Bahá’í World/Volume 6/In Praise of Words, by Helen Bishop
IN PRAISE OF WORDS
BY HELEN BISHOP
GLEANINGS from the Writings of Bahá’u’lláh.”1
To the waiting hand a Bahá’í gives “a Book sent down in truth unto men of insight! It biddeth the people to observe justice and to work righteousness . . .”2 This Book is of the quintessence of the Holy Books revealed from age to age, and may be weighed by “. . . the just Balance that ye possess, the Balance of the testimony of the Prophets and Messengers of God.”3
Although the pages of this Book of Life are charged with the meaning of our mute experience and, hence, can ". . . dissipate thy sorrows and dissolve thine anguish,”4 yet these same pages lie open to communicate mysteries only to those who can read “the testimony of God” with detachment from traditional misconceptions.
Some of the Words were gathered by patient labor of the Guardian, Shoghi Effendi, and preserved as "Gleanings.” For the first reapers were the martyrs of Írán, who discovered in the Cause a field of heroism and yielded up to God a harvest of purified and consecrated lives.5
Let us say that the “Gleanings” are the mountain of corn which Brother Giles in homely speech compares to God. A bird may seize one grain from the high peak, and another, then again; and while it may not diminish the magnitude of that storehouse, still each grain contains all the nutriments for sustenance. Moreover, each grain is the germ of life itself! And so we ought not to grasp to ourselves these “Gleanings,” as the all we have; we ought to stride the field with a fearless and giving movement,
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1Trans. by Shoghi Effendi, Bahá’í Pub. Co., New York, 1935.
2Ibid., p. 306.
3Ibid., p. 231.
4Ibid., p. 133.
5“The Heroic Age of the Bahá’í Cycle is reckoned 1844-1921. The present Formative Period will usher in The Golden Age.
sowing the seeds of the world culture destined “unto this last.”
Logos
It is not the romance of words which we praise, nor do we hold a brief for those philosophies which by lure of words have seduced minds from the realities of common sense. We do find it timely to call an inquest for theologies that have obscured the meaning of words, terms, and figures, and thereby withheld followers from the recognition of God through His Prophets. This is to the end that we may exalt above all others the Words of God enunciated by the Prophets, now again sent forth as entities charged with “. . . such potency as can instill new life into every human frame . . .” 6
Instead of questioning Jesus for the meaning of the prophecies on the Messiah, Israel accepted the priesthood’s literal interpretation of the Promise, and was thereby deprived of the regeneration. The Christians, uninstructed by Israel’s disinheritance, misinterpreted the promise of the “Second Coming,” and failed to acknowledge the Divine Unity through Muḥammad. Thus having deprived itself of insight, Christendom entered the prison of the Dark Ages and closed the door on its own spirit until the waves of Islám (“The Renaissance”) flooded Europe. The Muslims of Írán stumbled over the words “The Seal of the Prophets” and put to death the Báb in the year 1850. To-day, Jews, Christians, Muslims, besides the other religious communities all of which are expecting a Promised One, cling to the literal interpretation of their prophetic Books and fail to recognize the universal Manifestation of Bahá’u’lláh. This —although His Book upholds the mission of their own respective Prophets as exponents of one divine Message—"This is the
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6Ibid., p. 141.
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changeless Faith of God, eternal
in the past, eternal in the future.”7
Is not religion intended for unity? Wherefore these separatenesses? In explanation we venture at least two cardinal distinctions between the Words of the Prophets and the words of men: the first, language as human discourse is logical material, and each proposition has one, and only one function, so that meaning is not multiple but singleness;8 whereas, the pronouncements of God are of manifold and inexhaustible meanings.9
This circumstance necessitates, on the part of the Revelator Himself, the appointment of an Interpreter (and designated successors) assured of inspiring and unerring guidance. To be sure, the Gospels record the appointment of the Apostle Peter to a station of primacy; and tradition upholds Muḥammad’s choice of the Imám ‘Alí as His successor. Nevertheless, as both of these appointments were unwritten and inconclusive, witnesses agreed upon fact but widely disagreed upon meaning. Rival claimants arose in both of these communities; unanimity on great issues was never perfected so that time and events confronted a house already divided within itself. Legislation accumulated down the centuries, but it did not have the seal of divine inspiration and wisdom upon it, neither did sacraments and ceremonials take the place of the spirit and intent of the Founder. Theologies and sects have dismembered Christianity and Islám and destroyed their unity of faith; but the organic weakness lay in the absence of a divinely-invested Guardian universally recognized by all declared followers of the Prophet.
In this Dispensation, theologies and sects are obviated, for Bahá’u’lláh, in order to bind that Covenant of love and unity which is the essential purpose of religion, wrote His Testament and legislated conclusively, “Everything that ‘Abdu’l-Bahá says is My meaning.” The disaffected resisted this oneness of belief and community, but their agitation proved abortive because the Testament is an integral part of the Revelation of Bahá’u’lláh itself. Furthermore,
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7Ibid., p. 136.
8Refer to any good Handbook on Logic.
9“Gleanings,” p. 175.
‘Abdu’l-Bahá perpetuated the Law of Succession in His Will and Testament, wherein He establishes the Guardianship and appoints thereto His eldest grandson, Shoghi Effendi, and his lineal descendants. Inasmuch as all Bahá’ís turn to the Guardian and accept his interpretation, no longer can the question of meaning be the centre of obscurantism and the prolific source of divisions. At last, religion becomes the basis of unity.
As to the second cardinal distinction: knowledge instructs and cultivates the mind: whereas, the “gift of understanding” realized through the Prophet shifts the field of consciousness and is the rebirth of the mind itself. Outside of the Bahá’í Writings we do not find elucidation of what happens when the Prophet thunders: “Thus saith the Lord!”
The authors of a capital work on the preliminary problems and uses of language assail the early and well-nigh universal belief of the race in a special world of "words of power.”10 They quote from the German scholar preeminent in this field:
“Aristotle is dead because he was, more than perhaps any other notable writer in the whole history of philosophy, superstitiously devoted to words . . . For full two thousand years human thought has lain under the influence of this man’s catchwords, an influence which has been wholly pernicious in its results. There is no parallel instance of the enduring potency of a system of words.”11
Aristotle, the father of the sciences and the backbone of scholasticism, is now charged with getting the universities into a straitjacket, notwithstanding his liberal proposition: “All significant speech is so by convention only”—a convention as vague, or so it seems, as the Social Contract which Authority imposed upon the people in the treatise of Rousseau.
As instances of the enduring potency of words, we cite the Ten Commandments; the Lord’s Prayer; the millions of boys still
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10Word-magic as prohibitions against pronouncing the secret and ineffable Name are documented by Sir James Frazer in “The Golden Bough,” Macmillan & Co., London, pp. 244-262.
11Citing Mauthner, C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards, “The Meaning of Meaning,” Kegan Paul, & Co., London, Ed. 1927, p. 35.
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being named after Muḥammad,
or the nations
of Islám that have recited the five daily
professions of faith for thirteen hundred
years.
Surely, no one would wish to undo the civilizing influence of the Law of the Pentateuch or of the Qur’án except one who had not read history. Although there is nothing liberal in the dicta of Jesus: “Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God,” “Heaven and earth shall pass away, but My words shall not pass away,” nor anything vague about His Covenant: “He that loveth father or mother more than Me is not worthy of Me,”12 yet we are convinced that nobody would charge the Savior with verbal tyranny except a critic trapped in the appalling confusion between Logos and Exegesis.
Bahá’u’lláh estimates the influence of Jesus upon minds:
“Know thou that when the Son of Man yielded up His breath to God, the whole creation wept with a great weeping. By sacrificing Himself, however, a fresh capacity was infused into all created things. Its evidences, as witnessed in all the peoples of the earth, are now manifest before thee. The deepest wisdom which the sages have uttered, the profoundest learning which any mind hath unfolded, the arts which the ablest hands have produced, the influence exerted by the most potent of rulers, are but manifestations of the quickening power released by His transcendent, His all-pervasive, and resplendent Spirit.”13
And the modern says? Our fine old Professor held that the skepticism which is the pride of urbanity and enlightenment ought not to lie in the effortless futility that we don’t know anything and can’t know anything, but, rather in the consent to treat everything as a problem. Then why not turn the mind on the mind itself? Whoever takes the wager will find himself, as Immanuel Kant did, up a blind alley, for there are definite limitations to man’s finite mind. The Eighteenth Century couldn’t see that and pushed an unreasonable confidence in reason itself, with the result as Amiel
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12Matthew iv, 4; xxiv, 35; x, 37.
13“Gleanings,” pp. 85-6.
suggests, that its reasoners were able to explain away religion and everything else—but not to create anything.
Bahá’u’lláh points out that as man cannot attain complete knowledge of the reality within himself, even less can he know the Divine Essence. “This confession of helplessness which mature contemplation must eventually impel every mind to make is in itself the acme of human understanding, and marketh the culmination of man’s development.”14
At this point the will to believe is operative, for faith is also a datum of consciousness struggling to become full-bodied. However, neglected and even stultified by the modern temper, the capacity for faith is co-existent with the capacity for knowledge. Indeed, Reality enters culture through the people of faith: they make up the leaven which animates the realm of being and germinates the arts and manners.15 In accordance with this, Bahá’u’lláh is revealed unto men “. . . to lay bare those gems that lie hidden Within the mine of their true and inmost selves.”16
Why doesn’t a plane tree turn into a camel? Because the a priori form of the thing lies within the thing itself. And the mature form of the mind lies within the sphere of mind itself. The mind is destined to both education and conversion but not to Theophany. Consequently, man is compared to a mine which is worked for its gems; to a sheep that gets lost without the Shepherd; to a lamp supplied with both oil and wick but incapable of self-ignition. Man, “the supreme Talisman,” is a sign of God and the apogee of His creation, stands in absolute need of the Prophet.
The Universal Cycle
Through a word proceeding out of the mouth of God he [man] was called into being; by one word more he was guided to recognize the source of his education; by yet another word his station and destiny were safeguarded.17
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14Ibid., 165-6.
15Ibid., pp. 157-61.
16Ibid., p. 287; also 256-60; 336-66.
17Ibid., p. 260; also, “All men have been created to carry forward an ever-advancing civilization.” P. 215.
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The Words of Bahá’u’lláh
are Logos and constitute a collective force
of the first
order, which, by power of Spirit consciously
and unconsciously subdues the minds, informs
and recreates them in Truth. This
world is the descent into existence; the
Manifestation offers the ascent into being:
here we are born into time; the Manifestation
gives the rebirth into eternity. The
Words of God draw the souls of men to
life eternal: men, seeking a foretaste of that
immortality, strive to perpetuate themselves
on earth as well by carving their names into
history.
From Bahá’u’lláh we learn that man’s estate is two—fold: its subjective reality is consciousness; its objective reality is civilization. Culture or the totality of arts, sciences, laws, manners and institutions, is the visible embodiment or concrete form of consciousness itself.
Before the New Cycle, consciousness in the West had not gone beyond Naturalism and automatic necessity. Men had forgotten God and turned to nature as teacher and goal quite unaware of man’s dominion on earth.18 Voices were raised in protest, and a lonely poet cried out:
“Ah, Lady, we receive but what we give, And in our life alone does nature live;”
but these were words among many.
In the East—the Light, all light comes out of the East—the Báb (the “Gate”) appeared in 1844. His divine Manifestation gave consciousness a new orientation based upon the relativity and evolution of religion. The primary aspect of Truth is changeless and absolute, the same throughout the time cycles; but that secondary aspect of religion which concerns social laws and institutions, is valid only for the cycle assigned to the given Revelation. Therefore, the divine Message for the Day in which we live is the sole basis of culture and the energy behind creative evolution and achievement.
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18In 1843 Thomas Carlyle wrote: “To speak in the ancient dialect we ‘have forgotten God’; in the most modern dialect and very truth of the matter, we have taken up the Fact of this universe as it is not.” “Past and Present,” Essay on Phenomena, Oxford University Press, London.
The Manifestation of the Báb precipitated an epoch of unprecedented mental exploration in which the concept of evolution was taken into thought and verified by the emergence of new schools of knowledge or sciences. Psychology came out of philosophy as a new organism, accompanied by pedagogy or education; politics went ahead; economics and anthropology were born. Contemporaneously, the concept of evolution was related to the earth, which records the proofs of its cycles in the geological strata; the evolution of the human race became the theme of biology; the evolution of classes dominated the trend of economics; while the evolution of the forms and organization of society was contributed by "the science of man” himself.
This new mental fecundity due to the Báb’s outpouring of Spirit brought forth technics and inventions as well: time is defied and space conquered. Physics justified its birth by discovering the relativity of time and space, but its proofs for the uninitiated lie in changes that we now accept as commonplace. Man lives in a three-dimension world: he possesses the earth, crosses the oceans, moves through the air. Man subdues Nature and wrests from it the materials for his ‘civilization. Behold that material civilization! Is there to be no spiritual counterpart?
Bahá’u’lláh the “Glory of God” was manifested in 1863. His Revelation sets forth the principles, laws, and institutions of World Order. Exiled from Írán, confined by the prison walls of ‘Akká, and subjected for forty years to the Sulṭánate and the Caliphate, Bahá’u’lláh withheld not the outpouring of Spirit. By means of Letters He issued commands for the establishment of the “Most Great Peace” to kings and rulers. To all men He unveiled the pattern of consciousness based upon the oneness of mankind: this is detachment from all prejudices and acceptance of that one life and spirit which is the reality of man. This new understanding is consummated in ‘Abdu’l-Bahá: His unique station combines the perfection of humanity with the Mystery of Divinity, and He is the Exemplar to the nations.
This hour is the challenge and test.
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When we undertook
the new material civilization and
began to live in space, we left
behind the flat surface dimension of the
earth; so does the universal consciousness
leave behind the flat surface dimension of
the mind with its expansive forms of
self-love, which become destructive as religious
sectarianism, exploitation of classes, racial
superiorities, militant nationalism.
Bahá’u’lláh leads us into a Commonwealth of Nations, which is more than expansion and association, for the Divine Polity takes the nations into another dimension which searches the base and reaches the heights of unity. We are called to be citizens of Heaven and of “Thy Kingdom come on earth”: world government lies within the power of the creative Word.
Passport Issued by the British Consulate on behalf of the Transjordan Government in accordance with Bahá’í Marriage Certificate.