Bahá’í World/Volume 17/Essays and reviews

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PART SEVEN

LITERARY AND MUSICAL WORKS

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ESSAYS AND REVIEWS

1. THE UNITY OF RELIGION AND SCIENCE

WILLIAM S. HATCHER

OF all the conflicts which exist in contemporary society none is more destructive both for individual and social life than the conflict between religion and science. For the individual, religion is the expression of a need for self—transcendence, a need to feel a purpose which is God-given and not self—created. For society, religion represents the need for unity, love, harmony, and co-operation. Science, by contrast, represents the need to know, to understand, to gain mastery over ourselves and our environment. This is true both for the individual who needs knowledge in order to function in his own life and for society which needs organized knowledge in order to progress. Returning for the moment to the individual’s viewpoint, we might say that the religious urge is an urge to be encompassed. It is an urge to

feel oneself a part of something greater. The.

scientific urge is an urge to encompass. It is an urge to manipulate, control, direct, and dominate. There is no contradiction in these two urges since it is clearly possible for us to be in control on one level of our functioning while, at the same time, being controlled or encompassed on another level. Indeed, since our knowledge is always relative, we are in fact constantly in the position of having a relative mastery over part of our environment (including the self) while being encompassed by that part which we do not know. Moreover, the further we make progress in knowledge, the more we realize just how great our ignorance is. There is an increasing realization of being encompassed by the unknown which accompanies the extension of the boundaries of the known, for new knowledge also reveals the existence of hitherto unsuspected unknowns. Greater knowl edge gives greater mastery and, at the same time, greater humility before the everincreasing vastness of the unknown which lies before us.

Basically, then, the religious urge and the scientific urge are complementary, as each reinforces the other.

Of course, the thrill of first mastery which the adolescent experiences gives him a sense of omnipotence and an exaggerated pride in his knowledge. Some people never outgrow this immature response to knowledge and, therefore, become blind or insensitive to the vastness of their ignorance. This is the state of an individual or a society in which the scientific urge prevails while the religious urge is excluded.

In such a case people have a sense of being in absolute control when, in reality, their control is very limited and relative. This is the situation which largely characterizes modern Western technological society. Western man has given in almost totally to the scientific urge, the urge to dominate, manipulate, control, and direct. Because he has lost his humility before his ignorance, he has gradually overproduced, overdirected, and overcontrolled. The results of this immoderation are to be seen everywhere. It has led to pollution and destruction of the natural cycle, as we begin to discover, perhaps too late, just how much damage we may have unwittingly done. It has led to manipulation of the public through mass media. It has pfoduced engines of war of unimaginable destructive power.

On the personal level, the use of the social science of psychology, without the counterbalance of religion, has resulted in a painful self Author's note: This essay, revised for inclusion in the international record, originally appeared in World Order, Spring 1975, © 1975 by the National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of the United States. It was reprinted in slightly altered form in Bahá't Studies, vol. 2, September 1977, a publication of the Canadian Association for Studies on the Bahá’í Faith.

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consciousness for the individual as he enters an increasingly vicious circle of self—analysis and introspection in a futile attempt to encompass himself with his own mind.

We might say, then, that modern society is adolescent in that it is characterized by the false sense of omnipotence that comes from having abandoned itself to the scientific urge to the exclusion of the religious urge. Let anyone who feels that science alone can provide the basis for human progress ask himself whether, at this moment, the future of society stands in greater danger from science and its fruits or from religion and its fruits.

What happens when society abandons itself to the religious urge to the exclusion of the scientific urge? Since there will be a common feeling of humility before the unknown, there will be a strong sense of unity within such a society. People will be drawn together by the shared awareness of being encompassed by and submitted to unknown (generally nonhuman) forces. The feeling orsense of unity will be strong, but if the scientific urge is neglected, the concrete realization of that sense of unity will be very limited.

For example, without the means oforganization, education, communication, and transportation, which come only from a certain mastery of the environment, the gathering of large groups of people will be difficult as will be the communication between the physically separate groups. It will, therefore, be difficult for people to share ideas, languages, history, and the like. Society will remain organized in small villages, each with its particular expression of the intuitively-perceived unity and with its particular history. There will be many different dialects and religious experiences. Because of the relative lack of mastery of the environment, inhabitants of different villages will be limited in the degree to which they can share their experiences. This will make it difficult for them to go beyond superficial differences and realize the basic similarity underlying various types of experience.

The dominant feature of such a society will be its dependence on the unknown forces. We might say, then, that such a society is childlike because the lack of mastery, the dependence, and the passivity with respect to the environment are all characteristics of the stage of development in the life of an individual which

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we call childhood.

Maturity 0r adulthood in the life of the individual comes with the integration and balance of these two urges. It does not come by remaining continually adolescent. The adolescent, because he is unsure of himself, needs, in his typical Western manifestation, continually to prove his independence by rebellious and exaggerated gestures. The adult, however, knows how to accept a mature and conscious dependence. The adult knows, for example, that he is dependent on society, and so he obeys its laws. The extreme form of adolescent independence is lawlessness.

To be sure, the dependence of the adult is no longer the absolute dependence of childhood. It is a dependence based on the relative mastery of the adolescent. It is a dependence which is conscious because the adult is aware of his limitations as well as of his mastery. He thus abandons his adolescent sense of omnipotence for a more realistic give and take. The giving results from the degree of mastery, and the taking from an intelligent realization of need. It is the foolish person who thinks that, because he is adult, he has no genuine needs and, therefore, does not have to take. It is the immature adult who remains in a childish state of exaggerated dependence and crippled mastery.

The Bahá’í principle of the unity of religion and science applies this same principle of complementarity, so clearly true for individuals, to human society as a whole. ‘Abdu’l-Bahá has said:

Religion and science are the two wings upon which man’s intelligence can soar into the heights, with which the human soul can progress. It is not possible to fly with one wing alone! Shoulda man try tofly with the wing of religion alone he would quickly fall into the quagmire ofsuperstition, whilst on the other hand, with the wing ofscience alone he would also make no progress, but fall into the despairing slough of materialism.l

Concerning the state of religion without science, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá has further stated:

An y religion that contradicts science or that is opposed to it, is only ignorance—for ignorance is the opposite ofknowledge.

1 ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, Paris Talks: Addresses Given by 'Abdu’lBahrf in Paris in 1911—1912, 11th ed. (London: Bahá’í Publishing Trust, 1969), p. 143.

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Religion which consists only of rites and ceremonies ofprejudice is not the truth.‘

And again:

All religions of the present day have fallen into superstitious practices out of harmony alike with the true principles of the teaching they represent and with the scientific a'iscoveries of the time.2

Concerning the positive effects of the unity of religion and science, He says:

When religion, shorn of its superstitions, traditions, and unintelligent dogmas, shows its conformity with science, then will there be a great unifying, cleansing force in the world which will sweep before it all wars, disagreements, discords and struggles—ana’ then will mankind be united in the power of the Love of God.3

Concerning the result of science without

religion, Bahá’u’lláh has written:

The civilization, so often vaunted by the learned exponents of arts and sciences, will, if allowed to overleap the bounds of moderation, bringgreatevilupon men. Thus warneth you He Who is the All-Knowing. Ifcarried to excess, civilization will prove as prolific a source ofevil as it had been ofgoodness when kept within the restraints of moderation. 4

Concerning the attempt of man to find happiness through purely material pursuits, He has also written:

Say: O people! Let not this life and its deceits deceive you, for the world and all that is therein is heldfirmly in the grasp oins Will Are ye rejoicing in the things which, according to the estimate of God, are contemptible and worthless, things wherewith He proveth the hearts of the doubtfiil?5

In another passage He states flatly:

Your sciences shall not profit you in this day, nor your arts, nor your treasure, nor your glory. Cast them all behind your backs, and

set your faces towards the Most Sublime Word through which the Scriptures and the Books and this lucid Tablet have been distinctly set forth.6

Since it is the adolescent excess of the scientific urge that characterizes the modern world, the move to maturity can only come by the rebirth of religion on a mature, adult level. Man must acquire again a genuine humility and deep respect for God, the creative force of the universe. He must realize that it is only by this force, and this force alone, that all of his discoveries and technological advances have been made. In this regard, Bahá’u’lláh says:

Every word thatproceedeth out of the mouth of God is endowed with such potency as can instil new life into every human frame, ifye be of them that comprehend this truth. All the wondrous works ye behold in this world have been manifested through the operation of His supreme and most exalted Will, His wondrous and inflexible Purpose.7

Obstacles to the Unity of Science and Religion A half century ago, the prime obstacle to the unity of science and religion was probably religion. In 1911, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá affirmed as much when He described the results of prevailing religious dissension and discord:

The outcome of all this dissension is the belie f of many cultured men that religion and science are contradictory terms, that religion needs no powers ofreflection, and should in no wise be regulated by science, but must of necessity be opposed, the one to the other. The unfortunate effect of this is that science has drifted apart from religion, and religion has become a mere blind and more or less apathetic following of the precepts of certain religious teachers, who insist on their own favourite dogmas being accepted even when they are contrary to science.3

Thus it was the outmoded and narrow views of religionists which initially created the opposition between religion and science.

This opposition has, if anything, worsened in

‘ibid., pp. 130-131. 2 ibid., p. 143. 3 ibid., p. 146. 5 Bahá’u’lláh, Epistle to the Son of the Wolf, trans, Shoghi ‘ Bahá’u’lláh, Gleanings from the Writings of Bahá’í'u'llah. Effendi, rev. ed. (Wilmette, Ill.: Bahá’í Publishing Trust, trans. Shoghi Effendi, rev. ed. (Wilmette, 111.: Bahá’í Pub- 1953), pp. 97—98. lishing Trust. 1952), pp. 342—343. 7 Bahá’u’lláh, Gleanings, p. 141. 5 ibid., p. 209. 5 ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, Paris Talks, pp. 143—144.

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the years since ‘Abdu’l-Bahá made the above statement. Religious dogmatism and dissension have continued, giving rise to open religious conflict in such places as the Middle East, India, and Northern Ireland. Each of the traditional religious orthodoxies has continued to press, harder and harder, its claims to possess an absolute or final truth, excluding the possibility of reconciliation with other orthodoxies. Even such a movement as Christian Ecumenism is severely limited in that its goal is only an institutional unity of certain Christian denominations rather than a genuine move towards universal religious reconciliation.

Moreover, to the voices of traditional orthodoxy have been added a host of newer movements, each with its own claim to possess a unique or absolute path to the truth. Various cults, various forms of meditation, of spiritual and physical discipline have been put forth as the answer to man’s religious quest. At the same time, a rebirth of interest in astrology, in occultism, in satanism, in witchcraft, and in other forms of supernatural experience has taken place.

Since it is clearly impossible to reconcile the absolute and exclusive claim of each of the various sects, movements, and orthodoxies in the world today, what is the rational seeker after religious truth to do? One common-sense answer, and one which many individuals have undoubtedly adopted as a solution, is to consider that there is some truth in each of these movements and that their basic fault lies precisely in the arrogant attempt of each one to erect a partial and relative vision of truth into an absolute. The historian and religious thinker Arnold Toynbee has described poignantly his own reaction to this dilemma:

It is, of course, impossible that each of the higher religions can be right in believing that it has a monopoly of truth and salvation, but it is not impossible that all of them should have found alternative roads to salvation and should have seen truth, ‘through a glass, darkly’, in one or other of truth’s different facets . . . A belief in the relative truth and relative saving-power of all the higher religions alike will seem tantamount to unbelief in the eyes of an orthodox believer in any one of them.

. . . It lies with the orthodox, not with me, to

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decide whether, in their eyes, I am within their pale or am beyond it. But it lies with me, not with them, to feel thefeelings I, too, feel towards those sublime figures that are revered and adored by me as well as by their orthodox followers or worshippers. No human writ of excommunication can come between those saviours and me.1

One senses a strong integrity in a position such as that taken by Toynbee. Yet such a position, though helpful for the individual himself, does not solve the social problems resulting from the religion-science opposition. For there is no identifiable community of the various individuals who may have arrived at a view like Toynbee’s. Indeed, Toynbee himself makes a similar remark in a footnote to the above-quoted passage:

In any case, whatever light my critics may or may not have thrown on my position, they have thrown much light, I should say, on a far more interesting point. They have brought out the truth that, at the present time, the Western World is a house divided against itself on the fundamental issue of religious attitude and belief.2

We may summarize, then, by saying that the first major obstacle to the unity of science and religion is the widespread feeling that there is no religious voice which recognizes the relativity of religious truth and which, at the same time, speaks with deep wisdom and authority on the spiritual questions of life which every man sooner or later must face and ask himself. There is widespread confusion in the realm of religion, and this confusion has been made worse, rather than being helped, by the multiplication of claims to absolute authority and absolute truth which are now heard from all directions.

Another major obstacle to the unity of religion and science derives from the fact that a complex of science and technology, divorced from all moral and ethical influence, has now become the dominant force in society. This all-pervasiveness of science and technology has led many to a feeling of hopelessness. People often feel that science has shown religion to be a farce, and yet they recognize that science and ' Arnold Toynbee, A Study of History: Reconsiderations

(London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1961), XII, 99—100, 102. z ibid., XII, 101n.

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technology have not made us deeply happy. In fact, widespread unhappiness—unhappiness on a scale never before seen—is one of the most striking features of the contemporary scene.

In spite of this dissatisfaction with the sterility of modern technological existence, many still feel that they cannot turn with integrity to religion since, they believe, science has proved that God does not exist and that religious experience is a sham. Because religious experience is much more intensely subjective than technology, people are led to mistrust their own deepest emotions and their profoundest religious and spiritual longings. In this way does the misguided belief about technology lead to a certain self—alienation—people are led to deny the validity of their own truest needs and deepest longings. These longings are relegated to the domain of childish and immature emotions (perhaps to be ‘cured’ by psychoanalysis).

This second major obstacle to the unity of religion and science is, then, the feeling that science has somehow proved the non—existence of God or at least invalidated spiritual and religious experience and longings.

We now want to discuss certain aspects of some of these obstacles.

The Obstacle of Scientistic Materialism The characteristic feature of science, and the basis of its unity, is scientific method. Scientific method consists in the systematic and organized use of our various mental faculties in an effort to arrive at a coherent understanding of whatever phenomenon is being investigated. Of course, every human being on earth knows things and uses his mental faculties in order to attain this knowledge. What distinguishes the method of science is the systematic, organized, and conscious nature of the process. Science is self-conscious common sense. Instead of relying on chance experiences, one systematically invokes certain types of experiences. This is experimentation (the conscious use of experience). Instead of relying on common-sense reasoning, one formalizes hypotheses explicitly and formalizes the reasoning leading from hypothesis to conclusion. This is mathematics and logic (the conscious use of reason). Instead of relying on occasional flashes of insight, one systematically

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meditates on problems. This is reflection (the conscious use of intuition).1

The practice of this method is not linked to the study of any particular phenomenon. It can be applied to the study of unseen forces and mysterious phenomena as well as everyday, common occurrences. Failure to appreciate this universality of scientific method has led many people to feel that science is really only the study of matter and purely material phenomena. This narrow philosophical outlook, plus the historical fact that physics was the first science to develop a high degree of mathematical objectivity, has led to a common misconception that scientific knowledge is inherently limited only to physical reality and material phenomena.z Such a misconception naturally retards the unity of science and religion since religion definitely claims to have knowledge of nonmaterial aspects of reality. Once we see that the basis of science is its method and not any particular object of study, we can discard this misconception.

Physics and chemistry result when we turn scientific method to the study of the phenomena of nonliving matter. But if, keeping the same method, we turn to the study of living matter, the result is biology. If we turn to human beings as the objects of our study, we obtain psychology, sociology, and the other ‘human sciences’. Bahá’u’lláh has referred to religion as the ‘science of the love of God.’3 Thus religion results when we turn scientific method to the study of the unseen creative force of the universe which we call God.

It might be objected by some that the unity of science lies not in its method but in its goal, which is to know. However, there are other disciplines such as magic and occultism, both contemporary and historical, which claim knowledge as their objective. Yet these disciplines are not compatible with science and are

‘ For a more detailed and exhaustive discussion of the scientific method, see my essay ‘Science and Religion’ first printed in World Order, Spring 1969, and subsequently in revised form in Bahá’í Studies, vol. 2, September 1977.

1 This is why we have used the neologism ‘scientistic’ in the title of this section. The current materialism is scientistic in that it is generally attributed to science, but it is not scienufic since it is not really in harmony with the principles of science. We might say that this materialism is the result of an unscientific use of the results of science.

’ Baha’u’llah, The Seven Valleys and the Four Valleys, trans.

‘AlI-Kuli flan and Marzieh Gail, rev. ed. (Wilmette, 111.: Bahá’í Publishing Trust, 1952), p. 49.

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rejected by science because their method is unscientific. Thus to be scientific it is not sufficient to desire knowledge or to proclaim knowledge as one’s goal.

Another feature of scientific knowledge is its relativity. Because science is the self-conscious use of our faculties, we become aware that man has no absolute measure of truth. The conclusions of scientific investigations are always more or less probable. They are never absolute proofs. Of course. if a conclusion is highly probable and its negation highly improbable, we may feel very confident in the results, especially if we have been very thorough in our investigation. But realization and acceptance of this essential uncertainty and relativity of our knowledge is important, for the exigencies of human existence are often such that we are forced to act in some instances before we have had time to make such a thorough investigation. It therefore behooves us to remain constantly alert to the possibility that we may, in fact, be wrong.

Such a realization is also important for the unity of science and religion, for there are many who take the materialistic personal philosophy of some scientists as indication that science has proved that God does not exist. There are even some scientists who claim that science has proved that God does not exist. Such claims are foolish and ridiculous in the light of the universally recognized relativity of scientific conclusions, and especially as no scientist or scientific discipline has ever claimed to have undertaken a systematic, scientific study of the question of God’s existence and come up with the carefully validated conclusion that there is no God.

We should not be overly surprised at such contradictions in behaviour, however, since scientists are human and are subject to some of the same disastrous prejudices which afflict the generality of mankind.

There are, in fact, those who have consciously attempted to use science as a ‘cover’ or support to buttress some particular social or philosophical prejudice, or to justify some desired (but not necessarily justifiable) course of action. We must be constantly on our guard against such false uses of science; for they corrupt science, and they block effective attempts to establish the unity of science and religion. Such false uses of science are comparable to

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false uses of religion. as for example when religious institutions in the past have lent support to oppressive and immoral persecution of minorities.

It is heartening to note that, in recent years, increasing numbers of scientists have become sensitive to such false uses of science and have begun to raise their voices in public to point them out. Over the years there has been a small but persistent intellectual tradition of intelligent criticism of the false uses of science. The writings of Lewis Mumford are a strong contemporary example of this tradition. The closing paragraphs of his cogent The Pentagon of Power are virtually poetic in their appeal:

Reformers who would treat the campaign against environmental and human degradation solely in terms of improved technological facilities, like the reduction of gasoline exhaust in motor cars, see only a small part of the problem. Nothing less than a profound re-orientation of our vaunted technological ‘way oflife’ will save this planet from becoming a lifeless desert . . . For its effective salvation mankind will need to undergo something like a spontaneous religious conversion: one that will replace the mechanical world picture with an organic world picture, and give to the human personality, as the highest known manifestation of life, the precedence it now gives to its machines and computers . . . Of only one thing we may be confident. If mankind is to escape its programmed self—extinction the God who saves us will not descend from the machine: he will rise up again in the human soul.1

Toynbee states a similar conclusion in more general terms:

Religion is Man’s attempt to get into touch with an absolute spiritual Reality behind the phenomena of the Universe, and, having made contact with It, to live in harmony with It. This activity is all-pervading. It comprehends all the others. Moreover, it is Man’s lifeline. When once a creature has acquired, as Man has, a conscious intellect and a free will, this creature must either seek and find God or destroy itself.2

‘ Lewis Mumford, The Pentagon afPower: The Myth of the Machine (New York: Harcourt, 1970), p. 413. Z Toynbee, Study oinstory, XII, 663.

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Scientistic Atheism

Even though science has not disproved the existence of God, there still persists a feeling that the success of science and technology, independent of any religious orientation, has undermined the credibility of such belief. Belief in God is often seen as a hangover from primitivism. Primitive man saw God, the unseen creative force, in everything. He was in awe of the forces of nature. This sense of awe of primitive man is commonly attributed to his ignorance of the basis of natural phenomena. To many, our modern scientific understanding of these phenomena seems to have taken all the ‘mystery’ out of reality. Modern man feels guilty or childish about such feelings of awe— about his need to be encompassed. Science seems to have gradually reduced the possible domain of God’s existence to a vanishing point. Physics has removed God from nature, and psychology has removed Him from the human heart.

Again, further analysis reveals such an attitude as a misconception. For science has revealed to man not only ‘facts’ and ‘things’ but also a fascinating world of energy and unseen forces. Consider, for example, the view of matter and the material world which physics soberly presents to us for our consideration as the rational explanation for natural phenomena. The astonishing diversity of matter which we daily encounter is really due, we are told, only to different combinations of a small number of basic elements. Moreover, these elemental substances are themselves just different configurations of certain basic elementary particles which, in themselves, have no individuality. Furthermore, these basic particles are really just relatively stable forms of energy, and each of them is convertible. under suitable conditions, into energy. Thus all the stuff of everyday experience is ultimately just different configurations of energy.

And what, we ask, is energy? We may be successful in describing some of the ways energy works— some of the effects it produces. But when we ask what energy is, we come up against a mystery. And if we are humble enough, we realize that this is the same mystery primitive man intuitively perceived. Our science has served only to render our ultimate ignorance more explicit by showing how truly universal is this mysterious force, for now we

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see everything as a configuration of this one force.

The most striking feature of this energy, this ultimate mysterious force whose existence has been so strongly confirmed by science, is its ability to organize itself in ever more subtle forms and configurations. It is easy, for example, to characterize the direction of biological evolution. Biological evolution represents the organization of matter (thus energy) in ever more complex units, involving greater and greater complexity and specialization, and greater interdependence among the component parts. Man is ‘higher’ than other mammals precisely because of his relatively greater complexity of physiological organization.

Let us compare man with, say, a colony of one-celled organisms of comparable size. On the one hand, there is man with his cells specialized to form tissues which combine to make organs which combine to form systems which combine to form the human organism. This hierarchical structure enables man to function in an incredibly multifaceted way. Moreover, the continued, moment-to-moment existence of man is dependent on a host of favourable conditions. On the other hand, we have the colony of, let us say, bacteria which are capable of functioning only individually on the crudest level, each individual being virtually immortal (some bacteria can remain dormant for centuries without dying).

In particular, the human brain is the most complex physical structure known to us in the universe. Even the galaxies of stars and the movements of the planets cannot begin to compare in complexity to the subtle and highly organized human brain. The most complex computers invented to date are roughly equivalent to the brain of an ant when compared with the structure and complexity of the human brain.

Now, one well-known feature of the human organism is its self—awareness. Furthermore, scientific investigation has confirmed what man has always suspected: he did not create himself. It is not man who has organized himself in this subtle and complex way. Rather man awoke to his self—awareness and his subjectivity which he owes rather to the energy of which he is but a configuration.

We can thus pose the following clear question: Is it more reasonable to assume that a

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force capable of producing an effect (man) which is endowed with subjectivity and intelligence has also such characteristics, or is it more reasonable to assume that this force is deprived of such features? It is clearly more reasonable to suppose that such a force is at least as subtle as the effect it has produced. In fact, we know that energy is capable of subjectivity and intelligence because we have selfawareness and intelligence and we are configurations of this energy. Moreover, this force has produced other effects which man cannot produce (namely, it has produced man as well as the universe). Man has discovered himself and the universe, but he has not produced these phenomena. Thus we are inevitably led to hypothesize that this force is, in fact, even more subtle than himself. Following a long-established tradition, we call this force God.

Thus an unprejudiced application of scientific method to the facts of human existence leads to the probable conclusion that God exists and that He has consciousness and intelligence. Notice, however, that although reasoning and logic can lead us to the existence of God, they cannot give to us the experience of God. This is the role of religion, of which more will be said later on.

It is as if we had arrived at the conclusion, by scientific investigation, that there must be humanoid creatures on a planet which we lacked the technical means of visiting. The knowledge of the existence of these creatures would not in itself give us the intersubjective

, experience of their personalities.

There are several objections which are often raised against the otherwise clear conclusions we have drawn in ‘the preceding. It is often objected that the process which has produced man is due to chance and not to any force. Let us examine briefly this contention.

In scientific observation, a phenomenon is said to be due to chance when all logical possibilites occur with equal relative frequency. When such is not the case, and more especially when such deviations occur in some consistent way, we infer the existence of a force which is said to ‘cause’ the deviation from random behaviour. For example, it is logically possible for a dropped object to move in any direction (or not to move at all). But we observe that dropped objects do not move at random. They

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all move perversely in a downward direction. We infer the existence of an unseen force, called gravity, which produces this effect. The effect is, in a word, a consistent deviation from presumed equiprobability. We do not call gravity God because the effect produced by this force (the downward falling of objects) is not so marvelous as the effect we call man. Notice also that in space, when one is outside the reaches of the earth’s gravity, randomly dropped objects do move in a random direction.

In scientific investigations of phenomena it therefore becomes important to decide what events are probable and what events are improbable. In this way we can have some idea when a phenomenon is due to an unseen force and when it is due to chance. Science has discovered such a principle. It is called the second law Ofthermodynamics or Carnot’s principle. This principle says, simply stated, that order is improbable and disorder is probable. This is so because order represents a limited number of stable configurations whereas any possible configuration represents disorder.

Let us compare, for example, a brick house and a pile of bricks. I can transform a brick house into a pile of bricks by moving the bricks one by one in any possible sequence. I am free to take a top brick or a bottom brick or a middle brick first. But to build the house, it is physically impossible to put in a top brick before putting in any bottom brick. Only a certain limited number of possible sequences will produce the house. The house represents order, and the pile of bricks disorder (relative to each other).

Thus Carnot’s principle is nothing more than a precise statement of what we all intuitively feel about chance phenomena. The nonscientist would bejust as shocked as the scientist to find that the wind or a thunderstorm had transformed a pile of bricks into a well-built house (even if we had left the pile of bricks to itself for many years). But we are not at all shocked if such astorm transforms a house into a pile of bricks.

Now we have earlier on remarked that man, in particular man’s brain, is the most highly ordered structure in the universe. Thus, by Carnot’s principle, it is also the least probable. It is, therefore, the least likely to have been produced by a purely random process.

Biologists point out that the fundamental

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mechanisms of evolution are mutation, by which is meant spontaneous genetic change, and natural selection, by which is meant the superior survival rate over successive generations, and within a given population, of those genotypes whose phenotypical (physically observable or behavioural) characteristics better suit them to function within the natural milieu in question.1 Natural selection eliminates forms and organisms which are less well adapted, and thus tends to decrease variation (diversity) within a population. Mutation, however, has the opposite effect, that of increasing the genetic diversity. Evolution is a process of moving from lower (less complex) to higher (more complex) forms. Such a process necessarily involves periodic (though not necessarily regular) significant increases in variation and thus cannot depend on natural selection alone. In other words, the contribution of natural selection to the evolutionary process depends ultimately on the occurrence of mutations since if there are no mutations there will ultimately be an insufficient diversity of forms from which nature can select. But since, as we have already stressed, the direction of evolution is precisely from lower (that is, less ordered and thus more probable) to higher (that is, more ordered and thus less probable) forms, it is unreasonable to suppose that the occurrence in the evolutionary process of mutations favourable to an increase in complexity was wholly or primarily due to chance. We cannot reason from the fact of mutation to the conclusion that the cause of mutations in evolution is chance alone. We must be careful to distinguish between the known facts of the evolutionary process and the possible theoretical models used to explain and interpret the facts.

Moreover, what is needed to explain biological evolution is not just an occasional favourable mutation (almost all observed mutations are unfavourable) but a consistent sequence of favourable mutations in the right place and at the right timeintervals (if the first one happens ‘The somewhat technical, though nonetheless important,

point is that the genetic configuration of an organism is determined at conception and does not interact directly with the environment. It is rather the physical and behavioural characteristics of the organism which interact directly with the environment. Thus, natural selection can only operate on the phenotypic level, but this affects genet ic diversity indirectly to the degree that such physical and behavioural characteristics are genetically based.

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in Australia and the next one in Europe there cannot be any process of evolution). Nor did evolution take place in an ‘unlimited’ amount of time. Rather, the whole process occurred in a period of no greater than three billion years, and the major part of it (from small, primitive animals to man) in about one-half billion years. Thus there was not time for an ‘infinite' or unlimited ‘experimentation’ to take place.

In other words, the phenomenon of biological evolution presents us precisely with a clear, consistent deviation from randomness of the sort discussed above. We must therefore conclude the existence of a force which is the cause of biological evolution. Anyone for whom this conclusion is unacceptable must decide for himself why he feels such an inference to be unacceptable here while being generally and universally acceptable elsewhere in science.

It is obviously impossible in a short article such as this to enter into extended detailed discussion of these points on which scores of books have been written. The reader who is interested in pursuing the technical side of the question can do so on his own.

In closing this discussion, let us treat one last point, however. Recent advances in biology have led to speculation that man may one day be able to reproduce life in a test tube. Such knowledge or control over the vital process would, it is sometimes said, show that 'God does not exist after all because man would have discovered the secret of life. But no such conclusion is logically forthcoming. After all, man already knows how to reproduce life. Babies are born every day. What man clearly did not create is the process by which life is reproduced. Thus, even if the human brain finally succeeds in discovering the secret of life, this will not change the fact that man did not create the vital process which he would then understand. Moreover, man’s brain which does the understanding would itself owe its existence to this vital process which it did not create. Discovery is not creation.

Indeed, no discoveries that man can ever make in the future can change the eternal fact that man is not responsible for bringing into being the process which has produced his brain and its understanding. Man is not responsible for his own existence; and he depends, therefore, on something other than himself to which he owes his existence.

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A Solution to Religious Dissension

False concepts and false uses of science are only one-half of the problem. For even ifone is quite willing and desires to turn to religion, the question remains: where to turn? For the author of this article, and for many others on this planet, the answer to this question has turned out to be: the Bahá’í Faith. Rather than engaging in any abstract dissertation on the details of Bahá’í doctrine—which are already adequately available in other sources—we have thought better to describe in a straightforward manner those features of the Bahá’í experience which have led so many to feel that it furnishes a deeply satisfying answer to their religious quest.

First, and most important, the Bahá’í Faith renders accessible to the individual that experience of self—transcendence and mystic communion with the Spirit of God which is the heart of religion. We have previously remarked that logic and reason can prove to us the existence of God but cannot give us the experience of communion with God. Concerning proofs of the existence of God, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá has said:

. . . apply thyselfto rational and authoritative arguments. For arguments are a guide to the path and by this the heart will be turned unto the Sun of Truth. And when the heart is turned unto the Sun, then the eye will be opened and will recognize the Sun through the Sun itself. Then (man) will be in no need of arguments (or proofs), for the Sun is altogether independent, . . .1

In other words, the reality of the experience of communion with God carries with it a deeper conviction and sense of the reality of God than the purely intellectual acknowledgement of God’s existence which comes from logic and reasoning.

How, we might well ask, is this communion obtained? How does God reveal to us something of His personal and subjective nature in a way that is accessible to us? Since, as we have already observed, man is the most highly ordered and refined phenomenon accessible to us, it would be only logical that God might choose precisely this instrument for his SelfRevelation. It is clearly impossible for God to

l‘Abdu’l-Bahá, Tablets Of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá ‘Abbas, 3 vols. (New York: Bahá’í Publishing Society, 1909—1916), I, 168.

THE BAHA'l WORLD

reveal His most personal and subjective attributes to man through an instrument such as a rock or a tree which does not itself possess consciousness. Bahá’ís believe that this act of Self—Revelation through a chosen human instrument has occurred periodically in history (our collective experience). This is clearly necessary if the intersubjective knowledge of God is to re main constantly accessible to us, for with the passage of time the immediacy and force of such a revelation tends to be lost and dissipated.

Bahá’ís call these chosen human instruments Manifestations of God. The Manifestations are none other than the great religious founders of history, some of whose names we know: Abraham, Moses, Jesus, Muhammad, Buddha, Zoroaster, and most recently Bahá’u’lláh, the Founder of the Bahá’í Faith. Concerning the revelation of God through these Manifestations, Baha’u’llah has said:

. . . all things, in their inmost reality, testify to the revelation of the names and attributes of God within them . . . Man, the noblest and most perfect of all created things, excelleth them all in the intensity 0 f this revelation, and is a filler expression ofits glory. And ofall men, the most accomplished, the most distinguished, and the most excellent are the Manifestations Of the Sun of Truth. Nay, all else besides these M ani festations, live by the operation of their Will, and move and have their being through the outpourings Oftheir grace. 2

It is, therefore, as a result of the comings of these Manifestations that man has the possibility of communion with God. ‘Abdu’l-Bahá puts it simply:

The knowledge Ofthe Reality Ofthe Divinity is impossible and unattainable, but the knowledge of the Manifestations of God is the knowledge of God, for the bounties, splendours, and divine attributes are apparent in them. Therefore i f man attains t0 the knowledge of the Manifestations of God, he will attain to the knowledge of God; and ifhe be negleetfitl Ofthe knowledge Ofthe Holy Manifestation, he will be bereft Ofthe knowledge 0 f God. 3

2 Bahá’u’lláh, Gleanings, pp. 178—179.

3‘Abdu’l-Bahá, Some Answered Questions, comp. and trans. Laura Clifford Barney, rev. ed. (Wilmette, Ill.: Bahá’í Publishing Trust, 1964), pp. 257—258.

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The primary key to maintaining this communion of consciousness with God is the daily discipline of prayer and meditation on the words of the Manifestation. Bahá’u’lláh states:

Say: The first and foremost testimon y establishing His truth is His own Self. Next to this testimony is His Revelation. For whoso faileth to recognize either the one or the other He hath established the words He hath revealed as proof of His reality and truth. This is, verily, an evidence of His tender mercy unto men. He hath endowedevery soul with the capacity to recognize the signs of God. How could He, otherwise, havefulfilled His testimony unto men . . .1

These words are the instrument which creates the consciousness of the presence of God; for meditation, to be successful, must have some object or focus.

Although the experience of communion with God is an individual, subjective one, there are two things in the Bahá’í experience which tend to give it a sense of universality and objectivity. First, it is repeatable for the individual. If one had only an occasional ‘flash’ of mystic feeling, one could well doubt whether such experience was valid and was not, rather, some form of autosuggestion. Bahá’ís find that when they practice the daily discipline of prayer and meditation on the words of Baha’u’llah, the experience of communion is constantly renewed, accessible, and repeatable.

In a striking statement, Bahá’u’lláh boldly promises that the experience of communion with God will always be accessible through this discipline:

Intone, 0 My servant, the verses of God that have been received by thee, as intoned by them who have dra wn nigh unto Him, that the sweetness of thy melody may kindle thine own soul, and attract the hearts of all men. Whoso reciteth, in the privacy ofhis chamber, the verses revealed by God, the scattering angels of the Almighty shall scatter abroad the fragrance of the words uttered by his mouth, and shall cause the heart of every righteous man to throb. Though he may, at first, remain unaware of its effect, yet the virtue 0 f the grace vouchsafed unto him must

‘ Bahá’u’lláh, GIeanings, pp. 105—106.

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needs sooner or later exercise its influence upon his soul.2

Second, the experience is general or universal. It is not reserved for some elite and withheld from others. It is not vague or uncommunicable. All Bahá’ís experience it and find that they can discuss it and share it with others with the same feeling of clarity and coherence that one naturally has about any other multi-subjective experience such as seeing a red object or eating a delicious meal.

Another important feature of Bahá’í experience is the explicit acceptance by the Bahá’í Faith of the principle of the relativity of religious truth. Shoghi Effendi has said:

The Revelation proclaimed by Baha’u’llah, His followers believe, is divine in origin, allembracing in scope, broad in its outlook, scientific in its method, humanitarian in its principles and dynamic in the influence it exerts on the hearts and minds of men. The mission of the Founder of their Faith, they conceive it to be to proclaim that religious truth is not absolute but relative, that Divine

Revelation is continuous and progressive 3

Such total and explicit recognition of the principle of the relativity of religious truth is a hallmark of the Bahá’í Faith and an important element in permitting its followers to reconcile scientific method with religious and spiritual needs.

The Bahá’í Faith is not exclusive and creates unity rather than dissension. This aspect of Bahá’í experience naturally derives from the fundamental principle of the relativity and progressive nature of truth mentioned above. Bahá’u’lláh has said that the fundamental purpose of religion is to create love and unity and that whenever it happens that a religion ceases to perform this function and creates division and opposition, then it is better for such a religion not to exist.

Some people who are otherwise attracted to Bahá’í teachings and principles sometimes hesitate to identify themselves with the movement for fear that such identification will somehow cut them off from other people.

2 ibid., p. 295. 3 Shoghi Effendi, The World Order of Bahá’u’lláh (New York: Bahá’í Publishing Committee, 1938), p. xi.

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Because the Bahá’í Faith is numerically smaller than some other religious groups, or because the Bahá’í Faith is new and therefore sometimes unknown to or misinterpreted by the public, individuals perhaps fear that identification with it will subject them to similar attitudes of mistrust on the part of others. However apparently reasonable such fears may seem, this is not the experience which Bahá’ís have. Genuine human relations are based on truth, honesty, love, and the ability to communicate deeply with others. Bahá’ís find that their Faith gives them new inner resources and tools which permit them to approach human relationships in the light of these principles. Rather than feeling ‘cut off’, Bahá’ís experience a feeling of vastly increased ability to communicate and indeed commune with others, be they Bahá’í or non-Bahá’í’. These new personal resources compensate a hundredfold for any superficial and ignorant criticism which may, from time to time, be forthcoming. Moreover, both psychologists and philosophers have pointed out that the crowd togetherness and superficial conformities of modern life are only a poor substitute for genuine human relationships. Such genuine relationships are seen to be largely absent from modern life due to the ‘self—alienation’ created in part by the illusion of easy togetherness which leads the individual to suppose that satisfying human relationships can be attained without a strong and conscious effort of will on his part. Once the individual pierces the veil of this illusion and accepts the fact that effort and suffering are necessary to attain deep friend-' ship and lasting love, he will naturally seek that which will give him the resources necessary for the task. It is the experience of Bahá’ís that their Faith gives them these resources. Moreover, because the Bahá’í Faith is a living community, and not just an abstract idea, the striving for love and unity can take place in a new context not otherwise available. It is the context of a community in which each individual member has a similar commitment to this new quality of human relationship based on communion with God, Who is the ultimate source of man’s ability to love in the first place. The Bahá’í Faith illuminates our history and our personal experience. The inclusiveness of the Bahá’í Faith is not just a passive principle of tolerance. It is experienced by Bahá’ís rather

THE Bahá’í WORLD

asaclarifying and ordering force which enables them to ‘see’ the truth in other movements, perhaps even truths which orthodox followers of these movements may have missed. In talking about their Faith, Bahá’ís often find themselves in the position of defending or explaining the validity of certain teachings of past Prophets which the followers themselves have abandoned or rejected. The dedication which Bahá’ís feel to such founders of religions as Christ, Muhammad, Moses, and Buddha, is very real. It often surprises and amazes the followers of these religions, for it has even happened that Bahá’ís have vigorously defended the rights and doctrines of religious communities who have actively persecuted the Bahá’ís themselves.

Another important aspect of Bahá’í experience is that it does not tend to extremes in any form. At the basis of the Bahá’í Faith is a principle of moderation. This principle means that the individual feels continually pulled towards greater balance, calm, and integration in his life. He does not feel torn between extreme desires or called upon to become fanatical or unbalanced in his dealings with others or with himself. This sense of moderation does not imply a static or passive state or an indifference. It means rather the integration and balance among the deep emotions one feels.

A final and extremely important aspect of the Bahá’í experience is its focus on society and its goal of establishing world unity. We have seen religion as an answer to man’s need to be encompassed by something greater than himself. Quite clearly the individual is already encompassed by society as a whole. Therefore, there can be no ultimate answer to man’s religious quest and his religious needs unless and until society itself is spiritualized. The individual cells of a body cannot long remain healthy if the body itself is sick. Society’s influence on the individual is too great and too pervasive to be neglected. Indeed, the focus on the social aspects of religion and the goal of establishing world unity constitute the most fundamental contribution of the Bahá’í Faith to man’s collective religious consciousness. Shoghi Effendi states:

Unification of the whole of mankind is the hallmark of the stage which human society is

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now approaching. Unity of family, of tribe, of city—state, and nation have been successively attempted and fully established. World unity is the goal towards which a harassed humanity is striving. . . .

The unity of the human race, as envisaged by Baha’u’llah, implies the establishment of a world commonwealth in which all nations, races, creeds and classes are closely and permanently united, and in which the autonomy of its state members and the personal freedom and initiative of the individuals that compose them are definitely and completely safeguarded.1

Moreover, this consummation of human society can only be accomplished on the basis of religion:

The principle of the Oneness of Mankind, as proclaimed by Baha’u’llah, carries with it no more and no less than a solemn assertion that attainment to this final stage in this stupendous evolution is not only necessary but inevitable, that its realization is fast approaching, and that nothing short of a power that is born of God can succeed in establishing it.2

The Writings of Baha’u’llah contain a veritable blueprint for the establishment of this new planetary society, involving, among others, such principles as the establishment of a universal auxiliary language, a world court, a world legislature, a world police force, and universal education. The Bahá’í community is viewed as, in some sense, the spiritual embryo of this future society. Thus the common goal of working to achieve unity gives a sense of purpose to ‘ Shoghi Effendi, The World Order of Bahá’u’lláh: Selected

Letters, 2d rev. ed. (Wilmette, Ill.: Bahá’í Publishing Trust,

1974), pp. 202—203. 2 um, p. 43.

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the life of each individual in the Bahá’í community, while the experience within the community itself furnishes practical opportunities for growth and for the practice of this oneness.

To anyone seriously seeking a solution to the current disunity and opposition between religion and science, the answer given by the Bahá’í Faith merits deep investigation.

Who, contemplating the helplessness, the fears and miseries of humanity in this day, can any longer question the necessity for a fresh revelation of the quickening power of God’s redemptive love and guidance? Who, witnessing on one hand the stupendous advance achieved in the realm of human knowledge, of power, of skill and inventiveness, and Viewing on the other the unprecedented character of the sufferings that afflict, and the dangers that beset, presentday society, can be so blind as to doubt that the hour has at last struck for the advent of a new Revelation, for a re-statement Of the Divine Purpose, and for the consequent revival of those spiritual forces that have, at fixed intervals, rehabilitated the fortunes of human society? Does not the very operation of the world-unifying forces that are at work in this age necessitate that He Who is the Bearer Of the Message of God in this day should not only reaffirm that self—same exalted standard of individual conduct inculcated by the Prophets gone before Him, but embody in His appeal, to all governments and peoples, the essentials of that social code, that Divine Economy, which must guide humanity’s concerted efforts in establishing that all-embracing federation which is to signalize the advent of the Kingdom of God on this earth?3

3 ibid., pp. 60—61.

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2. CAN THERE BE A BAHA’I POETRY?1

GEOFFREY P. NASH

THE high station ascribed in Bahá’í scripture to art has led a number of Bahá’í artists to predicate and even to seek Bahá’í forms and artistic conventions. Shoghi Effendi, Guardian of the Bahá’í Faith, made the following com ments on this:

Music, as one of the arts, is a natural cultural development, and the Guardian does not feel that there should be any cultivation of ‘Bahá’í Music’ any more than we are trying to develop a Bahá’í school of painting or writing. The believers are free to paint, write and compose as their talents may guide them . . . As long as they have music for its own sake it is all right, but they should not consider it Bahá’í music.2

This is augmented by the following statement:

As regards producing a book of Bahai songs, your understanding that there is no cultural expression which could be called Bahá’í at this time (distinctive music, literature, art, architecture, etc., being the flower of the civilization and not coming at the beginning of a new Revelation), is correct. However, that does not mean that we haven’t Bahá’í songs, in other words, songs written by Bahá’ís on Bahá’í subjects.3

In considering poetry, the divinest of the arts, it is essential to differentiate between the true poet and the mere versifier. A true poet must have poetic vision, be attuned to great themes and ultimate mysteries, be impelled by his Muse to express his perceptions in poetic form. Such a soul can be born into any age. But the above intimations from the Guardian are unmistakable in their import. Great art is the flower of civilization, and its development in

‘ This essay appears here in its original form. At the request of the Canadian Association for Studies on the Bahá’í Faith it was subsequently revised for inclusion in vol. 7 ofBahd’f Studies. See also ‘The Heroic Soul and the Ordinary Self—a Study in the Religious Poetry of Roger White,‘ by Geoffrey Nash.

z The Universal House of Justice, compilation ‘Bahá’í Writings on Music’, Bahá’í Publishing Trust, Oakham, England, p. 11.

’ ibid.

the Bahá’í community, natural and inevitable. We are as yet in the early Springtime of the new World Order when the golden harvest of Bahá’í’ civilization is but a vision, though an assured one, of the future. Bahá’ís anticipate—it is a hallmark of their faith—a great world civilization in the fullness of time. At present, consonant with the metaphor ofnatural cycles so ubiquitously used in the Bahá’í Holy Writings, Bahá’ís recognize the barrenness of the times we live in as symptomatic of the season for planting the seeds. Hastening the advent of the oneness of mankind is the surest way to expedite the appearance of a world civilization unparalleled in recorded annals.

Must we then neglect the arts now, as of secondary importance at this stage of our history? I incline to believe such a course would prove unsupportable for Bahá’í’s. I believe great enterprises have never proceeded without a sense of poetry on the part of their executors. If empires are built upon valour, upon physical prowess, do they not require exertion of an energetic, even an imaginative will? Much more must this be so for the promotion and establishment of the great religions. Indeed the present activities of the Bahá’ís are saturated with poetry; their past equally, if not more so. Does not Bahá’í Holy Writing—the Word of God we believe—exude poetry? The writings of Shoghi Effendi abound in evocative turns of phrase. Presumably Bahá’ís respond to this beauty. Can it be that they will continue to do so but half consciously? If they do, it will be against the experience of the early years of the Bahá’í movement.

We recall how so many of the Babi’ martyrs died with poetry on their lips, be it a couplet or more from Hafiz or verses of their own composition, for many were themselves poets. One of the greatest jewels of the Babi’ dispensation was that eloquent, ethereal poetess Táhirih— a woman renowned in the East for her poetry as for her unique stature among women. Baha’u’llah, the Author of Arabic and Persian odes which are held to be so exquisitely beautiful as to be untranslatable, liked to have about Him believers who, at His bidding,

[Page 621]ESSAYS AND REVIEWS

would recite to Him their poetry. Nabil-iA‘;am, companion of Baha’u’llah and respected historian of the early years of the Babi and Bahá’í Faiths, was an inspired poet. ‘Abdu’l-Bahá would have Bahá’í poets recite their works in the Holy Shrines.

If we consider the lovers of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá who came from the Occident, we find that Lua Getsinger wrote verses imploring His favour. And thanks to a living Bahá’í poet, Roger White, the prose poetry of Juliet Thompson’s diaries has emerged in blank verse that tunes once again the strings of the proverbial Aeolian harp. George Townshend wrote devotional poetry and meditations of high quality. Shall not the Bahá’ís go on? Assuredly, they will continue to be inspired by Bahá’í ideals to write poetry of Bahá’í character.

But it is true as well that what Yeats once called ‘The Muses’ sterner laws’ require of the poet a single-minded devotion which is perhaps at present incompatible with the time required to be spent on the active establishment of the Bahá’í Faith in the world. Moreover, a great poet works within a tradition, and the tradition of great poetry has declined if not virtually died out.

In the modern world the poet is perforce an embittered outsider. By 1850, it was beginning to become apparent that the poet, the sensitive man, felt himself adrift in an alien world. The nineteenth century helped to fix the alienation of the poet in modern times, and also fixed in the minds of men in general an erroneous conception of poets as bizarre, extravagant individuals, invariably at war with received values. The century which had begun with Shelley’s claim that poets were the ‘unacknowledged legislators of the world’ and Carlyle’s prediction that Literature would become the new, green branch of religion, ended with Nietzsche declaring that the man of genius was outside of, and must necessarily contemn, established social values. The claim of the poets, if it had grown more shrill and unbalanced, had done so because society had turned away from noble values. The best poets have always dealt with intangibles, with spiritual values. The modern age is grossly materialistic and utilitarian, and above all atheistic; poets, if the evidence of the last century's poetry is to be trusted, cannot do without God. Baudelaire, the arch-defiant among nineteenth century poets in their alien 621

ation from society, could not live without believing in supernatural agencies.

We have to remember this situation because no poetry of lasting significance is written independently of civilization and tradition. The poet is individual and subjective, but he is mankind’s conscience. Mystically initiated to the divine order of things, he registers man’s departure from his nobler nature and his higher ideals. As Schiller said, the poet keeps alive in man aims that are higher than the material. No wonder he has no place in a world given over to the most vulgar technological hunger, the crudest behaviouristic philosophies, and the most soulless social engineering.

The dependence of the poet, in spite of his subjective nature, is very real. He requires not only an audience but a ground-work of shared values with those among whom he dwells. Cut off from this audience, above all cut off from a sustaining adherence to a generally—held social vision, the poet has no mooring and floats adrift in an amorphous, frightening ocean. Matthew Arnold expressed the dilemma of the detached nineteenth century poet:

Still bent to make some port he knows not where, Still standing for some false, impossible shore.

The Anglo—Saxon poet who composed Beowulf never knew such alienation when he sang before the assembled warriors the limited philosophy of valour and heroic death. The poet was in his place. So, one must suppose, was Petrarch in his medieval world and Tasso in his renaissance one‘ Neither did Shakespeare lack a patron or Milton a livelihood. Goethe too was esteemed at Weimar, and if Byron was a self—exile he still felt a link with the tradition of Pope, and Keats with that of Spenser. Arnold’s desolation in isolation presaged the tragic ends of the poets of the fin de siécle, of whom Yeats wrote:

What portion in the world can the poet have

Who has awakened from the common dream

But dissipation and despair.

There is thus a Church for the poet, as for the composer of music, and an apostolic succession

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of great ones to whom he feels indebted. And great epochs might consist of a handful of major talents: Marlowe, Jonson, Shakespeare, Webster, Fletcher and Middleton; Goethe, Schiller, Holderlin, Novalis, Heine; Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, Mendelssohn and Brahms. But in a barren age we can scarce name one master, let alone a succession of heirs.

Must the Bahá’í poet be disconsolate then, along with other contemporary poets? Certainly he will make no idle claims, knowing the low cultural standards of his time. Bahá’ís perhaps may partially escape the sense of vacuum most artists now feel. Bahá’ís live with that, but also maintain a transcendental vision. They are truly the heirs of the Romantic artists who sensed the dawning of the new age around 1800. They know what Richter was speaking of when he proclaimed:

Infinite Providence, Thou wilt cause the day to dawn.

We are aware that the sun has risen, yet still know ourselves to be ‘children of the halflight’. Such a vision, though circumscribed, still looks to a future (a glorious one!) and, being transcendental, bears witness to an eternity. Bahá’ís once more have found man’s place in endless time, regaining the organic awareness of the succession of epochs which Herder knew of. Moreover, whereas Herder and Fichte had caught a glimpse of God in the ever-unfolding revelation of history, Bahá’ís believe they are party to a knowledge of the Greater Revelation, the key to the whole progression. Baha’u’llah, the Greater Revelation, the Manifestation of God for this age, confirmed this knowledge of man’s destiny when He said: All men have been created to carry forward an everadvancing civilization.

The transcendentalist sees across time and into eternity; for him the present is part of the whole. A Bahá’í poet may write poetry today knowing that it will be far surpassed by great Bahá’í poets to come, poets supported by a fully-developed philosophy and a world civilization rooted in a religious culture. But he who writes today, writing in humility, may still know he contributed his part to keeping the vision of poetry alive. If what he writes comes from an inspired heart it may still be of human value, and highly regarded by later genera THE Bahá’í WORLD

tions, though its pure poetic value fail to match that of the great practitioners. For the poetic impulse, coming from the soul of men, is of universal interest to all men for all time. It is thus that we may still read today fragments from ancient poets and know that the pulse of poetry was yet alive in those times.

We can therefore best advise the Bahá’í poet of today to hold to the great themes. The eternal themes in poetry pertain to the perpetual themes of life. Above all, the greatest is Love: Love for God, as it is to be found in, for example, Indian literature, and in Stiff poetry; Love for nature, and Love between human beings—how ubiquitous are these themes in the world’s poetry.

By keeping poetry alive, we bear witness to the divine impulse within and also enrich society by increasing other men’s perception. Poetry is akin to the revealed Word, albeit infinitely lower in rank, being as all else dependent upon that; yet the poet also testifies that in the beginning was the Word, that man’s speech is also a mark of his divine descent, and poetry the utterance of his deepest nature. Little wonder that poetry is so closely associated with religion, and that the Word of God is often sublime poetry.

Surely, therefore, in the Bahá’í community, poetry shall be accorded a very high place of distinction, far above any mean assessment of utility. Even in this era of committees, the province of the poet remains individual and inviolate. There shall be no danger of official demands for realism, or even quasi-romanticism. Plato’s antagonism and the Prophet Muhammad’s qualified consent that there was some truth in poetry are to be forgotten in the age of man’s maturity. The Bahá’í poet is freed from restraint by virtue of the ideals to which his Faith calls him to aspire. Borne up by the moral vision of the Bahá’í Faith, we will not need to look for an evident didacticism, conscious moralizing or theologizing. There need be no pressure for adherence to the puritanical strain. For it remains true, in Yeats’s words ‘. . . that life is greater than the cause. . . and we artists. . . are the servants not of any cause but of mere naked life, and above all of that life in its nobler forms, where joy and sorrow are one . . ." We do not associate the

‘ W. B. Yeats, Essays and Introductiuns, New York, 1961 p. 260.

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‘cause’ referred to with God’s Cause, the Bahá’í Cause, but perhaps only that cause with a small ‘c’ that men may make out of the Bahá’í Faith. Causes, movements of ideas, have in the past not infrequently become sterile in their adherence to abstractions; that is, ideas not lived and experienced. Ideas and beliefs are not worthy until they become part of life itself. Life in its mere naked form is what human beings actually experience, and poetry addresses itself essentially to personal experience. If the poet is to sing of life in its nobler forms he must have experienced or compassed imaginatively such realities. He must know the joy and suffering that are one, through his own sorrows. It is as though he is articulating the spiritual battles of Everyman. In these matters there can be no abstraction, no dogma. It was Milton who insisted that poets who wished to write heroic poems should first make of their lives heroic poems. Bahá’í’s, following the advice of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, do not merely recite verses but strive to make their lives beautiful prayers. Poets must express what they believe not in theory but in the way they themselves, and others, have actually lived such belief.

Belief is in continual need of revitalization through the influx of spiritual sensibility and the infusion of real experience touched by imagination. The poet is one who can advance this aim, alongside the efforts of others, and thus we reiterate his importance to the Bahá’í community. For fully accepted and approved, in this role he does become servant of the cause, which is life itself, the higher life that is to be, which man must have more abundantly.

Profane imagery has been handled by the greatest poets, including Hafiz and Goethe; it has influenced the sacred, as in the case of the medieval lyric. The two English Puritan poets, Spenser and Milton, the most serious of poets both, were alive to the sensuous. Hatred of the world is not the poet’s way; he must have water and clay as well as nightingales and roses. The Qur’ánic paradise and the beloved’s hair are natural images that the most Sacred of Voices have not disdained to use.

At present then, the Bahá’í who writes poetry may find solace in the golden mines which have been worked by the great poets of the past. Like most literate poets he will read widely. His particular advantage is the inspiration of the themes, symbols and images to be

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found in the tradition of his Faith. He has both a tradition which is yet a new one, and a vision which is faced t0 the future. He may recall the potent influence of religion on previous literatures. In Hebrew literature poetry and religious inspiration are synonymous; the Indian languages have contributed a vital and varied literature to Hindu culture; and perhaps the most powerful example of religion wedded to literature is Islam and Arabic, which in turn fertilized the fields of Persian, Turkish and Urdu literature.

These thoughts only underline the inevitability of an unimaginably resplendent range of literature in the mature Bahá’í civilization. What an inheritance does the Bahá’í poet share! We may be present at the beginning, but the prospect is vast. Here is not the place to prophesy as to the possible images future poets will invoke, poets who have immersed themselves in the ocean of the Bahá’í Writings. But lest it seem that I am content only with generalization, I would like to quote briefly from a living Bahá’í poet whose work possesses, in my estimation, a distinctive character.

Roger White’s poetry contains, as far as I can tell, many echoes from the tradition of English literature. He moves from the meditative, sometimes self—dissecting introspection of the seventeenth century Metaphysicals, through the light-hearted jeux d’esprits of the eighteenth, to the apparent disenchantment of the modern mind.

We have a modern echo of John Donne:

Come, let me fete you, beloved foe, for I tire of this old-born war.

In stark contrast, we find the completely secular voice of the japing eighteenth century poet ostensibly berating a gourmand mistress:

My deeper need you blithely slight, Love—not food—my appetite.

And yet another volte—face reveals the sceptical conscience of the modern:

When you heard that God had died, you wondered

whether it was from sheer boredom all that joyless music and our impudent prayers.

I find in Roger White’s variety of styles, moods and themes the unity of a distinctive

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poetic mind. His use of secular image and idiom is unabashed and unrepentant:

Named by her past suitors ‘Akká, Ptolemais, St. Jean d’Acre,

she is no beauty, this aged courtesan, meanly rouged by sun.

Why did you do it, Keith? And you a looker.

Freddie, you walked in

with eyes as open as your heart,

knew it to be the deal beyond compromise; survived the imagery

accommodated to nightingales and roses.

Here is the use of colloquial phrase and the profane conceit, but not merely for effect. We sense there is an ulterior purpose behind the use of bawdy image, accusatory line and worldly wit. This sense of controlling wisdom behind the open technical facility is in fact the secret to the appreciation of Roger White’s intention as poet. His is a deeply human eye; hiding beneath the layers of burlesque and modernist world-weariness is a sorrowful and joyous delicacy of feeling. The heart of the quintessential pioneer—the grey-haired Bahá’í lady inveigling an innocent ‘contact’ into her Faith through her kindness and conviction—is penetrated. She would:

. . . have shielded the hapless

of Nagasaki, Warsaw, Buchenwald,

with her own body, if she could.

Long ago she wept and worked for causes not then named.

But if he can celebrate the unknown Bahá’í, he can also give a jolting insight into the predicament of known saints. The much-loved Fujita, renowned Japanese Bahá’í, loving and devoted servant of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, emerges as a vulnerable, isolated man as opposed to the walking institution or sentimental relic:

Acquitted of triviality by a pain and loneliness that might instruct us, rescued a halo’s-breadth from isolating

THE BAHA’l WORLD

sainthood by an exonerating intolerance and his need for us, but still a holy man.

That these lines suggest so much about ourselves as well as Fujita, as well as the poet’s seeing, sensitive eye, is perhaps a mark of Roger White’s range. On the surface eschewing didacticism like a plague, this poetry has ‘much to say’ because it requires the reader to look into himself. Do we confine to cruel isolation those we ostensibly canonize as living saints? Roger White sees the predicament of the real man but his poet’s lens also captures in a flash something of his subject’s character:

mikado of mirth, the Servant’s servant.

This is real poetry then. It is not accommodating; it is often sardonic, questioning, not easily satisfied. But it carries a note of wisdom and acceptance too. We see a practising poet writing, not as a single-minded poet-laureate for the Bahá’í Cause, but a sensitized human being.

But at a more obvious ‘Bahá’í” level, Roger White’s poetry suggests further points of departure. The heroes, heroines and history of the Bahá’í Faith are not invoked simplistically or meretriciously, nor do quotations from Scripture do the poet’s work for him. When there is a quotation (he loves to borrow Shoghi Effendi’s or the Universal House of Justice’s epithets to crown remembered Bahá’í figures) it is to build an aura of pageant:

Brilliant Keith! Thornton! courageous Marion! incomparable Martha!

constant Juliet!

immortal Lua! steadfast

What is the purpose in this?

I fashion a paean; to vanquish dread, invoke the victors.

It is an answer, then, to personal need. as well as to celebrate past souls and the spirit that moved them. Roger White’s poetry, while retaining the poet’s individuality, yet leads us to hope for a Bahá’í tradition of poetry.

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3. HIGHLIGHTS IN THE LIFE OF MiRZA ABU’L-FADL

(BASED ON AN ARTICLE BY R. MEHRABEANI)

. . . learned apologist. . . (one of the) successive messengers despatched by ‘Abdu’l-Bahá (who) succeeded in rapidly dispelling the doubts, and in deepening the understanding of the believers, in holding the community together, and in forming the nucleus of those administrative insitutions which, two decades later, were to be formally inaugurated through the explicit provisions of‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s Will and Testament.

Mirza Abu’l-Fadl was born in Gulpaygan, iran in 1844 into a family distinguished for its scholarship. His father, Mi’rza Rida, was a noted Sh1"ih cleric. Even as a youth, Mfrza Abu’l—Fadl displayed remarkable intelligence and had a phenomenal memory. He received his-education in various centres in iran including Iṣfahán and also studied in ‘Iráq, mastering all branches of Islamic theology, Persian and Arabic literature, and philosophy. Upon completion of his studies in October 1873 he accepted appointment as a lecturer at Ḥakím Héflim, an important and long-established theological college in Tihran. Far from being a narrow-minded priest, he had a broad outlook and an inquisitive mind and established contact with Zoroastrians, Jews, Christians and even the few Buddhists who could then be found in iran. In 1875 he became acquainted with a merchant of good character, Aqa ‘Abdu’lKarim, who had embraced the Bahá’í Faith. Although Aqa ‘Abdu’l-Kan’m had no schooling, he possessed a shrewd, acute mind. He introduced Mirza Abu’l-Fadl to the Bahá’í teachings and arranged interviews for him with learned Bahá’ís including Aqa Muhammadi-Qa’ini (Nabil-i-Akbar)2 who was known as ‘the Learned One of Qa’in’, Haji’ Muhammad-Isma‘l’l of Kéflan (surnamed fliabih ‘sacrificed’),3 Haji Mirza Haydar-‘Ah’ of Ardistén,‘ and others. For many months Mirza Abu’l-Facjl debated with the Bahá’í’s contemptuously and eventually finding himself, to his astonishment, unable to refute the proofs they adduced, became a convert in Sep ‘ God Passe: By, p. 195, 260.

2 Memorials of the Faithfid, p. 1; Al Taherzadeh, The Revelation ofBahti'u'llah, vol. II, p. 42, 341.

3 ibid., p. 137, 411—413.

‘ ibid.. pp. 68—73,passim.

Shoghi Effendi‘

tember 1876. His first letter to Baha’u’llah was only a few lines from the Qur’án: ‘0 our Lord! we have indeed heard the voice of one that called. He called us to the faith—“Believe ye on your L0rd”——and we have believed. 0 our Lord! forgive us then our sin, and hide away from us our evil deeds, and cause us to die with the righteous.’5

He immediately began, in his straightforward way, to propound the teachings of Baha’u’llah in his classroom. This provided an opportunity to his jealous enemies who denounced him to the clergy and prominent public figures in Tihran. In December 1876 he was dismissed from his teaching post and imprisoned by order of the Prince Regent, Kamran-Mirza, the Governor of Tihran, a son of Nasiri’d—Din flab. This imprisonment lasted about five months during which time Mirza Abu’l-Fadl’s brothers seized the property which he had inherited from his father, valued at more than one million tumans; one of them even robbed him of the few furnishings he had in his room. It was as though through these hardships God was preparing Mirza Abu’l-Fadl for the life of dedicated service he was to lead and remoulding his heart, mind and spirit. ‘Abdu’l-Bahá was to refer to him later as ‘an angel of heaven’ and encouraged the friends to ‘follow his example’. Mirza Abu’lFaqll gave himself wholeheartedly to the Faith. Years later when the friends would ask him to tell something about his life he was wont to answer: ‘What can I say? Before becoming a believer I was a dead man and the dead have no story to tell. And after becoming a believer, one is like a shadow which has no existence in the light of the Faith.’

5 Qur’án 3: 190—192.

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After his release from prison the clergy Of Tihran attempted to persuade him to continue to verbally acknowledge allegiance to Islam and not to openly uphold the truth of the Bahá’í Cause but he would not accede to their request. He then devoted himself to writing as a means of earning a livelihood and laboured diligently in spreading the Bahá’í teachings.

By 1882 the Faith had won a considerable number of converts throughout Iran and the Caucasus, among whom were many prominent citizens. In Tihran, Raflt and Mazindaran the clergy and civil authorities were again inflamed with envy and hatred. In the wave of persecution that broke out Mirzá Abu’l-Fadl and a number of other believers were accused of sedition and plotting against the government and were imprisoned for twenty-two months. They suffered rigorous distress and hardship and during most of this time no one was allowed to visit them. Twenty—four of the prisoners, including Mirzá Abu’l-Fadl, were for fourteen days chained together with long, heavy chains and confined in a dark underground dungeon. He related that for about six months they received daily news of the plots and intrigues of their enemies and expected death at any moment. The falseness of the accusations was eventually proven to the fléh who commanded that the prisoners should be set free.

Mirza Abu’l-Fadl then took up residence in the village of Qulhak, a delightful summer resort of Tihran, where he remained about seven months, engaged in lecturing and writing. He was imprisoned again—this time for about six months— and released on 5 February 1886. In that year he received a Tablet addressed to him by Bahá’u’lláh in which he was instructed to travel for the purpose of spreading the Bahá’í message. Thus began his journeys which over the course of thirty years took him northward through Persia, Turkey, the Caucasus and as far as Moscow; eastward as far as China and Kashgaria (Chinese Turkistan); to Syria and Egypt; and to Western Europe and America. In his travels he held discussions with learned men of various religions, nationalities and schools of thought. In addition to inspiring them with his own particular gift for explaining subtle philosophical points—a skill which in the view of many of his contemporaries amounted to genius and one which he felt he had received as a result of 3

THE Bahá’í WORLD

Mfrzd Abu’l—Fadl 1844 —1 91 4

prayer Bahá’u’lláh revealed for him in a Tablet‘—he also broadened his own knowledge in a way that would not have been possible without undertaking those extensive and frequently arduous journeys. He was an exemplary travelling teacher. On his trips in Iran he lived modestly and subsisted on a simple diet. His clothing, too, was very simple. In order not to inconvenience the Bahá’í friends he would stay at inexpensive caravansaries rather than accept hospitality from the believers. He earned enough to cover his few expenses by copying books for the friends. He continued travelling and teaching the Faith in Iran for some years, and despite the uncertain health from which he suffered all his life, he knew neither rest nor leisure.

In 1887, encouraged by the renowned Bahá’í teacher and poet (later martyred) Mirzá ‘Ali—Muhammad, surnamed Varqa (‘Dove’) by Bahá’u’lláh, Mirzá Abu’l-Fadl began to write for the Cause. He had felt it was an impertinence in the Day of God for the believers to

‘Tablet to Haji Muhammad Kazim of Iṣfahán; see The Bahá’í’ Proofs, introductory matter to 2nd ed., p. 12.

[Page 627]ESSAYS AND REVIEWS

take up their pens when the Supreme Pen was in motion. However, Mirza ‘AliMuhammad who had attained the presence of Baha’u’llah in ‘Akká, relayed the command of the Blessed Beauty that the believers should write books demonstrating the truth of the Cause. ‘When I heard this statement from Varqa,’ Mirzá Abu’l-Fadl records, ‘I ventured to undertake writing.Other believers from all parts were urging me both verbally and by letters to write books of explanation and proofs." There streamed from his pen, from 1888 until the time of his death, a flood of treatises and books. Two of his works have been translated into English, The Bahá’í Proofs2 and The Brilliant Proof]. The former was written in America, originally in Arabic, with the purpose of its being translated into English for the use of the friends and was not completed when he left America. A first edition was published in 1902; a second was published shortly after his death in 1914 and contained an account of his life and tributes and eulogies by ‘Abdu’l-Bahá. The Brilliant Proof is a small book written during Mirza Abu’lFadl’s stay in Beirut in December 1911 at the request of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá in refutation ofa critical article of Peter Z. Easton, a Protestant missionary, in which he misrepresented the aims and purposes of the Faith. ‘Abdu’l-Bahá Himself, while in America in 1912, directed that The Brilliant Proofbe published and in one of His discourses in Washington said of it: ‘Each one of you should have a copy. Read, memorize and reflect upon it. Then when accusations and criticisms are advanced by those unfavourable to the Cause, you will be well armed.’4

Mirza Abu’l-Fadl’s Fard’id, a work of more than 700 pages written in refutation of a mulla’s attack on Baha’u’llah’s Kitdb-i-chin, is perhaps his best-known book in the East and an outstanding example of the logic and power of his argument.

The passing of Baha’u’llah in 1892 had an almost paralyzing effect upon Mirza Abu’lFad! whose devotion to the Blessed Beauty was

‘ The Bahá’í‘ Proofs, introductory matter to 2nd ed., p. 14.

3 Trans. by Mirzá ‘Ali—Kuli Quin; New York: J. W. Pratt C0., 1902. Chicago: Bahá’í Publishing Society, 1914. New York, Bahá’í Publishing Committee, 1929.

3 Chicago: Bahá’í News Service, 1912. Wilmette, Bahá’í’ Publishing Committee, 1949.

‘ :ébdu’l-Baha, The Pramulgation of Universal Peace, p.

5.

627

boundless. Such was his humility that he never felt worthy of addressing Baha’u’llah directly but wrote many letters and asked many questions through His amanuensis or sons. At the beginning of these letters he wrote long fervent prayers and supplications expressing his love. The receipt by Mirza Abu’l-Fadl of a Tablet from ‘Abdu’l-Bahá asking him to arise and serve the Covenant vivified his grieving heart and in 1894, at the invitation of the Master, he visited the Holy Land where he remained for several months, basking in the presence of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá and deepening in knowledge of the Faith. His humility before the Master and his obedience to Him were of a degree unknown. Some of his distinguished contemporaries have stated that they had never seen any Bahá’í more conscious of the greatness of the Covenant and more humble before the Centre of the Covenant. The loving manner in which ‘Abdu’l-Bahá treated him only increased his humility and his desire to obey. His services springing from his understanding of the Covenant constitute a brilliant chapter in the early history of the Faith.

At the request of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá he visited Egypt, an important centre of Islamic studies where he was soon acclaimed by a number of theologians for his depth of knowledge. Indeed, some thirty advanced students of Al-Azhar, the greatest university of the Islamic world, expressed their belief in Bahá’u’lláh. Some of the divines and professors of AlAzhar then turned against Mirza Abu’l-Fadl and forbade their students to visit him or read his books. He was then confined to his house, writing books and answering questions brought to him from Bahá’í’s and inquirers.

Much could be said of the effect of his teaching among the friends of the West, who were deprived of Bahá’í literature, and some of whom had but a slight knowledge of the significance of the Cause which had attracted their hearts. Of his visit to Paris in 1901 it was written: ‘What a bounty to receive in 1901 the extended visit of Mirza Abu’l-Facjl, sent by the Master to strengthen His Western children. For perhaps a month he taught them almost daily, through the translations of Anton Haddad and ‘Ali-Kuli Qan. Of those memorable hours Agnes Alexander has written: “An atmosphere of pure light pervaded the Paris meetings, so much so that one was transported, as it were, from the

[Page 628]628

world of man to that of God;” to which Juliet Thompson’s testimony is added: “That Paris group was so deeply united in love and faith; May, Lua, Laura1 and Khán, these four especially so inspired, so carried away, so intoxicated with love for the beloved Master; our great teacher, Mirza Abu’l—Fadl, so heavenly wise—that those days were the days of miracle, of all but incredible confirmations.”2 To this may be added the tribute of May Maxwell: ‘We must first touch the heart to awaken it; if it opens and responds we must sow the priceless seed . . . Prepare the soil with the warmth of your love just as the sun prepares the soil in the spring or the seed will not grow. Remove the stones and weeds . . that is to say, in a kind way try to remove prejudices .. Uproot narrow superstitions by suggesting broader, deeper ideas. Never oppose people’s ideas and statements, but give them a little nobler way of seeing life. Such words and thoughts will take effect because they come from a Bahá’í whose life flows from the source of all life on earth today . . . My great and wise teacher, Mirza Abu’l-Fadl, laid down these divine principles of teaching in my soul . . and they have changed all my attitude. He showed me that it is the Spirit of God that is doing the work; we must wait upon the Spirit and do Its bidding only.’3

The American Bahá’í community’s appreciation of the visit of Mirza Abu’l-Fadl is recorded in The Bahá’í Centenary: 1844—19444 in an article entitled ‘Teachers Sent to America by ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’: ‘Also ‘Abdu’l-Bahá sent to America in 1902 the revered Mirza Abu’l-Facjl . . . He was accompanied by Mirzá ‘Ali-Kuli glam, later an attache of the Persian Embassy in Washington, DC, who acted as his interpreter and translator. The Bahá’í’s had already rented a house for a headquarters where the activities of the Cause were carried on. Here Haji’ Mirzá Hasan and party, Mirza Abu’l-Facjl and all the translators lived at the same time. This was a glorious experience for the friends who gathered there to receive the teachings from these marvelous teachers. Every Sunday ‘ May (Bolles) Maxwell, Lua Getsinger, Laura (Clifford)

Dreyfus-Barney. 2 May Maxwell, ‘In Memoriam’. The Bahá’í World, vol.

VIII, p. 634.

3 ibid., 11 636. 4 Bahá’í Publishing Committee, Wilmette. 111., 1944.

THE Bahá’í WORLD

they gave public lectures in halls rented by the believers for Sunday meetings only, as all other activities were held at the headquarters.

‘Mi’rzzi Abu’l-Fadl spent much time in New York, Green Acre, and Washington, returning there after his Visit in Chicago. His explanations of the Bible were wonderful, giving from Genesis to Revelation the most voluminous and the most explicit interpretations we have ever received.”

The transcription of the stenographic record made of his talks and lectures, the account concludes, has been ‘carefully preserved’ and this, together with a large number of his letters to believers and inquirers served ‘as a basis for giving the Message, especially to Christians.”

On 29 November 1904 Mirza Abu’l-Fadl took leave of the American friends. He was now old and his health, never robust, was deteriorating. The climate, the food, the demands on his time, had not benefitted him. After returning to the East he spent his time in Haifa, Beirut, Alexandria and Cairo. The Master took special care of him and he lived some years more, devoting much time to his writing. On 21 January 1914, in Cairo, his earthly life ended. His attending nurse said that as he expired she heard him exclaim: ‘God! God!’5

An eyewitness has left this account of the effect upon ‘Abdu’l-Bahá of the news of the passing of Mirza Abu’l—Fadl:

‘The telegram arrived last night (21 January 1914); it was delivered this morning, and the heart-breaking news conveyed to ‘Abdu’l-Bahá just as He sat down to partake of His lunch. The news saddened and grieved Him. He did not say a word, but arose from His seat without eating. He remained alone in His room till late in the afternoon. Then He went with Mirza Hadi’ to the telegraph office to send a message of consolation to the friends in Cairo. The Pilgrims’ House was a house of mourning; many eyes were weeping and many hearts burdened with sorrow.

‘In the evening all the believers gathered in ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s house. Under breath everyone was discussing the death of our venerable teacher, when Mirza Hadi’ brought us the word that ‘Abdu’l-Bahá would receive us. We all ascended to the upper floor, and after a few minutes He came in. At first He was silent, then while His eyes were shut He started to speak. 5 Star ofrhe West, No. 19, vol. IV.

[Page 629]ESSAYS AND REVIEWS

He would speak a few phrases, then a flood of emotions sweeping over Him, He would stop a few seconds and continue."

In a series of moving eulogies the Master paid tribute to one who He said was, from every standpoint, ‘peerless’:

‘. . . he was in a state of the utmost severance, and adorned with the highest virtues of firmness and steadfastness. He was absolutely detached from everything. From the day that he became a believer up to the last moment of his life,‘he was occupied in the service of the Cause of God; either he conveyed the Message or wrote books proving the validity of the Cause. He had not the slightest attachment to this mortal world

‘How erudite and learned he was! . . .He. . . was a standard-bearer of the oneness of the world of humanity. In the servitude of the Holy Threshold of Baha’u’llah he was my partner and associate. During the hours of grief he was the source of my consolation. From every standpoint I trusted him, and had in him the greatest amount of confidence. Whenever anyone wrote books and articles against this Cause, I referred them to him for irrefutable answer.

‘How humble and meek he was! We tried our best to persuade him to keep a servant, but he would always gently decline. He desired to serve the believers personally . . .

‘During all the days of his life I never heard from him the use of the word “I”—“I said so,” or “I wrote so and so.” . . . He never made a display of his knowledge, nor wished to impress upon the mind of any person that he knew such and such a subject. He was evanescent and lived in the station of nothingness. . . No one inhaled from him the odor of superiority . . .

‘Were one to read all his writings and works, he does not find “I-ness” and “egoism” stalking between the lines, nor does he observe any

' The Bahá’í’ Proofs, introductory matter to 2nd ed.. p. 19.

629

pedantic expressions or circumlocution—in order to bear upon the mind of the reader the whole weight of his learning and scholarship

‘How learned was he! How wise was he! How well informed was he! His understanding was marvellous and his wisdom beyond comparison. . . All the learned men and scholars of the Islamic world, especially those who reside in Egypt. and had conversed with Mirzá Abu’l-Fadl, have testified that he was a genius, a truly wise man. Notwithstanding this, his character was never tinged with any vanity or self—conceit.’2

In words such as these ‘Abdu’l-Bahá honoured a servant whose passing He said was 'an irretrievable loss for the people of Bahá’n”.3

Perhaps we glimpse in some small measure the personal loss experienced by the Master when we read: ‘While I was living in Ramleh, whenever I felt depressed or sad, I called on him, and soon afterwards I was in a happier frame of mind.’4

Now, on the Mediterranean coast of Spain, my memory goes back to a period twenty-eight years ago when I was putting the last touches on my work on the life of Mirzá Abu’l-Fad15 written during years of eager investigation, having travelled to Gulpaygan, his birthplace, to get my last inspiration for it. I walked for hours and hours along the streets gazing at the one-storey sun-dried brick buildings, the orchards of fruit trees, the fields of wheat and barley with clumps of tall willow and poplar here and there. In this unprepossessing setting was born a man of a kind of whom an Arab proverb says ‘he could count for a thousand men’. And, I thought, in the case of Mirza Abu’l-Fadl, whose name means literally ‘the father of learning’, for many more!

2 ibid., pp. 19—27.

3 ibid.. p. 23.

4 ibid., p. 21.

5 Published in Persian; 1975.

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THE BAHA‘I WORLD

4. A PORTION OF RADIANCE: A REMINISCENCE‘

BERTHALIN ALLIEN

I first heard Ofthe Bahá’í Cause a little before 1900, while I was in school in Paris. There I met a small group of people, a few American students, like myself, who seemed to be involved in a new religion stemming from Persia. I can’t say that I was especially impressed by what they said. Rather I was attracted by these people as unusual people—one in particular, a very beautiful girl who seemed to radiate a special magnetic charm. I was completely captivated by her and not understanding what she was saying, I just silently sat in wonder, somehow feeling her special station. Her name was May Bolles,2 who later became the mother of Rúḥíyyih Khánum.

I was leaving for home, New York City, and before leaving May gave me a letter to a friend who she said would explain things to me. . . . I found her to be a beautiful woman, beautiful and on fire with the religion she had embraced. Her name was Elfrida Martin. With her was a Persian, Anton Haddad,3 who I found out later was the translator of the famous Si’Jratu’l-Haykal.4 ‘Abdu’l-Bahá had sent him to America to teach and it was listening to him that I caught the first impact of something far greater than I could grasp at the moment. It all seemed too big, too incomprehensible for my understanding, too fantastic for my mind to grasp, but my heart seemed to know what my mind was unable to take in.

Anton’s theme was that the Spirit of Christ was on earth again to bring the people back to God. This thrilled me as ever since childhood I had in my heart a love for Jesus. I longed for Him always. Now was that divine Spirit here again? It must be so, I wanted it to be so. It flooded my heart with hope until I came to believe even before I knew anything about what I was to learn later, the greatness, the majesty of Bahá’u’lláh. So it was that Mrs. Martin and I were the first Bahá’ís at that time in

1 Published under the title ‘The Luminous Hour’ in Bahd’!’ News, February 1965; © the National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of the United States.

2 Later Mrs. William Sutherland Maxwell.

3 Anti’m Haddad.

‘ Sfirih of the Temple, an important Tablet revealed by Bahá’u’lláh in ‘Akká.

New York. In her apartment, where Anton Haddad gave the lessons of the Cause, the wonder of it, the holy words, entranced me. The holy words, life-giving fountains, revealing, ever new, to this very day since 1900. I believe I am thus the oldest living Bahá’í, who was living in New York City at that time.

Soon after that I returned to school in Paris and joined that first Bahá’í group of Europe.5 The Guardian many years later wrote telling me how blessed I was to have been a member of that group. A small group but there was radiance, the spirit of Bahá’u’lláh so strong, a tightly united group; it made me speechless; all I wanted was to be with them; my whole life was changed. There were no books the teachings of the Manifestation of God were spread by word of mouth and from heart to heart! How powerful the Spirit that radiated from this group, out into the far-reaching corners of this earth, until from that small beginning the radiance of the Cause of God is now felt by people, remote and far away.

There were no books, just a few words brought back to us from pilgrims who had gone to ‘Akká to see the prisoner, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá. They had seen Him, they had felt the magnetic power of the ‘Servant of God,’ the only title He wanted; they told us about Him and brought back the first teachings, His love, His hopes for those who believed in Him.

In those days we in Paris wrote to ‘Abdu’l-Bahá to confirm our love and devotion to Him and those letters were always answered by Him. After my schooling I returned to New York City having lived in Paris four years. The Tablets I received, thirteen of them, made a strange impact upon me. I was unable to ‘digest’ them—that’s not the best word—it was simply I could not believe that they were addressed to me. It was as if I should look over my shoulder to see the person for whom they were meant. To this day this one sentence still makes me stop short: ‘Praise be to God, thou hast been accepted at the threshold of the

5 A photograph of the first Bahá’í group of Europe appears on p. 132.

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Almighty and are mentioned in the Supreme Concourse!’ These Tablets are now safe in the Archives. I no longer remember dates, years, what happened in such and such a year. My life was a simple one, sometimes hard, many heartbreaks, but over the long span of life since 1900, now 1964 and close to ninety, I at last have made the words in the Tablets my own—everything ‘Abdu’l-Bahá had predicted for me has come true.

Year 1905: ‘O thou who art advanced to God! Be assured and content with the great bounty and generosity of God, and be cheerful because all that which is absolutely good will become possible for thee. In this day all that which is conducive to the eternal happiness is attainable by thee. Be not grieved at allneither sit down dispirited. Every difficulty will be changed to enlargement, and every affliction will be transformed to the mercy of omnipotence.’ ‘Upon thee be greeting and praise.’ (signed) ‘Abdu’l-Bahá ‘Abbas

Years passed with just living until, unexpectedly, I had a chance to go to Haifa. Years before ‘Abdu’l-Bahá had given me permission in one of His Tablets, but I had to wait all those years and by then ‘Abdu’l-Bahá had passed, in 1921. Four unforgettable weeks were spent in the Holy Places, surrounded by so much love, the hours spent in the shrines, in prayer and meditation, the precious time spent with the Greatest Holy Leaf—a pure spirit— as well as several visits with the Guardian . . . by his bedside, as he was ailing and depressed. The burden of responsibility thrust upon him so suddenly almost crushed him. Looking back now, since he has passed away, I have felt that he too was a martyr, for the responsibilities became ever more heavy. However, under it all he gained in strength and spirituality which helped him to become a brilliant leader. . . .

Much time has passed since 1900 when I first caught a glimpse of what was to come, but to me the year to be remembered is

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18l7fl November 12, when at the hour of dawn a child was born in the city of Ṭihrán. To me that hour must have stirred the very atoms of the earth, making the earth tremble with joy, for on it would walk the spirit of God and in another city a little known discipleI of Ahmad-i-Ahsé’l’2 (the forerunner of the Báb) bowed to the ground in an act of wonderment, testifying that ‘At this hour the light of the Promised One has broken and is shedding illumination upon the whole world.’ How shining was that hour! And as the believers multiply, their army marching into the far-off countries of the earth, exiles from home and kin, they carry the torch held high to tell the people of that luminous hour—November 12, 1817.

As to the moment of my actual meeting ‘Abdu’l-Bahá this was at the house of Ed Kinney.3 As He entered the room there was a strange stillness; we were awed by His presence; majestic yet very human, He looked at us with compassion. He strode about the room, some of us were sitting on the floor and every time He passed me I touched His garment. He spoke at length and each sentence was translated but what these words were I have no idea, for I like others was completely engulfed in an exalted consciousness in which the mind had no place. I don’t believe those words were taken down at that time, tape recording was still half a century away. Many ofthose present have described this scene and it can be found in several books. For me the words were lost— we were all caught up in an intensely vibrant atmosphere. As we gazed at the beautiful face of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, we were not in this world. A few who were there then are still alive, carrying the spirit of that moment out into the farreaching corners of the earth and all who hear them too are given a portion of radiance emanating from ‘Abdu’l-Bahá.

‘ Mirza MahmfidiQamsan’; see Nabil-i—A‘mm. (Mulla Muhammad-i-Zarandi’), The Dawn Breakers pp. 8—9.

Zfliaylg} Ahmad-i-Ahsé'i, (1743—1826) founder of the fiaylgy’ school.

3 Edward B. Kinney (Safe), see ‘In Memoriam‘, The Bahá’í World, vol. XII. p. 677.

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THE BAHA’I WORLD

5. FRAGMENTS FROM A DIARY

JONATHAN RISHWORTH

(Impressions of a Bahá’í youth of his visit to Kenya as a travelling teacher) 10 December 1978—25 January 1979

Haifa

10 February 1979 SOME days have passed since my return from the beautiful country of Kenya. During a brief six—week sojourn I was privileged to travel with friends into the Central Province as well as to the Coast Province. In both places, precious hearts abide, waiting for people to bring the Message of Baha’u’llah into their lives.

To have time to give our Lord, however short the days must be, however inadequate we each must feel, is such a wondrous gift, that as I look back over the days spent teaching in Kenya the gratitude in my heart knows no way of true expression; save to bend a little more each day to try, to strive, to take up the responsibility given each of us to serve the world of humanity for the sake of the Blessed Perfection.

A pleasant flight from Israel, a brief delay in customs, then, immediate contrast when I stepped through the outer door and was greeted by a welcoming group of Bahá’ís from Nairobi. A drive to the National Centre which was to be my base. Staying there also were some travelling teachers awaiting further instructions from the National Spiritual Assembly before journeying to various parts of the country to teach the village people, so many of whose hearts are yearning to hear the Message of God. Among those at the Centre was Jenabe Caldwell, an Alaskan, who was organizing teaching institutes throughout the Kenyan Provinces. After talking with him and some National Spiritual Assembly members I decided to travel to one of the institutes prior to any teaching activity.

Before attending the institute I felt slightly perturbed as to how I could ensure that my time in Kenya would not be frittered away on spasmodic, ineffectual teaching caused by my possibleinabilityto seize andpromote t0 the fullest, any God—given opportunity. I wanted desperately to be as afine instrument, freed from the impediments of self, so His Spirit would flow swiftly and deeply into the hearts of the people.

The institute took place on the Coast, in

Kilifi, and over the eight days the experiences shared by the twenty-five or more Bahá’ís present will always remain deeply deposited within each person, as gems ready to be brought forth and given to others when the opportunity presents itself to speak forth Baha’u’llah’s Teachings.

The days were spent in an atmosphere of love and learning, prayer filling our souls, Holy Words stirring hearts and laughter releasing a spirit ofjoy that touched all in the warm glow of His Presence. Any previous doubts fled from my mind, now instilled with greater insight into the myriad possibilities open to each ofus when prayer is offered up and the teaching of His Message is carried out in accordance with the directions given us in the Writings.

After: the return to Nairobi, waiting for friends as they prepared for the days ahead, then the exciting moment of departure. Mehraz, Samuel, Ernie and myself drove into the Central Province, and held a rendezvous with James, Moriuki and Mwangi. The joy of those moments is beyond my power of description. Prayers were offered by us all that our hearts be emptied, our spirits become magnets Of the love of God, and our feet be directed unfailingly to souls who might be receptive to the Message of Bahá’u’lláh that would enrich their lives both in this world and in the spiritual worlds beyond.

The sequence of days, the innumerable individual events that occurred are not relevant to this sketch, but the freedom of those moments might be thus described:

Dawn hours found us praying together; later, as individual entities, our hearts, minds and souls turn to the Creator supplicating strength, guidance, love, wisdom; praising Him, magnifying His Name, invoking His aid in recognizing the divine reality in the hearts and minds of all we might meet.

Suns rise, suns set, and a green—robed river valley witnesses a small band of the followers

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of the Blessed Beauty being welcomed by children running onto a wide, open grass field, bright shining faces, each child calling Allahu-Ablui.’ Those days will be remembered: the many waiting hearts, the precious individuals, one of the teachers smiling radiantly with God’s love shining in him, the quiet David who spoke such sweet words. Miracles seemed to happen daily, and all are remembered: those who listened, those who accepted, the smiles, the prayers, the election as we witnessed the birth of an Assembly.

Leaving that valley paradise, with two ofour new-found family remaining behind, we journeyed to a flat green countryside where tea plantations lined the dust roads. There in one small village we sat for two evenings: women, men and children relaxed on the grass listening as God’s Message was offered. (Please, touch their hearts, dear Lord!) Another Assembly was formed and thus was spun the unseen mystical web that binds and draws together, in ways too subtle to ever comprehend, those who respond to His call. Circumstances called us away. Those who are able to return promise to do so; we hold them in our hearts and prayers, supplicating that those who have been deeply touched by the Cause of God will talk often with their Lord and lead all they meet to new spiritual insights.

Again we reached the river valley, returning with a ‘family’ diminished in number because some were required to attend to other matters, each of us regretting the separation. There we see our brothers and sisters, so new to the Faith of Baha’u’llah, forging spiritual awareness into daily reality as they teach those they encounter; in a brief time another Assembly is formed, cemented with love. That valley of red dust roads and verdant, fertile banks where He has raised up loving souls eager to participate in the greatest challenge evergiven by Godto man,the unification of mankind—that valley is blessed.

With the arrival of a friend who suggested that we must travel onwards, events changed swiftly and my course was altered. A familiar destination awaited me: perhaps I owed it something. A telephone conversation with a member of the National Spiritual Assembly, a trip to Nairobi by motorbike, preparation for a flight to the coast and, God willing, an opportunity to offer assistance to the Province in which the teaching institute had been held. A

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short respite with friends in town—time to reflect on the days that have passed. One realization is overpowering: that it is Bahá’u’lláh Who knows what is to take place, what does take place, and the reality of what took place.

On the road once more. Goda, Mwombegu and myself were left in Malindi where a warm—hearted Bahá’í family welcomed us into their home inviting us to make it our home during our visit. The days merged together. Goda, Samuel, Godona, Mwombegu, Patrick and I travelled to Pendukiani, Mijomboni, walking over shadowed sand paths which wound past the homes of many people who, yet so physically close to western influence, seem remote from that world. The land is still an integral part of their lives. As we travelled from one village to another, the potentialities Ofthe area became increasingly apparent; our minds staggered under the weight and beauty of the concept.

We envisioned many Assemblies being formed, the Message being quickly spread among and accepted by great numbers of people. All too quickly my brief sojourn there ended. Leaving the others behind teaching the receptive villagers I returned to Mombasa, lost in reminiscences of those pure-hearted villagers who declared their belief, praying that other teachers would soon arise and visit these people, teaching them, explaining in detail the significance of the Revelation of Baha’u’llah—for the possibilities are limitless. (Please, God, we will achieve it!)

Nairobi once again, and a last glance at those hearts I had come to know so well. Wonderful news! Many people are accepting His Message in the area surrounding that first magical valley where He directed that pitifully small band of followers.

At home, enriched by memories of my visit to Kenya, I experience a wave of gratitude and tender love toward all those I met in Nairobi, Tambaya, Mombasa, Kilifi, Malindi, Pendukiani, Mijomboni— and for all the people of Kenya. Innumerable opportunities lie ahead for those who take up their lives and cast them at the feet of the Beloved: ‘To assist Me, is to teach My Cause.’ (Bahá’u’lláh)

How many prayers will be spoken from the heart? What lessons will be given? How often will we listen?

‘O God, my God, my Beloved, my heart’s Desire.’ (The Báb)

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THE BAHA’I WORLD

6. REGINALD TURVEY: AN APPRECIATION OF THE MAN AND HIS ART1

LOWELL JOHNSON

REGINALDErnestGeorgeTurvey was born in 1882 in Ladybrand, South Africa on the border of the little country known today as Lesotho. His family descended from pioneer Englishmen who came to South Africa in the first wave of settlers in 1820. His greatgrandfather, Edward Ford Turvey, also an artist, had headed one of the parties in the settlement. Life was difficult for these pioneers, but by the time of Reg’s birth, the Turvey brothers owned many of the farms encircling Ladybrand and the central square block of the town itself where his father ran a trading store and collected rents.

Reg’s first contact with art was the aboriginal Bushman paintings discovered while playing in caves in the foothills around Ladybrand and the Drakensberg mountains of Lesotho. He never completed his schooling because his teacher discovered his talent for drawing and convinced his father to send him abroad to art school. Reg entered the Slade School of Art in London in 1903 with the grudging support of his family who felt that he would do better to pursue a more lucrative profession.

On the first day of school he met fellow student Bernard Leach, in from another colony (Hong Kong), and they became lifelong friends. Leach says that he does not think he had any influence upon Turvey as an artist. ‘I was interested in line,’ he said, ‘and Reggie in colour texture. He loved painting in itself and was a born colourist. What we used to call “tone” in our student days was almost always clearly to be found in his strong brushwork. Touch sang to touch, tone to tone, tension to tension.’ In the sphere of their personal lives, however, they influenced each other greatly.

One year after entering Slade where he studied under Henry Tonks and won the W. Steer prize for portrait painting, Reg moved to the London School of Art where he spent four years becoming essentially a landscape painter.

'Excerpted from a forthcoming biography by Lowell Johnson.

He painted a number of portraits, including one of Sir Thomas Fuller, but he excelled in landscapes. The secret of his skill was his intimacy with the landscape; he was the landscape. He virtually walked into the painting which came to represent his feelings as he stood on Yorkshire downs or the banks of the canals of Amsterdam, Ghent or Bruges, or the shores and mountains of the Italian Riviera and southern Africa. Much of his early work was inspired by Constable and Cezanne whose paintings he greatly admired.

We have very few clues to Turvey’s thinking in this period except those to be found in a few letters written to Bernard Leach between 1909 and 1920 when Reg was in England and Africa and Leach was in Japan. The letters reveal a lonely man. He loved England but close companionship meant more to him, so with a gift from his father, he joined Leach in Japan in 1910. He. had hoped to give art lessons there but the Eastern way of life and the Japanese weather did not agree with him and reluctantly he agreed to return to his family in South Africa to assist on the farm. A letter written to his family at this time survives: ‘. . . but I shall, of course, in such spare time as I may have, try to keep up my art—of course, not interfering with the farm work. But, still you must never be sorry that your son is somewhat of an artist and has the true feeling for art, for it is not a thing to be ashamed of. People may scorn it as they will. I shall always be proud of having done what I have done, though it is little. My work has given pleasure to some few .. . it would be rather hard for me to lose touch with everything that has concerned my life in the pursuit of art, so while I am farming I would like just now and then to smell a paint brush.‘

The letter contains all the seeds of Turvey’s future frustrations: his family of farmers and businessmen did not understand him, and art made little impression in the South Africa of that day. Also, his father who moved to Kenya and established a farm there with Reg as his trainee, died within a year of the move leaving his bereft son in sole charge of the farm.

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The outbreak ofwar in 1914 deeply affected Reg’s sensitive nature. In a letter written on 8 November 1915 from Nakuru, Kenya he reveals his abhorrence of war, intuitively reflecting the teachings of the Bahá’í Faith which he had not yet encountered: ‘Oh, when will this wretched war be over? It is truly a barbarous thing: the worst thing that could have happened in this supposed-to-be civilized era. Real civilization has not touched the souls of many; yet this war is the indication of an evil thing which must be rooted out forever if possible. The cry of civilization is Peace, or ought to be. But when will real civilization be so universal and ingrained as to make such a thing as war impossible? If wars are to continue on into the ages and science continues to make the vast progress that it has within the last sixty years or so, then, ultimately the destruction of life will be so great that there will be plenty of room on the earth for the devil to walk to and fro in . . . Tell me, what is the finest aim in life, and why?’

Twice Reg tried to enlist in the army, once in Kenya and a second time after selling the farm and returning to South Africa, but on both occasions was told he had a weak heart, a fact proven not long after when he suddenly collapsed in pain while climbing a hill on the Natal coast to do some painting. He spent a year recovering during which he lived at sea level; slowly he began to paint again.

His letters to Bernard Leach during this period reveal his questing nature. After his heart attack, he wrote: ‘I did fight for life anyway, and the mind is a tremendous force when no adverse suggestion comes to bother it. I tried to impress this from the very first upon the few people around me. What a mystery life is! And yet sometimes, like you, I feel I understand things. Anyway, as far as they matter to us. The rest we leave to God. . . I think if one’s mind goes off searching in the right direction it does eventually take one into a calm placid region. I am vague, but as I say, I do sometimes feel things rightly without having much actual knowledge. Metaphysics, and all the rest ofit; I haven’t the mind to go floundering about amongst all the thoughts of all the philosophies. But to reach this calm region from which to regard life, to be “at-one—with” nature in its calm evolutionary progress seems to me the greatest attainment.’ Here are clues to the calm placidity of Turvey’s landscape

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paintings and his at—one-ment with nature from which they sprang. A few months later he wrote to Leach saying that he had been reading Theosophical books, deriving satisfaction from the writings of those ‘able to see the inner truth of things.’

In 1924 Reg married Frances Waddell Gunn in Ladybrand and not long after returned to England with his wife. Rejoining his friend, Leach, he set up a studio in St. Ives, Cornwall and later built a house and studio opposite Leach’s home. The next sixteen years were fulfilling for Reg. He had companionship, painted full-time, and had a relatively happy family life although his first son died of diphtheria. When Leach moved to Dartington as resident potter the Turveys followed. Although Reg was not on the staff he lived close to Dartington Hall and here entered into a new phase of art education. The bulk of his work in this period which had been stored in a shed was destroyed by mischance after he returned to South Africa in 1940.

In 1932 Turvey met the American Bahá’í painter Mark Tobey who taught the artist to work less from the mind than the heart and broadened Turvey’s outlook on contemporary art. Tobey’s approach to painting was not immediately reflected in Turvey’s work, but the ideas that Mark expressed about a gradual withdrawal from direct observational painting of nature and a movement toward abstraction influenced the paintings Turvey produced toward the end of his life. Bernard Leach, too, was attracted to Tobey’s teaching. He guided both men into the many developments of modern painting and introduced them to the Bahá’í Faith. Within three years Reg became a Bahá’í; Leach followed five years later.

The effect of the Bahá’í Faith on Reg’s life was not immediately manifested. He was to return to South Africa to his roots, experiencing occasional poverty and the pain and loneliness of divorce before the universal teachings of the Faith of Baha’u’llah brought him the peace he had always sought.

Soon after his return to South Africa a critic lauded Turvey’s paintings for their echo of ‘the suggestion of movement and the perfection of line seen in many of the magnificent rock paintings at Modderpoort and in the exposed caves of the mountains of Ladybrand and Basutoland . . . He has developed a personal tech [Page 636]636

nique which in the result is very original.’ As early as 1937 when he exhibited at the Bloomsbury Galleries, London, his work was praised for ‘its qualities rooted in ancient art.‘ In 1961, when Reg was seventy—nine, a perceptive reviewer wrote: ‘Reginald Turvey is a painter who has evolved a style, through his long years of devotion to his art. which refuses to be classified under any arty “ism”. His malleable talent has continued to expand and renew itself at a stage when most painters have become set in their habits.”

Reg never entered the realm of pure abstraction. His work generally evolved toward a simplification in which images from nature, birds and animals, were recognizable but imaginatively transformed. He drew closer to the world of pure imagination, and spoke from within of the life he had experienced through his senses, now reflected from a mature perspective.

A restrospective exhibition in 1966 drew this comment: ‘You need not to have known Reg Turvey to realize that this is an exhibition in a class by itself . . . Turvey himself, courteous, gentle and serene, has always firmly followed his own path (illuminated for him by certain masters) and this path can be traced again by the beholder at this retrospective exhibition. There are some touchingly lovely landscapes from this (earlier) phase of the artist’s career. His “Drakensberg”, painted with reverence and awe, makes one forget all the purple-and-green travesties of the same subject. Here . . . can be found the transition from mere know-how to the spiritual perception . . . Throughout his almost unacclaimed career, Turvey’s painting was slowly approaching a new mysticism as well as a mastery of a technique he had made his own, resulting finally in those elusive and imaginative canvasses in which silvery tones meet and dissolve in closely—woven brushstrokes At eightythree, with his brushes stacked away, Reg Turvey has at last become a “collector’s painter”.’

This last sentence was wishful thinking on the reviewer’s part. T0 the end, Reg was admired by fellow artists and informed critics, but he was not recognized by the general public. Many critics have tried to analyze the reasons: ‘Somehow, during his lifetime, Reg Turvey failed to receive the recognition which his work deserved. Perhaps it was because of an extraordinarily retiring nature and an

THE BAHA’l WORLD

Reginald Turvey I 882 —l 968

almost indifferent attitude to success. Perhaps it was that self-denial was a feature of the mystic Oriental religion he embraced.’ Another commented: ‘This lack of recognition would not have worried this most modest and lovable of painters, but . . . it is only right that those who neglected him should be able to go and worship at his shrine before it is too late.’ Those who knew Reg well in his later years found him to be totally devoted to his painting and his faith. He often combined the two interests by transporting African Bahá’ís to an area where they could teach. Having performed this simple service Reg would then take out his brushes and paint until they returned from their mission. He spoke about the Bahá’í Faith only when someone showed a keen interest. A friend and benefactor relates: ‘He explained what his religion stands for, how he believes, what he believes, what it meant to him. It was personal. He was so excited about his pilgrimage. He was in his seventies. He was happy. It gave him a new lease on life. In our family he was always classified as a saint who didn’t expect anything from the world; we always compared him with the rsadik of the Jewish

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religion, one of the thirty-six righteous men in each generation whose holiness and humble blameless lives merit for the world the divine grace that prevents its destruction.’ And again: ‘Reg is the nearest to a saintly man I have ever known. The only two saintly men I remember in my life are Reg and my father. When you told me that he is called the Father of the Bahá’ís of South Africa,‘ I wouldn’t have thought of such a thing, but it sums it up absolutely, a spiritual father.’

On several occasions I asked Reg what influence the Bahá’í Faith had on his life. He said it gave him contentment. His paintings reflect it.

Turvey’s works are not sentimental and he almost never painted Bahá’í themes. He was not strongly attached to his paintings and rarely gave them titles, leaving it to those who

‘ An appellation given to him by Shoghi Effendi during Reginald Turvey’s pilgrimage to the Holy Land in 1956; see ‘In Memoriam’, The Bahá’í World, vol. XIV, pp. 385—387.

Untitled painting by Reginald Turvey

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exhibited them. For example, the painting in oils inspired by the story of Táhirih was entitled by the exhibitor ‘Rima’ and thereafter Reg always referred to the picture by that name. Only in rare cases did he date his paintings and then usually at the request of the owner or buyer. It is from his few paintings that bear dates that we are able to estimate the dates of other works. Many of his paintings are unsigned. An even greater number would bear no signature had I not, towards the end of his life, urged him to sign them. Reg was without ego. He was like the unknown craftsman written of by Soetsu Yanagi, the philosopherleader of the Japanese craft movement: ‘Where does beauty lie if not in these qualities?—the plain and unagitated, the uncalculated, the harmless, the straightforward, the natural, the innocent, the humble, the modest, the meek, the austere, the unornate; they are the natural characteristics that gain man’s affection and respect.’ Turvey had these virtues.

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Even in physical pain Reg never complained‘ When his painting hand was afflicted with arthritis he did not mention it. When his first finger would no longer function he held the brush between his thumb and second finger; later, his second finger and thumb also gave out. His last works, semi-abstract with their thin silvery mosaic lines, were done with this disability. But he did not finally give up until his eyesight failed. When he could no longer paint or drive his car to provide transportation for Bahá’í teaching work he lost interest in life and entered a nursing home. His former wife, members of the Bahá’í community and other friends visited him as he faded gradually into the next world. He died on 2 March 1968 in Durban.

His sales to art galleries during his lifetime were few: one to the Durban gallery in 1928 and two to the National Gallery in Cape Town in 1964. Since his death all the major galleries in South Africa have acquired his paintings. A recent definitive history of art in South Africa devotes two full pages and two plates to him. The National Council for Human Sciences Research, which publishes the Dictionary of South Afi'icmz Biography, the South African Who’s Who, has since 1978 included a twopage summary of his life.

Turvey’s paintings do not reflect the time in which he lived. Although he was fully aware of the problems of society he did not use them as

THE BAHA'I WORLD

themes. The closest he came to social commentary was in a painting depicting a black and a white horse and an African family looking into a typical South African veld landscape anticipating a better tomorrow.1

Turvey’s versatility and technical facility are much acclaimed. Increasingly it is recognized that in his work extending over a period of approximately six decades he forged a significant link between South African and international art. In 1977 a professor of art at Witwatersrand University, Johannesburg analyzed Turvey’s retrospective exhibition at the Gertrude Posel Gallery and hinted at the permanent importance of his work.

But the words of his oldest friend, Bernard Leach, who knew him best, should Close this tribute to Reginald Turvey:

‘All his life Reg went on trusting people. He never lost integrity, and bitterness never showed in his face. Sadness, yes. That a man, so persistent an artist and so honest a painter, should be neglected until the last chapter of his life when his painting years were over, has been a sorrow to me. It is hard to wait sixty years for the assurance from the informed and perceptive that all those years of search were not meaningless. It implies great modesty and steadfast loyalty to an inner vocation.’2 ' Owned by Phillip Hinton, Sydney, Australia.

7 Beyond East and West, Bernard Leach, Faber and Faber, London and Boston, p. 291.