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Winter 1977-78

World Order

Quotas and Affirmative Action

Editorial

Unity in Diversity

Donald M. Barrett

The Christian-Muslim Encounter and the Bahá’í Faith

Juan Ricardo Cole

A Model for Moral judgments

Gerald B. Parks

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World Order

A BAHÁ’Í MAGAZINE • VOLUME 12 NUMBER 2 • 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:

FIRUZ KAZEMZADEH

BETTY J. FISHER

HOWARD GAREY

ROBERT HAYDEN

GLENFORD E. MITCHELL

WORLD ORDER is published quarterly, October, January, April, and July, at 415 Linden Avenue, Wilmette, Illinois 60091. Subscriber and business correspondence and changes of address should be sent to this address. Manuscripts and other editorial correspondence should be addressed to 2011 Yale Station, New Haven, Connecticut 06520.

The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the publisher, the National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of the United States, or of the Editorial Board. Manuscripts should be typewritten and double spaced throughout, with the footnotes at the end. The contributor should keep a carbon copy. Return postage should be included.

Subscription rates: USA, 1 year, $6.00; 2 years, $11.00; single copies, $1.60. All other countries, 1 year, $7.00; 2 years, $13.00; single copes $1.60.

Copyright © 1978, National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of the United States, World Rights Reserved. Printed in the U.S.A.

ISSN 0043-8804

IN THIS ISSUE

2 Quotas and Affirmative Action

Editorial

4 Interchange: Letters from and to the Editor

9 Unity in Diversity

by Donald M. Barrett

14 The Christian-Muslim Encounter and the

Bahá’í Faith by Juan Ricardo Cole

30 At the Forks

a poem by Judith Rhoads Alamia

32 A Model for Moral Judgments

by Gerald B. Parks

41 Unfinished Visions

a book review by Gary L. Morrison

50 Authors and Artists in This Issue

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Quotas and Affirmative Action

QUOTAS—how the word has changed meaning since quotas were imposed upon minorities to keep them from becoming too numerous in certain privileged reserves of the dominant group! For then a quota was a maximum—a percentage above which the minority members were not supposed to rise. The application of this emotion-charged word to affirmative action programs is disingenuous, since the meanings of the two concepts are diametrically opposite. Affirmative action is based on the proposition that there is reason to suspect the practice of unfair discrimination when the proportion of minority people admitted to a desirable situation (for example, medical school) is egregiously lower than the proportion of that minority to the general population. Quota, then, refers to maximums, to the limitation of minority group accomplishment, affirmative action to minimums, to the recognition that the powers of a minority group are not being developed or realized. To accept the quota principle is, therefore, to accept oppression. At the other end of the scale, to tolerate the underrepresentation of minorities in endeavors or situations that should be accessible to all is to be resigned to the workings of sociological forces that tend to maintain the privileged in their comfortable positions and keep out those who traditionally have not acceded to those positions. The alarmed majority, through quotas, imposes an upper limit on the dynamic accomplishment of monopoly-threatening minorities; the complacent majority, when its monopoly seems secure, is content with the conditions—inferior education, malnutrition, cultural and linguistic barriers, soul-destroying social attitudes— that are at least partly responsible for underrepresentation of minorities.

The love of justice calls for the opposite responses: no action should be taken to prevent the rise of minority persons to the condition of free competition with their fellow citizens; but action is required when the statistics of minority accomplishments are markedly inferior to the proportion of minorities in the general population. Affirmative action is well named; it is action to affirm the right of all citizens to equal access to opportunities for contributions to society, self-fulfillment, and leadership in government, business, and education. Any conditions that reduce such equal opportunity for particular ethnic, religious, or racial groups must be remedied. Where such conditions have existed so long as to have built into the society a pattern of consistent and self-perpetuating discrimination, the society as a whole has a responsibility to change those conditions and to offer special, compensating opportunities to the disadvantaged.

The loss of a privilege feels exactly like the loss of a right. Privileges of an arbitrary character, whether of birth, social rank, or wealth, or of the accidents of height, age, or alphabetic order of one’s family name, quickly come to seem natural and just, and to be defended with religious zeal. Even those deprived of privileges often share the illusion of the rightness of the prevailing patterns, and it is with difficulty and discomfort that they summon the courage to change the existing order, to transform [Page 3] the privileges of some to the rights of all.

Is there such a thing as reverse discrimination? The Bakke case, which at this writing is still occupying the attention of the U.S. Supreme Court, seems to be more a case of privilege lost than of right denied. The concept of reserving a small number of places for minorities in an institution for admission to which there is sharp competition is being denounced in the name of fairness to whites. The argument is advanced, and not often enough challenged, that, by this arrangement, some whites are denied admission in favor of “less qualified” non-whites. “Qualification” is often determined by criteria irrelevant to the candidate’s probability of success in the school to which he seeks admission, and even more to the probability of success in his chosen profession.

With respect to the special needs of minority neighborhoods for professional services—medical and legal, for example—the qualifications of “majority” people may be quite inadequate; but as yet no tests or explicit criteria have been worked out for the selection of candidates truly qualified to provide these services. The admission of minority people to places in professional schools is not simply in the interest of fairness to the candidates for such places, but also in the interest of the communities to be served by them. Just as a medical school, for example, chooses a balanced body of students who are, as individuals, expected to show special proficiencies—in research, work with children, or neurosurgery —so must it include the needs of the various communities which compose a total society. Any medical school that would devote its entire attention to the projected health needs of the white middle class would be derelict in its duty to the whole society. Qualifications, then, do not cover the same range of abilities for every student admitted; rather, individuals with varying capacities and talents must be admitted in order to constitute a balanced body of students and future professionals.

What is true of medical schools is mutatis mutandis no less true of other professional schools, whether of law, or business, or dentistry. If we are to be a total, harmonious society without privileged groups, with “liberty and justice for all,” we must provide the means for the accomplishment of this noble purpose and not be led astray by self-serving arguments that use the rhetoric of liberality and justice in the process of seeking the preservation of ancient social and racial privileges.

The Bahá’í position on the thorny issue of discrimination was stated forty years ago clearly and emphatically by Shoghi Effendi, who wrote: “To discriminate against any race, on the ground of its being socially backward, politically immature, and numerically in a minority, is a flagrant violation of the spirit that animates the Faith of Bahá’u’lláh. . . . If any discrimination is at all to be tolerated, it should be a discrimination not against, but rather in favor of the minority, be it racial or otherwise.” Today, as in 1938, Bahá’ís proclaim their unswerving commitment to this position.

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Interchange LETTERS FROM AND TO THE EDITOR

THE PUBLICATION of a tribute commemorating Mark Tobey elicited an immediate response from an unusually large number of our readers. Some praised the entire Spring 1977 issue; others commended one or another piece. Several readers expressed strong disapproval of Firuz Kazemzadeh’s letter from Zurich published as part of his reminiscences. A reader from the Midwest felt that Kazemzadeh’s account was in bad taste because it gave “such a detailed, almost clinical picture of senility.” Material of this sort, the reader said, is better left unpublished. Other readers objected to the exposure of old age and physical weakness.

The Editors consulted on this matter and endorsed the author’s views expressed by him in a personal letter:

I can very well understand [he wrote in reply to a reader] why some, especially those who knew Mark Tobey, would feel sad . . . or “even resentful about this material.” Sickness, debility, incapacitation are not cheerful. However, I do not believe that such matters should, therefore, be excluded from reminiscences, biographies, or history. Should one omit all references to deafness when writing about Beethoven or to blindness when writing about Milton?

A judgment as to what should or should not be written about an individual depends largely upon his place in history. In some cases any mention of private life, physical or mental condition, or finances may be inappropriate. In others, such information may be vital to one’s understanding and appreciation of that individual. The more important his contribution to history, the greater our need to know. Mark Tobey was no ordinary person entitled to privacy. . . . His very achievement as an artist makes it impossible to accord to him the kind of privacy most of us can expect and demand.

There is also the question of plain historical truth. Life is not pretty. Should one sugarcoat it in print? If one were to follow the opinion . . . that “in a case like this you don’t write anything,” there would be no biography and no tribute to Mark, unless one were to publish official portraits and expurgated accounts, distorting reality.

I also have a suspicion that under the surface there lies an unstated grievance. Had I written of physical debility, of Mark walking with a cane, Mark being half-paralyzed, no objections would have been raised. It is the decline of mental powers; it is the loss of memory that disturbed some readers. The faculties of the mind are associated with the soul, and it appears to some that the person whose mental faculties fail is somehow responsible or guilty. I do not hold such a view. Senility is no sin. It is not reprehensible and no dishonor. I was touched by the interest Mark showed in form and color, by the reverence and love he manifested for ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, even when he could not recall the name. I was deeply [Page 5] affected and shared what I saw and felt with my friends. It never entered my mind that to describe loss of memory, as against lameness or deafness, could be considered negative, objectionable, or in bad taste.

To give our readers a better opportunity to judge for themselves, we reproduce below a representative sample of other letters on the subject.

To the Editor

Your 1977 Spring issue was excessively filled with Mark Tobey. The article written by Marzieh Gail was enjoyable and in good taste. The rest leaves much to be desired, and the space would have been filled to a better advantage.

Why Mr. Kazemzadeh felt impelled to write anything is puzzling, but since he did at least it should have been enclosed in a sealed envelope marked “For Posterity (about 200 years hence)” and locked in a top drawer somewhere.

. . . when I criticize the contents of this periodical it’s as a reader (not of dime novels or mysteries either). Is it an outlet for frustrated writers? . . .

FRANCES B. EDELSTEIN

Montclair, New Jersey

. . . I’m an artist (painter), and I really appreciate the . . . issue [Spring 1977] that you did on Mark Tobey. Not only was he famed in Bahá’í circles but also in the art world. He was the first American to have a show in the Louvre. I have wanted to know as much as possible about him, and so again I say that I am deeply grateful to you for that issue. . . .

MICHAEL SOLOMON

Goleta, California

After reading the article describing an interview with Mark Tobey, I felt compelled to write the enclosed. My husband, Mihdi Samandari shares my feelings, but would probably express them less forcibly—he only met Mark Tobey once. I hope that you will see fit to print my comments. [Ed. Note. Mrs. Samandari’s comments include quotations from Gleanings from the Writings of Bahá’u’lláh, pp. 153-54, 161, which interested readers may look up. The substance of her comments is as follows.] . . .

The 1977 Spring number of WORLD ORDER reached me a few days ago. I read with keen enjoyment the tributes paid to that lovable genius, Mark Tobey, but was astonished that anyone could write such a cruel article, describing the veil that had interposed itself between the body and soul of Mark Tobey. Of what possible interest or value could such account be to those who did not know Mark Tobey personally—and how distressing for those who did. Would the writer of the article like to be remembered as one who had become senile or as one who had rendered outstanding services to mankind?

I had the bounty of meeting Mark Tobey quite frequently, just before World War II. It is impossible to describe such a personality in a few words, but there is one quality which springs to my mind when I think of him in those days—buoyancy. He was built on a generous scale, but he was not only light in his touch but on his feet, and I remember a snapshot taken at Summer School during a class, conducted by Arnold Van Ogtrop, on dancing. It captured this quality perfectly!

My memory of those days is very precious to me. . . . A group of young people would often gather in a cafe, after the meeting held on Sunday evening in Bloomsbury. Here we would carry on animated discussions with Mark Tobey, Hasan Balyuzi, Molly Brown (Balyuzi), Dorothy Cansdale (Ferraby), Marguerite Welby (Preston), and sometimes David Hofman and [Page 6] Richard St. Barbe Baker.

Once Mark read us a poem he had written —“As breaks the Heart.” I begged a copy of it, and he gave me permission to show it, anonymously, to the writer, Richard Church, whose perceptive comment was, “It is more the work of an artist than a poet.” . . .

URSULA SAMANDARI

Buea, Cameroon

. . . Please, could you also send me a copy of the Spring 1977 number of the present WORLD ORDER as it has the Mark Tobey memorial which I am very anxious to have. This [is] because I knew Mark Tobey “way back when”— as a beginner in the Faith in Geyserville (1933), and later (the ’60s) in Switzerland and Luxembourg where I was for nine years. He used to come quite often, and the Quirings have several of his best paintings (Dr. and Mrs. Emile Quiring). This number on Mark is truly fabulous and also tragic. (I did not know of his loss of memory. ). . .

VIRGINIA ORBISON

Malaga, Spain

. . . We felt the last copy [Spring 1977] was far too much oriented toward one person, Mark Tobey. If one was not overly interested in him, it left very little to read. Also by the caliber of some of the first-hand accounts it was a strain to come up with enough worthy material, and it did show I believe. . . .

JACK W. PAPRITZ, M.D.

Anacortes, Washington

Congratulations on the superb issue of WORLD ORDER (Spring 1977) dedicated to . . . Mark Tobey. . . .

. . . [Marzieh Gail’s] article succeeded in conveying an image of Mark Tobey as a difficult, eccentric, and at times not very likable individual who, at the same time, in spite of his all too human quirks, could be a gentle, loving, and devoted friend filled with child-like wonderment and the joy of life. Marzieh Gail’s highly personal account will remain memorable to me because of the rich detail of time and place and her brilliant use of the exact and revealing anecdote which capture not only a sharply etched pen-portrait of the artist but the era in which he lived and created and the people with whom he associated. “The Days with Mark Tobey” left me feeling content that I know Mark Tobey through the art works he left behind yet made me long to know more about Marzieh Gail, her life and times and friends. . . . I can only offer a grateful thank you for giving us her moving and rewarding memoir on Mark Tobey—a contribution to the study of Tobey as man and artist, and beyond this to the understanding of American Bahá’ís living and developing in an earlier era.

“Memories of Mark Tobey” by Firuz Kazemzadeh both satisfactorily complemented Marzieh Gail’s account of Mark Tobey and rounded out the biographical sketches. I can think of no other WORLD ORDER contributor who could have taken on the inherently thankless job of detailing the final days of a great and major modern artist and succeeded as admirably as Dr. Kazemzadeh in producing a tribute to Tobey that is detached yet respectful and loving and avoids any trace of either sensationalism in revealing his final senility or bathos in describing the loss of a great artist. . . . As a longtime admirer of Dr. Kazemzadeh’s professional and Bahá’í writings, I found “Memories of Mark Tobey” one of his best contributions because, among all his work, this one seemed to reveal more of the author himself. Dr. Kazemzadeh’s introductory . . . passages concerning his early experiences in America, acquaintances with early Bahá’ís on the West Coast, and his awakening to an understanding of what we term modern art allow us to see a[n] . . . intellectually and artistically inquisitive individual upon whose life the artist Mark Tobey will have a lasting impact; coming to terms with modern art for a Bahá’í is, in one sense, coming to terms with the art of Mark Tobey. Glimpsing the ravages of age on the declining person of Mark Tobey will not alter our understanding of or response to the total achievement which Mark Tobey left to posterity; rather it leaves us with a profound sadness in recognizing the fragile quality of life and permits us to appreciate the great fortitude required in an individual of Mark Tobey’s stature to pursue an art and produce a work which will enrich the world of man for ages to come. It is this delicate balance between what is lasting and what is ephemeral which Dr. Kazemzadeh . . . captures by juxtaposing his own early life experiences in learning to appreciate nonrepresentational art . . . and the description of Mark Tobey’s physical infirmity during what were to be his last days in Basel. . . .

Bernard Leach’s brief memoir, “Mark, Dear Mark,” and Tobey’s own 1949 article, “The [Page 7] Dot and the Circle,” also complemented each Other perfectly—the former in two pages catching the essence of Mark Tobey’s insatiable love of life and the latter revealing how Tobey’s groping toward world consciousness found its ultimate expression in the universality of the Faith of Bahá’u’lláh.

Then, what a stroke of editorial genius to reprint Robert Hayden’s poem “The Peacock Room” as a kind of summing up or meditation on life and art, the artist and his work, reality and vision. In all of his work Mr. Hayden’s voice rings with perfect harmony—the exactly chosen word, the memorable phrase, the subtle metaphors, the sometimes difficult but carefully hewn constructions, the haunting images, and the compassionate humanity that emerges from the whole. Robert Hayden suggests that what can finally be said about life and art and the summing up of an artist like Mark Tobey is simply that, in the words of Leonard Woolf, “the journey not the arrival matters”:

What is art?

What is life?

What the Peacock Room?

Rose-leaves and ashes drift

its portals, gently spinning toward

a bronze Bodhisattva’s ancient smile.

If this letter seems unduly long and laudatory, it is because your issue on Mark Tobey affected me very deeply. . . . The Spring 1977 issue Tobey: In Memoriam is another splendid example of a journal the American Bahá’ís can be justly proud of.

GARY L. MORRISON

Kapaa, Kauai, Hawaii

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Unity in Diversity

BY DONALD M. BARRETT

This essay is adapted from a talk given by the author at a service in the Interfaith Chapel at the University of Pennsylvania, State College, Pennsylvania, on September 18, 1977. The theme of the service was human rights in the 1970s.

THIS MORNING I want to share with you some thoughts on a subject that may determine whether you will be living in a divided society—divided by race, by class, by background, by culture, by fear, and by violence —or whether you will have a chance for a safe and secure future. I refer to the probabilities of achieving unity in a diverse society.

I am going to make two assumptions. First, I am going to assume that you are thinking persons. Second, I am assuming that you, who are students, are here at this great University because you want an education.

When I was at a state university, UCLA, some two and a half decades ago, I thought it was a nice place to study the nature of the universe, the nature of man and of woman. But sooner or later we all had to face the fact that when we left that great institution we would be facing what some called the “real world” out there. Some of us were a little concerned as to whether we could realize the career opportunities we were seeking. We began to be aware that perhaps there were some artificial barriers, out there, to our career development; especially, at that time, some twenty-five years ago, there were some very strong and very high barriers for women and for racial minorities. These barriers were, and are, the result of prejudices of one kind or another. But I am convinced that in today’s real world, with its vast changes, some of the barriers are coming down.

Out there two processes are really going on at the same time: a process of integration and a process of disintegration. The process of the disintegration of our society—of disunity, of mistrust, of fear and apathy, of materialism, violence, and moral decay—is relatively easy to see. It is dramatic. It shouts at us from the headlines. Old traditional values and respected institutions, such as government, the church, and the family, are undergoing great stresses. They are being challenged from many directions, from within and from without. Moral corruption has reached the highest political and commercial places. In recent years a president and a vice-president have resigned from office under fire. Many of their associates are in prison. Big corporations have been caught making illegal contributions to politicians here and abroad. Some schools and homes have become centers of drug and alcohol abuse, with resulting disruption of family life. Pornography is everywhere.

But if we look hard, we can also see the process of integration—a constructive, positive force—providing the healing remedies to the sick elements of our society.

One of the unifying forces is a set of laws that is helping to eliminate prejudice at the office, the mine, and the mill. These are the equal employment opportunity laws. Through these laws employees of diverse cultural and racial backgrounds, and women, are being given a better opportunity to develop their skills and to achieve their career objectives. Let us look at some of these developments from a historical perspective. Then we will relate these events to a thinking person’s spiritual orientation.

THE FIRST LAWS affecting employment opportunity may be said to be the Civil Rights Acts of 1866 and 1870. These Acts are now incorporated in Section 1981 of the United States Statutes. These Acts included a provision granting “All persons within the jurisdiction of the United States . . . the same [Page 10] right to make and enforce contracts . . . as is enjoyed by white citizens.” However, for about a hundred years, the courts considered those Acts as having little application, certainly little application to job opportunity. In the last decades, though, these laws, now Section 1981 of the U.S. Statutes, form the basis of many effective lawsuits to eliminate job discrimination.

The next significant development in equal employment opportunity laws came during World War II when presidents, first Roosevelt, later Truman, issued executive orders abolishing discrimination and segregation in the Armed Forces and prohibiting discrimination by contractors with the federal government. In 1961 President Kennedy issued an additional order requiring contractors to develop Affirmative Action Programs, which committed employers under federal contracts to hire, train, and promote minorities. The sanction for violation of the requirement was the loss of the very valuable contract with the federal government.

The most important legislation on equal employment opportunities was the Civil Rights Act of 1964, passed under President Johnson’s tenure. Title VII of that Act prohibited job discrimination by employers, unions, and employment agencies, based on race, sex, religion, and national origin. Title VII also established an independent federal agency—the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the EEOC—as an independent agency charged with investigating claims of job discrimination and of administering the law. Later, in 1972, this Commission, the EEOC, was given the power to sue employers.

In the early 1970s the Supreme Court of the United States was faced with some basic issues on the interpretation of Title VII. It finally adopted a position urged by the Justice Department at that time: that Title VII be interpreted broadly. The Supreme Court decided that Title VII prohibited employment practices that had a discriminatory impact, regardless of the employer’s intentions. In the landmark case of Griggs vs. the Duke Power Co., decided in 1971, the Court held that practices that were “neutral on their face” —that is, that did not appear to be designed to discriminate against women or minorities, but that, nevertheless, had an adverse impact on women or minorities in employment— were unlawful. Thus the good faith of the employer was not a valid defense.

Also the courts began to award back pay— that is, they required that the employee who was fired because of discrimination, be paid what he would have earned, but did not, because of the discriminatory act. The courts also reinstated employees who were fired, or demoted, or transferred, because of discrimination. Courts ordered some employers who had not been subject to the Executive Orders, to establish Affirmative Action Programs, which obligated the employers to hire, and train, and promote minorities.

Another powerful weapon was also developed: the class suit or the class action. An employee who was discriminated against could bring an action representing all other fellow employees of that company in a similar situation. If successful, this suit could result in a court order forcing the employer to give back pay to all of the employees in that class or category. You may recall some stories about the U.S. Steel Company, which was required in a class action under EEO laws to pay over thirty million dollars in a class-action suit. That kind of an award gets the attention of the biggest of corporations.

In my professional work as senior legal counsel to a large multinational corporation I have had the opportunity to handle some charges under the EEO laws, and I have participated in the formulation of Affirmative Action Programs for our company. I can assure you that these EEO laws are taken very seriously. I have acted under written instructions of our chairman and chief executive officer to bring about my company’s full compliance with these laws and related regulations.

Now you can see that the EEO laws are effective. I have seen women and minorities being hired and promoted to positions of real responsibility. The day of the token black and [Page 11] the token woman executive is gone, I think, or is fast going. In my company a woman is one of the few senior vice presidents; she is a member of the president’s council, which is an executive body, a decision-making body. We now have a woman on the board of directors. We have many women and blacks in so-called line positions—not just staff and advisory roles. We are continuing to make progress toward the ultimate elimination of the need for Affirmative Action Programs.

EEO laws apply not only to business but to federal and state and local governments and to schools and colleges. Moreover, the laws and their enforcement provide an opportunity for peoples of diverse backgrounds to develop their unique talents and capacities to the fullest, without artificial restraints or barriers. These laws help to establish an environment in which diversity can be appreciated, not just tolerated.

Of course, much is required of the federal agencies administering these laws and of our judicial system in handling the cases. At this time there is a tremendous backlog of charges placed with the EEOC and of suits under EEO laws in the federal courts. To give you an example of the volume of these cases: when I looked into it some time ago, at the end of 1975, there were over eighty thousand unresolved charges. Each charge represented either an individual claim or a class action claim—for example, a claim that all blacks at a certain factory had been held out of the line of advancement because of discriminatory practices. The volume of cases and charges is growing at the rate of over twenty thousand a year. There are over one hundred thousand such charges now pending, and the federal courts are choked with EEO suits.

I recently read a copy of an annual report, a publication of the NAACP called “The State of Black America 1977.” Of all the issues that the NAACP says are of concern to black America employment, or rather lack of adequate employment opportunities, is the most important. The NAACP is very critical of the government bureaucracy. It severely criticizes the system for being unable to carry the weight of all of these charges and for failing to bring about, rapidly, new employment opportunities.

Unless something is done to streamline the procedures within the EEOC and within the federal court system, these laws, which are effective on the books, will not become fully effective in real life. It seems to me that establishing a special court system for administering the EEO laws could be a solution for this logjam. We have, as many of you know, special federal courts for tax matters, for administrative law matters, for other matters. Perhaps we should have a special system of courts for EEO law matters. In this way some judges could become specialists in the field of EEO legislation, freeing the regular court system to handle matters that do not lend themselves to specialized procedures.

I am concerned about these matters, because, I, like you, am a thinking person, and also because I am motivated by spiritual considerations. I see the development of equal employment opportunity laws as the adoption by this government of one of the basic principles of my religion, the Bahá’í Faith. As a Bahá’í I believe that all human beings are creatures of God, destined to establish a peaceful, harmonious society based on the consciousness of the oneness of mankind. But until that consciousness of the oneness of mankind permeates the offices, the factories, the government, the schools, the homes, and the churches, I do not see how a peaceful and harmonious society can be established.

IN OTHER WORDS, unity in diversity is the essential foundation for real progress. The Prophet-Founder of the Bahá’í Faith, Bahá’u’lláh, over a century ago from a prison in ‘Akká, Palestine, said, “The earth is but one country, and mankind its citizens.” He [Page 12] stated that all human beings are endowed with talents and faculties and the capacity to know and to love God. He said that the purpose of life on this plane of existence is to know and to love God. We achieve this purpose by developing and using our talents and faculties to serve mankind. Bahá’ís believe that work performed in the spirit of service to mankind is worship.

In over 5,800 localities in the United States and in more than 75,000 localities throughout the world, Bahá’ís are working to unify all the diverse elements of mankind. For they believe that there is a spiritual basis for the unity of all peoples. They believe that all the great world religions have taught the unity of mankind. They also believe that now, in this age, in this century, new spiritual powers have been released to accomplish the unification of the world through a new revelation of God’s will for man.

Bahá’ís believe that religion is the outer expression of the divine reality. Therefore, religion must be living, vitalized, moving, and progressive. The Founders of religions have laid down certain laws and heavenly principles for the guidance of mankind. The Prophets of God have all voiced the spirit of unity and agreement. They have all been the Founders of divine reality. The followers of Moses and Christ, of Krishna, Buddha, Zoroaster, and Muḥammad, have established civilizations that have encompassed peoples of diverse racial and ethnic roots.

However, because human interpretations and blind imitations differ widely, religious strife and disagreement have arisen among men. The light of true religion has been extinguished, and the union of the world of humanity prevented. Thus the fundamental reality of the divine religions must be renewed, reformed, reaffirmed to mankind.

Spiritual progress is through the breaths of the Holy Spirit and is the awakening of the conscious soul of man to perceive the reality of divinity. The spiritual brotherhood that is enkindled and established through the breaths of the Holy Spirit unites nations and removes the causes of warfare and strife. It transforms mankind into one great family. It establishes the foundation of the oneness of humanity. It promulgates the spirit of international agreement and ensures universal peace. Therefore, all must investigate the foundation of reality of this heavenly fraternity. All must forsake limitations and promote the reality of the divine teachings. The reality of the divine teachings is the consciousness of the oneness of mankind.

Here at Penn State, thinking persons have an excellent situation in which to investigate the reality of divine teachings. You have available to you capable religious leaders, good reference libraries, learned and interested faculty members, and experienced teachers. In all the diverse points of view, opinions, theories, and teachings you encounter, you can perhaps discover some of the great, underlying spiritual principles—those truths that are eternal and universal.

I am confident, then, that my first assumption is true. You are thinking persons. I hope that my second assumption is also true: that you are here for an education. That education could include examination of some new career opportunities becoming available through the enforcement of equal opportunity legislation. I hope that you will think about the spiritual reasons for these developments and consider how these EEO laws and other integrating processes are laying the foundation for unity among diverse people. Every thinking person should recognize that, while love is the eternal basis for relationships between individuals, justice is the only standard capable of establishing unity among diverse groups of individuals. I firmly believe that every thinking person will recognize that unity in diversity is the essential and just foundation for a peaceful, harmonious, and progressive society.

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The Christian-Muslim Encounter and the Bahá’í Faith

BY JUAN RICARDO COLE

Part of the research for this paper was done in Beirut in 1974-75 while on a study grant from the Richter International Scholar Fund of Northwestern University, for which the author must express his thanks. Thanks are also due to Mr. Shihábú’d-Dín Zahrá’í, who took time out from his busy duties as Secretary of the National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of the Near East to give me valuable insights into the Bahá’í Faith, as well as to help in locating the original Arabic and Persian texts of some passages of Bahá’í scriptures that were essential to this paper.

THE CONCEPT of dialogue between the adherents of the various world religions is one to which perhaps only the world self-consciousness of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries could have given rise. The easy ethnocentrism, wherein one’s own religion represents an isle of salvation amidst a sea of perversity, is steadily being undermined by all the complicated forces of modernity. Even serious debate across confessional lines has been rare in the past, and such issues as Hindu theists’ distaste for the impersonality of the Buddhist Absolute and Islamo-Christian contempt for the popular idolatry of the Indian traditions have provoked a good deal of passionate polemic and apologetic literature, most of which remained singularly devoid of any real quest for insight.

However, of all the religious conflicts perhaps the most momentous, and quite possibly the most tragic, has been the dispute between Christianity and Islám. In spite of recent political crises there has recently been movement toward a more irenic meeting of the two faiths. S. J. Samartha, of the World Council of Churches, has pointed out some of the factors making a dialogue between Christians and Muslims possible: the closeness of their origins; their common prophetic tradition; their common belief in God and their desire to witness to that belief in today’s world; their social and political involvement with the world and with each other; and the mixing of the two populations brought about by the increasing mobility of the world’s peoples. Moreover, as one participant in a WCC conference affirmed, the dialogue does not require equivocation or easy agreement but rather may sometimes involve a “rigorous facing of differences and a stripping away of pretence.”

The wide ecumenism of the Vatican II pronouncements, the openness of much contemporary Christian theology, and such calls as that of Anglican Bishop and Islamicist Kenneth Cragg for common prayer between the two communities form a basis for an approach from the Christian side. The awakening of Muslims, who did some of the pioneering work in developing the discipline of the history of religions, to the necessity of formulating a modern theological and dialogical position toward other faiths is a further portent of the increasing possibilities for a fruitful encounter of the two religions.

Unfortunately, the immense potential of [Page 15] the Bahá’í Faith for a contribution to the Muslim-Christian dialogue has so far been largely ignored or misunderstood. Much of the misunderstanding has derived from the complexity of the Bahá’í Faith’s relationship to other religions. It is neither simply an association for the promotion of global ecumenism nor a syncretistic sect. Rather it is a new and distinct religion with its own Prophet, scriptures, rituals, doctrines, administrative order, and ideology. At the same time, rather than being a superfluous new religion, the Bahá’í Faith constitutes a reform within and a revalidation of each of the world’s existing faiths. Its destiny is inextricably bound up with the enterprise of fostering interreligious understanding, for one of the cardinal principles of the Bahá’í Faith is the spiritual validity and underlying unity of all the major world religions. Bahá’u’lláh (1817-1892), the Prophet-Founder of this new religion, wrote:

The Purpose of the one true God, exalted be His Glory, in revealing Himself unto men is to lay bare those gems that lie hidden within the mine of their true and inmost selves. That the divers communions of the earth, and the manifold systems of religious belief, should never be allowed to foster the feelings of animosity among men, is, in this Day, of the essence of the Faith of God and His Religion. These principles and laws, these firmly-established and mighty systems, have proceeded from one Source, and are the rays of one Light. That they differ one from another is to be attributed to the varying requirements of the ages in which they were promulgated.

The Bahá’í concept of progressive revelation states that each religion is a particular response by the Divine to a crisis in human affairs and has as its goal the reaffirmation of certain basic spiritual values, the reintegration and progression of society by new social principles, and the enabling of individuals to fulfill more perfectly their spiritual potentialities. Each religion’s conceptual language, symbols, and ethical precepts are, then, tailored to specific societies at specific times, though its symbols may enshrine such powerful existential truths as to give it a wide relevance over time and space.

From the Bahá’í point of view, however, any particular religion has a finite lifespan as the result of two basic processes. First, at the same time that a prophetic revelation solves the social and psychological crises of a particular society, it inevitably impels that society to create new forms that hold within themselves new crises unsolvable by the former religion. Second, two elements should be distinguished in religion—revelation and tradition. Revelation is the record of the spiritual experiences and teachings of the prophet. Tradition is the historical interpretation of that revelation and its embodiment in a community. While revelation is unchanging in the ideals it communicates, tradition is, like all [Page 16] other human institutions, subject to the ravages of entropy. It runs down, indulges in a baroque multiplication of doctrines, becomes rigid and barren, then fractures into innumerable schisms. Thus there is a perennial need for the renewal of religion, the appearance of new prophets, the promulgation of a new revelation.

Such a view of the nature of religion allows Bahá’ís to hold a considered universalism without resorting to a shallow syncretism or a theological fuzziness. But while the Bahá’í Faith generally stands opposed to the indiscriminate mixing of religious forms with no concern for their historical and conceptual contexts, it also makes clear that Islám stands squarely in the Judeo-Christian tradition and that Abraham, Moses, Jesus, and Muḥammad are part of an integral tradition within the varied stream of revelation. Bahá’u’lláh Himself stands in this tradition, though Bahá’í scripture addresses with equal respect other traditions with different sets of spiritual symbols, such as Zoroastrianism and Buddhism. It should be remembered that Muḥammad’s own conceptual milieu was largely biblical and that the later divorce of Muslim thought from the biblical tradition was not inevitable. Indeed, the Bahá’í position is that the revelations of God through Jesus and Muḥammad were unitive in intent and that the unfortunate divergence of Christian and Muslim tradition was the result of human misinterpretations. In the light of this understanding biblical and qur’anic faith should be reunited. This understanding also speaks eloquently for the potential role of Bahá’ís in the contemporary encounter of Islám and Christianity.

At this time, however, several factors intervene to prevent Bahá’ís from entering fully upon their natural vocation as mediators between Nazareth and Mecca. First, the very youth of the Bahá’í Faith and, consequently, the relatively small number of its followers lend little weight to its counsel among the more ancient faiths. But the present worldwide scope of its activities, and its mass appeal among such disparate groups as Bolivian Amerindians and Hindu outcastes, as well as its tight organization, its modern and scientific principles, its egalitarianism, and its powerful sense of mission, all bode well for its future importance in human affairs. Second, the voice of the Bahá’í Faith is inevitably a distinct one, and the ecumenically minded can only despair of yet another party to reconcile. Finally, the intellectual groundwork for a formulation of the Bahá’í position as regards several crucial concerns in the Christian-Muslim dialogue has only begun to be laid.

Below we will raise some basic questions and formulate provisional answers, all from the Bahá’í point of view. I will depend most strongly on the New Testament (RSV) and the Qur’án and will give special attention to the positions of Imámí Shí‘ah Islám. For, as the foremost Western authority on Shí‘ah Islám has observed, “It is evident . . . that the conditions for a spiritual dialogue between Islám and Christianity change radically accordingly as Christianity addresses itself to Shí‘ite Islám or to another branch of Islám.” Moreover, this branch of Islám is particularly relevant, for it is the one from which the Bahá’í Faith itself emerged. Finally, I should note parenthetically that when referring to the revelation of God through the Prophet Muḥammad, constructions such as “Muḥammad said . . .” will be used rather than the more traditional “God said . . .” Such a usage does not mean to impugn the divine origin of the Qur’án but to indicate that the instrument of revelation was the human personality of the Prophet in his particular historical circumstances. To say that the pen wrote is not to deny that the hand guided it.

IT IS THE FIGURE of Jesus Christ, standing as he does within both the Christian and Muslim faiths, that unalterably unites these two religions. But the interpretation of Jesus has also been the major source of discord between them. It seems appropriate, therefore, [Page 17] to begin by establishing the areas of agreement in the Christologies of the two religions. There is, first, a great similarity between Muḥammad’s presentation of Jesus and the presentation of Him found in the sermons of St. Peter, in the earliest chapters of Acts. In the sermon in Acts 3:13-26, for example, Jesus is called the Servant of of God and is identified with that Prophet who Moses foretold (Deut. 18:15-22) would be raised up among His brethren as the Messianic fulfillment of the Judaic dispensation. Jesus’ mission is characterized quite simply as that of turning men away from wickedness, and the deliverance of the people is seen to be in their repentance and in their acceptance of Jesus as the Messianic Prophet. There is no mention of the Incarnation, the Trinity, or the Redemption. The simple creed put forth by St. Peter undoubtedly represents that of the early Jewish Christians. It is this primitive theology of Christ that is echoed in the Qur’án. That the qur’anic Christology is Petrine rather than Pauline or Johannine need prove no greater challenge to faith than does the existence within the New Testament itself of different theologies. The concept of complementarity, which we will explore in more depth later, would indicate that sometimes seemingly contradictory assertions about a phenomenon do not invalidate but rather complete one another.

Muḥammad’s Christ stands as a unique and mysterious figure, Whose existence proceeded directly from God’s commanding Word; Who gave soaring life to clay; Who healed the sick, gave sight to the blind, and raised the dead; Who was empowered both to revise and confirm the millennium-old Mosaic Law; and Who founded a new and gentle religious community. As seems immediately clear, there is nothing here that contradicts the Gospel narratives and much that witnesses to them. The titles the Qur’án accords Jesus are, likewise, witnesses to New Testament epithet for him. He is called Messiah (Christ), Prophet (cf. Mark 6:15, 8:28), Messenger or Apostle (cf. Heb. 3:1), the Servant of God (Q. 4:170/172, 19:31/30; cf. Phil. 2:7, Acts 3:13, 26; 4:27), the Word of God (Q. 3:40/39; cf. John 1:1-18), and is represented as both fulfilling the Pentateuch and prophesying an eschatological successor (Q. 61:6; cf. John 16:12-13). Jesus, sinless according to Hebrews 4:15, is also considered to be sinless in Muslim tradition, as are all the Prophets. In summary, we can discern in the Qur’án a theology of Jesus that in the attributes and titles it accords Him agrees in all of its positive aspects with the New Testament itself.

The very earliest encounters of Christianity and Islám, however, were marred by an inability of either to respect or to comprehend the position of the other, and it seems clear that the cultural pride of their imperialism —be it Byzantine, Latin, or Caliphal—tended to distort the relationship of the two religions as perceived by their medieval adherents. The Christian attack on Islám has been well documented. We will here be more concerned with the Muslim reactions to the Christology [Page 18] of the Church.

The Muslim theologians began by assaulting the Christian case at its very foundation, denying that the Christians were in possession of the genuine Gospel of Christ. They alleged that passages had been deleted or interpolated and that the Trinity and the Redemption were Pauline inventions. While the Qur’án designates the Torah (Pentateuch) of Moses and the Gospel of Jesus sources of “guidance and light” (Q. 5:48/47, 50/49), Muslim thinkers construed Muḥammad’s rebuke of the Jews and Christians for tampering (Q. 3:70/72) with God’s Word as placing in question the authenticity and authority of the extant biblical literature. Individual Muslim theologians were willing to grant the validity of the Christian scriptures, al-Ghazálí and the Ismá‘ílí encyclopedists, the Brethren of Purity, among them. But these intellectuals were exceptions, while the mainstream Islamic tradition divorced itself from the Bible. It is significant for our later discussion, however, that several theologians of the Imámí community, which expected the supernatural Return of the Twelfth Imám, Muḥammad al-Mahdí (d. 260/874), were willing to use New Testament texts to enhance their theories.

The Muslims next denied the historicity of the Gospel accounts of the crucifixion of Christ, claiming that God had intervened to save Jesus. They based this claim on a qur’anic verse (4:144/157) that, in fact, merely claims the Jews did not crucify Christ. The Qur’án elsewhere asserts that Jesus died (19:34/33), and one Christian scholar has proposed that the verse seeming to deny the crucifixion could be read as an assertion that it was not the Jews’ will that had worked to cause Jesus’ crucifixion but God’s. Jesus Himself is reported in the Gospels as saying,

For this reason the Father loves me, because I lay down my life, that I may take it again. No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord. I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it up again; this charge I have received from my Father. (John 10:17-18)

The intent of the Qur’án could be much the same as in the words of Jesus on this point— the denial that the Jews had power over Christ in any ultimate sense. One of the reasons often given by Muslims for rejecting the Crucifixion was that it was not honorable for a Prophet to die such a death; Christian apologists were quick to point out, however, that the Qur’án itself speaks of prophets being killed (2:58/61).

While Muslim tradition rejected both the Crucifixion and the Redemption, it should not be thought that there is no concept of redemption in Islam. Muḥammad is widely expected to intercede for the froward in his community at the Day of Judgment. A still closer analogy to Jesus’ redemptive role is to be found in the martyrdom of the third Imám of Shí‘ah Islám, ‘Alí’s younger son Ḥusayn:

Much more than the blood of ‘Alí . . . it was the blood of Ḥusain who perished under the swords of government troops that was the seed of the Shí‘a Church. The passion motive was thus restored to religion again among the Shí‘a . . . to the Shí‘ís, the death of Ḥusain paved the way to paradise.

[Page 19] Vicarious atonement, one suffering for the weal of many, is thus not a concept entirely lacking in Islám.

The final issue to be discussed here that provoked dissent between Christians and Muslims was the Christian claim for the divinity of Christ. First, the Muslims rejected Jesus’ title the “Son of God.” A great deal of the difficulty here is a literary-linguistic one. In the Hebrew tradition, the Son of God was a divinely appointed leader, who was entirely obedient to God. The Hellenistic Jews apparently called any miracle worker by this epithet, and Wisdom 2 indicates that all the Patriarchs and Prophets of the Old Testament came to be termed “sons of God.” Luke even designates Adam as the son of God in his genealogy of Jesus (3:38). The metaphor of divine sonship thus had a long and complex history before it emerged in the ambience of Hellenistic Christianity to become paradigmatically associated with Jesus of Nazareth.

However, neither the long tradition of monotheism nor the emphasis on abstract thought underlying the Judeo-Christian usage of this concept existed among the Arabs to whom Muḥammad preached in the seventh century A.D. Here, the son of God would simply be a god, begotten by Alláh as Zeus begot Herakles. Indeed, the pagan Arabs already believed that God had sired three celestial daughters, a belief Muḥammad steadfastly opposed (Q. 112:3). The Qur’án does chastise Jews and Christians for claiming that God could produce offspring (9:30), but it asserts of these Christians that they imitated the pagans of antiquity—that is, they believed in Christ’s Sonship mythologically, not merely metaphorically. Such an interpretation is supported by another verse which affirms, “And they say, ‘God has taken to Him a son.’ . . . Nay . . . when He decrees a thing, He but says to it ‘Be,’ and it is” (2:110/116-111/117). What is in dispute in this latter passage is obviously the method God used to bring Jesus into existence: such a dispute could only arise if the Sonship of Christ were held in a crudely literal sense. The context even seems to suggest that “taken to Him a son” is a euphemism for “sired a son.” That there were groups of Christians in the Ḥijáz at this time that were possessed of so crude a theology seems not at all unlikely, given the nomadic, oral character of the culture and its pagan milieu.

Yet Muḥammad could not have thought all Christians intended a vulgar mythology by the epithet “Son of God,” for He would then have had no words of approbation whatsoever for such a religion, indistinguishable as it would be from the paganism He so heartily deplored. Yet, since He did praise Christians (for example, 5:85/88) and give them special social privileges as fellow monotheists, He must have known that there were Christians who had a more refined understanding of the title “Son of God” (cf. 5:70/69). Nor is it likely that the Christians Muḥammad praised did not use the metaphor of Sonship, for the epithet is scriptural and central to Christian belief. That Muḥammad Himself never used this metaphor might reasonably be attributed to an attempt to avoid confusing His pagan audience, for whom it would have been impossible to comprehend that the Son of God is not a god. The Qur’án itself attests to this difficulty: “And when the son of Mary is cited as an example, behold, the people turn away from it and say ‘What, are our gods better, or he?’” (43:57). While the Qur’án rejects only a mythological understanding of the Son-of-God concept, the Muslim polemicists rejected the term altogether. It is worthy of note, however, that so seminal a Muslim mind as that of al-Ghazálí seems to have attained an appreciation of the significance of the Father-Son imagery in the New Testament.

Second, the Muslims also opposed the implications of the New Testament doctrine of [Page 20] the Exaltation of Christ and the bestowal upon Him of the divine Name “Lord” (Gr. Kyrios; Ar. Rabb; cf. Phil. 2:9, Eph. 1:20-22, Heb. 1:4). They further refused to recognize the authenticity of the sayings attributed to Jesus in the New Testament wherein He used theopathic language, identifying Himself with God (for example, John 14:9). There are traditions of Muḥammad in which He sanctioned the application of the title “Lord” to Himself in a mystical way, but such sayings had little currency save in Ṣúfí Islám. Al-Ghazálí granted the legitimacy both of Jesus’ theopathic language and of His title Lord. Imámí Islám asserts that a theopathic language was used by Muḥammad as well, conceiving as it does of Muḥammad as the perfect imago dei, the Divine Manifestation (maẓhar-i-iláhí), and so should theoretically be more sympathetic to New Testament usage in this respect than the more austerely transcendentalist Sunnis.

The most intractable areas for Muslim-Christian understanding have to do with the doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation. As neither of these dogmas is explicitly present in its traditional form in the New Testament itself, Islám’s quarrel here is largely with the Church Fathers and Christian tradition. The major problem with the doctrine of the Trinity as an organic unity of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, each representing a distinct Person (Gr. hypostasis) within the one Godhead, is its dominance by an objectivistic atomism. A more satisfactory approach was that of the early Fathers Hippolytus and Tertullian, who described each member of the Trinity as an “aspect” or “mask” (Gr. prosopon, Latin persona) of God, and who used this term of Christ only in manifestation or revelation, not as the immanent Word. To speak of one God in three aspects is a much different thing than to speak of distinct hypostaseis within the Godhead: something can present us with more than one aspect while remaining a unity. Such an approach avoids the difficulties inherent in the objectivist doctrine of Nicea. The criticisms of the Trinity in the Qur’án (5:77/76) seem to be directed against a heretical doctrine that constituted Jesus, Mary, and the Father as partners in the Trinity (cf. Q. 5:116). The Ḥijáz offered a refuge for Christian heretics, and Muḥammad was also constrained to assert that Jesus and Mary ate food and died (5:79/78) against what can only have been a Docetic type of doctrine. Later Muslim thinkers applied the verses denouncing the Trinity to orthodox Christianity, however, and so inhibited a reasoned Muslim understanding of the dogma, which while framed with unwieldy terminology, cannot fairly be called idolatrous.

The doctrine of the Trinity is in Christianity inextricably bound up with that of the Incarnation. The New Testament bases for this doctrine are ambiguous and susceptible of quite different interpretations (for example, John 1:3, Col. 2:9). The real bases of the concept of the Incarnation lie in the theological councils of Nicea (325 A.D.) and Chalcedon (451 A.D.), where it was consecutively promulgated that the Son was of the same substance (homoousios) as God and that Jesus was possessed of two natures (physeis; sing. physis), the human and the divine, which coexisted without confusion. Such an approach violated the transcendental [Page 21] nature of God that the Muslims conceived so absolutely and proclaimed a God that was at least partially immanental. For Muslims, any talk of the Incarnation of God seemed to require that the Deity in Its Entirety become encapsulated in human form, which possibility they vehemently denied. The roots of this attitude are, again, qur’anic: “They are unbelievers who say, ‘God is the Messiah, Mary’s son’” (5:19/17). It should be noted that the syntax of this admonition indicates that the position being condemned is one wherein God is nothing more than Jesus Christ, a position that would be viewed as heretical in Christianity as well.

But while Islám, if it is to remain Islám, cannot be reconciled to any claim that God could ever become immanentized in the slightest degree, it is not clear that it must also reject a theological language that applies the category of “divinity” to the Prophets. In particular, Shí‘ah Islám, with its doctrine of the Prophet and the Imám as the Manifestation of the Names and Attributes of God, is conceptually fitted to accept such terminology. As Corbin notes, however, the idea of “Manifestation” does not at all imply an historicization of God, as the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation requires:

When the relationship between the Láhút (divinity) and Násút (humanity) in the person of the Imáms is envisaged, it is never a matter of something like a hypostatic union of two natures. The Imáms are divine epiphanies, theophanies. The technical term (ẓuhúr, maẓhar) always has reference to a comparison with the phenomenon of the mirror. The image which appears in the mirror is not incarnated in (nor immanent in) the substance of the mirror.

This Islamic approach to the relationship of God to human holy figures has fruitful implications for the ability of Islám to come to terms with the Jesus of the Gospels.

LET US NOW TURN to the Bahá’í Faith’s contribution to the Christian-Muslim dialogue. We should first consider the Bahá’í attitude to these two religions, an attitude clearly delineated by Bahá’u’lláh’s great-grandson and an authoritative interpreter of the Bahá’í scriptures, Shoghi Effendi (1897-1957):

As to the position of Christianity, let it be stated without any hesitation or equivocation that its divine origin is unconditionally acknowledged, that the Sonship and Divinity of Jesus Christ are fearlessly asserted, that the divine inspiration of the Gospel is fully recognized, and the reality of the mystery of the Immaculacy of the Virgin Mary is confessed, and the primacy of Peter, the Prince of the Apostles, is upheld and defended.

The striking contrast of such a position to the traditional Islamic one is immediately apparent; yet it should not be thought that the Bahá’ís have forsaken their Islamic heritage to arrive at it. Muḥammad and the Qur’án are revered no less than Christ and His revelation. Bahá’ís are, then, in the position of being members of an independent world-religion with its own scriptures, who yet read both the Bible and the Qur’án as authoritative parts of their own religious tradition.

Bahá’u’lláh Himself championed the Bible’s authenticity, and in The Book of Certitude He specifically denies the Muslim charge of textual corruption, asserting that the Qur’án referred to interpretative tampering only. He wrote of the Gospel that “the words of the verses themselves eloquently testify to the truth that they are of God.” Indeed, Bahá’u’lláh argues that God would not allow the [Page 22] Christians’ only link with Him to become spiritually invalidated, especially prior to the advent of Muḥammad. There is liberal citation of both the Old and the New Testaments throughout the Bahá’í scriptures. Bahá’u’lláh devoted a good portion of the first section of his Book of Certitude to an explication of Matt. 24:29-31, and He went so far as to state in the as yet untranslated Javáhiru’l-Asrár (Gems of the Mysteries) that were one to fail to understand the inner meaning of the prophetic words of Jesus as reported in the Gospel, one could not hope to vindicate the Cause of Muḥammad Himself. Yet Bahá’ís remain open to the findings of a responsible biblical criticism.

Bahá’u’lláh further affirmed the historical veracity of the Gospel accounts of Jesus’ crucifixion, though for Him the Crucifixion was no dry historical fact, but a spiritual event of truly cosmic proportions:

Know thou that when the Son of Man yielded up His breath to God, the whole creation wept with a great weeping. By sacrificing Himself, however, a fresh capacity was infused into all created things. . . . The deepest wisdom which the sages have uttered, the profoundest learning which any mind hath unfolded, the arts which the ablest hands have produced, the influence exerted by the most potent of rulers, are but manifestations of the quickening power released by His . . . Spirit.

. . . Blessed is the man who, with a face beaming with light, hath turned towards Him.

Bahá’u’lláh’s theology definitely requires that sacrifice bring immense blessings and thus that the martyrdom of so exalted a personage as Jesus release tremendous spiritual energies and bounties. The Shí‘ah sentiment about the martyrdom of the Imám Ḥusayn forms the immediate background to this emphasis, though Bahá’u’lláh also links the concept of redemptive suffering to God’s command to Abraham to sacrifice his son. The Christian intuition of a vicarious atonement is thus abundantly attested to in the Bahá’í writings, though the Crucifixion is here seen as a particular ectype of an archetypal act of redemptive suffering that is cyclically enacted in human history. Bahá’u’lláh’s own biography of imprisonment, exile, and torture was seen by Him to release the sacred energy whereby contemporary mankind might be delivered from the various spiritual bondages in which it finds itself. As for the qur’anic verse (4:155/156) cited above which Muslims interpreted as a denial of the Crucifixion, the Bahá’í understanding is that Muḥammad was here simply stressing that whatever tragedy befell the human form of Jesus, his Reality as the Christ transcended it.

As for the Resurrection, the Bahá’í position is that the Gospel reports of a bodily resurrection are symbolic and that Jesus’ Resurrection was of the celestial body rather than the physical body (cf. 1 Cor. 15:44). Indeed, the approach of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá (1844-1921)— Bahá’u’lláh’s son and the Interpreter of His writings—to this issue bears a striking resemblance to that of modern liberal Protestant theologians who understand Christ’s Resurrection as an existential event in the lives of his bereaved disciples.

The complex issues involved in the question of Christ’s divinity are not skirted in the Bahá’í writings, and we shall investigate them at length. First, the sinlessness of all the High-Prophets is upheld by Bahá’u’lláh in His monumental Kitáb-i-Aqdas (His Holiest [Page 23] Book), where the doctrine is enunciated that the law-giving, or dispensational Prophet is endowed with Infallibility. In the Bahá’í Faith, such a station is enjoyed not only by Bahá’u’lláh Himself, but by Abraham, Moses, Jesus, Muḥammad, and the Báb in the Semitic line of prophets, as well as by Krishna, Buddha, and Zoroaster in the Aryan prophetic traditions. The doctrine is that for Universal Manifestations of God, there is a teleological suspension of the ethical, insofar as they are empowered to define the ethical for their dispensation; and, therefore, there are few external standards which may validly be applied to the judgment of their teachings and conduct.

Having accepted the New Testament, the Bahá’í Faith as a matter of course accepts Jesus’ title “Son of God.” Bahá’u’lláh often refers to Christ in Arabic simply as “the Son” (al-Ibn), but just as the term “the Spirit” is an abbreviation of the Islamic appellation for Jesus, “the Spirit of God,” so by “the Son” is intended “the Son of God.” In Bahá’u’lláh’s time, there could be no question of the metaphor of divine Sonship being taken literally, and so the qur’anic hesitation about the phrase that derived from early Islám’s pagan milieu was no longer a factor. As we have seen, Shoghi Effendi affirms both the Sonship and Divinity of Jesus.

The Bahá’í position on the doctrine of the Trinity (which, as we have noted, is, in its classical formulation, unscriptural and lexically unwieldy) is quite clear. The idea that God can in any way be divided or that there could exist within the essential Godhead three separate Persons (hypostaseis) is emphatically rejected by Abdu’l-Bahá. The relationship between God, His Manifestation (in this case Jesus), and the Holy Spirit is rather explicated by reference to the mirror analogy so beloved of the Shí‘ah tradition. “The sun,” ‘Abdu’l-Bahá points out, does not “descend to dwell and abide in the mirror.” He continues:

Now if we say that we have seen the Sun in two mirrors—one the Christ and one the Holy Spirit—that is to say, that we have seen three Suns, one in heaven and the two others on the earth, we speak truly. And if we say that there is one Sun, and it is pure singleness, and has no partner and equal, we again speak truly.

We might note that the three “Persons” of the Trinity have here been conceived according to the primitive Christian idea of the three aspects of God.

As for the Incarnation, it should be stressed that the God of Bahá’u’lláh is absolutely transcendent and is described as “the unknowable Essence,” which is “exalted beyond” “ascent and descent, egress and regress,” and about Whom it is perspicuously affirmed that no “tie of direct intercourse can possibly bind Him to His creatures.” The Incarnation is specifically denied by Bahá’u’lláh, a denial eloquently amplified by Shoghi Effendi. But while the Islamic claim for the radical transcendence of God is thus asserted against Christian immanentalism, the intuition of God’s irruption into the world in the person of Jesus Christ which underlay that immanentalism is yet vindicated in the Bahá’í doctrine of the Prophet as the Manifestation of God (maẓhar-i-iláhí).

The transcendentalist theology of the Bahá’í Faith avoids the pitfalls of immanentalism, pantheism, and monism while yet maintaining a very clear perception of God’s Presence in the world. This is accomplished by means of a well-defined Logos doctrine, wherein the copula between God and the world is the divine Word. The Word of God is the agent of His creative grace, the instrument of the creation of the universe, metahistorical [Page 24] in its nature, and manifold in its significances. There is, of course, a Logos doctrine in both Christianity and Islám, though Christianity has tended to identify the Logos with Christ, whereas Islám conceived of the Word as the Qur’án. Both of these usages appear in the Bahá’í scriptures. In His commentary on Súrah Ninety-One of the Qur’án, “By the Sun,” Bahá’u’lláh extolls the Word of God (kalimatu’lláh) as everlasting, and assures us that its meaning can never be exhausted. The context here makes it plain that He intends by the Word of God the Qur’án, and we may thus conclude that revealed scripture is part of the meaning of the Word. But while the revealed Book is assuredly the Word of God, Bahá’u’lláh has further affirmed in His Lawḥ-i-Ashraf, “The Book of God hath been sent down in the form of this Youth.” Therefore, the Prophet is Himself an incarnation of the divine Word that He bears as revealed scripture. Thus does Bahá’u’lláh resolve this controversy between Christianity and Islám.

‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s explanation of the nature of the Logos seems to require a distinction between the essence of a thing and its attributes, rather like the phenomenon / noumenon distinction of Immanuel Kant. Essence and attribute have an identical referent, save that attribute is the thing as perceived and conceptualized, and essence is the thing as it is in itself. Insofar as perception is never direct, but always involves intermediaries between the perceiver and the object of perception, the essence of a thing uncolored by perceptual intermediaries (Kant’s Ding-an-sich) must remain in some sense unknowable. The Word of God is considered in the Bahá’í writings to be the sum of the attributes of God—that is, to be God as phenomenon. The Manifestation is to God as light rays are to the sun, for though heat and light are attributes of the sun, they are but the way the fusion process is perceived from the human perspective, while the fusion process in its essence remains forever outside the realm of man’s experience. In the same way, God’s positive attributes such as Love, Power, Eternality, and Omniscience disclose something of Him insofar as these concepts, which are extrapolated from human experience, point the way toward the Absolute. The most perfect single expression of these attributes is the divine Manifestation, Who is the “complete incarnation of the names and attributes of God.” The sum total of the divine attributes is signified not only by the Word in Bahá’í theology but also by the Holy Spirit, which is to say that both of these in some sense represent God-as-phenomenon, God in attribute. These attributes have no own-being in Bahá’í theology and are but an expression of the essence of God, the way He is reflected in His creation; it is this reflection that represents His presence in the world and is embodied in the personalities of the High-Prophets.

Bahá’u’lláh wrote that in the absence of “any tie of direct intercourse” between the Deity and creation God has ordained the existence of “an Essence Who shall act as a Manifestation and Vehicle for the transmission of the grace of Divinity Itself” and that [Page 25] “Unto this subtle, this mysterious and ethereal Being He hath assigned a twofold nature; the physical, pertaining to the world of matter, and the spiritual, which is born in the substance of God Himself.”

The implications of this passage for the rapprochement of the Islamo-Bahá’í tradition with classical Christian theology are enormous. The consubstantiality of Christ with God and the twofold nature are the fruits of Nicea and Chalcedon respectively, and Shoghi Effendi’s translation obviously consciously echoes these doctrines. A more literal rendering of the crucial verse would read: “and this divine Ethereality (laṭífiy-i-rabbání) and eternal Abstrusity (daqíqiy-i-ṣamadání) He has created with two natures (du‘unṣur), an earthly, exoteric (turábiy-i-ẓáhirí) nature and an occult, deific (ghaibiy-i-iláhí) nature.” Here, the purely Islamic character of Bahá’u’lláh’s two-nature concept is clearly apparent, and there is no indication that Bahá’u’lláh was Himself conversant with the niceties of Christian doctrine. Shoghi Effendi’s amplification, which bears the weight of an authoritative interpretation, is ecumenical in character and strives to point up the similarities between the Bahá’í and the Christian points of view on the nature of the Manifestation’s relationship to God.

A two-nature Prophetology, no less than a two-nature Christology, poses philosophical problems and has terminological consequences. Insofar as these problems are at the core of the dispute between Christianity and Islám, we will investigate them at length.

Obviously a theopathic language on the part of the Prophets is quite in order from the Bahá’í standpoint, and yet language indicating the Manifestation’s humanity can also be accommodated. In His incomparable theological treatise The Book of Certitude Bahá’u’lláh states that the two stations of the Manifestations make it appropriate to apply to them, on the one hand, the attributes of “Godhead, Divinity, Supreme Singleness” and, on the other, terms such as “absolute servitude, utter destitution and complete self-effacement.” The possession of two stations, of two natures, explains how Jesus could refuse even to be called “good” next to God (Mark 10:17-18); could pray to be relieved of the Cross (Mark 14:36); could offer “up prayers and supplications, with loud cries and tears, to him who was able to save him from death,” and be “heard for his godly fear” (Heb. 5:7); and yet could affirm that “He who has seen me has seen the Father” (John 14:9). Such an approach further explains how Muḥammad could insist, “‘I am only a mortal the like of you’” (Q. 18:110) and yet could equally declare, “Whosoever obeys the Messenger, thereby obeys God” (Q. 4:82/80). Bahá’u’lláh was keenly aware of this dichotomy and wrote, “‘When I contemplate, O my God, the relationship that bindeth me to Thee, I am moved to proclaim to all created things “Verily I am God!”; and when I consider my own self, lo, I find it coarser than clay.’”

It is true that Judaism and Islám, perhaps because they were born in the midst of, and were forced to struggle mightily against, mythological ways of thinking, have on the whole stressed a transcendental theology and chosen to exclude the Prophet from any divinity, whereas Christianity and Hinduism, with their common, inveterate theological immanentalism, have tended to identify their Prophets with God in an absolute sort of way. We might say that the Bahá’í Faith, which combines a transcendental theology with a theophanic Prophetology, represents a middle course between the extremes into which the past religious traditions have fallen.

As to the resolution of the seeming contradiction [Page 26] of humanity and divinity coexisting in the same being, we might point out that modern psychology and physics have both made discoveries that possibly shed light on this phenomenon. Gestalt psychology has shown that under certain circumstances, the same perceptual configuration can be construed by the mind in two entirely different ways. A common example is that of a pattern which can be seen either as a vase or as two profiles facing one another. This can happen whenever a pattern is such that for any figure picked out by the eye, there is a ground of nearly equal size and of equal organization. What is important here is that the same pattern can reveal two completely different forms: “The reversible figure phenomenon is one demonstration of the dynamic nature of forms. Each reversal means that a new figure is seen, a figure with new properties, not that change in attention has merely altered the degree of clarity with which the two figures are perceived.” It might be suggested that the Manifestations of God confront the mind with information as ambiguous as that which the vase / profile pattern presents to the eye and that the divine / human dichotomy here represents a sort of conceptual “Gestalt switch.”

That this visual phenomenon might have a mental correlate is a position given support by the dilemma of the physicists who developed quantum mechanics and who are unable to arrive at a conceptual model that consistently, causally explains their experimental results. It seems that electrons sometimes appear to behave like particles and sometimes like waves. It was first thought that these two models were mutually exclusive, but it was later seen that there was no decisive experiment which might decide in favor of one or the other of them. To the question, “Is the electron a particle or a wave?”, the physicist can only reply that it is impossible to know and that sometimes it acts like the one, sometimes like the other. It was the Danish physicist Niels Bohr who made a crucial breakthrough in this area with the formulation of his famous Principle of Complementarity, which stated that both the wave and the particle models were necessary to account fully for the behavior of electromagnetic phenomena. Bohr himself was not unaware of the wider implications of this principle, and he recognized that it is reminiscent of the ancient Chinese Yin-Yang philosophy, which viewed apparent opposites (hills/valleys, male/female) as parts of a larger whole. Bohr himself suggests that mercy and justice, which appear mutually exclusive, can only be reconciled by a recognition of the Principle of Complementarity. We may now suggest that the Manifestations of God exhibit evidences of both divinity and humanity in much the same way as electrons behave alternately as waves and particles and that as with the latter, so with the former, both models need to be taken in conjunction if a more complete understanding is to be [Page 27] reached. Both the Principle of Complementarity and the concept of the Gestalt switch provide concepts whereby we can understand the apparent contradictions in the two-nature Prophetology of the Bahá’í Faith. Such an approach further sheds light on the process whereby Christianity and Islám variously interpreted the unitive revelations from God through Jesus and Muḥammad. Christians tended to see the profiles, Muslims the vase. Christians perceived the particle, Muslims the wave.

FINALLY, we should briefly deal with the Bahá’í understanding of the relationship of Jesus to Muḥammad and of Bahá’u’lláh to both of them. First, it should be stressed that all of the book-bearing Prophets, the “Prophets ‘endowed with constancy,’” are equal in station. Indeed, to exalt one of the Manifestations of God above the others is seen by Bahá’ís to be a very serious error.

Second, Bahá’í eschatology will prove relevant to the relationship of the Prophets to one another. Corbin points out that the concept of the divine Manifestation (which is shared by the Bahá’í Faith) provided Shí‘ah Islám with the basis for the development of a cyclical view of history and prophecy. Building on the cyclicity of Shí‘ah thought, Bahá’u’lláh interpreted cosmological eschatology as sociological eschatology. He claimed that the eschatological pronouncements of Jesus and Muḥammad had reference, not to the end of the physical cosmos in linear time, but to the cyclical collapse of institutions of civilization. For Bahá’u’lláh, the darkening of the sun, the fall of the stars, and all the other traditional apocalyptic symbols refer to the entropic stagnation of religion as the bearer of values in society.

When the value structure of a society disintegrates, a new charismatic figure often arises to establish a new order. All of history is dominated, in the Bahá’í view, by a periodic cultural apocalypse and messianic renewal. The time of the end and the return of Christ are thus cyclical events. Each Prophet who arises does so at the time of the End for His own civilization and is thus a manifestation of the Parousiac (advent) Christ. Bahá’u’lláh understood Jesus’ saying, “‘I go away, and I will come to you’” (John 14:28) to be an eternal verity of the Manifestations of God. Muḥammad, the Báb, and Bahá’u’lláh are all in some sense the Return of Christ. There is no question of reincarnation here; rather their mystic unity proceeds from their common function as the incarnation of the Word. Bahá’u’lláh has thus identified Jesus and Muḥammad ibn ‘Abdu’lláh with one another in a crucial way.

As for the position of Bahá’u’lláh, the Bahá’í doctrine is that each cycle of human history has two periods, that of its inception and infancy and that of its maturity, throughout which a succession of charismatic Prophets appear to provide civilization with the ethical guidelines and spiritual dynamism to progress. At that point where the cycle comes to maturity, a Universal Manifestation of God appears, Who, while not ontologically different from all the other Manifestations, by virtue of His unique position in history dominates the entire cycle. What went before Him culminates in Him, and what comes after Him fulfills Him. Our particular cycle began with Adam (a historical prophet rather than a mythological Father of Mankind) about six thousand years ago. It then proceeded through the epicycles of the historical High-Prophets, and reached maturity in Bahá’u’lláh—Who will yet be followed by future Prophets with the power to abrogate His particular dispensation. As the prophetic culmination of six thousand years of history, Bahá’u’lláh’s revelation indicates for Him an exaltation even greater than that accorded Jesus. While Jesus received the Name of God, “Lord,” of the dispensation prior to His, Bahá’u’lláh receives [Page 28] the Names of God in several prior traditions, including the tetragrammaton of Judaism, the “Father” of Jesus Himself, and the hidden, Hundredth Name of God in Islám, which is revealed to be “Al-Abhá,” the “All-Splendrous.”

In summary, we can isolate three basic ways in which the Bahá’í Faith can make an important contribution to the modern encounter of Christianity and Islám. The first is the tremendous will to mutual understanding and harmony among the religions that the Teachings of Bahá’u’lláh communicate. The second is the original and creative solutions offered in the Bahá’í scriptures to the particular points of controversy between the Christian and Islamic traditions. The third potential contribution of the Bahá’ís is their own living witness to the compatibility of the Bible and the Qur’án. The movement of history has so far vindicated Bahá’u’lláh’s commitment to an irenic encounter of the world religions. As the peoples who inhabit the globe find themselves in increasingly close quarters with one another, and as a naive ethnocentrism becomes frighteningly self-destructive, it seems clear that to the extent that religion continues to be a powerful factor in the governance of human affairs, there is a need for the Bahá’í witness to the unity of the religions. That witness “Unequivocally” and “without the least reservation . . . proclaims all established religions to be divine in origin, identical in their aims, complementary in their functions, continuous in their purpose, indispensable in their value to mankind.”

[Page 29]

[Page 30]

At the Forks

It’s not far, only up the hill and around the turn,

a graveyard neatly kept and a stone wall.

From the bridge at the edge of the wood I can see it

from the bridge I can see cows, their swollen sides

heaving as they walk,

birds creaking branches on the trees, fluttering

from ground to bough,

squirrels bravely snatching nuts from the worn path

because they are used to me.

I am part of them.

But there is a gravel road through the tombstones,

stopping at the tall iron gate,

a black top parking lot that sweats in the heat,

and a church with locked doors

(I have tried the doors, but no more.)

I have seen the church before—

the basement is open when the caretaker comes—

I will enter quietly.

Below, the damp smell of old cement,

walls shifting through the years have settled

to uneasy silence.

Two ants crawl rapidly across the floor.

[Page 31]

The stairs are dark and I sense the holiness

that is lost somewhere in the empty rooms.

My feet touch the soft rug on the upper floor

with a reverence that is partly fear.

It is red, all of it;

the carpet, the small pillows that soften the pews

for old backs and young ones,

the dusk light filtered through stained glass,

the covers of hymnals.

I come to pray, but I do not.

Instead I wander through rooms,

touching, breathing lightly.

I wait for others to come,

but they do not, they will never come when I am here.

The pencils on long tables are new and sharp,

the books worn, the pictures grey.

And because this is a holy place, I leave too soon;

I am helpless in this house alone.

I leave swiftly, dart across the basement,

exhaling to open air, the gravel road,

the somber tombstones.

I run to the bridge at the edge of the wood.

—Judith Rhoads Alamia

[Page 32]

A Model for Moral judgments

BY GERALD B. PARKS

IN THIS PAPER I shall address myself to two interrelated questions: How do we judge an individual? And how do we judge a society? Both these questions were raised in my essay “The Necessity of a Utopia,” in which brief tentative answers were given. The following paragraphs develop the same line of reasoning more fully.

In “The Necessity of a Utopia” I stated: “We judge a society as we judge an individual (or anything else, for that matter)—on the basis of certain . . . assumptions about what it should be or do. In the sphere of individual conduct this is clear. We condemn a man who kills his fiancée, for example, because we assume murder is wrong. If the assumption should change, so would our judgment. Thus, in war, we do not condemn the soldier who kills because we assume it is right to kill an enemy. The pacifist’s judgments and conclusions are different because he assumes that it is always wrong to kill, even when the person killed is an enemy.”

Our judgments, then, will depend upon our assumptions. These assumptions may be conscious or unconscious, or both, and they effectively guide not only our intellectual judgments but our conduct as well. The more unconscious they are, the more imperious they are as governors of conduct, but the more unreliable as guidelines for rational action. It should be the task of every reasoning individual to examine dispassionately the axioms that serve him as bases for his social life, lest he become merely a prey to caprice or passion or a passing vogue.

Normally, however, we do not question the assumptions that determine our judgments of individual conduct or social organization unless they give rise to conflicts that put us in a state of crisis. This may happen because most, if not all, of our assumptions are inherently imprecise, having never been defined by us in all their implications, or because of contradictions arising between some of them (or, to be more precise, contradictory implications deriving from assumptions that, at first sight, may not appear to be contradictory). Let us take the example of a soldier in the army. Suppose that the soldier has had a Christian education and feels it is wrong to kill but that he is also loyal to his country and knows he must obey orders. There is no apparent contradiction between these principles, but it is clear that a certain moral crisis may arise as soon as the soldier is ordered to kill. He must then modify his original assumptions, either to permit him to kill when ordered to do so or [Page 33] to refuse to carry out orders that violate his personal moral code (and take the consequences, naturally). Conscious moral decisions of this sort (as opposed to what may be termed unconscious moral reflexes) are much more likely to be taken in just such times of crisis, when the contradictory implications of differing assumptions become apparent.

Now, crises are rather frequent in times like our own, in which there may be little or no agreement between different individuals as to their moral assumptions. Furthermore, the number of assumptions that each person uses to operate is very large; hence, contradictions and crises are constantly cropping up. Nor can it be said that there is, as yet, a science of morals, though moral philosophy is a venerable discipline. (Some modern philosophers altogether exclude ethics from the domain of philosophy. For example, A. J. Ayer writes that “We can now see why it is impossible to find a criterion for determining the validity of ethical judgments. It is not because they have an ‘absolute’ validity that is mysteriously independent of ordinary sense-experience, but because they have no objective validity whatsoever. If a sentence makes no statement at all, there is obviously no sense in asking whether what it says is true or false. And we have seen that sentences which simply express moral judgments do not say anything. They are pure expressions of feeling and as such do not come under the category of truth and falsehood. They are unverifiable for the same reason as a cry of pain or a word of command is unverifiable —because they do not express genuine propositions.”)

There would seem to be considerable justification for Ayer’s position that moral propositions are not true or false, and that “ethics, as a branch of knowledge, is nothing more than a department of psychology and sociology” (and, may I add, anthropology). Yet it is certainly not an unimportant field of enquiry, as the question “How should we live?” is perhaps the most challenging one a man can ask himself. What follows, then, though it may be an exercise in “casuistry,” nonetheless has the modest aim of clarifying some of the moral ideas to be found in modern Western society. No claim is here being made for the validity of any of these ideas.

Although there is no perfect agreement among adults in the Western world [Page 34] today (not to mention other cultures and other epochs), still certain moral assumptions are widely held. If we could collect all such assumptions about human conduct and make a list of them, we should have a sort of ideal person whom we could use as a model for judging conduct. Of course, we should also have to make a systematic analysis of our assumptions to see if they are conflicting or contradictory or incomplete, and we could amend or discard those which proved unsatisfactory.

There would thus be two stages in the construction of such a model. The first attempt, to be complete, would probably have to contain thousands of assumptions, both moral and pseudomoral. (A pseudomoral assumption is one that guides our judgments of conduct and character even though it may contain no ethical content, in the traditional sense, or may be a statement of a presumed fact. Thus “One should always smile and be cheerful” is a pseudomoral proposition. It is similar to a moral proposition in that it states what one “should” do and is used for evaluating behavior. “He is always so depressed [or neurotic, or paranoid, etc.]” is an example of a pseudomoral statement [with its implied judgment] masquerading as a statement of fact.) Then, on detailed analysis, it would probably be found that these statements could be reduced to a few, more basic ones. A hypothetical third stage, which for the moment can only be considered theoretical, would be the reduction of all moral assumptions to a single, all-inclusive proposition, the one, that is, that contains all of them in nucleo.

Such a thorough analysis of moral propositions (or, if we wish to call it so, a sort of moral algebra) would require a full-length book for its development. But some idea of what is meant can be given by the following sketch. The assumptions, for convenience of presentation, are given in the form of commandments. Please note that moral statements are mixed with pseudomoral ones and that what follows is simply a random list of some moral assumptions or pieces of advice that can be picked up from everyday observation; anyone could add to the list indefinitely. This is merely a sample and by no means contains all of the most important moral propositions that might be made.

(1) Do not kill.

(2) Do not steal.

(3) Do not fornicate.

(4) Do not commit adultery.

(5) Do not commit suicide.

(6) Do not lie.

(7) Do not swear.

(8) Do not envy what others have.

(9) Do not cheat.

(10) Do not try to be what you cannot be.

(11) Be honest.

(12) Be cheerful.

(13) Love your fellow man.

(14) Help those who are in need.

(15) Know yourself.

(16) Be faithful to friends and spouses. [Page 35]

(17) Be content with what you have.

(18) Obey your father and mother.

(19) Obey the laws of the land.

(20) Be generous.

It should be pointed out immediately that the numbering here used is purely casual and does not imply any ranking order. A hierarchical order could, no doubt, be introduced into them, but it seems more appropriate to introduce such an order at a later stage of the analysis.

FOR THE MOMENT, let us take a look at the “raw material” of our study. It is obvious at a glance that this list contains two types of statements (or assumptions), which here take the form of positive and negative commands. This grammatical difference in form corresponds to the difference between the adjectives “right” and “wrong” (or the verbs “One should” and “One should not”); thus the statement “Do not steal” is equivalent to the sentence “It is wrong to steal” (or, “One should not steal”), and “Be honest” to “It is right to be honest” (or, “One should be honest”). (Note that the adjectives “good” and “bad” may replace “right” and “wrong.”) In effect the adjectives “good,” “bad,” “right,” “wrong,” and the verbs “should,” “ought to,” “supposed to,” etc., only mask the fact that all moral utterances are really commands (or, if the action has already been committed, expressions of approval or disapproval).

Moreover, this difference of form conceals the fact that some of these assumptions are, if not identical, at least overlapping. Our concept of “honesty” certainly includes the injunctions not to lie, cheat, or steal. Assumption (17) merely restates in positive form the ideas expressed in (8). Number (20) implies number (14), although it also implies much more. Assumption (15) presumably entails (10); number (16) subsumes both (3) and (4), as well as others not listed here (and overlaps with number 14). Assumption number (13) may be said to underlie most, if not all, of the others, in that true love for one’s fellow man would automatically lead to behavior in conformity with the commandments given here.

On analysis, then, the list’s assumptions might be reduced to the following (no ranking order is here intended): (a) Love your fellow man. (b) Be honest. (c) Know yourself. (d) Be faithful. (e) Be content with your lot. (f) Be generous. (g) Obey the laws. (h) Obey your father and mother. (i) Be cheerful. (j) Do not kill. (k) Do not commit suicide. (l) Do not swear. Further analysis would no doubt reduce the number further, but I think the method to follow has, at least, been demonstrated. It can be seen that positive commands are more inclusive than negative commands, most of which tend to be exemplications of some positive command (as “Do not cheat” is one example of what is meant by “Be honeSt”).

There may, however, be conflict between some of these axioms under certain conditions. What happens, for example, if one’s parents encourage one to disobey the laws of the land (in an episode of civil disobedience, let us [Page 36] say)? Should one disobey the laws (with the possible risks that involves) in order to please one’s parents, or should one obey the laws, disobey one’s parents, and perhaps be punished by them? In such cases, further assumptions are needed to resolve the conflict. Some sort of hierarchy, or priority ranking, could solve the problem, either by assuming that obedience to the laws takes precedence over obedience to one’s parents or vice versa. The most convincing way of establishing a ranking order seems to be that of proceeding by the elimination of absurdities. For example, the above situation might be solved by examining the real consequences of the act of disobedience. If the law to be disobeyed brings with it life imprisonment, whereas parental disapproval goes no further than verbal abuse, it is clear that it would be absurd to break the law in question. This does not mean that the morality of all actions should be judged by the practical consequences of the action. Some acts are commonly accepted as having an inherent value; sacrificing oneself for the good of others or martyrdom (sacrificing one’s life to uphold an idea or belief) are examples. A complete science of morality would have to admit that certain apparently absurd actions (such as self-sacrifice) have great moral value—and partly, one might argue, because of their practical consequences for others, for society in general. But patently absurd situations can also be resolved by appealing to the common good, or to common sense.

Further examples may make this even clearer. Let us suppose for the moment that it is more important to be generous than to obey the laws. Thus if one has a good chance to steal some money to give to needy people, one should do so. One could even justify this by saying, “That may seem ridiculous, but if the needy family is literally starving, violation of the law against stealing might be justified. That is, the failure to save a life when there is a clear opportunity to do so, even if to save a life a law must be broken, is morally equivalent to murder.” But by such reasoning anyone could justify breaking any law as long as he did so to benefit others. Clearly this would lead to anarchy in a short time—a society in which no one could live decently. Therefore, the above priority ranking is absurd and must be rejected. (I am aware that I have just introduced another assumption—the necessity to avoid social anarchy—in order to resolve the conflict. This is in line with what I said earlier about the frequent need to appeal to other postulates besides the few given here.)

Likewise, if we assume that it is more important to be cheerful (i) than not to kill (j), we reach the absurd conclusion that “If you’ve got to kill, be cheerful about it.” Common sense tells us that this is nonsense.

A tentative hierarchy might be the following (I welcome any comments and suggestions for its improvement) : (I) Love your fellow man (a). (X) Do not kill (j). (II) Be honest (b). (XI) Do not commit suicide (k). (VII) Obey the laws (g). (III) Know yourself (c). (IV) Be faithful (d). (V) Be content with your lot (e). (VI) Be generous (f). (VIII) Obey your father and mother (h). (XII) Do not swear (l). (IX) Be cheerful (i).

N.B. One must be careful to consider all aspects of every situation. Thus if [Page 37] it is more important to love one’s fellow man than to be honest, this does not mean that a person who loves mankind will regularly tell lies; indeed, if he did so, he would show that he truly did not love anyone. However, there may be certain occasions when lying is justified, out of love and consideration for others (the classic example is that of a doctor withholding news of imminent death from one of his patients).

Even the above example, however, is open to question. By its nature moral behavior means the rational application of moral assumptions or guidelines to complex real situations, in which there is always room for choice and, consequently, error. But the better we realize what our assumptions are, and the finer we make them (the more we qualify them to suit them to various kinds of situations), the more reliable and comprehensive our moral choices will be.

The broadest assumptions are those that involve abstract concepts such as honesty, faithfulness, or dignity. They are also extremely vague unless qualified by specific exemplifications, which often take the form of negative commands. This is psychologically interesting, in that a quality that we think of as positive (for example, honesty) in actuality becomes manifest through abstentions from action, rather than through positive action; our worth, it seems, is based upon what we do not do. (This is not always true, of course. An honest person is also one who returns lost property, reports dishonest actions, and so on. Furthermore, to refrain from a wicked action is not simple inaction, but requires a considerable attempt at self-mastery, resistance to temptation, and the like. More energy may be expended in suppressing a response to a strong stimulus than in responding normally to a stimulus. Thus, while it is not always possible to draw a clear line of demarcation between positive and “negative” action (or inaction), the importance of not acting should not be underestimated.)

It is thus clear that not all assumptions are of the same kind of importance. Some are positive, others negative; some abstract and general, others concrete and (relatively) particular; some subjective (that is, regarding an individual’s conduct toward himself—“Know thyself” is of this sort), others objective (regarding an individual’s conduct toward others). One may also dispute on the merits or demerits of particular assumptions, and the advisability of accepting them. If most or all of the assumptions are changed, the model for behavior will be radically different. Obviously, the moral assumptions of a teen-age gang differ enormously from those given above. (At this point it becomes clear that, as mentioned earlier, ethics spills over into sociology and anthropology.) But one point must be stressed: even the most highly qualified statements are only rough guidelines for action or judgment. Any real situation involves so many concurrent circumstances that inevitably no assumptions will fit it precisely; conflicts between different values come into play, and the individual must make choices and judgments, often on the basis of priority rankings invented ad hoc. This is the essence of moral action.

I mentioned above that it might be possible to reduce all our moral assumptions to one basic, underlying principle. What follows is just a hypothesis and is not to be construed as a logical deduction from what has gone before. But it seems that any serious attempt to reduce our various and often conflicting moral judgments to one essential and irreducible maxim would probably [Page 38] lead us to affirm that the greatest value is respect for life, both one’s own and that of others; for without life no other value can exist. Many of the above commandments are, in fact, concerned with preserving or enhancing existence (for example, “Help those who are in need,” “Love your fellow man”) and two directly prohibit the taking of life (injunctions against murder and suicide). The prohibition of suicide is eminently logical, since if one respects life and has a fundamental attitude of respect for being, he must also respect his own life; in fact, this respect for one’s own life is commonly the foundation of respect for the existence of others.

This psychological and moral truth was pointed out over two hundred years ago by Jonathan Edwards in his essay The Nature of True Virtue. “True Virtue,” he wrote, “most essentially consists in benevolence to Being in general. Or perhaps to speak more accurately, it is that consent, propensity and union of heart to Being in general, that is immediately exercised in a general good will.” Virtue, he continues, most essentially consists in love; but not love of any one particular Being, but of Being in general. That is, the love we feel for any particular example of Being is only a natural consequence of our love for Being in general, which is God. (It is a corollary of this that it is necessary to withhold consent, or love, from individual Beings who are in a state of discord with Being in general; thus hatred of a particular person may have its origin in general love of Being.)

So far we have been concerned with describing and analyzing moral assumptions as applied to individual behavior; as we said earlier, if we made a list of all such assumptions and analyzed them carefully, we should then have a model by which to judge individual lives and conduct. We have seen how such an analysis might be conducted, how overlapping assumptions can be weeded out, how tentative ranking orders can be established, and how (perhaps) a common denominator for all moral assumptions can be found.

THE REST of this paper is really a sort of appendix. Nonetheless, certain considerations seem worth making. As was pointed out in my previous essay, “The Necessity of a Utopia,” a similar sort of analysis can be made of the assumptions we use to judge societies or guide social action. Social criticism, [Page 39] or politics, is really just an extension of moral philosophy; it involves the application of moral assumptions to groups of individuals, rather than to individuals considered separately. Naturally, some of the assumptions remain the same—the requirement of honesty, for example—but many are different because of the different nature of group phenomena. All aspirations for social justice, however, may be seen as an outgrowth of the moral imperative to love one’s fellow man, and perhaps also other social goods can be traced back to the fundamental moral laws governing human conduct.

To reiterate, many of our criteria used for judging a society are simply moral commandments applied to the social sphere. Thus a sense of justice corresponds to common ideas of fair play; honesty is expected of public officials as well as of private citizens; loyalty is transferred from the family to the State, and so on. But there are some interesting differences. For example, in most societies the right to kill legitimately is reserved exclusively to governments. Only the government can lawfully execute criminals, or suspected criminals; only the government can wage war. Such legitimate killing is almost never referred to as killing at all, but as capital punishment, defensive action, or in war, combat, offensive action, and so on, whereas the illegitimate killing performed by individuals is known as murder, homicide, manslaughter, or simply killing and is (in an efficient state) speedily punished.

This distinction, of course, raises enormous problems. Although it may seem easy to state that the killing carried out by governments is legitimate because they have this power by law, and that individuals have this power neither by law nor by moral precept (except when they are acting as the agents of the State), yet there may be times when people feel that the power of the government is being abused and is thus no longer legitimate. Do they then have the right to overthrow existing regimes or to engage in terrorism or obstructive behavior? As in every case of crisis in moral attitudes, such quandaries can only be solved by setting up hierarchical structurings of our moral concepts, introducing new ones into the equations, if necessary.

In sum, all criteria used for judging a society are essentially moral precepts and in many cases are extensions of moral principles operative in the regulation of individual conduct. This is true even though different standards of morality may, in some cases, be applied when dealing with governmental actions. Yet surely some of the most radical of all social criticism consists simply in the application of ordinarily accepted moral rules to the operations of governments or other public institutions. It is such an attitude that lay behind opposition to the Vietnam War and that lies behind denunciations of police brutality, capital punishment, and the like.

[Page 40] As for individual morality, the systematic collection and analysis of all our assumptions regarding social organization would provide us with a complete and coherent model of an ideal society, a “utopia” that might serve us as a goal for action. Social criticism or action that has no such ideal model will necessarily be incoherent, contradictory, and partial and may even be counterproductive. The formulation of a rigorously logical utopia would provide us with a clear set of criteria by which to judge the performance of today’s governments. What they do would then be acceptable to the extent that their actions coincide with the utopian model, and unacceptable when they deviate from what the model tells us is reasonable and just. The existence of our theoretical model would also permit us to determine whether the world is making progress in the right direCtion and, if so, how fast.

In this way, we could avoid the usual pitfalls of a social criticism based on unexamined premises, which is just as dangerous as a moral code that has not been the object of serious reflection. We have to calculate the rights and wrongs of our world. And we know that our criticism of society is ultimately based on moral precepts, inasmuch as all criticisms imply judgment, and judgments are inevitably moral.

No doubt many such utopian models are possible, and many writers have tried to produce more or less complete visions of a better world (one very interesting example is Aldous Huxley’s Island). But perhaps the most complete example is to be found in the Bahá’í Faith. Bahá’u’lláh, starting from the principle that mankind is one—which follows from the realization that God is One—bans all artificial divisions into tribes, sects, religions, nations, and races; all prejudices must be overcome, and all mankind gathered together into one unified community. This unity must be political and economic, as well as spiritual; hence Bahá’u’lláh proclaims the need for a world government. Nor can the practical aspects of life be ignored; thus there needs to be a universal auxiliary language, to facilitate communication among men, a universal system of weights and measures, and so on.

There is no space here for more than this brief sketch, but what has already been said gives some idea of the great shortcomings of present-day society and the long road ahead. It is not only the outer forms of life that must change, but the inner spirit as well, without which they are nothing. As ‘Abdu’l-Bahá put it: “Old trees yield no fruitage; old ideas and methods are obsolete and worthless now. Old standards of ethics, moral codes and methods of living in the past will not suffice for the present age of advancement and progress.” What is needed is a dispassionate examination of all our values, both individual and social, so that we can create models of behavior that will allow us to bring into being a future more in harmony with human strivings than our past.

[Page 41]

Unfinished Visions

A REVIEW OF THEODORE ROSZAK’S Unfinished Animal: The Aquarian Frontier and the Evolution of Consciousness (NEW YORK: HARPER, 1975), 271 PAGES, AND L. S. STAVRIANOS’S The Promise of the Coming Dark Age (SAN FRANCISCO: W. H. FREEMAN AND COMPANY, 1976), 211 PAGES

BY GARY L. MORRISON

IN 1928 E. M. Forster published a parable for our times, a fantasy entitled “The Machine Stops.” In it he depicted advanced technology and modern machines, along with those social and cultural forces bent solely toward material comfort, as evils diminishing the human spirit. Man had lost control of the new technology he had created and, consequently, of the world around him. He had become a slave to technology, dehumanized and spiritless. Kuno, the hero of the story, defies society and risks “homelessness” to make the discovery that “Man is the measure”—“Man’s feet are the measure for distance, his hands are the measure for ownership, his body is the measure for all that is lovable and desirable and strong.” Kuno discovers “a way of my own.” In Kuno’s revelation Forster captures the intent of modern, secular society: to do away with traditional belief and faith in any outside spiritual authority and to substitute man as the sole standard of material and spiritual good.

Indeed, one of the distinguishing features of Western literature and philosophy from the nineteenth century to the present is the disappearance of God. Seeing man without God and, therefore, without a soul destined to live in a hereafter, the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre has characterized modern man as having only two conditions: being and nothingness. In Sartre’s view man, faced with an empty universe, must grasp life while he may; and, in the courageous act of forging ahead against the unwavering odds of total nothingness, man becomes his own destiny. This existentialist view of life, which tries to find meaning in life without God, now permeates Western thinking. Even those who pay lip service to God and Christianity—at the highest levels of public life in fashionable prayer breakfasts and in middle- and lower-class born-again movements—continue to act as though God does not exist and, at the same time, to argue that the West is not godless because x number of people attend churches of their choice.

Yet this world without God that we have fashioned for ourselves in the twentieth century is an increasingly perilous one. We have passed through two world wars and countless regional wars. The processes of decolonialization and modernization have resulted often in disastrous sociocultural, economic, and political dislocations. The new economic imperialism pits the more developed against the less developed nations. The emergence of conflicting ideologies and various “isms” fractures even firmly established national entities into disunified parts. Problems of poverty, overpopulation, and an endangered environment appear so immense as to be without [Page 42] precedent or solution. We have seen that the “best and the brightest” minds in America in recent years were capable only of bringing about a major regional war in Southeast Asia and worldwide inflation, stagflation, and economic recession. We feel we can no longer control the forces we have unleashed; consequently, in the Western world there is a growing despair of rational change. On the one hand, we appear to be turning away from any hope of improving qualitatively the life of mankind through existing institutions, leaving our governments to contend with keeping the seams of society from simply splitting apart. On the other hand, radical movements briefly flourish, then fall by the wayside, or modify their aims in order to gain admittance into established political and economic structures, proving the futility of hopes for radical change.

We have reached a dead end. Traditional belief and faith are moribund; the moral order of the world is shaken. Yet, like Kuno, still trying to discover “a way of my own” to fill the spiritual void and to restore a semblance of order to the world, we find ourselves in the 1970s veering off in two directions. One is toward increased introspection, a turning away from the world and any social or personal responsibility and a focus on the self. Our own personal “space” and “trips” are all that matters—out from the trap of drugs and the general radicalism of the 1960s and into the movements of the 1970s: health foods and vegetarianism, macrobiotics, biorhythms, bioenergetics, est, yoga, massage, Rolfing, transactional analysis. The other direction reveals a new sociopolitical emphasis on localism in the rise of neighborhood and citizens’ associations striving for self-management and in calls for self-determination among ethnic and special interest groups ranging from blacks to women to the elderly. These movements reveal a vigorous counterculture that, contrary to the myopic perspective of some critics, has continued from the 1960s to make headway in many areas of our lives in the 1970s.

The counterculture—coming from the matrix of existentialism but increasingly concerned with transcendent values—provides so many alternatives in life styles and beliefs that it is becoming perhaps our best indication of the weakening of the foundations of the modern existentialist world view. At the same time it shows, by the vast proliferation of its alternatives, how difficult it is today to establish the fundamental unity upon which stable societies are built and with which they are held together. Yet if we survey the personal trips of the counterculture gurus or tune in to the concerns of special interest groups, we can perceive hints of a newly emerging sensibility, as yet lacking definition but certainly linked to a new order of concepts, values, morality, hence to a new civilization arising in our midst.

Two significant, recent books treat this period of transition from an old to a new sensibility from different starting points. Theodore Roszak, who identified the emerging counterculture in the late 1960s, has chosen to write a survey and general critique of the religious revival currently gripping the Western world in Unfinished Animal: The Aquarian Frontier and the Evolution of Consciousness, in which he discusses “a transformation of human personality in progress which is of evolutionary proportions, a shift of consciousness fully as epoch-making as the appearance of speech or of the tool-making talents in our cultural repertory” (p. 3). Recognizing a similar transformation, L. S. Stavrianos brings a historian’s steady perspective and scholarly mind to his subject in The Promise of the Coming Dark Age, which focuses on “not only the death agonies of an old order but also the birth pangs of a new epoch—a new golden age which assuredly will outshine those of the past” (p. vii). Relying chiefly on present-day examples of experimentation and innovation throughout the world in the areas of technology use, working conditions (including management and labor relations), democracy, [Page 43] and self-actualization, Stavrianos tries to generalize the trends in the emerging new consciousness.

Both writers collate many bits of interesting information and suggest trends that are often thought provoking; nevertheless, the reader finishes their works unsatisfied. They place man at the door of a new era in his collective development and try to guess what lies beyond by describing what is seen through the keyhole; their field of vision is necessarily restricted. If the new era is a quantum leap in the fortunes of mankind, an evolutionary change of tremendous magnitude, as both authors suggest, one might suppose that present trends—debatable as to their portents— are not sufficient indicators of the world beyond tomorrow. Thus whereas Roszak sees a promising future emerging from the current religious revival, Stavrianos believes that the proliferation of sects and the reliance on subjective values indicates a widespread “flight from reason” that will result in a dark age. Roszak and Stavrianos present unfinished, conjectural visions of a new age that, nevertheless, command attention because they help to illuminate coherent patterns in seemingly chaotic events of the present.

Roszak identifies two contrasting forces in the present religious revival in the West: introspection and universality. On the one hand, “Personal awareness burrows deeper into itself” and “we grow more introspectively inquisitive about the deep powers of the personality,” while, on the other hand, “our sense of belonging reaches out further” so that we can “embrace the natural beauties and all sentient beings, each in her and his and its native peculiarity” (p. 4). A “consciousness circuit” channels every spiritual impulse toward the “Aquarian frontier,” which Roszak defines as “an evolutionary transition of consciousness” (p. 75). It is possible to reach the Aquarian frontier by any entry point on the consciousness circuit, Roszak instructs us. The points of entry, therefore, include various Judeo-Christian revivals such as the New Pentacostalism “Jesus Freak sects and communes” and the Havurot movement; eastern religions and their offshoots including all the “personal gurus and mass-movement swamis”; esoteric studies from theosophy to kabbalism, astrology, and tarot, among others; eupsychian therapies such as Jungian psychiatry, Gestalt, primal therapy, humanistic psychology, and mind dynamics; body therapies like Rolfing, bioenergetics, aikido, orgonomy, and massage; etherealized healing from acupuncture, polarity therapy, and homeopathy to psychic surgery, yoga āsana therapy, and herbology; neoprimitivism and paganism, which includes the philosophical mythology of Jung and Eliade, the shamanism of Don Juan, and voluntary primitivism as a lifestyle; organicism including everything from simple nature-food cults and macrobiotics to biorhythms and fruitarian dieting; wild science such as ESP and parapsychology, psychedelic and split-brain research, Kirlian photography, thanatology, and synergistics, among others; psychics, spiritualists, and occult groups such as Uri Geller, Edgar Cayce, Eckankar, and pyramidology; psychotronics including neural cybernetics and electronic manipulations of the brain; and pop culture from science fiction, metaphysical fantasy, and UFO cults to acid rock, multimedia spectaculars, and “unstructured mind-blowing” (pp. 26-29). There is no end to the possibilities, each new experience raising up its gurus and commanding a legion of devoted advocates.

Roszak identifies the commitment to the personal quest for discovery and the collective proliferation of cults, movements, and experiences to expand the limits of the personality with the twin concepts of introspection and universality. For him everything naturally fits into the network of the consciousness circuit—“an effort to free the transcendent powers of the personality from the dead hand of the culture’s secular and religious orthodoxies” (p. 6). Nothing is laughed off, scorned, or cast aside—even these “flawed, contemporary gestures of transcendence” have some value—because “transcendent possibilities lie at the root of every human fascination which is not irredeemably [Page 44] demonic” (p. 16). Roszak suggests that at the base of the current religious revival there exists a genuine “search for rebirth” in the sense that people are seeking to exchange their old and empty lives for new and spiritually dynamic ones.

It must be admitted, however, that “not everything that promises rebirth brings the experience of transcendence”; some alternatives —and Roszak includes scathing critiques of Van Daniken, Velikovsky, Wilhelm Reich’s orgone theories, and Uri Geller’s theatrics, although he does not reject them as points of entry on the consciousness circuit—are merely among the “many forms of ‘spiritual fascism’ which only exploit our need” (p. 39). But who is to distinguish the valid from the merely exploitative, the transcendent from the irredeemably demonic, and by what standards or criteria?—this question Roszak fails to answer convincingly. Faced with the obvious problem that one person’s transcendent experience may be another’s idea of spiritual fascism, Roszak calls for the exercise of “spiritual intelligence”—“the power to tell the greater from the lesser reality, the sacred paradigm from its copies and secular counterfeits.” The source of this spiritual intelligence lies “in sacred tradition, in those ancient springs of visionary knowledge” from which we draw all “metaphysical insight” (p. 13).

Roszak both links the present religious revival to this sacred tradition and judges it thereby. This tradition, which he terms the “Hidden Wisdom,” has little relationship to the great religious movements of history, but it pervades pagan or primitive religion. Between the two kinds of religion, in the murky area that combines philosophy with magic and shamanism, Roszak finds the Hidden Wisdom in gnosticism, tantrism, kabbalism, and Taoism, among other occult traditions, and in its modern form in the teachings of Madame Blavatsky, Rudolf Steiner, and George Gurdjieff in the late nineteenth century. Theirs, then, is the sort of “spiritual intelligence” that Roszak believes will guide mankind beyond the Aquarian frontier into the new age.

Roszak sees in the Hidden Wisdom a revival of the ancient truth that the history of mankind is one of the evolving consciousness of the true nature of the human species. He perceives man to be an unfinished animal, “nature’s uniquely self-creating, self-defining species” that has the task in this life “to discover the godlikeness in whose image we are said to have been cast” and to regain the superhuman perfection that once belonged to us before “some primordial ‘fall’” (pp. 107, 5). Then the reader encounters Roszak’s own curious historical fantasy, a kind of occult history of mankind. He suggests that conscious life began with the Few—beings who were the first to have the divine knowledge that it was the destiny of man to possess. As an unfinished animal, we must reach out and achieve that transcendence first experienced by the Few. Hence for Roszak history is really a “process of ever-expanding receptivity” or evolution, and this process makes of the world a grand drama of redemption and transformation (p. 92).

This “discovery” of Roszak’s could only have been made within a Christian context by someone feeling the need to reject the Christian concept of stasis in favor of the idea of dynamic evolution in the life of mankind. Indeed, Roszak has no room or heart to accept what he lumps together as the Judaic-Christian-Islám complex. These “higher” religions are renounced for placing the divine above nature, for stressing moral duty over all other spiritual considerations, and for their “single-minded ethical emphasis” (pp. 165, 216). In effect Roszak appears to be rejecting Churchianity as the source of the perversion of the ancient truth that the history of mankind is one of evolving consciousness. For him the pursuit of ecstasy through direct religious experience, or what he terms the visionary experience, is our basic spiritual need that will motivate us to ethical action. These concerns do not lead Roszak to consider the revival of ancient truth and direct religious experience within the higher religions or their startling renewal in the Bahá’í teachings; rather, Roszak turns back to the [Page 45] Hidden Wisdom and to his twin themes of introspection and universality. “The way forward is inevitably the way inward,” and, without a single unifying spiritual force outside ourselves, he stresses the need to accept the common experience of all (p. 239).

Roszak, like many modern thinkers, is perfectly content to accept and elucidate a concept of life and evolving consciousness fashioned by man, whether that of the nineteenth-century occult masters or his own, yet to be completely skeptical of, dispense with, or ignore any concept or idea wedded to a claim of divine revelation, such as that made by the Báb and Bahá’u’lláh more than a century ago. Thus, rejecting the higher religions based on claims of divine revelation (presumably because he is exercising spiritual intelligence), Roszak simply categorizes the Bahá’í Faith under “Eastern Religions” as one of the many entry points in the consciousness circuit to the Aquarian frontier. He fails to see that through the higher world religions great transformations in consciousness have occurred. The permanent transformation of large and disparate segments of mankind has always depended on a spiritual factor, on something beyond words and reasoning, an elusive element that captivates man, arouses profound love and loyalty, and, thereby, has the power to transform him. Because Roszak rejects exclusivity, and, therefore, any claim of revelation from an unknown God through a chosen spokesman, he would have man himself be his own standard. Thus the reader is persuaded to accept the concept of a Roszakian consciousness circuit overloaded with hundreds of sects, cults, personal gurus and swamis, all manner of therapies, movements, and beliefs, all clamorously claiming his attention as truth—a veritable smorgasbord of the occult, magical, strange, supernatural, and spiritual, with no common standard save the elusive notion of “spiritual intelligence” by which to distinguish valid from bogus religious experience. In effect, virtually all is acceptable. Almost everything is good. Everything is a “trip.”

Roszak probably realizes the destructive potential in total reliance on subjective experience, because the future he postulates is based on identifying “centers of consensus,” or common areas of understanding shared by many of the groups in the consciousness circuit. He proposes eight such centers of consensus.

First, there is potentiality. Because the way inward naturally allows for innumerable kinds of personal “trips” undertaken with the goal of achieving full potential, future generations will develop a new potentiality therapy to help individuals overcome distress, which will increasingly be seen as the result of “the tension between potentiality and actuality” (p. 241).

The second center of consensus he labels upaya—“proven techniques for awakening and controlling visionary energy” (p. 243). Because future man’s goal will be to achieve a direct, personal experience with transcendence, there will be a vast increase in the number of techniques and disciplines on which people will rely.

The third proposed center of consensus is the concept of transpersonal subjectivity. We will gradually see that spiritual teachings are rooted in a broad range of myth, symbol, and archetype deep in our collective unconscious minds, giving us a transpersonal reality.

Hence, the fourth center of consensus is universality, and this seems to be the core of Roszak’s confusion. He believes that there will be greater acceptance of the many alternative paths to spiritual reality but that there will also be a convergence; once we value all religious experience as valid, we will try “searching out what is humanly common and constant: the essence that has frequently been covered over by a thousand ethnic accretions” (p. 249). Roszak seems to hint at a universal, indivisible Truth that will link multifarious beliefs and unite mankind, but he refuses to admit its entrance into his discussion.

His fifth center of consensus is built around man moving toward wholeness—on the level of the individual, who takes in everything and finds a place for anything in his mental [Page 46] system, and of society, which will gradually blend the sacred and profane so that the material world will reflect the divine. Roszak never suggests how this will come about, how it would be recognized if it did come about, or even the pattern of the divine to be reflected or how this might be revealed.

Instead, he moves on to discuss a sixth center of consensus focusing on organicism. Roszak feels that the body will be seen as a microcosm of the universe and that there will emerge “unashamed physicality and whole-body eroticism” (p. 255). For Roszak, as for many others, the way inward seems to lead not to a healthy respect for the body as the temple of the human spirit but rather to a glorification of the body for its own sake and a confusion of the merely sensuous with the divine.

A seventh center of consensus will emerge around a new respect for the commonplace. It will be reflected in a general revival of folk arts and handicrafts.

Finally, the eighth center of consensus will be in the concept of community reasserting itself, a phase Roszak labels satsang—“the true fellowship of souls striving for mutual enlightenment” or “eupsychian community” (p. 259).

While Roszak would like to see a future in which all manner of subjective experience is possible and valid and integrated into a whole through centers of consensus, nevertheless he fails to convince the reader that his world would be either liberated or liberating. If Truth is so divisible, there is little possibility of ever comprehending anything outside immediate experience. And this can adversely affect the ability to perceive objective reality; in fact, reality itself becomes highly questionable. Reliance on subjective reality can weaken and eventually destroy the ability to discriminate, to form critical value judgments, and to accept agreed-upon verbal concepts and vocabulary, and hence can lead to the demise of the rational mind. In the realm of subjective reality, our personal “trip,” our own “space,” insight, and spiritual journey are all that matter. God is within and in everything; we can strive to reach a state of pure ecstasy to recognize that “I am God” or “I am one with God”—the traditional goal of mystics—and thereby turn away from the world. Roszak does not propose any adequate means of channeling unleashed spiritual energies from total permissiveness to disciplined discrimination. He asks us to view with him a future that will combine every possible religious experience, spiritualize promiscuity, and form loosely organized communities based on shared “trips” to enlightenment.

For a Bahá’í, truth is an objective reality, something outside himself and accessible through effort by all, a major point of departure from Roszak’s view. He is not trapped and confused by glimpses and glitters but liberated and assured by the full and indivisible reflection of the divine in this world. God exists as an unknowable essence, neither an incarnated spirit nor an anthropomorphic father figure. Man cannot know God directly, but can know Him by the qualities He reveals through His Manifestation in a human form; a Buddha, Christ, Muḥammad, or Bahá’u’lláh reflects by His qualities an infinite God to His finite creation, and man’s purpose is to know and to love Him through His Manifestation. Man cannot be God, but he can reach out, by his own efforts, to reflect the radiance of His attributes and thereby achieve the fullness of his identity. For Bahá’ís subjective reality is not an end in itself, as it seems to be for Roszak. Rather, subjective reality is what man makes of himself in his exertions to reflect the divine qualities he inherently possesses. To know one’s own self is not to know God in an absolute sense but to know simply the full potential of his own humanity as a reflection of infinite qualities. Acceptance of God’s Manifestation is an acceptance at once of an objective standard by which to measure the value or worth of all things. True liberty is not “a way of my own” but the submission of one’s personal will to the divine standard, which one might call the Will of God. Acceptance of and submission to an objective reality, after which man can pattern himself, [Page 47] results in the liberation of all the human potentialities within him and unites him with all humanity. Finally, for Bahá’ís, personal or self-realization and fulfillment are meaningless unless accompanied by a journey outwards to embrace their fellow human beings with love and justice, a channeling of the spirit, in other words, into the building of living and viable communities so that man’s profane kingdom of earth truly reflects the sacred kingdom of Heaven in both material and spiritual terms. In this man achieves universality and wholeness.

Whereas Roszak would like to integrate all experience, Bahá’ís believe that some experiences may not be worth integrating. The point of departure is simply in accepting and maintaining a standard by which to discriminate. Roszak would like to see the emergence of a planetary culture in a vague form of satsang, idealized brotherhoods. However, he offers nothing and emphasizes nothing that even suggests a viable resolution to the problem of planetary unity. His future world is something vaguely defined, idealized, and ethereal that appeals to those in search of the instant experience with no corresponding responsibility. Thus his vision represents a turning away from the world of the present, an escape from having to deal with the practical world of economic and political survival. It is distressing to see Roszak offer flashes of real insight only to let them fizzle in an inadequate treatment and a restricted view of the future. Had he explored the revelation of Bahá’u’lláh with the same fervor he devoted to unraveling the mysteries of Madame Blavatsky, he might have contributed a worthwhile book to the future. Instead, he presents a seriously flawed survey and critique of the current religious revival in the West that serves merely to rationalize what the reader already knows from many sources: that the generation of the 1970s is turning inward and escaping from the world.

ALTHOUGH Roszak sees in this a positive force, a major thrust toward the golden age of the Aquarian frontier, L. S. Stavrianos considers it to be a frightening manifestation of a general “flight from reason,” a major symptom of the approaching dark age. Stavrianos gives four characteristics by which to recognize dark ages: economic imperialism, ecological degradation, bureaucratic ossification, and a flight from reason (p. 7). Applying these criteria to the present world, Stavrianos sees that the major metropolitan centers of the industrial world control the economic life of the less developed peripheral areas (economic imperialism); 6 percent of the world’s population in the United States disproportionately consumes one-third of the world’s irreplaceable energy and raw materials output (ecological degradation); vast bureaucracies are spawned by all contemporary, modernizing societies, thereby increasing governmental control and regulation of nearly all aspects of our lives (bureaucratic ossification); and, feeling despair of any rational change, intellectuals and the masses alike are turning to irrationality and mysticism (flight from reason). Stavrianos concludes that “the prospect emerges of a new Dark Age that, like the medieval original, will witness deterioration and demolition, but that will also generate amidst the wreckage new values and new institutions heralding a new epoch in human history” (p. 3). Thus he titles his work The Promise of the Coming Dark Age.

Stavrianos explores the entire world to find evidence of the new values and institutions emerging from the wreckage of contemporary civilization. He sees a general trend toward self-management of human affairs beginning in Western societies at least as early as the American and French revolutions. The four central chapters of his work are devoted to analyzing the self-management impulse, particularly in the areas of technology use, administration of the working place and general working conditions, relations between citizens and government, and self-actualization or consideration of what it means to be human. If Roszak turns to the mystical path and avoids the world, Stavrianos brings us on to firmer ground with practical feet.

[Page 48] He sees the heart of the dark age in continuing obsolete policies and outmoded institutions, whereas the promise of the dark age lies in all the efforts that are, in effect, altering our world in fundamental ways. Signs of promise include counterinstitutions such as free schools, underground churches, and communal groups; neighborhood self-management organizations like the Community Development Corporations funded by the United States government; the Citizen Action League, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, and the Alliance for Neighborhood Government in America; worker-controlled Chinese communes and Israeli kibbutzim factories; the Tanzanian experiment in developing village technology; the rural revival underway in America; various technology experiments with wind and solar energy, non-water-carrying sewage disposal systems, and hydroponic greenhouses; and the struggles for basic human rights by minority groups throughout the world.

Looking at the seeming chaos of current political and economic events, Stavrianos discerns a definite pattern in the restructuring of global arrangements and relationships. He sees “a political decentralization reminiscent of the disintegration of the Roman Empire” —a “trend in global reorganization . . . toward regional autonomy” as evidenced by the emergence of China and Vietnam, the assertiveness of Latin American states, the economic power and clout of the Arab bloc, the liberation struggles of Africans against their colonizers or racist white regimes (p. 168). At the same time, there appears to be a trend toward decentralization of economic operations, particularly since the recent OPEC (Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries) challenge to the “West-dominated global economic order” (p. 173). In other words, we may be standing at the threshold of a profound shift in the centers and, therefore, the substance of civilization.

The weakness in Stavrianos’s vision of the future lies in his limited use of projections of current political and economic trends and liberal concepts of the good life. Because China, for example, has implemented a system of “organized and habitual mutual aid,” through the development of communes and the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s, which placed a major emphasis on bridging the gap between urban and rural populations, she is seen to hold “the key to surviving nuclear war” and is, therefore, presumably representative of the way of the future (p. 190). Whereas Stavrianos may castigate the West for stressing economic development by emphasizing an ever-expanding GNP, he, nevertheless, looks to China as the way of the future precisely because of her tremendous growth in productive capacity and in improving the material conditions of the Chinese people. Because he relies on a level of material improvement as an indicator of change, growth, and the good life, Stavrianos is limited in postulating alternative futures based on less visible criteria.

Yet Stavrianos gives us enough useful information about current political, economic, and social experiments and innovations to raise serious questions about the assumptions upon which the present world order has been built. The current rural revival and the failure of governmental agricultural policies in America mentioned by Stavrianos suggest that efficiency in food production is not dependent on large-scale agribusiness. He surveys recent experimentation with alternative energy sources in the world to indicate that material improvement and the good life are not solely dependent on energy policies that stress expanding consumption of dwindling resources. Stavrianos studies the worldwide shifting patterns of labor-management relations and the rise of worker-controlled environments —existing even within the United States—to attack the assumption that economic freedom is conditional upon successful capitalistic enterprise and the uncontrolled growth of multinationals. Using examples of kibbutzim in Israel and the communes of modern China that he believes to be successful, Stavrianos questions the assumption that political stability is dependent on strictly [Page 49] democratic governments. For those attached to the underlying assumptions of the old order, the present world does indeed appear to be bleak and collapsing. For those already sufficiently detached from those assumptions, the current wave of political, economic, and social experimentation seems to hold great promise for the future, although Stavrianos offers no suggestion of how eventually to integrate on a global scale the results of the many experiments he sees in the world. For him the innovations and experiments are sufficiently interesting in themselves.

The Promise of the Coming Dark Age and Unfinished Animal are, in sum, works that describe the present state of transition more than the golden age beyond the Aquarian frontier. They illustrate the two major trends of the moment—the turning inward to focus on personal experience and subjective reality and the stress on localism in movements of cultural and political self-determination and economic self-management. But ultimately both Roszak and Stavrianos fail to envision a complete world of the future because, in keeping with the mainstream of contemporary thought, they have ruled out a major possibility in projecting the future—the intellectually unfashionable idea that what is happening in the world, and the direction that the evolutionary shift is taking, is the result of divine intervention in the affairs of humankind.

Shoghi Effendi, whose letters on world order must eventually become a standard to which any future study must be compared, has postulated a future built on spiritual, moral, and social values resulting from the gradual recognition of the oneness of mankind, the acceptance of the basic unity of all religions, and the growth of internationalism, world federalism, and world order, all fundamental principles proclaimed by Bahá’u’lláh more than a century ago. The world Shoghi Effendi postulates, however, is not, like the futures suggested by Stavrianos or Roszak, the result of a synthesis of present conflicting ideologies and political relationships. The perilous world of this century, Shoghi Effendi tells us, is the result of man’s own handiwork. Finding a way of our own in a world without God has led us to a man-created and man-centered present, a world built on old assumptions of economic and political self-interest, racial, sexual, social, cultural, and intellectual prejudices, a world fractured by countless ideologies and beliefs, in which human life is cheap and interpersonal relationships are, at best, tenuous; the present world order is involved in the process of destruction. At the same time Shoghi Effendi details a counter-process of construction, an embryonic society and eventually a world civilization growing out of the Revelation of Bahá’u’lláh, which proclaims “the supremacy of Divine Law in civilization” and defines the laws, the social code, the institutions, and the essentials of a divine economy as the chief means for the unification of the world.

Followers of Bahá’u’lláh are discovering what Roszak merely longs for: the visionary experience leading to ethical action. Though utterly ignored by Stavrianos, Bahá’ís throughout the world are involved in grand experiments in community building and in constructing a new body politic within which every active Bahá’í is constantly engaged in shaping himself into a new being reflecting the principles of Bahá’u’lláh. What neither Roszak nor Stavrianos considers is that the world of the future may be totally at variance with present trends. Shoghi Effendi’s statements and letters on world order stand completely apart from the mainstream of modern humanism and, therefore, offer not only a valid comparison to books like Unfinished Animal and The Promise of the Coming Dark Age but a challenging and realistic alternative to the dead end that modern, secular society —in all its variations—has become.

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Authors & Artists

JUDITH RHOADS ALAMIA makes a first appearance in World Order. She has served as assistant editor to TV Guide. Her interests include writing poetry and songs, playing the guitar, and camping.

DONALD M. BARRETT is senior counsel for Gulf Oil Corporation in Pittsburgh. He holds law degrees from UCLA and McGill University and has attended the graduate schools of business at Columbia and Northwestern Universities. The author of a number of articles in legal and business journals in the United States and Latin America, Mr. Barrett has made special studies of multinational corporations. At the present time much of his work involves the application of equal employment opportunity legislation in the corporate structure. He finds time in his busy schedule for tennis, jogging, and other active sports.

JUAN RICARDO COLE graduated with highest distinction from Northwestern University with department honors in the history and literature of religions, after which he spent six months in Beirut as a Richter International Scholar working on his senior thesis on Christian-Muslim interrelations. He has lived and studied in other Middle Eastern countries and is now completing a Master’s degree in Islamic studies. His interests include Ṣúfism, the sociology of religion, and Buddhism.

GERALD B. PARKS is a lecturer in English at the Interpreter’s School of the University of Trieste. He holds a B.A. in Latin from the University of Washington at Seattle and an M.A. in classical studies from the University of Michigan. His hobbies include photography and amateur films, and he has written several plays. He has published poems in Italian, Latin, and English (a number in World Order), as well as articles and a short story. His “The Necessity of a Utopia” appeared in our Fall 1974 issue.

GARY L. MORRISON holds a Master’s degree in Southeast Asia studies from Yale University and a doctorate in education from the University of Massachusetts. He recently returned to the United States after spending more than three years in Brazil, where he helped establish Brazil’s first graduate program in educational technology at the National Institute of Space Research in São Paulo. He is at present engaged in private business in Hawaii. Dr. Morrison has reviewed a number of books and films for World Order (one with his wife Gayle); his “‘Abdu’l-Bahá and the Early American Bahá’ís” appeared in our Winter 1972-73 issue.

ART CREDITS: Cover, design by John Solarz, photograph by Glenford E. Mitchell; p. 1, photograph by Joan Miller; p. 8, pen and ink drawing by Ian Bamber; p. 13, photograph by Glenford E. Mitchell; p. 29, photograph by Glenford E. Mitchell; p. 51, photograph by Joan Miller.

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