townshend then outlined the main features of the teachings of Baha’u’llah, conceived as a plan of practical effort, and concluded by asking:

‘ See, for example, the Montreal Gazelle, Sept 11. 1912. 2 'Baha’u’llah's Ground Plan of World Fellowship,‘ in Proceedings, p. 229.

681

In such an emergency does not this bold, original scheme of fellowship merit serious consideration and even the test of experiment? In advocating peace to a western audience ‘Abdu’l-Bahá once said: You have had warfor thousands of years; why not try peace for a change .7 If you do not like it you can always go back to war. One might hazard a similar suggestion about this fellowship plan. We have tried every other advice, why not now try this?3 For whatever reason the appeal did not evoke from the interfaith movement the effort of trial and study for which it called. By 1936, however, Shoghi Effendi had at hand the instrument through which he could act on the vast project conceived by Bahá’u’lláh and ‘Abdu’l-Bahá and touched on in Mr. Townshend’s presentation to the inaugural conference of the World Congress of Faiths. For over a decade, ever since his assumption of the role assigned to him by ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, Shoghi Effendi, as Guardian of the Bahá’í Cause, had pursued the laborious task of constructing the framework of the Administrative Order conceived by Baha’u’llah and inaugurated by ‘Abdu’l-Bahá.4 It included the creation of a system of democratically elected assemblies to conduct the affairs of the Cause at the national and local levels. By 1936, as the essentials of Baha’u’llah’s plan of world unity were being presented to the first World Congress of Faiths, Shoghi Effendi was completing preparations to use this administrative instrument in implementing the plan on the scale which Bahá’í resources at that time made possible. For the next twenty years, until his death in 1957, and through a series of phased programs, he persisted in this extraordinary undertaking.5 The magnitude of his success is indicative of both the spiritual energies upon which he drew and the vast hunger for unity and the capacity to respond of the peoples of all faiths and lands. You might be interested and encouraged by the limit. pp, 309 3m 4The appointment and its functions and prerogatives were spelled out in ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s Will and Testament. See

‘Abdu’l-Bahá, Will and Testament of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá (Wilmette, 111.: Bahá’í Publishing Trust. 1944), pp. 10—15, 25—26.

5 The first Seven Year Plan was 1aunched in 1937. Following a

two-year respite a second plan of the same duration was launched. Then in 1953 Shoghi Effendi launched the first fully global program of its kind under the title the Ten Year Crusade. He himselfdied in November 1957 at the midway point of this vast undertaking, but it was successfully completed by the Bahá’í community in 1963, as called for in Shoghi Effendi’s original plan,

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scope which Shoghi Effendi’s project has now achieved. Let me, therefore, sketch briefly for you the outlines of the work.

In 1936, outside the land of its birth, the Bahá’í Cause had only a few thousand followers, living in fewer than perhaps a thousand localities in approximately forty countries and territories of the globe. Its administrative structure consisted of ten National Spiritual Assemblies, several of them serving two or more countries at the same time, and fewer than 120 Local Spiritual Assemblies. Only a handful of these bodies were incorporated. At its World Centre in the Holy Land, near the burial places of the Báb and Bahá’u’lláh, external circumstances had made it impossible for the Cause to pursue more than a token development. To the great mass of the people of the world even the name of the movement was as yet unknown.I

Today, forty years later, the Bahá’í Cause is established in over 330 countries, territories, and major islands of the globe, from isolated villages in Canada’s farthest Arctic to the remotest islands of the South Pacific. It includes in its embrace representatives of virtually every religious, racial, ethnic, national, and social group on earth. There are today as many National Bahá’í Assemblies as there were Local Assemblies in 1936, and the number of Local Assemblies now approaches twenty thousand, quite apart from the more than sixty thousand centers where Assemblies are being built by Bahá’í groups or by individual believers. Wherever this institutional development has occurred, the creation of Houses of Worship, schools, hospices, and administrative headquarters, and the acquisition of other properties for such purposes, have followed. In 1963, on the one hundredth anniversary of Bahá’u’lláh’s declaration of His mission, the members of the fifty-six National and Regional Spiritual Assemblies, of whom more than 280 gathered on the slopes of Mount Carmel, brought into existence, in what may well have been the first democratic global election in history, the crowning unit of the Administrative Order conceived by Baha’u’llah. That body took the name which Baha’u’llah had given it a century earlier, ‘The Universal House of Justice.” Through the

' For a more detailed view of the Bahá’í Cause in [936, see The Bahá’í World, v01. VI, April 1934—1936, comp. National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of the United States and Canada (New York: Bahá’í Publishing Committee. 1937)

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acquisition of consultative status in the nongovernmental organizations of the United Nations, as well as through the continuously expanding recognition of its institutions and practices by scores of national and provincial Governments around the world, the Cause has secured those relationships with civil authority which are necessary to its various humanitarian purposes. Its literature, which in 1936 was translated into fewer than forty languages, can today be read in nearly 600, and includes not only the collected Writings of the F ounders and the commentaries of Shoghi Effendi as Guardian but also a vast range of works which elaborate the principles and teachings of the Cause for both the scholarly and the popular reader. Most recently an intensive program for the use of various communication media has begun in order to assure that the message of Bahá’u’lláh is as accessible to the illiterate seeker as it is to his more fortunate brother, as comprehensible to modern youth as it is to adults. The total phenomenon may well represent the most rapid expansion of a serious religious movement in modern history.2

These statistics will suggest, as I say, the scope of the program undertaken by Shoghi Effendi. What is important to our concerns here is the qualitative development which has taken place within this outer structure. What Shoghi Effendi succeeded in bringing into orderly existence is a global community, a model inspired by the teachings which had been enunciated by Baha’u’llah and presented to the nations of the West by ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, a model which faithfully incorporates all the features of these teachings.3 And it is because this model exists—because the past forty years have been spent in intensive, concerted, and, I am happy to say, successful effort—thatl felt able, as a Bahá’í, to accept your invitation to this important anniversary conference. Because that model lies directly in the path of the central thrust of this Congress, directly in that particular path of the universal

3 The two most recent volumes of The Bahá’í W()rld(voli XIII, comp. The Universal House of Justice [Haifaz The Universal House of Justice. 1970]: vol. XIV. compi The Universal House of Justice [Haifat The Universal House of Justice, 1974]). although carrying the study only as far as 1968. provide a panoramic view of the development. Vols XV which covers the period |968—1973 is currently at press. (Published 1976).

J For a summary of these features, see Shoghi Effendi, 7710 World Order ({f Bahá'u'llz'z/I: Selected LL’IIerxV 2d rev. ed. (Wilmette. III.: Bahá’í Publishing Trust, 1974).

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search for Truth, which the founders of the World Congress of Faiths adopted for themselves and which you have since pursued with such single-mindedness and integrity. It is a model, to use the words of Sir Francis Younghusband, of ‘World Fellowship.”1

Forty years ago, at the completion of the presentation of the paper outlining Baha’u’llah’s plan, Sir Herbert Samuel, who was then in the Chair, had the kindness to express his beliefthat:

If one were compelled to choose which of

the many religious communities of the world

was closest to the aim and purpose of this

Congress, I think one would be obliged to say

that it was the comparatively little known

Bahá’í community. Other Faiths and creeds

have to consider at 21 Congress like this, in

what way they can contribute to the idea of world fellowship: but the Bahá’í Faith exists almost for the sole purpose of contributing to the fellowship and unity of mankind.2 Sir Herbert can, I think, safely be acquitted of any suspicion of partisanship or proselytism. Without doubt he was responding to an instinctive recognition of the role of the Bahá’í Cause not as a religion competing with other religions but as a social force with a very special, perhaps even a unique contribution to make to the aims of this Congress. Ifthat is the case, the emergence of Bahá’u’lláh’s model more than justifies remarks which, forty years ago, may well have appeared extravagant to some of Sir Herbert’s listeners.

What are some of the features of this model which recommend it to the serious study of members of this organization? The first, and the one most relevant to our concerns here, is the model’s universality. That is to say, that in attracting adherents from every race, class, and creed the process of assimilation has not occurred at the expense of cultural and spiritual diversity of its members. If we are to take our fellow human beings at their own word (and their testimony is both unanimous and emphatic), those who have entered the community of Baha’u’llah from Jewish, Buddhist, Muslim, Christian, Hindu, Sikh, or Zoroastrian backgrounds believe that they have done so with their

’ Sir Francis Younghusband. Vital Religion: Brotherhood rgl'

Faiths (London: John Murray, 1940) and The Gleam (London: John Murray, 1923)

2‘Bahát‘u’llzih‘s Ground Plan of World Fellowship,” in Proceedings, p. 31 l.

683

original faith fully intact.3 Ifl may be forgiven a personal note, I, for example, do not regard myselfin any way as less a Christian today than when I was a member of one of the Churches known by that name, or necessarily than is one who uses the term in an exclusive sense. Quite otherwise. It is a fact, established now through a century of experience, that a worldwide community can revere the Founders of all the great revealed religions equally; can draw for their devotions on the Bhagavad Gita, the Old Testament, the New Testament, and the Qur’án; can experience the precious benefits of ‘interfaith dialogue’ in the homeliest occasions of local community life and in the truest sense of that much abused phrase.

A second feature of the model which has emerged from Baha’u’llah’s Revelation and which seems to have special relevance to the concerns of this Congress is its success in remolding human conscience—in establishing a set of universal moral standards relevant to the age of mankind’s maturity. Solely out of devotion to the Founder of the Bahá’í Cause ordinary people in every part of the world have surrendered themselves to a process of education in ideals as comprehensive and challenging as the goals of the most advanced social reformers: the eradication of prejudices, the independent investigation of truth, the assurance of equality of opportunity to men and women, a program of universal education, the attainment of social justice, and the establishment of an effective world order, to name only a few ofthese ideals. The point is that these principles are not merely matters of sociological theory within the Bahá’í community but integral parts of the psychological pattern and emotional life in which generations of human beings, one generation after another, are being patiently and deliberately raised.4

Third, a point dear to my own heart, Baha’u’llah’s community enjoys its own history.

3 Beyond accepting the validity of all the great revealed religions. the Bahá’í Cause holds that, according to a predetermined order. they have revealed progressively more complete aspects of the Divine Will and have been the primary motivating force in the building of civilization.

4 Ethical teachings which relate purely to the individual life are such as would be familiar features ofall ormost of the existing world religions. although there is a reordering of moral priorities. (Backbiting, for example, is condemned in particularly strong terms, as a blight which quencheth the light ofr/n' heart, and extinguisheth the sze aftlze soul. Bahá’u’lláh. Gleaningsfrom I/ze Writings q/‘Ba/zd'u'lláh. pl 265.)

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It has its ‘noble army of martyrs,’ some twenty thousand of them, whose self-sacrifice won the unstinted admiration of Sir Francis Younghusband, when he first encountered their stories several decades ago,1 Apart from its lively interest in the spiritual giants of earlier Revelations it has its own archetypal heroes and saints (for whom its children are named), whose lives provide moral example, and whose spiritual achievements have already begun to evoke the first halting response of Bahá’í artists, writers, and musicians. Today, all around the world, an entire generation of Japanese, Italian, Bolivian, Ugandan, Canadian, and Persian children are being educated in this common tradition.

Finally, there is the feature of the Bahá’í community which is related to the pivotal teaching of Baha’u’llah’s Revelation: The earth is but one country, and mankind its citizens.2 Baha’u’llah asserts that: The well—being of mankind, its peace and security are unattainable unless and until its unity is firmly established.3 A feature of Baha’u’llah’s model, therefore, which has enormous significance for the future, is the fact that it has passed safely through the first critical century of its history with its unity firmly intact. No single effort to create sects and factions has survived the generation which saw it appear. There is not, so far as I am aware, any other great movement in recorded historyreligious, political, or social—of which this can be said. Time and again in all other forms of human association, the process of schism has taken hold in the early, vulnerable stages; and the originating impulse has had to continue its work through the activities of often contending parties and sects.4

A point which a Bahá’í speaker would wish not merely to acknowledge but to point out is that this model has been produced by and is identified with an independent world religion.5

‘ The life of the 83b. for example, Sir Francis described in The Gleam as a ‘story of spiritual heroism unsurpassed in Svabhava’s experience.‘

2 Baha’u’llah, Gleanings from the Writings of Bahz'z'u'llhh, p: 250.

3 Bahá’u’lláh, quoted in Shoghi Effendi, The World Order of Baht’z’u’lláh, p. 202.

4 The history of the various unsuccessful attempts to create schismatic groups within the Bahá’í community may be read in Shoghi Effendi, God Passes By (Wilmette, Illi: Bahá’í Publishing Trust, 1944). Such attempts continue to arise from time to time and the Founders of the Faith have indicated that these aberrations will continue to present challenges to Bahá’í unity well into the future.

5 The distinction is suggested by the not entirely interchangeable terms ‘Bahá’í Cause‘ and ‘Bahá’í Faithi‘

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Like Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism,

Hinduism, and all of the other major revealed

religions, the Bahá’í Cause has a center of

authority in its own Prophet, its own laws, and its voluminous sacred scriptures. As Buddhism respects the Vedic tradition out of which it emerged, as Christianity cherishes its Judaic origins, the Bahá’í Faith fully acknowledges and appreciates the Islamic matrix in which it first appeared. Unlike the many other admirable modern religious movements which have slipped early and inevitably into the role of sects of their mother religions, however, the Bahá’í Faith has entirely escaped the gravitational pull of the parent Faith, a fact of its history which both

Western scholars and Muslim religious author ities have hastened to recognize.6

Indeed, Bahá’ís see the success the model enjoys as the result of its organic wholeness. This integrity, they further believe, arises from the fact that Baha’u’llah is the Manifestation of God to our age, the One promised in all the scriptures of the past.7 Is an acceptance of this extraordinary claim a prerequisite to a scholarly study of the Bahá’í community? Must a scientific examination of the evidence by a scholarly

community be prefaced by a discussion of a

principle of faith? Surely not. The influence of

Baha’u’llah in the creation of the model must

compel the attention of any serious observer ; but

this, too, is surely the province of detached and careful study. Indeed, it offers an opportunity which seems to be open to us in no other quarter.

We have already noted that one of the most

serious handicaps to a scientific study of the

phenomenon of revelation is that the originating impulse in each case has receded so far in history as to be accessible to us in only a very limited and unsatisfactory degree. Far otherwise with the work of the Founder of the Bahá’í Cause. The details of His life are massively documented, as are the contributions ofthose whom He inspired

" The Opinion andJudgment of the Appellate religious court of Beba in Egypt on 10 May, 1925, for example, held in a major case presented to it that ‘The Bahá’í Faith is a new religion, entirely independent . , . No Bahá’í, therefore, can be regarded a Muslim or vice-versa, even as no Buddhist, Brahmin [sic], or Christian can be regarded a Muslim or viceversa.’ Cited by Shoghi Effendi, God Passes By, p. 365.

" Verily I say, this is the Day in which mankind can behold the Face, anllhcar the Voice, of the Promised One. . . . ll behovelh every man to blot out Ihe trace ofevery idle wordfrom [he table! of his heart , and to gaze, with an open and unbiasedmina’, 0n the signs of His Revelation, the proofs ath'x Mission, and the

tokens q/‘His glory. Bahá’u’lláh. Gleaningsfram the Writings afBahá'tl'th, pp. I(Ll 1.

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and led. His spiritual and social teachings are available in the original texts, under His own seal, often in His own hand. The same may be said of the provisions He made for the organization of His Cause. The sequence of events by which these concepts, laws, and institutions molded the development of the Bahá’í community also lie open to our scrutiny, unobscured by time, by myth, or by the glosses of conflicting schools of interpretation.

One thinks inevitably of the statement of Professor T. K. Cheyne as he looked ahead to the spiritual struggle in which our generation is now engaged: ‘The want of a surely attested life, orextract of a life, of a God-man will be more and more acutely felt. There is only one such life; it is that of Baha’u’llah.’1

Here, then as with all forms of life, the qualified observer may examine in detail not only the organism itself, but the processes by which it has come into existence and assumed its form and functions. The fact, therefore, that the Bahá’í community stands identified with an independent religion in no sense disqualifies it as a model of the kind I have described. To impose limitations on research because of a priori assumptions about the nature of the phenomena which command our attention is clearly out of harmony with the scientific spirit.

Our common and consistent religious experience over the past three millennia would. in any case, argue quite the opposite. If a key to the realization of the spiritual and social unification of the race does exist and is to be found through human effort, experience suggests that it is far more likely than otherwise to be associated with another intervention of the Divine in human affairs. Such a possibility, moreover, would seem also to have been anticipated in virtually all of the scriptures of the past. And it would appear to be entirely in harmony with the original impulse which gave rise to the creation of the Congress. One thinks of the remarkable intimations which came to Sir Francis Younghusband on that memorable morning in 1904, near Lhasa, and which he later recorded in words familiar to us all : ‘I had visions of a far greater religion yet to be and of a God as much greater than our English God as a Himalayan giant is greater than an English hill.’2 lThomas Kelly Cheyne, The Reconciliation of Race: and

Religions (London: Adam and Charles Black. 1914), p. 209. 3 Cited by Braybrooke, Faiths in Fellowship, p 6.

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I do not in any way insist upon the point, which is incidental to my remarks here. My sole concern, as I have said, is to free our discussion of any lingering or transient assumption that the object of our long search must, by its very nature, be incompatible with a new Revelation of God, with a new religion. Science needs no more reassurance than that in order to begin its patient work of discovery. Faith we can safely leave to pursue its ends within each individual human heart, free of obligation to account to any other.

If I may then sum up: my remarks today have been essentially a progress report on the implementation of the plan suggested here at the time the Congress of Faiths was born forty years ago. The results, I think you will agree, could not be more encouraging. I have indicated that there now exists a promising, operating model for the spiritually-based world society which this Congress was founded to seek. The model is a global community which, far from seeing itself as already complete or self—sufl‘icient, is embarked on an infinite series of experiments at the local, national, and international levels in its efforts to realize the vision of mankind’s oneness which it finds in the Writings of its Founder and of all the Messengers of God. In this great undertaking all people of good will are free to participate.

I have thought it important to draw your attention especially to a number of notable features which the model demonstrates: universality, unity, a relevant and effective moral system, a common history, a coherent administrative framework, and an embrace which accepts all the varieties of human life. For a global community to manifest these features at this critical stage in history seems to me to be quite the most significant development which could come to our attention. For its existence is, so far as I am aware, the first convincing evidence that the goal we seek here is fully realistic and eminently attainable within the foreseeable future. No matter how limited in size or still restricted in influence the model may be, such a phenomenon deserves the most able and the most disinterested study mankind can bring to it. I trust I shall not be misunderstood when I express my belief that it is preeminently deserving of such attention from this Congress.

In closing, therefore, I warmly invite the World Congress of Faiths to undertake such a study, with all that term implies, and to share the findings with mankind. Such a project would

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seem to me to be a natural extension of the Congress’ work and fully in harmony with its founding principles. Admittedly, it implies a further major development in methodology, perhaps even in organization. Such challenges, however, are inherent in the very nature of the search for truth in any field of endeavor. Indeed, the Congress itself represented at the time of its founding nothing other than a practical response to these familiar challenges by those who were the heirs of the nineteenth century’s spiritual visions.

What these methods and organizational developments should be I am obviously not competent to say. They will arise naturally out of the consultations of the Executive Committee and the Congress itself. And should another field of investigation emerge, demonstrating equally impressive possibilities for our purpose, let us by all means find the resources to respond appropriately to it as well. That is surely the spirit of truth.

The gloomy and sterile philosophy of materialism which, in one form or another, today dominates the minds of men everywhere owes its power and prestige to nothing more than the enormous productivity of science; this in turn has been the result solely of the faithful application of the method of science to material phenomena. But science is the heritage of all alike. What distinguishes the physical scientist is that he searches in the expectation of continual

THE BAHA’l WORLD

discovery, and in that confidence transforms our environment. Search is not for him merely a feature of personal identity or a pastime. Why should those of us who are aware that the range of human possibilities extends far beyond the physical universe fear to take up this human birthright and demonstrate by serious study and experiment its limitless creativity in those areas of life on which human happiness and indeed human survival absolutely depend? Bahá’u’lláh’s model is a proof, a gage that the universe in which we live is rational, progressively evolving, and at its heart loving and joyful, the intended home of a united human race. We have only to claim it. Words Baha’u’llah uttered a century ago seem to be particularly appropriate to the decisions facing the Congress; I leave them with you: Every age hath its own problem‘ and every soul its particular aspiration. The remedy the world needeth in its present-day afli'ictt'ons can never be the same as that which a subsequent age may require. Be anxiously concerned with the needs of the age ye live in, and centre your deliberations on its exigencies and requirements.

That which the Lord hath ordained as the sovereign remedy and mightiest instrument for the healing of all the world is the union of all its peoples in one universal Cause . . .1

‘ Bahá’u’lláh, The Proclamation afflahd’u’lláh, pp. 116, 67.