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[Page 1]

World Order

Spring

1967

The Dilemma of the Modern Intellectual

An Address by DANIEL JORDAN

Buddhism in Ceylon

by KEITH de FOLO

[Page 2]

World Order

VOLUME 1 NUMBER 3 • PUBLISHED QUARTERLY

WORLD ORDER is intended to stimulate, inspire and serve thinking people in their search to find relationships between contemporary life and contemporary religious teachings and philosophy.

Editorial Board:

DR. FIRUZ KAZEMZADEH

DR. HOWARD GAREY

MR. MONROE E. MICHELS

Business Manager:

MRS. MURIEL MICHELS

Yearly subscriptions: $3.50 per year in U.S., its territories and possessions; foreign subscriptions $4.00 per year. Address any correspondence or checks for subscriptions to World Order, c/o Mrs. Muriel Michels, 1 Cove Ridge Lane, Old Greenwich, Conn. 06870. Single copies available $1.00 each.

Copyright © 1967, National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of the United States, World Rights Reserved. Printed in U.S.A.

Manuscripts and suggestions for articles and subjects to be treated editorially will be welcomed by the editors. All will be acknowledged.

CONTENTS

The Dilemma of the Modern Intellectual

An Address by DANIEL JORDAN ..... 3

An Editorial .......................... 9

A Westerner Views Buddhism In Ceylon

by KEITH DE FOLO ................. 10

The Selection of an

International Auxiliary Language

by JEFF GRUBER ................... 19

Bright Day of the Soul

by MARZIEH GAIL .................. 27

Criminal Responsibility

by DR. D. C. GRANT ................. 41

Ecumenical Man

by BILLY ROJAS ................. 50

A Review

by EDWIN S. REDKEY ............... 56

The views expressed herein are those of the authors, and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of the United States, nor of the Editorial Board.

[Page 3]

The Dilemma of the Modern Intellectual

An Address by Daniel Jordan

Daniel Jordan is Associate Professor of Psychology and Education as well as Director of the Institute for Research in Human Behavior at Indiana State University. He is at present serving as Chairman of the National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of the United States.

One of a Series of Centennial addresses sponsored by the Andrew Rankin Memorial Chapel, Howard University, Washington, D.C., October 30, 1965.

One of the more sensible functions of an anniversary commemoration of the founding of an institution is the provision of an opportunity to consider anew its purpose and how that purpose can be understood in these present times of rapid social and technological change. During Howard's centennial year, the University's religious services at the Andrew Rankin Memorial Chapel provide a forum for the examination of some of the purposes of this unique educational institution as reflected in the overall centennial theme adopted by the Chapel: Resources for Moral Readiness in a Changing Society. Surely one of the purposes of the University is to discuss the many problems related to the achievement of moral readiness, and since a good percentage of us who are here have an image of ourselves as intellectuals, I wish to make some observations about the dilemma the modern [Page 4] intellectual faces when he confronts the issue of moral readiness in our changing society.

The dilemma can best be understood in terms of its historical development —a development which is so extensive and complex that in no way can I justify the cursory treatment that I'm going to give it this morning. I hope you will grant me this license.

The dilemma of the modern intellectual originated when, some millions of years ago. consciousness in man came into being. The more conscious he became, the more aware he was of himself as a creature distinct from his environment. The more aware he became, the more compelled he was to relate himself in one way or another to everything in that environment, including other human beings.

Men and animals ordinarily achieve the establishment of relationships in a very basic way through the various modes of sensory perception. But human beings want to know more than just what things exist in their environment; they want to know about the relationships among them.

In the process of trying to understand these relationships, man runs on to a very basic difficulty. How does he relate himself to unknown or unknowable things which he somehow intuitively suspects to exist?

There are, of course, a vast number of unknown and unknowable things about us, but I want to talk about two such basic unknowns which seem to have direct relevance to the question of moral readiness. How man relates himself to them determines, in part, the kind of power he can mobilize for moral readiness. One of these unknowns, which all men of all societies have sooner or later encountered, is that force behind the order in the universe—the force which down through the ages has been called by many different names—Allah, Jehovah, God, The Great Spirit.

The other concerns that unknnwn part of our own selves, the unexpresaed potential, which I believe is that intangible reality analogously referred to in theological terms as the Kingdom of God within us.

The difficulty for many intellectuals in trying to deal with these two unknown forces stems from the fact that the intellect alone does not seem to provide a totally adequate means of relating the individual to them. This would probably be of little concern except for the fact that an inadequate orientation to these basic unknowns in our lives always precipitates a kind of free-floating anxiety, an existential anxiety—an objectless foreboding which frequently makes moral readiness impossible. In extreme cases it can lead an organism into a state of dysfunction, render it utterly incapable of assuming any responsibility for itself, and may progress to the point where the organism may even destroy itself.

Thus, having some reasonably consistent and satisfactory orientation to these two unknowns which assist in the preservation of the organism is for most a general mark of maturity and something well worth the effort to acquire.

To my mind, the essence of moral readiness is the courage to become what you potentially are in the face of a thousand forces which try to beat you down and away from that path of development. Of course, intellectual supports are important and necessary when pursuing one’s destiny, but they often are insufficient when it comes to coping with all of the obstacles which inevitably will be in the way.

The dilemma of the intellectual comes into sharp focus when he struggles with the question of how to move—how to exist, how to grow, how to become what potentially he can become—all through rational means alone.

The struggle persists because the intellectual tends to recognize as reality [Page 5] only those things which his mind can grasp and because the only acceptable approach to reality, as he defines it, is through intellectual activity. Yet, there is evidence that much of life’s meaning comes from our relationship to these unknowns and therefore has an important non-rational dimension which cannot be ignored with impunity. This non-rational aspect of meaning cannot be crammed into the mold of logical propositions or mathematical formulae. The substance of it cannot be easily conveyed in words. This is why no society has ever been without art and religion, for these are the usual media through which much of the non-rational aspect of meaning in life is expressed and reflected.

Art and religion represent activities which draw upon some additional means of relating men to the two unknowns about which we have been speaking. The most important additional means, I believe, is faith.

To be sure, there are many, many definitions of the word faith, and no doubt not all would agree with the definition which I wish to present, but for the moment, let us consider faith as an organization of feelings about the two basic unknowns which permeates one’s emotional orientation to life in general.

When the same organization of feelings is shared by many people and the values stemming from those feelings become institutionalized, we then have a religion. Pointing out how vital religion is to man’s development, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, the son of the founder of the Bahá’í Faith, stated that: “The greatest bestowal of God in the world of humanity is religion; for assuredly the divine teachings of religion are above all sources of instruction and development to man. Religion confers upon man eternal life and guides his footsteps in the world of morality.”

Now when an intellectual reaches the point of considering religion—of belonging to a community of persons who have a similar organitation of feelings and values about ultimate things—he encounters yet another dilemma. Which religion (or which community) shall he belong to?

This dilemma is a real one, and a common destiny of many intellectuals is to remain on its horns forever. The discomfort of this position is usually made reasonably bearable by undertaking a course of self-study in comparative religion and philosophy. This often has the effect of confirming the intellectual's predisposition to remain on the fence and not become identified with any one religion, since there seems to be no way of sorting out the innumerable conflicts among them.

Yet, being on the fence and not making a decision about religion causes the intellectual to continue talking and talking until he ends up talking about nothing. He finds himself in the position of the philosopher, Husserl, who realized one day that he was spending all of his time sharpening his knife until there was no knife left. Consequently it never fulfilled its function of cutting anything. The intellectual always runs into the danger of forever sharpening his wits, but never using them because he cannot become committed to anything except more wit sharpening—more talking.

Sharpening one’s wit for its own sake is not entirely a bad thing, I suppose, but I can’t help agreeing with E. M. Forster in his contention that it is far worse always to be preparing but never “called” than it is to be “called” even if one is unprepared. One of the direct consequences of always preparing for something but never actually doing it is that one begins to live entirely in the future and not at all in the present. This brings its own anxieties and discontents, and is a part of the pattern of maladjustment reflected in the lives of great number of human beings living in the Western world today.

The late Swiss psychiatrist, Carl Jung, was fond of saying that he never had [Page 6] a patient come to him over the age of 35 whose basic problem in the last analysis was not that of finding a religion to which he could become committed. It is psychologically difficult to become committed to anything of great import without making a decision about one’s relationship to God and the unknown in himself— without developing legitimate ultimate concerns, to borrow a concept from Tillich. Lives without commitment are like fields which have been plowed but never planted or harvested. Characteristically, persons who never become committed to anything eventually develop symptoms of mental or emotional disturbance after they reach the middle of their lives. Part of this disturbance is nearly always reflected in a pathoological fear of death. Jung pointed out that someone whose life has borne no fruit will never be ready for the harvest. It is as if man expects the harvest, death—itself an unknown—to reveal something about the two unknowns we have been discussing. If a whole life has been characterized by a postponing of decision about its relationship to those unknowns and a sea of words (philosophical knife sharpening) has been poured forth to rationalize the postponement, acute apprehension about death is understandable.

Bacon once said that a little philosophizing makes an atheist out of man, but that deep philosophy brings him hack to God. As the wits-sharpening of the intellectual leads him into “deep philosophy” he tends to become dissatisfied with the sharpening of wits for its own sake and begins to concentrate his efforts on a search for a religion—a search for values about the unknown shared by others— which he can conscientiously uphold. Trying to make a sound decision through the intellect alone about which religion to embrace is the same dilemma in different guise still facing him.

Impressive numbers of intellectuals on campuses everywhere are actively avoiding this kind of decision making. But many others are earnestly struggling with the dilemma and when in the course of their search for an answer they hear of the Bahá’í faith, few can resist its magnetic power.

This faith represents a new and powerful force in religion today. Its founder, Bahá’u’lláh, whose name translated into English means The Glory of God, diagnosed the ills of humanity and prescribed remedies for them in over a hundred volumes which comprise the sacred writings of the Faith. He predicted that the structure of the old order, based on out-worn principles and inadequate understandings of man’s purpose, would collapse and that a new world order would be rolled out instead. The history of this Faith is filled with turmoil, violence, and unbelievable heroism. The extent to which it has spread throughout the world in just a little over 100 years is truly impressive.

Its greatest achievement, however, lies in its power to develop moral readiness in those who become committed to it. Because of this, and because of several other very appealing basic tenets, the Bahá’í Faith today is of particular interest to the intellectual who is facing the dilemma I have described.

In the first place, Bahá’u’lláh stresses the importance of arriving at commitment and faith through independent investigation of truth. In order to achieve independence of investigation, He warns that we have to put both love and hate out of our minds and hearts if objectivity is to be attained, and that we must free ourselves from subtle and unconscious needs to endorse what our forefathers have believed.

Secondly, the Faith clearly defines the position of science in our lives and indicates the need for faith and religion to be balanced by reason and science. Bahá’u’lláh vividly expresses this need by likening science and religion to the two wings of a bird. If the wing of religion is strong and the wing of science weak, the [Page 7] bird will land in a bog of superstition; if the wing of religion is weak and that of science strong, then the bird will fall into the swamp of materialism. To keep the bird in flight, both wings must be equally strong.

Keeping the Faith from degenerating into superstition is an extremely important function, for a society that becomes superstitious will cease to progress. It will no longer be free to effect changes in its structure or in its collective actions, both of which are essential to the maintenance of an optimal level of adaptability. ‘Abdu’l-Bahá noted that “the development and progress of a nation is according to the measure and degree of that nation’s scientific attainment. Through this means, its greatness is continually increased and day by day the welfare and prosperity of its people are assured.”

Down through the ages, man has shown a tendency to regard his own religion as a true faith, and the religion at others as superstition. This tendency was not checked in the past, partly because previous religious dispensations did not make in their scriptures a clear-cut definition of faith which would distinguish it from superstition. When presenting a talk on the Bahá’í faith in Germany some years ago, I began by asking anyone in the audience to define faith in such a way that it would be clearly distinguished from superstition. A protestant clergyman had come to the meeting and volunteered an explanation. Although he didn't offer a direct definition, he gave examples which he felt would clarify the difference between the two: “When a Christian believes in Christ as his saviour, that is an example of true faith; when a Buddhist believes in Buddha as his saviour, this is an example of superstition, since Buddha is not a saviour.”

Although many of you may find this amusing or beyond belief, nonetheless an alarming number at people in the Western world would agree with that statement. It is alarming because lack of a clear definition of faith permits and many times even encourages the formation of attitudes which are destructive of human relationships. In the Bahá’í Faith, the distinction is clear. Faith—the organization of feelings about God and man—may transcend reasoning, but not oppose it. In this dispensation, science cannot usurp all power and cast society into the throes of materialism nor can religion degenerate into institutionalized superstition. ‘Abdu’l-Bahá emphasizes the role of science in keeping faith from becoming superstition when he says that “the man of science is perceiving and endowed with vision whereas he who is ignorant and neglectful of this development is blind.”

To the intellectual, the Bahá’í view of the relationship between science and religion is a welcome one. It means that there is a faith in the world today which joins him in putting a premium on intellectual honesty.

Thirdly, the Bahá’í understanding of the role of religion in history makes good sense. To be a Bahá’í means to accept the cultural and spiritual validity of the great world religions at the time of each one’s inception and development. The founders of the great religions—historical figures such as Muhammad, Jesus, Moses, Buddha, and Bahá’u’lláh, all of whom Bahá’ís would call Manifestations of God—articulated man’s relationship to the great unknown, God, inspired commitment to a set of values based on that relationship, and unified all men who would share them. On the basis of that unity, civilizations rose.

Thus, Bahá’u’lláh taught that the purpose of each Manifestation is to renew man’s relationship to God in terms that enable him to respond successfully to the special exigencies characteristic of the period of history in which he appears. In other words, Bahá’ís uphold the principle of the relativity of religious truth. While accepting the world’s religions as part of their own cultural heritage does [Page 8] not commit them to the outworn dogmas, doctrines, or rituals of past dispensations, it does commit the Bahá’ís to the principle of the oneness of religion as one of those values essential to progress and development in this age.

The fact that the Bahá’í Faith is of recent enough origin to have a good deal of historical information about its development available, also appeals to intellectuals. The original manuscripts of its sacred scripture are extant. This helps to insure the saaed writings against interpolation, substitution, and endless controversy over authenticity.

Many other basic teachings of the faith are not only appealing but already acceptable to the intellectual. The soundness of such principles as the oneness of mankind, progressive eradication of prejudice of all kinds as a prerequisite for world peace, universal compulsory education, the equality of the sexes, a universal auxiliary language to facilitate communication and understanding would he denied by few intellectuals.

But what makes the Bahá’í Faith an appealing religion for the intellectual to investigate is not necessarily what persuades him to embrace it. What is convincing is the subjective experience of feeling moral readiness—the courage to assume responsibilities for becoming what one can potentially become—growing within one’s being. At that point, his dilemma disappears, deeds and not words become his adorning as Bahá’u’lláh promises, and he embarks upon a life’s journey filled with high purpose and fruitful endeavor.

My friends, it has been a great honor for me to be with you on this occasion, and I am very grateful for the opportunity to extend to you, from this very platform from which ‘Abdu’l-Bahá spoke on April 23, 1912, this invitation to investigate the Bahá’í Faith—a new religion for a new age, a powerful source of moral readiness for these challenging times, and a convincing response to the dilemma of the modern intellectual. That Howard should expose its students to diverse religious points of view through the Chapel series of addresses as one means of commemorating its centennial anniversary, is a testimony to its progressive spirit and a good omen for the next 100 years of its future.

[Page 9]

An Editorial

Howard University is celebrating its centenary. Like many a great institution of higher learning, it had a modest beginning in the immediate post-civil war period, when the need and the duty of educating millions of emancipated slaves was first perceived.

Founded by a group of well-wishers, most of them former officers of the Union army, the University was intended for the training of a Negro elite who would help raise the level of their own people. Yet, symbolically, the first class which met on May 1, 1867, consisted of four white girls.

Howard has never been a segregated institution. Lafayette C. Loomis, a professor in the newly opened Medical Department, was thus quoted in the Annual Report of 1867-1368:

It is the belief of not a few that events have demonstrated, and will still continue to show, alike the fallacy and impracticability of all theories and projects which look to the speedy separation of the two races, and that the only feasible, as it is the only just and sensible plan is to accept the situation as it is—to recognize the principle of Hebrew legislation in respect of those escaped from bondage and ‘permit them to dwell among us in that place which they shall choose...’

Almost half a century later, in a segregated America, Howard University continued to provide a platform and a home for the teaching of unity of mankind. It was there in 1912 that ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, son of the Founder of the Bahá’í Faith, going far beyond the demands of the humanitarians of that day, appealed for complete racial unity. He likened mankind to a garden and the various races to “the flowers which constitute its adornment and decoration.” He prayed:

May both [races] develop toward the highest degree of equality and altruism. May you be drawn together in friendship and may extraordinary development make brotherhood a reality and truth. I pray in your behalf that there shall be no [other] name than that of humanity among you.

Love and unity between blacks and whiles in America, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá said, would bring about unity of mankind, “for the accomplishment of unity between the colored and the whites will be an assurance of the world’s peace. Then racial prejudice, limited patriotism, and religious bias will pass away and remain no longer.”

Howard University is entering its second century. In the years to come it will continue to grow and develop, and will gradually, as segregation disappears from American life, lose its character as a Negro institution. May it prosper and excel, and may it hold fast to the principles which lit its way through its first century.

[Page 10]

A WESTERNER VIEWS BUDDHISM IN CEYLON

By Keith de Folo

Keith de Folo, a graduate of Stanford University, is at present in Ceylon as a free-lance journalist and photographer. He has been a staff writer for FORBES MAGAZINE, TIME, and the CHRISTIAN HERALD. His photographs and articles have appeared in the ROTARIAN, the NEW YORK TIMES, the SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE, and in various travel magazines.

Two thousand and five hundred years ago, the Gautama Buddha proclaimed a scientific fact which was revolutionary: All component things are impermanent. (“Sabbhe sankhara anicca.”)

Nothing exists in an immutable form—a rock, a tree, a human being—more than an infinitesimal fraction of a second. The world of matter and the world of the mind are in constant flux. Therefore, a permanent “self,” or ego, or “I” is not possible. If there is no permanent “self,” the struggle of man to grasp material or secular rewards is as pointless as chasing butterflies in the boiling noonday sun.

The only satisfaction that comes forth from greed is a fleeting sensation of pleasure. Then, greed, feeding on itself, pushes mam forward to grasp more fleeting pleasure. More sensations, more greed. Where is the end of this diabolical [Page 11] process? There is no end, states the Buddha, until the prisoner of craving accepts the Four Noble Truths:

(1) Earthly existence is Ill (dukkha).

(2) The origin of all Ill or Suffering is Craving (tanha).

(3) The cessation of suffering occurs when craving is conquered.

(4) The only way to conquer craving and end suffering is to follow the Noble Eightfold Path.

The stages of the Eightfold or Middle Path (Majjhima Patipada) are: (1) Right view; (2) Right aim; (3) Right speech: (4) Right action; (5) Right livelihood; (5) Right effort; (7) Right mindfulness; (8) Right concentration.

The Path is not easy to follow, but it can be trod by anyone who will make a strong effort. This is the Path the Buddha discovered at the moment of Enlightenment. This is the knowledge the Buddha attained after six years of exploration, suffering, and meditation. This knowledge brought deliverance to the 35-year-old Gautama, and it is this knowledge which the Buddha passes on to every man in every century in every part of the globe.

The goal which the Buddha reached is freedom from “self,” from the bondage of “separate existence,” from having to live in a world of self-enslavement. Freedom from all craving and all illusions of permanence is the Supreme state— Nibbana. This is the goal to which every Buddhist aspires. Since the Buddha preferred to maintain silence on the exact nature of Nibbana, it is many things to many Buddhists: imperishable, agelessness, bliss, the secure refuge, Truth, the Supreme Reality, the eternal, incomprehensible Peace. Literally defined as “blowing out,” Nibbana sounds like absolute finality. But we are assured by the Buddha that any man may attain this ineffable state in this world before his physical death. It is boldly clear that Nibbana is a transcendent reality beyond words, space, and time.

Regardless of the precise nature of Nibbana, it is the supreme goal sought by Buddhists of all schools and sects, The followers of the Tathagata (Who is “truth- arrived”) are arrayed in two great schools: Hinayana (or Theravada) and Mahayana. Nevertheless, a general agreement exists as to the Dhamma (Doctrine of Law) and the Buddhist attitude toward life. The followers of the Buddha in Ceylon, Burma, Thailand, Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia rightly claim that Theravada Buddhism is the older and more authentic interpretation. By contrast, the Buddhists of Japan and northern Asia follow Mahayana, a Way that contains many accretions and commentaries and includes ideas and theories which are not to be found in the early Pali scriptures. In Mahayana Buddhism, the Blessed One becomes a Divine Object to be worshipped, and every human being holds the potential for becoming a Buddha himself. The unity of Buddhism is more apparent than the disunity, states Dr. K. N. Jayatilleke, one of Ceylon’s leading Buddhist scholars.

“The unity of Buddhism is not so much the unity of strictly orthodox beliefs ...rather the unity of the fruits of a genuinely religious life—peace, harmony and happiness flowing from wisdom and compassion. But a common core of doctrine is not lacking and the differences on the whole are differences of presentation or emphasis.”

Even within the two great schools of Buddhism there are numerous divisions and deviations. The goal of the human creature is always supreme and the particular road he travels is secondary. Always, Nibanna is beyond the top rung of [Page 12] the ladder. Attainable in this world, Nibbana is sought by all laymen and yellow- robed disciples of the Buddha.

Contradictory to the accusation that is often hurled at Buddhism, the religion of Gautama is not negative. The Dhamma contains fewer “do nots” than are to be found in the other major religions. The straightforward admission that this world is Suffering or Ill cannot be logically refuted by any Westerner or Easterner. The ultimate goal, Nibbana, stripped of all lures and euphemisms, sounds far more real than the fanciful rhapsodies written on heaven and paradise. The obstacles confronting the twentieth-century traveler on the Path seem well-nigh insuperable: struggle [or existence; resistance to inner and outer attackers; society’s demands for keen competition. Ceylon’s villager is luckier than his city cousin or the majority of Asia’s underfed population. The villager has to struggle less for everything. Generally, he grows his rice and vegetables, dwells in a small mortar and palm-thatched house, and lives peacefully with his neighbors. He hopes to send his son to the University, in expectation of a future engineer or doctor in the family. The villager is a healthy man, hard-working when necessary, extremely affable, and possesses a mind that is usually free of grinding anxieties. The villager’s greatest asset is that he is not driven by an irresistible ambition to be rich, powerful, or famous. He is a realist, and he digs his living out of the soil. He knows that his lack of education and worldly experience will always keep him in the village.

In spite of the comparative ease of his life, the village Buddhist in Ceylon doesn’t really believe he is making much spiritual progress. This may be due to a natural modesty, but more likely to a feeling of inferiority: He thinks: “I try to live a good life and follow the Teachings of the Buddha. But I know that I have many bad thoughts. These thoughts hold me back. I will have to go through many deaths and rebirths before arriving at my final existence.”

The villager’s cherished desire is to be reborn for the last time in the age of the Maitreya Buddha, who is the long-awaited Buddha of Universal Love.

If you ask a Buddhist in Ceylon, “Do you know anyone who is now living in Nibbana?”, he will probably respond, “No—but there may be some—somewhere.” if you query a Sinhalese priest (bikkhu): “Do you know an arahat (perfect man)?”, he will smile and respond, “No, arahats are not found today. They only lived near the time of the Buddha.”

The Dhamma was given by the Buddha to all men for all times. Why should the Supreme State no longer be attainable in this world? A religion or Way of Life should be a living reality in every respect. The doctrine of Christ, without the reforming power of salvation, is only a saccharine syrup. The Buddha is reported to have said: “My religion will endure as long as men follow the Dhamma.” It is alarming to think that a large number of Buddhists really doubt the ability of men to follow the Law today.

Many Ceylonese, and Asians, do earnestly strive to mould their actions according to the instructions of the Buddha. Leaving aside the fanciful allegory of the youthful period of Gautama (who was known as Prince Siddhattha Gautama Sakya), we are told that at the age of twenty-nine, having renounced his family, wealth, and power, he met and studied under two ascetics, Uddaka and Kalama. After a long and fruitless period of meditation and trance, Siddhattha reached a “state of nothingness.” Leaving his teachers, he encountered five holy men who became his followers. Through observing excruciating austerities, the minds and bodies of teacher and disciples atrophied into living skeletons. Renouncing mortification as the “way,” the Buddha dragged his emaciated body to the foot of a [Page 13] bodhi tree, where he sat for seven weeks. Wrestling with the cosmic problems of birth, decay, and death of man, the Buddha discovered the Noble Truths during the first moments of his Enlightenment (traditionally, May 25th, 528 B.C.) at the age of thirty-five.

As his mind traveled through many stages of trance, he discovered the Way to conquer ignorance and craving and lead men to Freedom. These were the first moments of Illumination, and a new Buddha (“Awakened One”) was born into the world. Traveling to Benares, India, the Buddha preached his first sermon, on the Four Noble Truths, to the five ascetic mendicants who had suffered austerities with him. They became the first followers of the Dhamma, and the founding members of the Sangha (Order at Monks).

As the mind at the Buddha rose through many stages before it attained the Higher Knowledge, so the mind of a disciple must pass through many levels of meditation before entering into the Stream of Liberation.

The Moral Discipline of the mind is the starting point, springing from the final step of the Noble Eightfold Path. Realizing that the world is filled with suffering, man must develop an attitude of indifference toward the pains and the pleasures of the physical body. He must learn to analyze and contemplate every part and action of his body with utter detachment. He must view his body, not as a unified whole, but as a collection of ingredients; viz., hairs, nails, skin, muscles, kidneys, heart, spleen, intestines, stomach, brain, bile, blood, fat, sweat, and so forth.

The body does not contain a “self”, “I”, or any individual personality. According to the Abhidhamma (Highest Dhamma), the body is composed of five “heaps” or groups (skandhas). Assigned to the fourth century B.C., the Abhidhamma deals with scientific and metaphysical subjects which were treated by scholars soon after the passing of the Blessed One, The five groups of mind and matter are: (1) Material body (rupa); (2) Feelings (vedana): (3) Sensations and Perceptions (sañña); (4) Volitions, impulses, and dispositions of the mind (sankhara); (5) Consciousness and the total mind (vinnana). Separately, none of these elements constitutes a “self”, and collectively, they do not make up a “self”. None is permanent, and each is dependent on one or more groups for operation. The term, “I”, according to the Buddha, cannot exist, because there is nothing within the human make-up which is all-inclusive and can retain possessiveness, During the time of the Buddha, the “self” was interpreted as the soul (“atta”), and this was the element that was supposed to migrate into a new existence.

The Buddha stated emphatically: There is no fixed, unchanging spiritual substance within the body. This is the meaning of the Buddha's no-soul theory. It can readily be observed that the widespread misunderstanding of the word, soul, at the time of the Buddha, led him to deny flatly the existence of a permanent soul. The Buddha strongly supports a survival after death, but the survival is activated by a force apart from “soul”.

The earnest traveler of the Noble Path must constantly guard against his senses and always maintain a keen awareness of lures and temptations. If not, his mind will fall out of control and lead him into grave error. The Buddha reportedly gave sound advice to Ananda, his most beloved disciple, who inquired:

“How do we treat women?”

“Don't see them,” replied the Buddha.

“If we do see them, what do we do?”

“Don't talk.”

“If they speak to us?”

[Page 14]

Warned the Blessed One: “Keep wide awake!”

The second spiritual level we must try to reach is Concentration. By concentrating on a bowl oi flowers, a lighthouse on a peninsula, or an image of the Buddha, it is possible to become detached from every negative and positive feeling. The thoughts travel onward, to the plane of Faith, and then into the purer and higher realms of trance (jhana). The journey through “purity of mindfulness and evenmindedness” leads us onto the station at “neither perception nor nonperception”. This exalted state must give way to a state where all motion, speech, and thought are absent. Only, when the last shred of “self” is washed out of the conscious and the unconscious mental stream is it possible to enter Nibbana.

During the upward journey, the mind will cultivate the four supreme attitudes toward every being in the world. Sometimes called the Brahma Virtues (or “Illimitables”), these are the virtues reflected by the Buddha toward all living creatures: Friendliness, Compassion, Sympathetic Joy, Equanimity. The “Metta Sutta” of the Pali Canon describes the outlook which anyone can attain:

“May all beings be happy and at their ease!...Let none deceive another, or despise any being in any state; let none by anger or ill-will wish harm to another! ...with a boundless mind should one cherish all living beings, radiating friendliness over the entire world, above, below, and all around without limit; so let him cultivate a boundless goodwill towards the entire world, uncramped, free from ill-will or enmity.”

Wisdom is the highest virtue a human being can develop. This is the level from which there is no return. Wisdom leads directly into Nibbana. When one truly understands the Dhamma of the Buddha, has traveled the perilous heights of trance, he will find wisdom or insight (pañña) which destroys all of the darkness and delusion that surrounds all beings. “He who is concentrated knows, sees what really is.” This is the description of true wisdom by Buddhaghosa, Ceylon’s fifth century (A.D.) scholar-commentator on the Buddhist scriptures.

Any attempt to find wisdom must be firmly rooted in the awareness that no individuality (soul) exists and that every act and activity of life is impermanent and unsatisfactory. “Sabbhe sankhara anicca.” All component things are impermanent. This must become our key-thought. By carrying this thought to the realms beyond logic and illogic, beyond sounds and words, beyond time and space, the understanding of everything within the universe is reached. Nibanna is won!

Long before attaining Nibbana, the ordinary man goes through a long cycle of births and deaths. Until, through volition, hard work, and concentration, he is able to overcome every craving and put an end to suffering, he can never expect to be “released.” The act of “becoming again” (bhava) poses the greatest mystery that Buddhists and non-Buddhists have tried to solve throughout the ages. Violent discussions have raged, and are raging, around the question: “If the Buddha denied the existence of a permanent soul, what is it that passes into the new birth (punabbhava)?”

The answers are as numerous as the motivations that lead men to investigate rebirth. The generally accepted opinion among Buddhist scholars and philosophers is that a “stream of consciousness” passes from one earthly existence into the next. This “stream” is not to be identified with an unchanging spiritual substance, a personality, a “self,” or “I”—none of which exists. Buddhism claims that a person in two successive lives is “neither the same nor another.” The new birth may possess some of the traits or tendencies of the former, but strictly speaking, the rebirth is a new life.

The process of rebirth is frequently compared to the flame of a candle whose [Page 15] dying flame is transferred to a new candle. The two flames appear to be identical, revealing the same light, heat, color, shape. Although every quality appears to be identical, they are not the same flames “Neither the same nor another.”

Kamma (action) is the force that determines the particular nature, shape, and level of the new life. “As ye sow, so shall ye reap,” say Christ and the Buddha. The thoughts of the mind, the words of speech, the actions of the body in this life accumulate and flow in a direction that directly influences the next birth. The Pali Canon repeatedly states that volition is the vital and decisive factor in kamma. What a man wants to do, what he desires, what he “wills” (even if undone) will have a dominant influence upon the formation of his kamma. In the sequence of the Noble Eightfold Path, it is significant that the Buddha assigns the first two steps to Right View and Right Aim. Unless the direction of the vehicle is clearly on the straight Path, the course of the journey will be crooked.

One popular Buddhist theory of rebirth seems to have been constructed to satisfy the biologists but not the orthodox Buddhists. The similarity between two lives is scientifically explained by heredity, which transmits mental and physical traits via genes from one life to the next. While this sounds rational, how can one prove that the son of “Mr. and Mrs. Smith” is the actual product of the kamma of a particular, previous life? All we know is that the child inherited some traits from his parents, but heredity and kamma are not the same thing. Kamma, which is the cause and effect of a man’s actions, cannot be validly equated with the biological process of transmitting atoms and molecules.

There are other Buddhist scholars, Western and Eastern, who categorically affirm that the no-soul theory prevents any kind of survival. The British scholar- educator, J. G. Jennings, states that “...Buddha taught that all actions have their inevitable effects, but it is not established that he himself assumed that the aggregate of one individual’s actions miraculously creates upon his death a new individual to bear the consequences...it may he assumed that Buddha, teaching the doctrines of no-permanent-soul, moral responsibility, and altruism, taught a doctrine of altruistic responsibility or collective Kamma according to which every action, word, and thought...brings forth consequences to be suffered or enjoyed by others in endless succeeding generations.”

This “generations” theory is acceptable only from the standpoint that every action performed by a man has some effect on the men who follow him, even though the effect be very, very slight. Mr. Jennings’ theory offers nothing in explanation of how a man suffers or enjoys the fruits of his “sowing.”

Irrespective of the particular attitude toward rebirth, Buddhism does not appear, at first glance, to offer any consolation to the follower of a theistic religion. The Christian, Jew, or Moslem asks: “Where is God?”

The Buddha did not admit the existence of a Supreme Power nor did he absolutely deny the existence. He refused to answer the question. The Buddha knew that his answer would provoke interminable wrangling and contention. Gautama lived in an age that abounded in useless theories and philosophies. Every academy, forum, and public square offered fools and pundits who waged oratorical battles. Among the popular topics were: “Is the universe eternal (not eternal?)?” “Is the soul identical (not identical) with the body?” “Is the soul annihilated (not annihilated) at death?” “Does the Perfect One (Buddha) exist after death?” “Does the Perfect One neither exist nor not exist after deaLh?”

Despite the Buddha‘s refusal to affirm positively the existence of God, it is [Page 16] clearly evident that Buddhism is a religion and not a secular philosophy. The elevating steps of the Noble Path, the altruism toward all men, the loving encouragement given by Buddha to the struggling Wayfarer, the ultimate deliverance into Nibbana—all at these qualities identify the Teachings of the Buddha with a transcendental religion.

States Dr. K. N. Jayatilleke: “Early Buddhism is not atheistic in the sense in which Materialism or Marxism is atheistic...(it) recognizes the validity of moral and spiritual experiences and values and asserts that Nibbnna is a transcendent reality beyond space, time, and causation.”

It cannot be denied that Buddhism offers no personal God to the believer or to the person who would like to believe in God. Does the ordinary Buddhist in the villages of Ceylon suffer because of the absence of God in his religion? The answer is, “No!”

To the Buddhist who understands the true nature at the founder of Buddhism, the Tathagata was a man who mediated, suffered, and discovered the Path leading to the highest realms of insight and knowledge. Before his Enlightenment, the Buddha was a sensitive, intelligent young man. When he attained Buddhahood, through his own effort, he became an extraordinary Being. Still, he remained a human being outwardly in order that he might set the Example for all to follow. The Buddha often stated that he was neither God nor a god, and he disclaimed omniscience and omnipotence. Once, he sternly scolded Sariputta, an overcredulous disciple, for his blind faith in the Buddha:

“Have you examined the minds of the Perfectly Enlightened Exalted Ones of the past [and] future...or my own mind in the present?”

When Sariputta confessed his failure to have investigated, the Buddha warned him against accepting any statement from anyone on blind faith.

The Theravada Buddhist who understands that the Gautama had earned the right to be called “Buddha” will not pray to him, ask him for favors, or exalt him to the seat of Godhead, as the Mahayana Buddhists have done. In Ceylon, the object of supplication is not the Buddha. A big percentage of the Buddhists possess a pantheon of Hindu deities which they happily worship without the slightest sense of guilt or incongruity. The reverence paid to Siva, Vishnu, Pattini, Murugan, Aiyanar, Ganesha, Parvathy, and Lakshmi harks back to the days of King Devanampiya Tissa, the first convert to Buddhism in Ceylon (270 B.C.). Throughout the centuries, the Hindu deities have lived peacefully with the Gautama Buddha in many of Ceylon’s Buddhist temples. Ganesha, the elephant-image god is the guardian deity of Ceylon’s ancient capital, Anudradhapura, and Vishnu is the protector of Ceylon. Every year, thousands of devoted Buddhists make the arduous bus trip to the Hindu shrine at Kataragama. Buddhist and Hindu pilgrims offer flowers and make vows and supplications to Lord Kataragama. If the sick child is healed, if the rice crop is bountiful, if the rains come on schedule, the graceful worshiper fulfills his vow to Kataragama. It is not surprising that a small temple to the Gautama Buddha stands fraternally next to the Hindu devale at Kataragama.

This all-embracing outlook is “popular” Buddhism, the religion of the masses. At the same time that the devotee strives to perfect himself by climbing the Middle Path to Nibbana, he is begging assistance from the Hindu gods that surround the citadel of the Buddha. As one Buddhist scholar phrased it: “From [Page 17] Buddha, the believer seeks the inner qualities of love, compassion, and wisdom. From the deities, he hopes for material rewards.”

If you question the Buddhist as to the compatibility of the two goals, he will probably smile and murmur: “Well, I don’t think it's really wrong. I know that Buddha is superior to the gods, so nothing harmful can come out of it.”

The Buddha repeatedly said that no man should accept the Noble Path without verifying every guidepost. He wanted no luke-warm, uninformed disciples who might be easily tempted to follow the next teacher who drifted along. As the Buddha hammered out every stone of the Dhamma, he prescribed the following steps of verification:

(1) Sensory experience; (2) Intuition (insight); (3) Meditation and the aid of Extra-sensory Perception. Unless a statement, or a premise, is exposed to the searing glare of proof by every possible device, no claim of verification can be advanced. The outer eye and the conscious mind are not sufficient. Insight that flows from a mind which has been cleansed of defilements, is reliable knowledge. When a disciple reaches an advanced mental state, he is encouraged to develop those faculties, inherent in every man, which will produce telepathic and clairvoyant experiences.

The Buddha claimed to have known his hundreds of previous lives: “When his mind is thus composed, clear and cleansed without blemish, free from adventitious defilements, pliant and flexible, steadfast and unperturbed, he turns and directs his mind to the recollection of his former lives...Just as a man who has traveled from his village to another and from that to yet another...remembers how he came from village to village.”

The Buddha strongly denounced the acceptance of theories which originate in revelation, scripture, tradition, authority, hearsay, report, or speculation. He criticizes pure reason as a road to knowledge, because the reasoning may be superficial or based upon a false premise. The Buddha insisted that only a “rational faith” can be the starting point in developing a stable and informed disciple.

Certainly, it is no indictment of the Ceylon Buddhists to remark that only a handful have made a detailed study or analysis of the Scriptures. The Buddhist has inherited his faith just as the great majority of Moslems, Christians, Jews, and Hindus were born into their religious. There is no urgency to question “why.” His is but to do and die (and be reborn). The Teachings of the Tathagata gives the Buddhist peace, consolation, joy, and at rare moments, a spark of exultation. Because of his simple, willing belief, Lhe ordinary Buddhist in Ceylon would probably not heed this advice of his Teacher:

“Just as the experts test gold by burning, cutting, or applying to a touchstone, my statements should be accepted only after critical examination and not out of respect for me.”

The Buddhist does realize that ignorance and craving are the root causes oi his “becoming” again and again. The Theory of Causality (Paticca Samuppada) or Dependent Origination lies at the very crux of the Buddhadhamma. Every cause has an effect, which produces another cause-effect, and so on. This diabolical circle is called the “Wheel of Life.” As the birth-decay-death-rebirth process is described many times in the Teachings of Buddha, it is clear that the Buddha was very anxious to instruct his followers in the precise and correct way to stop the onward march of suffering.

Ignorance of the inner meaning of the Four Noble Truths causes a man to [Page 18] commit new actions which will propel him into a new birth. Consciously, we may not want to “become again,” but our natural desire (or craving) for life, painful as it is, is stronger than our will to end “becoming.” Obviously, this is caused by ignorance. Craving produces a new mind and body and an accompanying set of sense organs. Man approaches a crucial stage when one or more of his senses contacts an object. If the feeling caused by the contact is pleasant, he will crave further contact, and thus, he guarantees a new birth. If the feeling is unpleasant, the individual may be awakened to the knowledge that all life is Ill. This revelation will terminate his rebirth. Once a man craves for a new birth, he will seldom change his pattern, and thus, the chance of attaining Nibbana during the present birth is totally lost. From the level of craving, man is swept into the pit of grasping, thence, into the whirlpool of “becoming.” The penalty is another existence of suffering-decay-death.

Is the grinding of the Wheel of Life inevitable? Not at all. Man is not a prisoner of any Fate or god or predeterminism. When the individual discovers that craving is the cause of his suffering, he will—by his own effort and volition—halt the revolution of the Wheel. The Buddha exhorts his listeners to seek no help from any living or supernatural agent. “Work out your deliverance (salvation) with diligence,” are the dying words of the Buddha to his beloved disciples.

The individual possesses all of the mental and physical faculties for discontinuing a destructive life-process—if he wishes to. For example, an alcoholic is destroying his life with liquor. Before he can stop drinking, he must become aware of what liquor is doing to him. Knowledge must replace ignorance. Then, if the alcoholic has the volition, he will stop drinking, By his effort, and his effort alone, he will conquer the evil habit. The Buddha, who is the wise and compassionate Physician, has shown man the diagnosis of life through the Four Noble Truths. He gives the remedy in the Noble Eightfold Path.

Does the Ceylon Buddhist understand that he can cure himself? Does he know that he holds the key to end his samsara (roll of births and deaths)? We believe that he knows the theory of the cure. It is doubtful, however, that the follower of Gautama Buddha in the Twentieth Century holds the amount of faith that is a prerequisite to putting the complete remedy into effect.

Too many Buddhists demonstrate a greater reliance in the efficacy of supernatural deities than in the Dhamma of the Buddha. This may be attributed to a decline of the true understanding of the Dhamma. Or to the widespread belief that deities can be invoked to perform miracles, which the Buddha cannot (and will not) perform.

Living among the people of Ceylon, one gradually becomes conscious of a marked lack of self-confidence in their own abilities and actions. The natural consequence is a weakening of self-effort. If a man does not put forth the diligence to change the direction of his life, no god or Buddha will interfere.

When the effort to follow an inspired Way of Life is not forthcoming, there is always a deterioration of morals and conduct. This is equally true of an individual and a society. Many village and town dwellers in Ceylon will emphatically attest to the swiftly onrushing breakdown in the standards and behavior of their people. The remedy for arresting the breakdown is the same in every age, culture, and country: To return to the Teachings of the Law-Giver. It matters little whether the name of the Law-Giver is Krishna, Moses, Christ, Mohammad, Buddha or Bahá’u’lláh.

[Page 19]

ON THE SELECTION OF AN INTERNATIONAL AUXILIARY LANGUAGE

By Jeff Gruber

Jeffrey Gruber is a biologist and linguist (Ph.D. in linguistics from MIT, 1965), now on a post-doctoral research fellowship at MIT. His two principal interests are the acquisition of language by the child, and general, theoretical studies in syntax and semantics.

The eventual adaption of an auxiliary language throughout the world is one of the basic Bahá’í principles. One language is to be chosen by all the nations and taught in all the schools as a supplement to the various native languages. Its effect would be to promote the cause of world unity. In the words of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, Son of the Founder of the Bahá’í Faith:

The very foremost service to the world of man is to establish an auxiliary international language. It will become the cause of the tranquillity of the commonwealth of man. It will become the cause of the spread of sciences and arts amongst the nations of the world. It will be the cause of the progress and development of all the races.

We will discuss here those criteria which might be used to decide on a universal [Page 20] auxiliary language (henceforth called a UAL). If at any time a certain language can be universally accepted, it should be, even if some of the criteria here discussed go unsatisfied. No natural language has ever been shown to be intrinsically better for human communication than any other. The differences between them are certainly very small compared with the benefit which the choice of any one for universal use will bring. Any important inadequacies an artificially constructed language might have would eventually be corrected by the confrontation of natural human creativity with the everyday exigencies of its use.

Nevertheless we shall discuss some ways in which one choice for a UAL might be better than another. None of our considerations will be political. We will attempt to discover what sort of language will be most beneficial and just for the world, and not necessarily one which, if any, can he accepted by self-seeking societies existing in the world today. Bahá’ís will find that their deliberations are most significant when posed in the context of a spiritual world community. Here conflicting national and ethnic interests play no role when compared with the interests of world citizenship. The choice of the UAL should be made in the future by an international tribunal, whose decision will be accepted as just by a united world.

Although from our present viewpoint the day of the universal adoption of some language seems a long way off, it is interesting that from 1855 up until the past few decades the general idea that the time was imminent pervaded the literature on this subject. It was as if men had seen the mountain of their hearts’ desire looming large on the horizon and rushed madly to reach it, only to discover that their goal was many miles away. Yet the goal had been seen. Currently there is a lull; authors are no longer actively trying to perfect and promote their creations. One could say that the matter is no longer in the hands of hobbyists. In 1930, Otto Jespersen reported: “A new science is developing, Interlinguistics—the branch of the science of language which deals with the structure and basic ideas of all languages with a view to the establishing of a norm for interlanguages.” This is reminiscent of the earlier statement of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá: “Regarding the universal language: Ere long significant and scientific discussions concerning this matter will arise among the people of discernment and insight and it will produce the desired result.” The science of linguistics has grown considerably in the past few years. It is certain that the fruits of linguistic science will ultimately be of value in deciding on a UAL.

Criteria for the choice of a UAL fall in four general areas: 1) communicative functions, 2) ethnic associations, 3) syntax or sentence structure, 4) vocabulary.

l) Communicative Functions

The essential purpose of a UAL is to provide for universal communication of all sorts. In the past, languages have been proposed as universal vehicles for special kinds of communication. There have been artificial languages which professed to be eminently logical and precise, suitable for scientific intercourse. English has been proposed for the business world; French for the world of literature.

[Page 21] First of all, it is probably wrong to assume that any natural language is intrinsically better suited for one function than for another: obviously, many French speaking people have professions other than writing. All human languages seem adaptable to the full range of human communicative needs. The adaptability of an artificial language is demonstrated by the success of Esperanto.

Secondly, the UAL is intended to be a single language capable of facilitating human communication in all the exigencies of life. In the wards of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá:

A universal language would make intercourse possible with every nation. Thus it would be needful to know two languages only, the mother tongue and the universal speech. The latter would enable a man to communicate with any and every man in the world.

A third language would not be needed. To be able to talk with a member of any race and country without requiring an interpreter, how helpful and restful to all.

Of proposed artificial languages, Jespersen pointed out: “Only those systems had a considerable number of adherents which were sufficiently complete to serve for many purposes.”

2) Ethnic Associations

Since our considerations are non-political, the idea that the language of some nation will not be accepted because of ethnocentric feelings on the part of other nations does not constitute grounds for discounting the choice of one of the ethnic languages for the UAL. Indeed, there are certain reasons to favor the choice of an ethnic or natural language over one artificially constructed. Only an ethnic language has a tradition in literature and a speech community endowing it with a historical human vitality. The very life of a historical language might well be worth preserving in a UAL. In addition, so much has been written and translated in certain ethnic languages, such as English, that it might be a great loss to leave such work out of the world’s inheritance. There are many languages whose literatures will always be cherished, and which will always be most intimately understood in the original. [Editor’s note: the adoption of a UAL does not imply the abandonment of foreign language study. The great languages which have contributed to human culture will not be forgotten. The study of literature in the original languages must be continued for the intimate and accurate understanding of world masterpieces, as well as to make possible the periodic re-translation into the UAL which will he necessitated by the latter’s normal change and development through time. Furthermore, the production of literature in local languages will continue, with the need for translating them into the UAL, as well as for their study, not by every one but by specialists, in their original texts.]

However, the general idea that the UAL should have a literary tradition seems to be a small consideration in view of the fact that it is only in the past several centuries that the traditions of modern languages have been built up. Since the UAL, once adopted, will continue to be used for many millennia, its possible lack of a literary tradition now, would soon become irrelevant. Furthermore, the literary traditions already built up need not be lost, since the UAL is meant not to supplant but to complement existing languages.

Although we need not be concerned with considerations as to what biased groups some language may satisfy or offend, it is nevertheless in our interests to approach a level of world justice. The choice of a UAL with ethnic and literary traditions will perforce constitute a spread of those particular traditions. It would [Page 22] not seem to be in the interests of justice to favor any one culture over any other. In addition, when we speak of linguistic traditions, we speak of structural principles incorporated into the language through past ages, and it may be unjust to amplify the importance of the principles of one speech community by making their speech the UAL. The original speakers of an ethnic UAL would have, moreover, an advantage for one or two generations in being the only native speakers of that tongue,

One may wonder, however, whether the issue regarding cultural traditions will be at all important in view of the fact that diverse cultural values are inevitably being forced into reconciliation today. Thus it makes less and less sense to talk about the spread of one culture at the expense of another. The old argument used against an ethnic language, that it would give an unfair advantage to some particular ethnic group, seems now rather superficial.

The choice of a natural language for the UAL is neutral as regards the culture it will impose on the world. This is so principally because it is more the culture which imposes its effects on the language than vice versa. Since the culture which will eventually envelop the earth will be a new and universal creation, its influence will ultimately alter the UAL to its own specifications. The UAL, whatever its ethnic origin and whether or not it is artificially constructed, will manifest the same adaptability that all languages have always shown.

While a natural language is neutral in this regard, an artificially constructed language may have the aesthetic advantage of being a new creation, purposely free from the outset of the cultural and linguistic traditions of any one natural language, but incorporating within it an inheritance from the languages of the world.

3) Syntax or Sentence Structure

The sentence structure of an artificial language can be set up to be a more perfect vehicle of human thought than has occurred naturally. As indicated above, the science of linguistics may discover underlying identities among the natural languages of the world. This would not be surprising since human psychology, being essentially the same everywhere, demands that human thought have a certain universal structure. Language, being a vehicle of human thought, mirrors this underlying system. However, some natural languages emphasize one aspect of the system and obscure others, so that languages when studied superficially seem to differ. Linguistic science, as it is now developing, attempts to analyze languages in sufficient depth so as to uncover those structures that are universal and essential to human language.

Natural languages depart in individual ways from the essentials of human language. There is an historical tendency for the overt forms in language to drift away from reflecting their underlying functions rooted in the necessities of human thought. But also, because the expression of human thought is a persistent motive in language, there is opposing this tendency an abiding impulse to manifest the structure of thought more directly. The latter tendency can be pursued consciously in the making up of an artificial language.

With this understanding, the term “artificial language” becomes somewhat of a misnomer. Since the underlying structure of human thought and language exists in reality, a language constructed according to its principles will be a language more properly termed “discovered” than “artificially invented.” Such a language would be based on the realities of the human mind, and on those that universally exist among the languages of the world. Every human language would be of use for its discovery, since every human language is a source of data for the science of language.

[Page 23] We are reminded of the Truth which the Manifestation of God possesses innately and which men can attain by degrees through science and meditation. Bahá’u’lláh, the Manifestation of God for our time, knew of a suitable universal auxiliary language when he said:

At present, a new language and a new script have been devised. If thou desirest, we will communicate them to thee. Our purpose is that all men may cleave unto that which will reduce unnecessary labor and exertion, so that their days may be befittingly spent and ended. God, verily, is the Helper, the Knower, the Ordainer, the Omniscient.

No such language was ever communicated. Whether or not the science of language will ever progress to the point that such a language based on truth could be constructed cannot now be answered. Since at present very little is consciously known about the essential structure of language, a UAL cannot now be constructed to approach perfection in the above sense. If our criterion for a UAL is to have as nearly perfect a vehicle for thought as possible, then a natural language would be a better choice than a constructed one at this time. A language constructed in ignorance may fail to incorporate within it certain essential or favorable factors. All natural languages, however, possess on an underlying level a system that parallels the nature of human thought and which may be ultimately discoverable by science.

It is difficult to know the full benefit a language so constructed would have for society, human thought, or international communication. Such a language, in addition to having the aesthetic value of representing what is truly universal for a language of mankind, would undoubtedly be easier to learn in some sense, would provide a sharper tool for all the uses to which thought itself can be put, and may have other advantages which an ethnic language could not possess at all.

It has been argued that a language should be constructed so as to be easy for all men to learn. One should understand that all languages are learnable equally well by the child. Languages are difficult for the adult to a large extent depending on how much the language to be learned differs from his particular mother tongue. If the UAL is taught at a very early age (at about three) when language learning ability has reached its peak, then, like any natural language, it can be learned easily and fluently. There would be little advantage to a purposely simplified or regularized artificial language. It is true, however, that there are certain aspects of natural languages which are learned by the child later than oLhers. These so far appear to be those elements which are less frequent among the languages of the world. A language based on the universal principles would be easier in the sense that children would master it at an earlier age; and considering all the diverse ethnic languages together, this language would be maximally familiar for all of them.

Some advocates of a constructed language have expressed the desire that it be logical in structure. A language that is logical, precise, and mathematiaally free of redundancy, although useful for special purposes, would hardly be suitable at all for any of the uses to which natural languages are put. A language which is logical in the sense of fitting perfectly the necessities, conveniences, and the patterns of human thought, however, would be as adaptable to all purposes as human thought itself. Indeed, the adaptability of a language can only increase as the ease with which it can serve as a vehicle of thought increases.

Only a language based on the principles of unlversal grammar could possess the advantages of being useful in learning ethnic languages and in translating [Page 24] from one ethnic language to another. Once mastered, such a UAL would lay bare to its speakers the essentials of language. It is the particular manifestation of these essentials in the ethnic tongues which the student must ultimately come to master and the translator must be able to recognize.

The struggle to achieve a language perfect in some sense has been the main cause of dissension between groups proposing artificial auxiliary languages in the past. There have been scores of proposals for a UAL, each with its body of supporters claiming that theirs is superior in one respect or another. The original purpose of having a constructed UAL—to quell nationalistic oppositions—was subverted by what amounts to another form of nationalism. As was said, the decision as to what language shall serve for the UAL must never obstruct the implementation of some language for this purpose. While a language most perfect as a vehicle for human thought is conceivable, no doubt there will always be some argument, scientific or otherwise, whether one small point represents Reality more closely than does another. The decision must always have some arbitrary qualities, which ultimately must he left in the hands of those persons in whose authority the world has faith.

4) Vocabulary

If the UAL is artificial, one of the aspects to be decided on more or less arbitrarily would be its vocabulary. This would he completely arbitrary when it comes to the phonological forms which each word would take, but only somewhat arbitrary in terms of the concepts they signify.

It is possible to discover an alphabet of sounds which exist in most languages of the world, and thereby have a sound system as universal as possible for the hypothetical UAL. This would be as founded in reality as the syntactic system discussed in the previous section. What would be completely arbitrary, however, would be the particular sound sequence in be associated with each word. To avoid being completely arbitrary, one solution, as employed in Esperanto, would be to take the principal word stock from the related European languages. The argument has been that since the roots which make up the vocabulary of European languages are already international, it would be a great loss to omit them from the UAL. It would seem this is a reasonable consideration. But we have no way of knowing at present what the relative international status of European languages will be when it is actually time to decide on the UAL.

As regards the concepts which the words of the UAL are to symbolize, it may be that underlying the vocabulary of every language there is a basic conceptual framework which is universal. Languages may manifest the potentialities of this framework in different ways. The issue here is similar to that for sentence structure discussed above. A way of optimally manifesting the conceptual framework inherent in all languages may be discovered, making the UAL reflect the potentialities of the human mind more perfectly than any one natural language ever has.

A vocabulary set up on such a principle as above would suffice for most purposes. However, a language is not superior as its set of words is smaller, more orderly or more efficient. Such things as synonymy, the existence of words expressing complex ideas either denotatively or connotatively, and words with specific and uncategorizable meanings all tend to enrich a language. A natural process employed whenever a speech community finds need to have a word for a new idea is to borrow the word from some other language. Thus English borrowed the word “robot” from the Czech word meaning “work”; “kimono” is from Japanese; and “typhoon” comes from “big wind” in Chinese. It would be possible to employ consciously this means at enriching the vocabulary by surveying the many languages [Page 25] of the world. All no doubt would have something to contribute. By this means every language could be a part of the world’s inheritance.

Since the vocabulary is the most arbitrary part of the language, it is that part which is most subject to adaptation and changing fads. If the UAL is artificial, once the vocabulary is chosen, one could expect it to take its own evolutionary turns. The principal concern of authors of proposed international languages has been in constructing vocabularies. Little attention was paid to the structure of sentences, nor anything said about it. The reason why such a lack could have escaped criticism is simply that sentence structure is sufficiently universal so that a speaker’s knowledge of the syntax of his mother tongue, or his innate intuition as a human being, is adequate once he knows some basic vocabulary. Nevertheless, it is possible that many of the potentialities of syntax remain unexploited in such a constructed language. And further, the benefit of an artificial UAL over a natural one is principally in the perfection of its syntax as a mirror of human thought. A language constructed in ignorance of the nature of language cannot profess to have many advantages over a natural one. The depth and subtlety of each and every natural language is a continual source of marvel for the one scrutinizing it.

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BRIGHT DAY OF THE SOUL

[Page 27] By Marzieh Gail

Marzieh Gail, a graduate of Stanford University (M.A., University of California) is the author of AVIGNON IN FLOWER, a story of the popes of Avignon, and has translated, among other Bahá’í classics, the SECRET OF DIVINE CIVILIZATION by ‘Abdu’l-Bahá.

At a time when the vaults of the United States Treasury contained “only a pitiful surplus of $394,000,000,” it was nevertheless, by Act of Congress, decreed that an American Legation should be set up in the capital of Persia. Accordingly, President Arthur selected and dispatched to Tihrán a diplomat who, with his wife, remained in Persia from 1882 to 1885, at which time the Democrats returned to power and the Minister gracefully resumed private life. His book, brought out by Ticknor and Co. in Boston in 1887, contains perhaps the second public mention of the Faith of the Báb in the United States—the first was a letter published in the New York Sun on December 10, 1883.

The Minister’s account also includes what can only be an oblique reference to Bahá’u’lláh, whom the Báb called “Him Whom God Shall Manifest.” He speaks, too, of Azal, that nominee of the Báb, who as readers of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s A Traveller’s Narrative are aware, was chosen as a provisional figurehead to distract attention from the Promised One. So inconsiderable was the nominee that his name does not appear in the royal edict that banished Bahá’u’lláh from Persia. He was always hiding, and it is, interestingly enough, this secretiveness of his which the Minister emphasized: “As his belief in the Báb is a secret,” the text, naming him, says, “his name is not mentioned in this connection.”

Of the new Faith in general the diplomat states: “The Bábís present one of the most important religious phenomena of the age...their activity does not cease, and their numbers are increasing rapidly....They are found among all conditions of society, and, strange to say, adherents are gained among the priesthood as well as the laity.”

It was the old, long-dreaming Persia of another age which the first American Minister noted down in his book. He told of fairy gardens, unsuspected back of blind mud walls—walls without windows, so that none could spy out should the Sháh, his Court and his ladies come driving by. You entered such a garden from a lane through a shabby door, came into a dark passage, and suddenly there you were in a great court, where, reflected in a vast pool, you found a palace richly ornamented with mouldings of brick, and stucco and carved wood, about it waving cypresses and pines, beds of fragrant herbs, jasmine bushes and sweet-lemon trees. Here was only the bird-broken, water-broken quiet, so that the great city around you was blotted from your mind. You knew, too, that the palace was double, that beyond a second wall was another garden, another pavilion, a place of secluded mystery, barred to all men but the man of the house, where the women decked in their diaphanous costumes lived out Lheir secret days.

He told of floor-to-ceiling windows intricately filled with small panes of colored glass; of lavish, stucco ornamentation painted in green, scarlet and gold; of shimmering-diamond walls covered with hundreds of bits of mirrors, like “crystal and burnished silver,” set in floral and geometrical designs; of down-soft, almost flying carpets, of ceilings with carved and tinted crossbeams, the deep panels [Page 28] between them blue, and spangled with golden stars; of wall niches and silver hubble bubble pipes, of high verandas floating over beds of roses. Of wind towers on the roofs, to circulate a cool current of air. Of pomegranate trees, the fruit scarlet sparks in the dark green leaves. Of thirty-four underground courses of mountain water, marked by hillocks of upthrown earth where vertical shafts had been dug to guide them, all down the long miles to the city; of the lavender sunset stain on Damávand’s high, white cone to the northeast.

And always, he said, the silence. No clangor of traffic and church bells as in the West. Only the floating cry of the muezzin at his stated times, or street vendors’ calls, or the clink of camel bells. And at night, under closely-gathered stars, wind washing through the trees, or the nightingale’s intermittent, tremulous airs, or maybe a boy singing his high soprano as he passed, or maybe from some ruin the guessed-at hoot of an owl.

He went to the Sháh’s grand audience chamber, “one of the most imposing in the world,” floored with priceless glazed tiles, in its center a vast table overlaid with beaten gold. At the end of the great hall, streaming with gold, quivering with the lights of a thousand jewels, stood the Peacock Throne. In a glass case the Sháh kept “a large heap of pearls dense as a pile of sand on the seashore.” He saw a globe of the world turning on a frame of solid gold, its oceans all turquoise, its countries varied jewels, and Persia “a compact mosaic of diamonds.” He knew, too, that locked here in a double iron chest was the “Sea of Light,” the second diamond on the planet. “One ruby there is in that mine of splendor,” he added, “which, on being placed in water, radiates a red light that colors the water like the blood of the vine of Burgundy.”

In his wanderings he came, as well, on a deserted pavilion built by a Sháh of other years, lapsing into oblivion now, where he found a circular pool in a subterranean hall. Here, from an upper story, was a steep slide of polished marble leading into the pool. At its foot, His Majesty was wont to stand in the water, while down from the upper story would slide one of his wives, into the royal arms.

“No more,” the diplomat wrote, “no more are peals of laughter heard there, nor the song warbled by ruby lips. All are gone...The livelong summer-day the nightingale trills in the rose-bush, and the turtle-dove coos in the plane trees, and the murmuring water dashes down its marble channels, but no on dwells there now...”

He saw much, this American Minister, but he missed more, for he was there in Persia only three decades after the climactic events of early Bahá’í history. Clearer was the vision of France’s Count de Gobineau, who was there from 1855 to 1858, again from 1862 to 1864, and made that country “one of his fairest intellectual conquests”; clearer that of Cambridge University’s E. G. Browne who, inspired by Gobineau, went to Persia for a year in 1887, and later even saw Bahá’u’lláh. And most enlightened of them all was the French Consul at Tabríz, A. L. M. Nicolas, who began his Bahá’í studies in 1889, and ultimately accepted both the Báb and Bahá’u’lláh as the two Revelators of this age.

Turning old pages, looking at drawings and rare photos, you can get yourself back into mid-19th century Persia again, feel yourself under that tender sky, sheathed in that very silence, breathing the warm smell of summer roses, setting your lips to tea with the lime juice and sugar, and since it was in a holder of silver filigree, not burning your fingers on the glass. You can look all across the gold plains of Tihrán, that were studded with green garden clusters, and in season webbed with purple judas trees, to the almost 19,000-foot, eternally white cone of Damávand. In these days it could be seen from every open point of the city.

[Page 29] Less than four decades before the American would come to that country, a young Persian, Mullá Husayn-i-Bushrú’í, at first quite alone, played there a strange, predestined role. Of all those around the world who then awaited the Lord’s coming, he would be the first to find the Promised One—not in New England, not in the Holy Land as had been expected by some, but far away in the heart of Persia, deep in Shíráz. “the home of Persian culture, the mother of Persian genius.”

Meanwhile in the United States, William Miller got the year right—1844— roused the country and even in apologizing later on, when he had been derided and condemned, would write: “Were I to live my life over again, with the same evidence that I then had, to be honest with God and man I should have to do as I have done. I confess my error, and acknowledge my disappointment; yet I still believe that the day of the Lord is near, even at the door.”

It was in lost, forgotten Persia that this Door—this Báb—would swing wide to the new age at the touch of Mullá Husayn.

Persian names of the last century were, you might say, a summing-up of the individual, of his birthplace or work, and his station in life. The actual name, in this case Husayn (for he was named after the Imám Husayn, the grandson of Muhammad, which shows he was a Muslim of the Shiah branch) was only a part of his designation. “Mullá” meant he was a scholar, particularly a religious teacher, cleric or theologian; and the last part of the title referred to his birthplace, a town called Bushrúyih in the province m Khurásán.

He was slender, even delicate, and there was a tremor in his hands. He had until this time lived only the life of books, and it was through books of holy Islamic traditions that he had found the signs which drew him to Shíráz. Shíráz, its title “the Abode of Divine Knowledge”; founded or else rebuilt in the 7th century, sacked by Tamerlane, beautified again, then under the Qájár Dynasty brought low once more.

Which is how he came, on that immortal evening, in that small upper room over the low, star-silvered roofs of the town, while the orange tree sent up incense from the courtyard, and from a minaret, across the silence, floated the muezzin’s call to prayer—to gaze on the Báb, to listen to Him, to be His first disciple.

In any case this young intellectual saw and knew that the Advent had taken place, and he was enrolled by the Báb as the first “Letter of the Living.” His fellow-adventists soon followed him, for such an explosion of light could not be hidden, and there would be eighteen of these Letters in all—twenty, counting the two Manifestations of God, the Báb and Bahá’u’lláh: Letters making up the Word, and all generated as when you write, from the First Point made as you set pen to page.

After his first ecstasy of discovery, Mullá Husayn was soon dealt a terrible blow. He had thought the Báb would choose him as a fellow-pilgrim to Mecca— where, in fulfilment of age-old prophecy, the Báb had to betake Himself to declare His Advent before the holiest shrine in the Muslim world—the Ka’bih set with its Black Stone. But no, it now turned out that it would be someone else, the Omega of the Eighteen Letters—not himself, Mullá Husayn, the Alpha—whom the Báb would choose as His companion on that journey.

But the Báb gave Mullá Husayn a special mission, and instructed him so lovingly as to the path they all had chosen, the way lo their own certain death, that his heart was comforted.

“My Covenant with you is now accomplished,” the Báb told him...“Be not

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O God, refresh and gladden my spirit. Purify my heart. Illumine my powers. I lay all my affairs in Thy hand. Thou art My Guide and My Refuge. I will no longer be sorrowful and grieved, I will be a happy and joyful being. O God, I will no longer be full of anxiety, nor will I let trouble harass me. I will not dwell on the unpleasant things of life.

O God, Thou art more friend to me than I am to myself. I dedicate myself to Thee, O Lord.

—‘Abdu’l-Bahá

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(continued from page 29)

dismayed at the sight of the degeneracy and perversity of this generation, for the Lord of the Covenant shall assuredly assist you...And shall lead you from victory to victory. Even as the cloud that rains its bounty upon the earth, traverse the land from end to end, and shower upon its people the blessings which the Almighty, in His mercy, has deigned to confer upon you. Forbear with the ‘ulamás (divines), and resign yourself to the will of God. Raise the cry: ‘Awake, awake, for lo! the Gate of God is open, and the morning Light is shedding its radiance upon all mankind’!”

As if looking at him from across the tomb, the Báb continued. “We have left you behind to face the onslaught of a fierce, relentless enemy. Rest assured, however, that a bounty unspeakably glorious shall be conferred upon you. Follow the course of your journey towards the north, and visit on your way Isfahán, Káshán, Qum and Tihrán. Beseech almighty Providence that He may graciously enable you to attain, in that capital...the mansion of the Beloved. A secret lies hidden in that city. When made manifest it shall turn the earth into paradise.”

There had been more as to his perilous mission, which the Báb promised he would accomplish, until which time, the Báb said, should the whole world arise against him no one would be able to harm a hair of his head. There had been the hope held out that he, Mullá Husayn, would look upon the Báb in this world again. And almost at the very last hour of their being together, the Báb had said: “Grieve not that you have not been chosen to accompany Me on My pilgrimage to Hijáz. I shall, instead, direct your steps to that city which enshrines a Mystery of such transcendent holiness as neither Hijáz nor Shíráz can hope to rival... The essence of power is now dwelling in you, and the company of His chosen angels revolves around you. His almighty arms will surround you, and His unfailing Spirit will ever continue to guide your steps.”

And that is how Mullá Husayn came to be standing high on the pass here, looking backward across Shíráz, “The Green City of Solomon,” to him the jewel box that still held, he knew, the priceless treasure he of all on earth had been the first to find. The road he had traveled ran broad and straight, under the great arch down there in which was preserved “the Qur’án that weighs seventeen maunds,” down to that bridge over the dry river, and through the Isfahán Gate.

This point where he stood on the road is called the Pass of “God is Most Great!” because here after long journeying the beauty of Shíráz, through a wide break in the mountains, bursts on your sight and you have to cry out, “Alláh-u-Akbar!”

He could see the grassy plain, the far grape-blue mountains still under snow, and nearer the cypresses, rounded domes and threading minarets of the vast city below him, drifting up to him in perfumed silence. Way to his left was the silver water of Lake Mahálú, and to his right lay vineyards and gardens, while below the Arch under which he had come was the ghost of the “rose-walks” of Háfiz, Persia's 14th century “Tongue of the Invisible World,” buried down there in a white-walled enclosure amid the black cypresses; lying under an oblong stone engraved with his verses, some of which might well have passed through the mind of Mullá Husayn in his exalted state—this one, perhaps, who knows? “Be a slave, O heart, to the King of the world, and be a King!” Or this, from the great Sa’dí, also at rest in the dust of the city down there, for it too would have a subtle meaning for Mullá Husayn at that hour and till the close of his brief life: “Shíráz,” Sa’dí had written, “Shíráz that wrenches the traveller’s heart from his native home.”

[Page 33] What was it his Lord, his Beloved, had said at the end, not to him only but to the Letters of the Living as He sent them out across Persia to teach and die? Not to them only, but to all the people who would, throughout all the years of the future, not in Persia alone but throughout all the Seven Regions of the earth, come to know and love the Báb as the Eighteen now knew and loved Him? He had gathered them before Him and told them:

O My beloved friends! You are the bearers of the Name of God in this Day. You have been chosen as the repositories of His mystery. It behoves each one of you to manifest the attributes of God, and to exemplify by your deeds and words the signs of His righteousness, His power and glory. The very members of your body must bear witness to the loftiness of your purpose, the integrity of your life, the reality of your faith, and the exalted character of your devotion. For verily I say, this is the Day spoken of by God in His Book: “On that day will We set a seal upon their mouths; yet shall their hands speak unto Us, and their feet shall bear witness to that which they shall have done.”

This was the beginning of what the Báb had said. It was time to obey Him now, to look away from Shíráz, to put even the Báb out of his mind, if that were possible, because even love could hold him back, and go on as he had been instructed, to Isfahán. He journey forward, up the stony road.

In those days there was more coming and going on the roads than we now think, for merchants, envoys, soldiers and pilgrims have always put the long miles behind them. Poeple usually banded together in a convoy for greater safety, with armed guards, pack horses, baggage mules, some travellers on horseback; others, veiled women perhaps, sat in covered panniers for two, one balanced on either side of the horse, jotting along, crying out when their animal lurched or stumbled. The muleteers went on foot. A. V. Williams Jacksons’ muleteers could walk “forty miles a day...without apparent fatigue.” There were, too, messengers famous for their endurance, who walked. They had their counterpart in Shaykh Salmán, Bahá’u’lláh’s courier who, once every year, walked back and forth between the provinces of Persia and ‘Akká, on the Mediterranean Sea.

There were regular stopping places where most people stayed overnight—post houses or caravanserais along the way. One such caravanserai on this road between Shíráz and Isfahán was a ruined one of stone. Its central court within the protecting outer walls held carcases of camels or horses in various stages of decay, besides live animals and their bales. Springtime, it was crowded with tribesmen marching toward summer pastures, driving their donkeys, sheep and goats, bringing along their black hair tents, their babies and infirm and all they owned, the rough beauty of their women’s faces not covered by a veil. The average traveler had, perhaps, a prayer rug, which he laid down in an empty, arched niche on the broad platform above the open court. He got out his samovar, made his tea, ate his lumps of goat cheese and flap of folded bread, wrapped himself in his clnak and slept on his rug.

His noontime meal, where maybe a blue runnel of pure water passed, edged with a line of green along the roadside and with a few trees fanning above, and crested hoopoes darting in the clear air, provided another break in the endless hours.

They did not seem endless to Mullá Husayn. He ignored neighboring Persepolis which Alexander burned—including the Scriptures of Zoroaster, written in golden ink on 12,000 oxskins. He passed uncaring near the “Rustam picture” carvings, where lie Darius and other Achaemenian Kings. He did not turn aside [Page 34] into that desolate plain where once rose a royal city, mile on mile, for the ruined tomb of Cyrus, of him who, 550 years before Jesus Christ, conquered the Medes and humbled Babylon. He would have seen there, standing in that emptiness, a rectangular house of stone on a base of giant steps. “Mosque of the Mother of Solomon,” the muleteers called it. A tree sprouted from its root, and only scholars remembered that an inscription there once read: “O Man, I am Cyrus...who founded the Empire of the Persians, and was King of Asia. Grudge me not therefore this little earth...”

He went on, saw a flock of storks, saw gazelles, came to a shepherd in a stiff sheepskin coat, rolled turban and shoes of rough hide, gathering his fat-tailed sheep. In a village he may have passed workmen leisurely putting up a wall of sunbaked brick, singing the builder’s song. Used to these sights and sounds, he paid them no mind; nor to the camel thorn along the road; nor to occasional, reptilian caravans that came from another world and passed back into it again, the camels’ disdainful heads tilting, floating as the loaded beasts padded purposefully along, a brass bell and tassels at the neck, also wearing blue beads to ward off the evil eye.

He took, doubtless, the summer road that leads through mountains to the south west of Yazdíkhást, unique, boat-city that rises out of a sunken river bed, went past Qum-i-Sháh—there was a blue dome here—passed stony plains between raw, black hills, came to a rugged defile, and found himself in the long plain of Isfahán. The city lay under pale blue smoke, miles of ruins about it, for it had shrunk down from former days. He could see pavilions and towers, giant domes, and bridges of old lace at the river. He knew the biggest, pearshaped, turquoise dome of all was the Sháh’s Mosque at the vast royal square; there, a marble goal post at each end still showed where the Princes had played polo in now vanished times, where a golden goblet would be set up on a tall post and shot at for a prize as the royal marksmen galloped by.

He may have rested briefly at the Farewell Fountain, that place, marked by a single tree, to which the people of Isfahán come out with their southward- journeying friends, to say goodbye. “Isfahán, nisf-i-jihán,” he may have repeated to himself: if I rouse this city I have wakened half the planet, for “Isfahán is half the world.” This was the dazzling capital of Persia two hundred years gone, under Sháh ‘Abbás the Great in the days of Elizabeth. As for the city’s age, who knows? In the second century after Christ, Ptolemy the Greek geographer called it Aspadana (the equivalent of Old Persian for “having horses as a gift”). In the twelfth, Benjamin of Tudela noted that its Jewish inhabitants numbered 15,000. “We came to a towne called Spaham,” Josafa Barbaro wrote in 1474.

Long before, in legend’s mists, it was here that Kávih the Blacksmith was born, Kávih, crying out for justice, who stripped off his leather work apron, fixed it to a spear, and carried it against a tyrant who had usurped the throne. For centuries thereafter (till the Arabs took it) this leather apron, set with gold and jewels, was the royal flag of Persia, the standard held out at the head of Persia’s armies, and the keeping of this treasured flag was the right at Isfahán.

Over the bridge, the one with the thirty-three arches, below which, on the pebbly banks, the dyers spread out their bright, new cloth, and which was thronged all day till nightfall and the curfew horn, was a wide Christian Armenian suburb called Julfá.

How often had his Lord referred to Jesus Christ. That part of the Báb’s farewell to the Letters of the Living came back to him now:

Ponder the words of Jesus addressed to His disciples, as He sent them forth

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to propagate the Cause of God. In words such as these, He bade them arise and fulfil their mission: “Ye are even as the fire which in the darkness of the night has been kindled upon the mountain-top. Let your light shine before the eyes of men. Such must be the purity of your character and the degree of your renunciation, that the people of the earth may through you recognize and be drawn closer to the heavenly Father who is the source of purity and grace. For none hath seen the Father who is in heaven. You who are His spiritual children must by your deeds exemplify His virtues, and witness to His glory. You are the salt of the earth, but if the salt have lost its savor, wherewith shall it be salted?”

Here in Isfahán Mullá Husuyn betook himself to a religious college, a large, two-story structure built around a courtyard on which many rooms looked down through tiled archways. It had a rectangular tank of water, sycamore trees, protecting outer walls and a massive gate. The leaders in Isfahán already knew the young voyager as eloquent and a scholar, but had no inkling that he had been transformed and that another man now stood befure him. The pulpits roundabout were offered to him, and when he spoke the masses jammed the mosques. He preached to them the Báb made manifest, the advent of the Revelator inspired by God with new words for the new age. Seeing his success the clergy protested to the lay authorities, saying Mullá Husayn was disrupting Islám. The wise Governor left it up lo the ‘ulamá, maintaining this was their concern, so for a time at least Mullá Husayn could reach the people. This governor, the delicate, pale Georgian, who in the years to come would offer his life and all he possessed to the Báb, was a man of vast wealth. The story went that the Sháh had summoned him and said: “We hear that you live like a King in Isfahán.” Whereat the governor answered: “Yes, Sire, your governors must live like kings, to justify your title ‘King of Kings’.”

Tension mounted in the city; under the tongue lashing of the ‘ulamá, the people grew restive. Mullá Husayn was a scholar, not a soldier, he was frail and not armed, but he was safe. They might whip up the mobs against him, running men might turn on him, killers, their lips drawn back, the unseeing glare of hate in their eyes, but no one could harm him. Till his mission was accomplished, not a hair of his head could be touched.

When the time came he went out through the city gate, through the poppy fields, past the high, cylindrical pigeon-towers with their castellated tops, and continued on toward his next city, Káshán. Up and over the long mountain pass he labored, on and down where the miles wound through stone walls, got to orchards and green fields, passed the wide, half-natural lake built by the Safaví Kings, went on by a deep depression in the rock that people called the hoofprint of ‘Ali’s horse, saw at last the hundred-foot-high minaret that first breaks the level of Káshán, saw the vaulted roofs of sunbaked brick.

Eight centuries before Christ, men say, the city of Káshán was already here. Much as it is now, its summer heat, its collected rain water and the reservoir at Fín, its melons and figs, its neighboring eighteen villages, were described in the 14th century. According to Odoric of Pordenone (1320), this was the city from which came the Three Wise Men; and from here these Kings got to Jerusalem, with God’s help, in thirteen days. A fine royal city, he says, rich in bread, wine and everything, though ravaged by the Tartars. In the 15th Josafa Barbaro not only wrote of it but lived here for a while, speaking of it as the “well enhabited citie called Cassan, where for the moste parte they make sylkes and fustian...”

Here were some, including a prominent merchant, who listened to the new [Page 36] Message. A famed divine, however, a friend of Mullá Husayn’s, could not give up his rank and power for the new Cause. And the messenger was saddened, for he had tried to bring his friend the pearl of inestimable price, and the friend had chosen frippery instead.

Mullá Husayn went on, out of Káshán. Did he rest, perhaps, by the roadside and have a white, gondola-shaped slice of melon at Nasrábád, or stop further on in the splendid, half-ruined caravanserai that goes back to the Safaví Kings— glimpse the dimly-vaulted stables, the empty rooms and vacant stair; or did he taste the brackish water at Shúráb? Had you asked him afterward, he could, perhaps, not have told you, in the condition he was in. The Báb Himself, after their first encounter, had cautioned him: “if you leave in such a state, whoever sees you will assuredly say: ‘This poor youth has lost his mind.’” Always within his heart, he could hear that voice which had enslaved him. The universe was a handful of dust in his cupped hands. It was the first morning of creation, and he was the first that awoke.

He repeated over to himself still more of those parting words of his Liege Lord:

O My Letters! Verily I say, immensely exalted is this Day above the days of the Apostles of old. Nay, immeasurable is the difference! You are the witnesses of the dawn of the promised Day of God. You are the partakers of the mystic chalice of His Revelation. Gird up the loins of endeavor, and be mindful of the words of God as revealed in His Book: “Lo, the Lord thy God is come, and with Him is the company of His angels arrayed before Him!”

Here at hand was the desert in earnest, “sand, salt and solitude.” Here was the boundless waste that stretches to the eastern frontier—turn off the two-foot track and be sucked down with your load and camel, lost and blotted out forever, sinking, strangling in the salt swamps. But his road lay flat beneath the hills, along its edge. And he came on into Qum, the “Blue City,” with its manufacture of blue tiles and all its blue and greenish domes, dwarfed by a golden one. Under this rests Fátima, sister of Imán Ridá, the eighth Imám, eighth victim of the split that cracked Islám at the Prophet’s death, so that the Muslim Caliphs murdered the Muslim Imáms down the long years.

The Báb’s envoy taught some here, but not till later would the seeds spring up. The earth was not ready for them then. He thought often of the people muttering words they did not understand, making gestures no Prophet had ever taught, mimicking, parroting down the generations, speaking, thinking, doing what other men—no better than themselves—had decided they should. From all such man-made forms, his Lord had saved him. Again he returned in his mind to the Báb's farewell:

The days when idle worship was deemed sufficient are ended. The time is come when naught but the purest motive, supported by deeds of stainless purity, can ascend to the throne of the Most High and be acceptable unto Him. “The good word riseth up unto Him, and the righteous deed will cause it to be exalted before Him.” You are the lowly, of whom God has thus spoken in His Book: “And We desire to show favor to those who were brought low in the land, and to make them spiritual leaders among men, and to make them Our heirs.” You have been called to this station; you will attain to it, only if you arise to trample beneath your feet every earthly desire, and endeavor to become those “honored servants of His who speak not till He hath spoken, and who do His bidding.”

[Page 37] The pull of Tihrán was stronger than ever, and he passed through the blue- tiled gate and over the long bridge across the river bed and went on, leaving Qum to drop behind him into the salt swamps. The desert, flecked with salt, lay off on his right, to the east. Bare black hills jutted up, knife-sharp, and he came to that place they call the Valley of the Angel of Death, a spot of desolate defiles, where, the muleteers say, monsters appear in the guise of people you love and beckon you away from the caravan to a ghastly death. But he went on unheeding. After a while he could see, like a spark, the gold-flash of Sháh ‘Abdu’l-‘Azím, the shrine which rises on the edge at ancient Rayy. This was only six miles south of his goal.

This shrine was a refuge city for hunted criminals; the whole town was a sanctuary. Here not a finger could be laid on a man, no matter what he had done. The only thing was, the greater the crime, the closer in to the shrine must the outlaw remain; a murderer could not set foot beyond the courtyard of the golden mosque, while a debtor could walk free, so long as he kept within the city walls.

Beyond them the earth is covered with a shrub that is pungent when crushed underfoot. You could stand here in the fragrant stillness and look off across the sweep of plains to Tihrán and Damávand, seeming far nearer than they are, through the crystal air. You could hear from somewhere, like water dripping down on hollow metal, the rhythmic thunk of camel bells. Beside you rises a high, circular rampart of white stone—the Tower of Silence, where the Zoroastrians expose their dead. In troubled times, fearing molestation, they left no opening in the old tower. They used ropes and ladders then, to work the corpse up over the side, and laid it down within, to the vultures and the sky.

Rayy is old, but Tihrán, up there to the north, is “new.” It has been the capital only since 1788, with the advent of the Qájár Dynasty. Before that, the capital was Isfahán, and before that, in the 16th century, Qazvín—the Casbeen of Paradise Lost. Tihrán began to go up as a modern city about seven hundred years ago, when Rayy began to go down. The geographer Yáqút, about 1220, mentioned it only as “a stronghold, one farsakh distant from Rayy,” and said the inhabitants dug their dwellings underground and were always at war with each other. “With the rise of Tihrán to power,” a modern authority has written, “Media has been able once more to reclaim the supremacy she lost to Persia in the time of Cyrus, and the present capital occupies a site that is almost identical with the ancient city of Rages (Avestan Ragha, Old Persian Raga), now Rayy...which shared with Ecbatana [Hamadán] in antiquity the honors of supremacy over Iran.”

Up there beyond the roofs and tree tops of the city was the Alburz mountain wall, bare but many-colored—amethyst, orange, jade green—from the mineral deposits within, and strewn with cloud shadows; and there in the northeast corner rose the cone of Damávand, Persia’s white eternal symbol of man’s freedom under justice, for in its heart is chained forever the tyrant Zahhák, the tyrant that Kávih the Blacksmith brought down. What secret would be disclosed to him in that city, Mullá Husayn wondered. What holy Mystery that neither Mecca nor Shíráz could hope to rival? And where was the House of the Beloved?

He listened again to the voice of the Báb in his heart:

You are the first Letters that have been generated from the Primal Point, the first Springs that have welled out from the Source of this Revelation. Beseech the Lord your God to grant that no earthly entanglements, no worldly affections, no ephemeral pursuits, may tarnish the purity, or embitter the sweetness, of that grace which flows through you. I am preparing you for the advent of a mighty Day. Exert your utmost endeavor that, in the world to come, I, who am now instructing you, may, before the mercy-seat of God, rejoice in your

[Page 38]

deeds and glory in your achievements. The secret of the Day that is to come is now concealed. It can neither be divulged nor estimated. The newly born babe of that Day excels the wisest and most venerable men of this time, and the lowliest and most unlearned of that period shall surpass in understanding the most erudite and accomplished divines of this age. Scatter throughout the length and breadth of this land, and, with steadfast feet and sanctified hearts, prepare the way for His coming.

Guided by chance, perhaps, Mullá Husayn went to live in one of the empty, cell-like rooms of the college of Páy-i-Minár (which means at the foot of the minaret). He stayed here incognito, did not go out to preach, but met, quietly, a great many people. Count de Gobineau says that everybody wanted to see him or to have seen him, and that the Sháh and the Prime Minister summoned him as well, heard out his doctrines and saw the newly-written Texts. (When there was something to copy the Persians sat and copied it, taking out their pen boxes and writing rapidly with their powdered ink and reed pens, from right to left, the paper resting in the palm of their left hand, and many handwritten copies of the Báb’s words must already have been going the rounds.)

Early every morning he would leave his room and be gone till after sundown, when he would quietly return and shut the door on his day. Among the instructors at this college was the chief, for Tihrán, of that Muslim adventist group to which Mullá Husayn had himself belonged, and among whom he had been so valued that at the death of its over-all leader, Siyyid Kázim, they had wished to put Mullá Husayn in the departed one’s place. By now word of the young Mullá’s conversion had spread from mouth to mouth, and his former co-religionists saw him as a Judas, a betrayer of their cause. They could not believe that the Promised One had indeed come, they wanted to go on expecting Him forever. Now the instructor upbraided Mullá Husayn for preaching the Advent, and said if he kept on this way he would destroy his own former group. With all the learning and passion at his command, Mullá Husayn tried to win this man over to the Báb. Noting it was useless, the convert ended by saying that in any case he would not be long here in the capital, and that he had not been unfaithful to the founders of his original belief.

It chanced that from his neighboring cell a student overheard all this. He listened in horror to the arrogance and contempt which was his till then much- respected teacher’s only answer to the visitor’s obviously sincerely-meant account. At midnight while the college slept, he crept to Mullá Husayn’s door and knocked. Asked to enter, he found the Mullá seated there, in the Persian fashion, on the floor beside his lamp. Wrought up, close to tears, the student tried to tell him what had happened.

“I know now why I chose this place,” the Mullá answered. “Where the master was blind, may the pupil see. What city is your home?”

“My home is Núr,” was the reply.

At this a great change came over Mullá Husayn. Eagerly, he asked the boy after the family of the late Mírzá Buzurg of Núr. Was there now, he wanted to know, a new and worthy Head to that illustrious house?

“Yes,” was the answer, “there is his son, Mírzá Husayn-‘Alí.”

“And what does He do?”

“He cheers the disconsolate and feeds the hungry.”

“What of His rank and position?”

“He has none—apart from befriending the poor and the stranger.”

[Page 39] “How does He spend His days?”

“He roams the woods. He loves the countryside.”

“How old is He?”

“About twenty-eight.”

Mullá Husayn radiated joy. He learned that, himself from Núr, this student often went to pay his respects to Mírzá Husayn-‘Alí. He got out a scroll wrapped up in a piece of cloth, and urgently requested the youth to deliver it the very next morning, at dawn—an hour when many would flock to the door of noblemen’s houses.

And this was the second dazzling night in the life of Mullá Husayn. He had found the Báb, Revelator and Herald, in Shíráz. Now in Ṭihrán it would be given him to learn the core of the Báb's Message, to discover “Him Whom God Shall Manifest,” Revelator and Founder of a World Faith, who would assure the dawning of the universal Day of God. Again it would be he, Mullá Husayn, unworthy though he felt himself to be, helpless against the massed power of the world, facing death anyway, to be the first to know. He must have wept, prayed and exulted that night, and remembered the Báb’s last promise in His Farewell to the Letters of the Living:

Heed not your weakness and frailty; fix your gaze upon the invincible power of the Lord, your God, the Almighty. Has He not, in past days, caused Abraham, in spite of His seeming helplessness, to triumph over the forces of Nimrod? Has He not enabled Moses, whose staff was His only companion, to vanquish Pharaoh and his hosts? Has He not established the ascendancy of Jesus, poor and lowly as He was in the eyes of men, over the combined forces of the Jewish people? Has He not subjected the barbarous and militant tribes of Arabia to the holy and transforming discipline of Muhammad, His Prophet? Arise in His name, put your trust wholly in Him, and be assured of ultimate victory.

At daybreak the next morning the student left the college and passed along the shadowy, tortuous lanes between the high mud walls. Already the water carriers were sprinkling the streets from their black, hairy goatskin bags, to lay the dust, already, though the heat was not yet come, the acacia blossoms perfumed the air. He came to Bahá’u’lláh’s house, to the house of that Mystery which neither Mecca nor Shíráz, neither Muhammad nor the Báb, could hope to rival, and found His brother standing at the gate. The brother soon returned with a we]come for him, and bowing low the student was brought in to the Head of the house. He took out the scroll and handed it to the brother, who laid it before Bahá’u’lláh. Asking them both to be seated, Bahá’u’lláh unfolded the scroll, and in vibrant tones, began to read.

He then glanced at His brother and remarked: “Músá, what have you to say?” He added that if you believed in the Qur’án, and that it came from God, you would have to believe as much of the words now in His hands. They saw that to Him this was a new Faith, come out of Islám as Christianity had come out of Judaism before it. They knew that the Qur’án teaches belief in the long succession of Prophets preceding Muhammad, saw He was telling them that just as God had addressed mankind a number of times before, He now had spoken again.

Then He sent the student away with a message and present for Mullá Husayn: He sent him, besides His appreciation and love, a loaf of Russian sugar and a package of tea. Tea and that special sugar were rare in Persia then; they were used as gifts between friends.

Waiting back at the college, Mullá Husayn, seeing the messenger return, [Page 40] leapt to his feet. Bowing low, he took Bahá’u’lláh's gift in his trembling hands, and raised it to his lips. What could it all mean, the student wondered. He knew that to Mullá Husayn, even gold and silver and jewels were children’s playthings, and this was only sugar and tea.

A few days after this, Mullá Husayn left the city. As he went, he looked into the student’s eyes. “Divulge not His name,” he said. “Pray that the Almighty may protect Him, that, through Him, He may exalt the downtrodden, enrich the poor, and redeem the fallen. The secret of things is concealed from our eyes. Ours is the duty to raise the call of the New Day and to proclaim this Divine Message unto all people. Many a soul will, in this city, shed his blood in this path. That blood will water the Tree of God, will cause it to flourish, and to overshadow all mankind.”

Then he left the boy and went away, along that road from which there was no turning back.

[Page 41]

CRIMINAL RESPONSIBILITY

By Dr. D. C. Grant

Dr. Donald Grant is a specialist in medical sociology, with an emphasis on family structure and mental illness in the professions. He is particularly concerned with medico-legal interaction in the formation of conceptual problems in the behavioral sciences.

Under British Law certain persons are excused the usual punishment for their criminal acts because they are said not to be responsible for their criminal behavior. The limitations on criminal responsibility are defined legally as

(l) immaturity—varies with charge;

(2) mental disease or defect;

(3) drunkeness—some crimes you are too drunk to do;

(4) coercion of wife by husband.

It is the second category of mental disease or defect which concerns psychiatrists, but only secondarily. By this I mean that the problem of deciding whether a person is responsible for his acts is, in practice, primarily a legal one, and doctors are involved secondarily as expert witnesses in court proceedings, where their function is to give an enlightened opinion for the court’s consideration. To [Page 42] emphasize the primarily legal nature of the problem in practice, it must be stated that the doctor can function satisfactorily within his medical frame of reference, and never raise the question of responsibility for actions, whereas the courts functioning within their frame of reference cannot avoid consideration of this question and furthermore must reach definite conclusions.

It will be most instructive, therefore, to consider first the development of legal thought with regard to criminal responsibility. It is worth noting that this is specifically oriented to this particular problem.

Secondly we must consider the development of medical thought concerning the nature of mental disorders. Here it is worth noting that the particular problem of criminal responsibility is covered by implications rather than by specifically oriented thought. Lastly we attempt to clarify some of the areas of conflict which both present at their present stages of development.

LEGAL THOUGHT REGARDING CRIMINAL RESPONSIBILITY

One thing to bear in mind, in regard to criminal proceedings, is their purpose. They are not therapeutically geared, except incidentally, but are geared to maintain order in society by the impartial dispensatiun of justice, which may or may not be therapeutic for particular persons.

The courts and the lawyer are thus not directly concerned with the question of the welfare of the defendant. If in fact, in a series of cases, the protection of the State required that a sentence he imposed, the effect of which would be dubious for the defendant’s welfare, then this sentence would be imposed. It is this sort of reasoning which in South Australia, for instance, has justified for some courts the continuance of whipping penalties, and in other states justifies the use of deterrent sentences. If one is to argue against this, then it must be clearly shown that the welfare of society as a whole is safeguarded by the alternative, and it must also be argued that the alternative is more effective in individual rehabilitation.

Now, bearing in mind that the law is oriented towards the maintenance of social order, and not the creation of situations which are therapeutic for individuals, let us turn our attention to a more detailed examination of the development of legal thought with regard to criminal responsibility.

Ancient law took the attitude that man was responsible for all his actions. “Law in its earliest days tries to make men answer for all the ills of an observable kind that their deeds bring upon their fellows.” (Pollack and Maitland, History of English Law). However, when the strict law called for punishment without reference to the state of mind of the one whose act had resulted in harm, administrative techniques were developed in an effort to protect those not really at fault. For example, Henry III (1216 on) commonly gave pardons to those who murdered by misadventure, in self-defense, or if of unsound mind. Such techniques administratively came into existence because of a general feeling that the strict law was not properly fitted to the social need and resulted in a change in the criminal law itself, so that the “mind at fault” became an element of the crime This idea was formalized in common law by the concepts of actus reus and mens rea. Actus reus is the objective element of a crime. It must be shown that a criminal act has been committed by the accused and the onus of proof is on the prosecution. Mens rea is the subjective element of a crime. The criminal act must have been intended, Intent is assumed in law, and the onus of proof of absence of intent is on the defense.

[Page 43] Before the seventeenth century there were but sporadic instances of criminal proceedings invoking a defense on the grounds of absence of mens rea. This defense had to be based on the hypothesis that one who had no reason or mind could have no mens rea. The legal test of the time was that if a person was so deprived of reason that he resembled a beast rather than a man he could have no felonious intent (mens rea) and therefore could not be convicted of a crime. Thus the subtler forms of insanity which we recognize today were excluded as a defense, in criminal proceedings.

At the beginning of the seventeenth century the observations of Sir Edward Coke drew attention to the subject of the criminal acts of the insane. He recognized four kinds of persons non compos mentis:

1. The idiot or natural fool.

2. He who was of good or sound memory and by the visitation of God has lost it.

3. The lunatic who has lucid intervals.

and 4. He, rendered non compos mentis by his own act as a drunkard.

However, the establishment of a state of non compos mentis did not automatically establish a defense on the grounds of absence of mens rea.

On the basis of the ruling that the person needed to resemble a beast rather than a man before his insanity was accepted, it seems probable that only those in the first two categories of Coke’s classification would be excused punishment. It is quite certain that excuse was not given to the last group. “Although, he who is drunk, is for the time non compos mentis, yet his drunkenness does not extenuate his act or offense nor turn to his avail. Or, as it was said in a rougher age, ‘He that kylleth a man drunk, sobur schal be hangyd.’” (Starkey, England in the Reign of Henry III).

Towards the end of the seventeenth century, Sir Matthew Hale commented on insanity and its status in law. His most significant contribution was that he distinguished between partial and total insanity. By partial insanity Hale meant that class of persons who give the appearance of being deluded, in respect of one subject, but who appear to be sane in all other matters. He ruled that partial insanity did not excuse persons of the committing of any offence.

In the eighteenth century, cases in which the sanity of the accused was questioned were governed by the “wild beast” test. One of the most celebrated of these was the case of Arnold, who in 1724, at Kingston Assizes, was arraigned for attempting to murder Lord Onslow. The prisoner had shot at and wounded the peer, under the influence of the delusional belief that Lord Onslow was responsible for all the disturbances which took place in the County and that he caused devils and imps to be introduced nightly into the bedroom of the accused in order to persecute and plague him. Arnold was found guilty and sentenced to death, although at Lord Onslow’s personal request his sentence was commuted to life imprisonment.

The next major development was the trial of Hadfield, who shot at King George III at Drury Lane, London, in 1800. Hadfield believed that he had to sacrifice his life in order to save the world. As he did not want to commit the sin of suicide it was ordained that he should carry out an act for which he would be hanged. High Treason seemed the best choice and King George became his target. Erskine’s defense was brilliant. In commenting on Coke and Hale he said, “If total deprivation of memory was intended by these great lawyers to be taken in the literal sense of the words:—if it was meant that, to protect a man from punishment, he must be in such a state of prostrated intellect as not to know his [Page 44] name, nor his condition, nor his relation towards others...then no such madness ever existed in the world. It is idiocy alone which places a man in this helpless condition.” Erskine went on to consider the nature of delusions. “Their (the victims of delusional beliefs) conclusions are just and frequently profound; but the premises from which they reason, when within the range of the malady, are uniformly false—not false from any defect of knowledge or judgment but because a delusive image, the inseparable companion of real insanity, is thrust upon the subjugated understanding, incapable of resistance, because unconscious of attack. Delusion, therefore, where there is no frenzy or raving madness, is the true character of insanity.” On the basis of this reasoning Lord Kenyon stopped the trial to direct the jury. He said to them, “With regard to the law, as has been laid down, there is no doubt upon earth; to be sure, if a man is in a deranged state of mind at the time, he is not criminally answerable for his acts; but the material part of this case is whether at the very time when the act was committed, this man’s mind was sane.” The verdict was “We find the prisoner is not guilty; he being under the influence of insanity at the time the act was committed.”

The significant development which emerged from this case was that the previous legal test of insanity (that the accused should resemble a wild beast rather than a man) was overruled, and in its place no formal legal test of insanity was enunciated. This left juries to decide on insanity, without a formal test to apply, in making their decision. This proved particularly difficult, and conflicting decisions were made. In the case of Bellingham, who shot the Prime Minister, Mr. Spencer Perceval, in 1812, the accused was sentenced and executed within a week of his action, despite the evidence of his paranoid and deluded state.

In the case of Oxford, who discharged two pistols at Queen Victoria and the Prince Consort, in 1840, the defense produced evidence of the delusional insanity of the accused, and he was found not guilty, and lived for many years in an asylum.

For 43 years alter the Hndfield decision this state of confusion existed, and an attempt was not made to clarify and resolve the dilemma until 1843 in the celebrated case of Daniel M’Naghten.

In 1843 Daniel M’Naghten shot dead Mr. Edward Drummond, who was the private secretary of the Prime Minister and Leader of the Tory Party, Sir Robert Peel. M’Naghten shot Mr. Drummond by mistake, believing him to be Sir Robert Peel. It was not this mistaken belief that gave rise to the controversy about M’Naghten’s criminal responsibility, but the reasons he gave for wishing to kill Sir Robert Peel. M’Naghten believed himself to be persecuted by the Tory Party. In his statement to the examining magistrate he said that he believed his life was in danger on account of the persecution to which he had been subjected. In an eloquent defense Cockburn traced the history of the prisoner’s delusional beliefs, relating them to the crime. He showed that M’Naghten suffered from paranoid delusions. The jury was instructed to “convict if the defendant was in a sound state of mind” but to “acquit if he had not the use of his understanding, so as to know he was doing a wrong and wicked act.” The jury acquitted M'Naghten.

Because of the public figures involved, this case created considerable interest among laymen and jurists. The decision was controversial. In an effort to clarify the matter the House of Lords summoned the judiciary before it to question them on the grounds deemed necessary to establish a defense of insanity. These questions and their answers, which were put in the House of Lords, have become known as the M’Naghten Rules, and they have remained the legal test of insanity down to the present day. They are as follows:

[Page 45] Question 1

What is the law respecting alleged crimes committed by persons afflicted with insane delusion in respect of one or more particular subjects or persons: as, for instance, where at the time of the commission of the alleged crime the accused knew he was acting contrary to law, but did the act complained of with a view, under the influence of insane delusion, of redressing or revenging some supposed grievance or injury, or at producing some supposed public benefit?

Answer 1.

Assuming that your Lordships’ inquiries are confined to those persons who labour under such partial delusions only, and are not in other respects insane, we are of opinion that, notwithstanding the party accused did the act complained of with a view, under the influence of insane delusion, of redressing or avenging some supposed grievance or injury, or of producing some public benefit, he is nevertheless punishable according to the nature of the crime committed, if he knew at the time of committing such crime that he was acting contrary to law; by which expression we understand your Lordships to mean the law of the land.

Question 2.

What are the proper questions to be submitted to the jury, where a person alleged to be afflicted with insane delusion respecting one or more particular subjects or persons, is charged with the commission of a crime (murder for example) and insanity is set up as a defense?

Question 3.

In what terms ought the question be left to the jury as to the prisoner’s state of mind at the time when the act was committed?

Answers 2 and 3.

As these two questions appear to us to be more conveniently answered together, we have to submit our opinion to be, that the jurors ought to be told in all cases that every man is to be presumed to be sane, and to possess a sufficient degree of reason to be responsible for his crimes, until the contrary be proved to their satisfaction; and that to establish a defense on the ground of insanity, it must be clearly proved that, at the time at committing the act, the party accused was labouring under such a defect of reason, from disease of the mind, as not to know the nature and quality of the act he was doing or, if he did know it, that he did not know he was doing what was wrong. The mode of putting the latter part of the question to the jury on these occasions has generally been, whether the accused at the time of doing the act knew the difference between right and wrong: which mode, though rarely, if ever, leading to any mistake with the jury, is not, as we conceive, so accurate when put generally and in the abstract, as when put with reference to the party’s knowledge of right and wrong in respect to the very act with which he is charged. If the question were to be put as to the knowledge of the accused solely and exclusively with reference to the law of the land, it might tend to confound the jury, by inducing them to believe that an actual knowledge of the law of the land was essential in order to lead to a conviction: whereas the law is administered upon the principle that everyone must be taken conclusively to know it, without proof that he does know it. If the accused was conscious that the act was one which he ought not to do, and if that act was at the same time contrary to the law of the land, he is punishable;

[Page 46]

and the usual course, therefore. has been to leave the question to the jury, whether the accused had a sufficient degree of reason to know that he was doing an act that was wrong: and this course we think is correct, accompanied with such observations and explanations as the circumstances of each particular case may require.

Question 4.

If a person under an insane delusion as to existing facts commits an offense in consequence thereof, is he thereby excused?

Answer 4.

The answer must, of course, depend on the nature of the delusion: but, making the same assumption as we did before, namely, that he labours under such partial delusion only, and is not in other respects insane, we think he must be considered in the same situation as to responsibility as if the facts with respect to which the delusion exists were real. For example, if under the influence of his delusion he supposes another man to be in the act of attempting to take away his life, and he kills that man, as he supposes, in self-defense, he would be exempt from punishment. If his delusion was that the deceased had inflicted a serious injury to his character and fortune, and he killed him in revenge for such supposed injury, he would be liable to punishment.

Having now reached the current legal situation, I shall postpone a discussion of this until we have made a brief analysis of medical thought with regard to responsibility and mental illness.

MEDICAL THOUGHT CONCERNING MENTAL ILLNESS AND ITS IMPLICATIONS REGARDING RESPONSIBILITY

The management of persons with disturbed behavior has had a varied history. In the earliest societies of the Middle East, India, and China, disturbed behavior was thought to have supernatural causes, as were most other phenomena in the natural world. Management or treatment was in the hands of priests.

In the Golden Age of Greek society, Hippocrates was contemptuous of those who thought that disturbed behavior had supernatural origins, yet he was unable to give an adequate alternative theory. This may have been due to the fact that the philosophy of rationalism was at its zenith, and this probably limited concept formation in an area which is largely irrational.

Next came the Roman Empire. Most Roman Patrician families retained a Greek physician, and the Greek schools remained the focal point of the medical world, although much superstition crept back into medicine after the death of Hippocrates and incantations were again used in medical treatment, combined with physical remedies. However, the practice of medicine remained under secular control.

With the complete disintegration of the Roman Empire, which followed its division into Eastern and Western empires, organized secular government, and in fact all organized secular activity came to a standstill. During this same period in Europe the Church was growing and consolidating its own internal structure. By 400 A.D. the Church was the only organized element in the whole social structure of Europe and complete control of all matters both spiritual and secular fell to the Church. This included the practice of medicine. Christ cured the sick by laying on of hands and casting out demons, and this became the basis of medical practice. It was widely held that not only mental illness but also physical illness was caused by demons.

[Page 47] This belief became so firmly entrenched that even St. Augustine was able to believe and say “All diseases of Christians are to be ascribed to demons, chiefly do they torment the fresh baptized, yea even the guiltless, newborn infant.” It may be noted in passing that the neo-natal mortality rate was very high in these times.

This theory of illness, the origin of which we can see in the broader philosophy or theology of the times, logically gave rise to treatment aimed at eliminating the demons from their human habitat. In earlier medieval times it was thought that demons sometimes entered human bodies without the consent or active participation of the human beings. Treatment was by incantations, laying on of hands, exhibition of holy relics, and physical assault on the person possessed, in order to make the human habitat too uncomfortable for the demon, who would flee. These people were not held responsible. In later medieval times it was believed that persons possessed by demons had actively consorted with Satan and his cohorts, in order to become possessed, and these persons were held responsible for their condition and burned at the stake as a punishment.

From this example, we can see that the overall philosophy of a given society will have ramifications in all areas of social intercourse, including the practice of medicine and the management oi mental illness. A somewhat analogous situation exists today. About 500 years ago the universal power of the Church of Rome was overthrown. The Roman Church never regained this lost prestige and power. The splinter groups that separated from the Church never attained anything like the control over the whole social structure that Rome had enjoyed. Organized secular activity was increasing, and in England, at least, it was the King who was the focal point of secular power, who overthrew the leadership of Rome and established a Church subservient to his secular government. Thus the stage was set for the rise of a secular philosophy or explanation of events in nature. One did arise, and its influence has continued to expand up to the present day. We call it Scientific Materialism.

Scientific Materialism was based on the deterministic premise that the Law of Cause and Effect was an immutable law of nature and that the same cause always gave rise to the same effect. This hypothesis led to outstandingly successful results—the physical sciences, and an attempt was made to make it the basis of biological and behavioral sciences.

Recent developments in the physical sciences, however, have shown that this premise does not always hold, even here. The classical Newtonian and deterministic laws of physics hold good at the gross level, at which we exist and perceive, but at a subatomic level they do not hold. Physical phenomena at this level must be analyzed by the new methods and concepts of quantum physics which recognizes the principle of indeterminism and has in fact given it precise mathematical formulation as the Planck Constant (L = 6.5 × 10²¹ gm cm² sec.) To emphasize the point that determinism is not a universal law, even in the physical world, we quote from Erwin Schrodinger who won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1933. He says, “According to the new theory, identical conditions at the beginning do not invariably lead to identical results.” (Science and the Human Temperature, page 59.)

After this digression we must now return to our essential theme. The point to grasp is that the theories in the physical sciences were until very recently exclusively deterministic, and since they had achieved such spectacular success here, men in other fields tried to couch their theories in a similar deterministic way. These men in other fields include the doctors who by this time had resumed the responsibility held so long by the Church for the management of people with disturbed [Page 48] behavior. The doctors’ theories of physical disease, couched in terms of immutable cause and effect, were great advances and served to put medicine on a scientific basis. However we might note that scientific does not necessarily mean deterministic.

It is in the field of behavioral disturbance that the application of deterministic principles leads to the most provocative conclusions. In all the theories of the origins of disturbed behavior of this period in history, that of Freud overshadows all others. His is a theory of psychic determinism. That is, what has happened to the psyche in the past will determine present behavior.

It is interesting to note in passing that the most serious rival to Freudian and neo-Freudian theory in the West is the theory of organic determinism, and in the East human behavior is viewed in the framework of social determinism, propounded by Marx. In short, deterministic thinking is almost universal in today’s world array of behavioral scientists, while at the same time it has been eliminated in large areas at the physical sciences where it had its origins.

The essential point towards which this discussion leads is that if we explain behavior in purely deterministic concepts, that is, in terms of giving a person a particular stimulus situation, which will always result in a particular pattern of behavior, we leave no room for free will and choice in action. This is a logical conclusion of any deterministic theory of behavior, so that consciousness and free will become epi-phenomena, of no causal significance, in behavior. Such a conclusion would be most satisfactory with regard to the law and the question of criminal responsibility, if the modern theories of psychologists and psychiatrists were theories of abnormal behavior. But, they are not. They are general theories of behavior both normal and abnormal, and no sharp line is drawn between normal behavior and mental illness. Thus according to these theories all behavior is determined and there is no free will. Therefore the question of criminal responsibility does not arise, as no one can be held personally responsible for his actions, criminal or otherwise.

SOME CRITICISMS

From what we have just said it is not surprising that doctors often find themselves in court unable to give a clear indication as to a person’s responsibility for his actions, for although many doctors think in a deterministic frame of reference, they do not quite accept its logical conclusions regarding responsibility. Criticism of the current state of affairs, with regard to criminal responsibility, is not limited to the muddled thinking of some doctors, however. The present legal rules are not particularly satisfactory either. The McNaghten Rules divide insane persons into two classes, namely, complete insanity and partial insanity. Those in the class of complete insanity are dealt with in the section of the rules reading, “It must be clearly proved, that...the party accused was labouring under such a defect of reason, from disease of the mind, as not to know the nature and quality of the act he was doing, or if he did know it, that he did not know he was doing what was wrong.”

In its strict application this rule is not much more inclusive than the rule of the “wild beast” that preceded the case of Hadfield. Partial insanity is included by the passage from the rules reading, “He who labours under such partial delusion only, and is not in other respects insane, we think must be considered in the same situation as to responsibility as if the facts with respect to which the delusion exists were real.” This ruling is based on the false notion that an insane person will behave in a rational way, but his behavior is based on a false premise. Maudsley, among many others, criticized this. He said. “Here is an unhesitating assumption [Page 49] that a man having an insane delusion has the power to think and act in regard to it reasonably; that at the time of the offense he ought to have and to exercise the knowledge and self-control which a sane man wouid have and exercise were the facts with respect to which the delusion exists real; that he is in fact bound to be reasonable in his unreason, sane in his insanity.”

There is another more general criticism which may he leveled at the McNaghten Rules. The McNaghten Rules, in fact, define intent. Strict application of the Rules, will show whether or not a person intended to perform an act which he knew was wrong. However, the real question in persons who are mentally ill, is whether or not they have an insane intent, that is, are their intentions the result of their illness. This question is not covered by the Rules.

In view of these criticisms which can be leveled at both medical and legal thought regarding criminal responsibility, one might think a situation of complete chaos exists. In order to end on a less gloomy note, it can be pointed out that, although controversies do arise, juries do make reasonably just decisions in most cases, despite the lawyers and the doctors.

[Page 50]

ECUMENICAL MAN

By Billy Rojas

Billy Rojas holds the B.A., and M.A. from Roosevelt University and is a member of Phi Alpha Theta, honorary history fraternity. This promising young historian is currently interested in the utopian movements of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and will soon publish in this area.

The response of non-Bahá’ís to the faith of Bahá’ís usually revolves around certain specific criticisms of the Bahá’í religious orientation—rather than to any of its articulated principles. Unfortunately in many cases, Bahá’ís, by their own insufficient understanding of the nature of the religious life, compound the difficulties which persons of different theological backgrounds find in the Bahá’í Faith. However, the source of many problems does not lie with anything Bahá’ís may say or do. In our secular society it is all too easy to be glib and superficial when dealing with issues that demand an existential resolution, Whether one is a professor of philosophy, a student of literature or a moderately educated housewife, the propensity to see only the obvious surface of social phenomena because of one’s own preoccupations is preponderant. Sometimes, of course, even those who express sympathy with Bahá’í teachings are unable to make the sacrifices which religious conversion may entail but once one really discovers the meanings of these teachings it is more difficult not to follow one’s inclinations through than to remain committed to another way of life. Before such insight is possible, however, it is first necessary to become aware of the limitations which predispositions impose on one’s ability to see into the nature of things.

Gentiles usually criticize the faith of Bahá’ís for one of three reasons. And each reason corresponds to the stage of maturity achieved by the critic. The nature of our religious experience is reflected in our judgment of the religious experience of others. Accordingly, we can dismiss one sort of stricture directed against any faith, the criticism of those who are “absolutely certain” in their convictions. Such certitude is not the sign of religious experience: it is, rather, an indication of the neurotic condition of the critic’s personality.

“Convictions,” as Nietzsche said, “are prisons.” Before there can be communication, or understanding, it is necessary that there be an openness to learn. Legitimate criticism always begins with interest.

To the nominally curious person, a Bahá’í seems to be someone who seeks to reconcile the irreconcilable, who throws Buddha, Abraham and Toynbee into a religious pot and comes out with a lumpy stew. In addition, it is noted, Bahá’ís sometimes use a peculiar vocabulary when discussing religious matters (the result, no doubt, of the fact that the Bahá’í Faith is an aberration of “Mohammedanism” recently imported into the United States. A Bahá’í is, to such a spectator, an example of a cultist who can be photographed for posterity and pasted in a two- dimensional album of cultist “types.” Such a spectator, needless to say, would protest if his own faith or institutional commitment were judged in so perfunctory a manner.

[Page 51] To someone who brings a deeper understanding of human behavior to bear upon the issues involved, a Bahá’í appears to be someone whose intellectual milieu is the 19th century. There are certain affinities which Bahá’í thought shares with Hegelian philosophy, with utilitarianism and utopian socialism; these correspondences, it is supposed, are indicative of the orientation Bahá’ís maintain to the world. By this reading a Bahá’í is something of an idealist, a rather muddle-headed but tender-hearted, panacea-seeker. Put another way, a typical example of what Marx denoted by the appellative bourgeois.

Notwithstanding the fact that some Bahá’ís may be cultists whose “cult” is the Bahá’í Faith and that some Bahá’ís are, indeed, muddle-headed panacea- seekers, we must remember that “the eye oi the beholder” has much to do with what is seen. Certainly the response of a psychologist, or a sociologist, to the same phenomenon will be different, just as the responses at an urbanite to events will probably be different from those of a person of rural background. Besides, it would be pointless to deny these differences; many times a change in perspective affords us unanticipated insights to understanding either an individual’s faith or his religious, institutional commitment. What we do maintain, however, is that a genuine understanding of the Bahá’í Faith and the faith of Bahá’ís requires a willingness to suspend judgment on the matter until one has made genuine confrontation with the issues which faith raises.

Tillich remarks, in the Dynamics of Faith that neither religious institutions, nor religious persons are extensions of propositions, i.e. one cannot prove, or disprove, a faith simply by dealing with its articulated beliefs. Rather, “the criterion of the truth of faith is whether or not it is alive.” It is as futile to “prove” the existence of God, as it is to disprove the literal meaning of statements in the scriptures. What one can do, however, is demonstrate the relevance, or irrelevance, of a faith.

For example, although Bahá’ís and Christians sometimes share a common ethics, Bahá’í orientation to the world is of a different order than that usually experienced by Christians. Although Bahá’ís recommend programs similar to those urged by many democratic socialists, Bahá’ís do so for reasons which assume a set of values at variance with the values of many socialists. And though Bahá’ís seem to see things through Buddhist eyes, or to do things one would expect from Mormons, it should be recognized that a Bahá’í’s faith is not some muddled synthesis of ethical philosophies. The Bahá’í frame-of-reference radiates from an ecumenical faith; this orientation creates meaningful religious syntheses—it is not the product of such synthesis.

As a religious movement, the Bahá’í Faith is an act of creation, the creation of a world community within national and associational boundaries. The Bahá’í community, as a Bahá’í sees it, is the nucleus for a new world order and a new world process. For intrinsic to this community is a radical repudiation of divisive social forces, a rejection of prejudice and petty self-interest. To become a Bahá’í, it is necessary to do more than merely “switch brands”; not only are new words used to describe one’s experience—old words assume different meanings. The essential characteristic of the Bahá’í Faith, understood individually, or institutionally, is the denial of dualism and, put affirmatively, the restructuring of religious life on an ecumenical basis. A Bahá’í is not an idealist with a new ideal even though he is nourished by new ideals. Nor is a Bahá’í the end result of historical contingencies even though the very real tendencies at work in history suggest his actions. Integral to an ecumenical faith is an openness to considerations both of history and of ideology.

[Page 52] Such an orientation involves, also, a commitment to certain universal values which, it should be noted, are not static entities: The values themselves change. Nebulous values become defined; and the extension, or limitation, of values is a continuous process. The antecedents of this process lie in the growth of the evaluative organism: The development of the consciousness of the individual and the maturation of the self-critical sense of the institution.

Faith is a constellation of values and so understood is the result of growth. Faith is our orientation to reality; it determines our interpretation of the life experience. No less, however, the life experience determines our faith. In a word: Faith is negotiable. The agency of negotiation is doubt. Any repression of doubt is a repudiation of faith since the act of doubting is also the act whereby faith grows. A person does not become a Bahá’í, rather, one is always becoming a Bahá’í.

The background which persons bring with them into the Bahá’í community enriches the community; their reference to life is broadened by a plurality of lives to refer to. Just as in the case of an individual doubt is an agency of growth, the community has an agency for this same end: Dialogue. Dialogue, as the counterpart of doubt, is an act of negotiation bringing fresh insights to bear by allowing the play of alternatives to open new doors to the problems of life. Any repression of alternatives is a denial of dialogue since it is the openness of the community to insights that indicates the aliveness of its faith. Faith is never a closed question.

An analogy derived from Dewey should make this clear: Our system of values is like a map. During childhood this map is rather vague, describing but the broad outlines of ethical geography. Only here and there, nearest to the location of our birth, is there any of the detail so essential to a successful journey over the countryside that the map depicts. The situation is similar to early Renaissance maps of the old world showing Europe in adequate detail but distorting Asia and Africa and altogether neglecting the Americas.

As we mature, our map, like our system of values, becomes more adequate. Usually in young adulthood an experience happens to us roughly equivalent to the experience of the 16th century geographers: New continents are discovered. A living value system takes these new discoveries into account in the same way that Schöner took into account the existence of the new world in his cartography of 1523.

Gradually, moreover, the proportions of distant regions become more accurate and the sort of detail only available for, say, Europe becomes accessible for the rest of the globe. When we reach adulthood, our value map is a broadly reliable chart. And here is where most people put their map under glass, where values and faith are petrified. And here begins the departure of the Bahá’í Faith from other faiths.

A Bahá’í realizes that the process of spiritual cartography is never ending; that, no sooner has he “finished” drawing in contours and boundaries, the processes of nature and man have made his map obsolete. Besides, a Bahá’í is not merely a passive cartographer, for he can change things. Just as the government can initiate the construction of networks of highways and dams and, consequently, cause demographic change, so also Bahá’ís can initiate changes in the composition of the world’s values. In addition, as we have seen, genuine faith is responsive to relevant ethical or social trends not necessarily originating from one’s primary religious community. Thus one’s value-map must continually be re-drawn and re-thought.

Maps, moreover, are not all of one kind. Just as a dozen maps of the United States, can reveal a dozen different features (population density, vegetation, climate, [Page 53] political divisions, national history, etc.) so too the backgrounds of Bahá’ís enrich alternatives and insights of the community by bringing many interests into play (philosophic, economic, vocational, educational, etc). In some cases this same interaction does happen in non-Bahá’í communities. What differentiates the Bahá’í from others, however, is the addition of another set of criteria into the level of religious dialogue. Any interchurch dialogue rejects the relevance of new Christian religious experience. Bahá’í dialogue sees a convert’s previous Buddhist experience, or his experience as a Negro, as being not only germane, but as essential to the dialogue.

The process, then, of becoming a Bahá’í can be compared with the process of assimilating the information from different maps and of accounting for the fact that no map is final.

Indeed, just as it would be impossible for a single cartographer to chart the many features at the physical world and therefore must work with other professionals in his field, so also a Bahá’í faith is interwoven with the faith of his community. Finally, just as the cartographer will go outside his profession to history, economics or geology in order to exploit more thoroughly the possibilities of his craft, so also do Bahá’ís enter into dialogue with non-Bahá’ís to enrich both their faith and their understanding of other faiths.

This map-faith analogy should not be overdrawn, however. No analogy is capable of doing more than to suggest the phenomenon on which the comparison is based. The workings of faith and the function of values in the religious life are decidedly psychological rather than geological in character. Moreover the significance of goals, of purposes in life would he lost if an attempt to translate them into visual terms was made. And it is one’s goals and one’s purposes that motivate the life of faith, that awake in us the desire to create a meaningful orientation to the world.

There is another quality embodied in the nature of faith which should be mentioned: On certain levels we should not fear contradiction. Nothing is more unhealthy than the regard which “true believers” have for their beliefs; any sentiment that contravenes dogma must, it seems, be persecuted. It is bad enough when dogmatists extend this attitude to those besides believers, but the worst damage is done to themselves by their act of repression. The indefinite extension of the logical principle of non-contradiction denies intellectual honesty by subordinating honesty to ideology; it also denies the many real changes human beings undergo during their lifetimes. What is valid and self-evident to an adolescent can hardly be expected to do service for a maturing adult. Changes in development necessitate modification of one’s understanding and values. New knowledge, like new experience brings changes in one’s perspective. Acknowledgement of the significance of these changes is experienced as doubt. And doubt calls for resolution, not repression. The absence of contradiction from one’s ideas during the course of years does not indicate “redeeming faith”; more probably it indicates dishonesty.

Maturity consists in the willingness, as ‘Abdu’l-Bahá put it, “to clear away all that you have previously learned,” i.e. wrongly learned; it consists in the willingness to “begin our education all over again,” when necessary, in the quest for truth. Such are the preconditions for ecumenical faith.

What, then, is “ecumenical man”? An ecumenical man is, first, a person whose life orientation is “of one cloth,” that is, one in whom religious faith, vocation, interests are an integrated whole. Second, his faith is described in the same terms as his life: In terms of growth. Third, his life and his faith are open [Page 54] to many levels of influence and opportunity, to challenge from the world. Fourth, his faith is honest. And honesty, though it is a cliché to say so, is difficult to achieve. The most accurate measure of a man’s honesty lies in his ability to face failure consciously. Absence of this ability has wrecked many institutional and individual faiths. It is want of this ability, and concomitantly, slowness in responding to errors, that explains the characteristic failing of religious movements: An unrealistic approach to life. Neither ecumenical man nor an ecumenical movement can tolerate this deficiency.

Our definition of ecumenical man represents the potential available in ecumenical faith, and it should be emphasized that potentiality is another term for what becomes actuality. Ecumenical faith can liberate people from many of their native limitations. Nonetheless, it remains a fact that several limitations remain. Most evidently one’s childhood experiences are crucial factors in this sense; one’s education, one’s opportunities, one’s government, one’s social environment are also significant. In everyday life, vocation and interest can militate against ecumenicity.

Certainly, not all vocations can be thoroughly ecumenical. Personal tastes, similarly, do not usually support a total ecumenical orientation. This admitted, two things still need to be said: (1) Such limitations are not a legitimate excuse for aborting the ecumenical approach to our life-experience, or the requirements of problem solving. One’s taste in literature, for example, may be strongly disposed toward poetry. That this inclination should arbitrarily be confined to Europe and America does not follow from the premise. Your love for poetry can be further nourished by reading Li-Po and Rumi in addition to Whitman and Dryden. One’s job may be rather narrowly defined, but that fact does not, of itself, necessitate its shallowness. Industry cannot long thrive on routine, for routine eventuates in bankruptcy, Industry requires fresh insights into its many human inter-relationships and its methods periodically need modification. The need for new methods can draw on the experience of other enterprises: Materials handling techniques, for instance, have been recently adapted from usage in forestry for usage of building fabrication. The need for understanding the human factor in industry has been approached by management through initiating sociological research; by labor thmugh union participation.

The other point is: (2) Our religious life should not be limited by the accident of individuality. One cannot be (some few eclectics excepted) a Buddhist, Christian, Jew, etc., in one lifetime, but that one’s faith should be closed to the experience of Buddhists, Christians and Jews is another matter. Where an ecumenical propensity exists, and certainly this is the case in most Bahá’í communities, the process of dialogue opens up the possibility of transcending the limitations of personality.

Mention should here be made of the fact that some vocations (or avocations), like some inclinations, are more suited to ecumenicity than others. Part of the Bahá’í goals include cultivating the richest ecumenical sources. Ecumenical potential exists in communications, in the arts, in teaching, most notably. The ecumenical discipline, however, is history.

Some historians, unfortunately, are among the least ecumenical of professionals. Some historians defiantly obstruct the adoption of scientific methodology into their field; others take inane delight in senseless minutiae, e.g. the evolution of accounting in Low Hampton from 1732 to 1734. Such is the discipline ecumenical history wants to leave behind.

History is more than journalism of the past. History is a science where the [Page 55] comparative method replaces the laboratory. History is the study of the flow of ideas, economies and personalities through the dual co-ordinates of time and place. Ecumenical history is as much concerned with religious movements as it is with the evolution of technology. And it is through historical investigation of this order that we can most adequately formulate values and, simultaneously, discover the means to understand values, for ecumenical history includes in itself the philosopher’s task of understanding reality on a conceptual level. Ecumenical history is the substance of the map which, in our analogy, was faith: A dialectical map.

Faith is like a map but it also signifies something else. Faith is responsive to the world but the ecumenicity of man would ultimately be forfeited if faith was unresponsive to the world’s depths as well as its altitudes. What acts through nature is as real as nature. A truly ecumenical faith is responsive to the experience of unsolicited grace. Ecumenical man is at home in this world, not in some dream world. What acts through nature is not his superego, nor the spectre of repressed libidinal drives. Ecumenical faith is responsive to the sources of creativity which nourish human life. Ecumenical faith is epiphenomenal. For this, one must have life before death. In this lies freedom.

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A REVIEW

By Edwin S. Redkey

Edwin S. Redkey. A veteran of the Naval Air Arm and graduate of the University of Washington (Seattle), Mr. Redkey holds the Bachelor of Divinity degree from Princeton. He has served as Chaplain at Middlebury College in Vermont. He is now at Yale University, where he is a candidate for the Ph.D. in American History (he already has his M.A. from Yale in the same area), Lecturer in American Studies, and Dean of Trumbull College. His doctoral thesis concers the back-to-Africa movement from 1890 to 1920.

THE PROBLEM OF SLAVERY IN WESTERN CULTURE

(Cornell University Press, 1966) 502 pages, $10.00

Slavery may have been a great step forward in human relations. It may have been, as someone has written, a great humanitarian who first spared the life of his defeated foe and put him in chains. To put him to work instead of to death may have been the better way. But that was centuries ago. When slaves stopped being captives and became capital, when owners no longer conquered them but purchased them, the picture changed. Slavery then became an institution and slaves were its victims.

Today, thousands of years after slavery was invented, it has been abolished in the western world. The very thought of enslaving a man for life, of keeping his children in perpetual bondage, is repugnant to us. “Liberty or death” expresses our thought on the subject.

Yet just over a hundred years ago, western civilization was divided on the question of slavery. In the United States a war was fought between those who believed in slavery and those who opposed it. Educated and devout men on both sides argued from history, religion, economics and logic. The anti-slavery people won here as they had in Europe; not only their armies but their ideas triumphed.

How did this change of the western mind come about? How did America and Europe move from universal acceptance of slavery to revulsion at the very thought of holding men in bondage? What were the ideas of those who accepted slavery and those who opposed it?

Professor David Brion Davis of Cornell University has answered many of these questions in his book, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture, (Cornell University Press, Ithaca, N.Y., 1966, pp. 502+, $10.00). He set out to discover how the ideas of abolitionists were formed. In so doing he traced the different ways, pro and con, in which men have thought about slavery since the beginnings of recorded history. The book it a fine example of intellectual history. For those who would understand the origins of slavery and the race problem in the United States, for those who would know the background of their own thoughts about their fellow men, this book is important.

Professor Davis traces ideas rather than institutions. A history of slavery per se must wait to be written until detailed studies of individual slave systems appear. Suffice it to say that slavery was practiced long before mm began to record their thoughts about it. The institution existed at various times in almost every culture of the world.

There was, however, a basic paradox in slavery which made men meditate upon its meaning: “Because slaves are men who are defined as things, the institution has always generated tension and conflict.” Professor Davis focuses on that paradox.

Despite the universal use of slave labor, despite the tensions which made men worry about slavery, no organized anti-slavery movement appeared until about 1770. The great minds of ancient, medieval, renaissance and early modern history all came to terms with human bondage without condemning it. Neither the Old Testament nor the New, Plato nor Paul. Seneca nor [Page 57] St. Augustine, Luther nor Locke spoke out against it.

Three major concepts rationalized slavery to these minds. First and most important, slavery was seen as a punishment for sin. Men were in bonds because they or their fathers had either offended God or not known Him. Both Greeks and Christians tried to show how slaves could be free in spirit, but somehow the change did not work. Christians, especially, used slavery as a model for pious dependence upon a Father-God or as a starting point for a divine quest for holiness. But the institution of slavery was accepted rather than attacked.

The second rationale for slavery was simply that slavery had always existed. It was part of the world’s economy, the logical base of the social order. If there were questions about its goodness or wisdom, slavery’s defenders could not envision a world without bondage.

The third idea was based on race or nationality. Most nations had taboos against enslaving their own people. But prisoners taken in war or slaves bought from abroad were legitimate bondsmen. When Africans were enslaved for American plantations, it was easy for owners to consider them non-European, non-Christian, non-civilized. Slavery’s defenders claimed that by bringing the pagans into civilized lands the slaves would be bettered in every way by contact with Christian Europeans.

These three major defenses of slavery persevered through the ages. Philosophers and theologians modified them and restated them, but the ideas found employment as long as slavery continued.

Despite the fact that slavery in Europe was almost extinct at the time of the discovery of America, the inherited ideas about slavery made it easy for Europeans to justify slavery as the solution to the labor problem in the New World. Churchmen who lived in the Americas tried but failed to Christianize the institution. Both Catholics and Protestants, Latins and Englishmen, tried to think of slavery in terms of kindly masters receiving love and patient service from satisfied servants. But the facts made such rationalization impossible. The simple fact that humans were being held against their wills brought bloody revolts by she slaves and cruel repression by the masters. Even in Brazil, where some historians have claimed that slavery was a lighter burden for its victims, Professor Davis shows that hopes for making slavery more humane failed simply because “a slave was not a piece of property, nor a half-human instrument, but a man held down by force.”

How, then, did abolition of slavery become the major intellectual force which eventually freed all slaves? Professor Davis finds the answer in a stream of ideas, institutions and men which converged in the 1770’s to strengthen one another and set the scene for the great abolitionist crusade.

American Quakers, many of whom had become uneasy about slavery and the slave trade, began in the early eighteenth century to let their doubts be known. Their sectarian tradition enabled the Quakers to break with the status quo and try to change society. Men like Benjamin Lay, Ralph Sandiford and John Woolman saw slavery as the great sin of the Americas and, in time, they persuaded both English and American Quakers openly to condemn the institution.

Among more orthodox Christians, on the other hand, there grew a new sense of progress and reform. The old idea of original sin, that man could do nothing which was totally pleasing in God’s sight, gave way to a more moderate view that men could indeed do good, could help bring the Kingdom of God on Earth, could foster progress. In such a climate among American and British churchmen, the paradoxes and cruelties of slavery could stimulate another stream of anti-slavery ideas.

A third source came from the ferment in British Protestantism. Francis Hutcheson wrote a treatise on ethics which, rather than revealed laws, stressed benevolence and utility for mankind. With these weapons he attacked both the cruelty and permanence of slavery. John Wesley, at the same time, led the Methodist revolt against stodgy orthodoxy. Not only did the evangelicals believe that man could achieve sinless perfection in this life, but they emphasized personal decision and commitment to the quest for perfection. Thus the Methodists believed slavery was evil and that they could help eliminate it.

Fourth, the Enlightenment, that philosophical [Page 58] movement which stressed the rationality of man, contributed to the growth of anti-slavery ideas. Various writers from Voltaire to Benjamin Franklin questioned the wisdom and rightness of slavery. More important, they contributed a general moral sensibility, compassion, individualism and belief in “higher law” which questioned both revealed religion and political authority. The form of anti-slavery ideas partook of all these Enlightenment qualities.

A fifth stream of ideas which converged with the others around 1770 was the British philosophy of utility and natural law. Adam Smith, in particular, saw slavery as a shackle on the feet of industrious men who would fight monopoly and privilege if given the opportunity. Among British Americans, where the ideas of independence and natural sovereignty were growing, there was considerable and growing agreement that slavery was incompatible with those ideals.

The catalyst which brought these ambivalent murmurings of abolitionism together was the Seven Years’ War (1756- 1763). The war wiped out the French Empire in America and thus led men to question the established order of governments. It forced the pacifist Quakers to divorce themselves from the establishment. The resulting persecution emboldened them to speak out against the slavery they had been privately questioning. Would-be revolutionists in British North America recognized that British slave-holders in the Caribbean had not helped finance or fight the war against the French, and the North Americans, therefore, grew angry with the sugar planters and their wealth-producing slave system. The “great awakening” of evangelical faith in the colonies helped stress the equality of all men, slave and free, before God. Enlightenment and Utilitarian philosophers saw in the pre- independence rumblings of the North American colonists a new assertion of individual rights and they urged the Americans to be consistent and abolish slavery. The agitation for independence in the colonies was closely tied to the ideas of abolitionism in both Britain and America.

Thus, by the time of the Declaration of Independence, the scene was set for the great abolition crusade which was eventually to succeed so well in changing western ideas and institutions. With the ideas all arrayed on the stage, Professor Davis concludes this first volume of his study of anti-slavery ideas. He proposes in future volumes to continue his analysis of these ideas in the drama of abolitionism. It is safe to predict, however, that he will find that men like Clarkson, Wilberforce, Garrison and Weld, the heroes of the abolition struggle, drew their ideas from the intellectual roots he has discovered in the earlier years.

If the world is a better place, if men are more humane, if society is somewhat more just today than two hundred years ago, it is partly because of the anti-slavery ideas which Professor Davis has so skillfully described and analyzed. We are in his debt for helping us understand a major theme in modern life, a theme which still agitates men of good will in a world of inequality, cruelty and injustice.

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