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Fall 1978

World Order

Iran in Turmoil

Editorial

Health, Nutrition, and the Future of Children

Elizabeth L. Bowen

The God of Bahá’u’lláh

Jacques Chouleur

Afterlife and the Twin Pillars of Education

John S. Hatcher

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World Order

A BAHÁ’Í MAGAZINE • VOLUME 13, NUMBER 1 • 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 © 1979, 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 Iran in Turmoil

Editorial

4 Interchange: Letters from and to the Editor

9 The God of Bahá’u’lláh

by Jacques Chouleur

21 Afterlife and the Twin Pillars of Education

by John S. Hatcher

39 Inheritance: In a Churchyard in Sweden

a poem by Mary Hedin

42 Health, Nutrition, and the Future of Children

by Elizabeth L. Bowen

57 Continuing the Survey of Bahá’u’lláh’s Writings

book review by Firuz Kazemzadeh

60 Authors and Artists in This Issue

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Iran in Turmoil

IRAN is in turmoil. Modernization and its attendant phenomena— industrialization and urbanization—have produced enormous pressures in a society the majority of whose members is still dominated by a traditionalist outlook. Conflicting interests, attitudes, and ambitions have exploded in a violent struggle that has already claimed hundreds of victims and could result in thousands more.

In the midst of this national upheaval certain fanatical elements have launched attacks on religious minorities. Since the largest of these, and the only growing one, is the Bahá’í community, it has once again become the primary target of persecution. In several provinces mobs have beaten and injured Bahá’ís, driven them into exile, burned their homes, killed their livestock, and uprooted their orchards. Government offices have issued circulars calling for the discharge of Bahá’í employees. In a number of towns and villages merchants have refused to sell food to Bahá’ís. Unscrupulous politicians have repeatedly labeled their opponents Bahá’ís as a means of discrediting their rivals in the eyes of the intolerant. A number of religious leaders have gone to great lengths to misrepresent the attitude of the Bahá’ís toward Islám.

Why should the Bahá’ís, members of a law abiding and nonbelligerent community, arouse such violent antagonism? The answer lies deep in history and in the psychosocial structure of Iranian society.

When in the middle of the nineteenth century the Báb proclaimed His mission, heralding the advent of “Him Whom God will manifest,” a universal Prophet Who would endow mankind with one universal Faith, the state and the clergy united in opposing the new religion. They saw a negation of their old prejudices, a denial of their antiquated beliefs, and a threat to their position as leaders and shepherds of an obedient and credulous flock. They must defend their privileges. They must destroy the new religion by exterminating its followers and eradicating its ideas.

There followed years of indiscriminate massacre, cruel torture, and relentless abuse. Out of savage persecutions that claimed the lives of the Báb and of the majority of His disciples there emerged the Bahá’í Faith. Its Founder, Bahá’u’lláh, affirmed the unity of God and called on all people independently to search for truth. Among His teachings were: progressive revelation, the unity of religion and science, equality of sexes, unity of nations and races, the establishment of universal peace, the abolition of poverty and limitation of wealth, the elimination of barriers to international economic and cultural exchange, and the development of institutions that would secure the progress and tranquility of mankind.

[Page 3] These enlightened principles did not win the sympathy of the state and the clergy. The continued to regard the Bahá’í Faith as a threat, continued to refer to the Bahá’ís as “harmful misleaders” and “heretics,” and provoked periodic outbreaks of violence against them. Gradually Bahá’ís became scapegoats. As their numbers increased, they became ever more tempting targets for pogroms. In times of crisis, during famines, revolutions, and foreign invasions, they could be blamed for all the miseries afflicting the nation.

In 1896, when a Pan-Islamist terrorist assassinated Náṣiri’d-Dín Sháh, the Bahá’ís were instantly blamed. Several lost their lives. In 1903, in the reign of Muẓaffari’d-Dín, more than one hundred Bahá’ís were put to death in Yazd. Occasional murders occurred during the Persian revolution of 1906-11, during the two world wars, and since then.

In 1955 a large-scale attack was mounted on the Bahá’í community with the connivance of the authorities who permitted a fanatical mullá, Muḥammad Taqí-yi Falsafí, to preach defamatory and incendiary anti-Bahá’í sermons over the government radio. On May 2 the police locked the gates of the Bahá’í National Headquarters in Ṭihrán. Five days later the building was taken over by the military, and the dome over its large meeting hall was demolished, the army’s chief of staff striking the first blow with a pickax. Contemporary reports painted a vivid picture of shops and farms plundered, “crops burned; livestock destroyed; bodies of Bahá’ís disinterred in the cemeteries and mutilated, private homes broken into, damaged and looted . . . young girls . . . raped; families murdered; government employees dismissed and all manner of pressure brought upon the believers to recant their Faith.”

This pattern of events is recurring. The Bahá’ís are once again accused of acts they have not committed, of beliefs they do not profess, of aspirations they never harbored. Far from ignoring the interests of Iran and of its people, the Bahá’ís hold that land sacred, for it is the cradle of their Faith. Far from denigrating Islám or belittling Muḥammad, the Bahá’ís have made them dear to hundreds of thousands of Hindus, Christians, Jews, and others who have embraced the teachings of Bahá’u’lláh, for these Teachings recognize Muḥammad’s divine mission and the validity of Islám.

The Bahá’ís throughout the world grieve for all the victims of violence and hate, and pray that the land of Zoroaster, of the Báb, and of Bahá’u’lláh, a land that has withstood so many trials in its long and turbulent history, may know peace, tolerance, and brotherhood.

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Interchange LETTERS FROM AND TO THE EDITOR

A RECENT MAILBAG brought the following praise: “The Spring [1978] issue of WORLD ORDER is lovely—not just the articles, but the cover, one of the most beautiful you’ve ever had.” We, too, are very pleased about our new look and cannot resist a few reminiscences about the ever-changing appearance of our magazine.

Our first issue in Fall 1966, which some of you will remember, was a crisp green, the logotype (chosen by Monroe Michels, one of our first editors), anchored at the foot of a three-inch white band at the top of the magazine. White disappeared with our fourth issue in 1967 and was replaced by a second color, which increasingly has been used by our Managing Editor to achieve interesting effects on the illustrations and photographs on the back of the cover. But the three-inch color band remained until 1971, when it began to shrink a bit in width. The logotype, however, had already begun a journey. On the Winter 1967 issue it was moved up to float in the color band at the head of the cover. At the same time, lines, boxes, and unusual type arrangements were introduced to highlight the article titles featured on the front cover.

In the Winter 1975-76 issue, partly to accommodate an unusual design for our Bicentennial issue (on which Joon Chung worked with the Managing Editor), the logotype shrank half an inch and the top band became a slender two-and-a-quarter inches.

In 1977 a graphic artist of some twenty-year’s experience came round one day to say he felt the contents of the magazine had outstripped its visual appeal. We asked him to propose some new designs, which he did and which we liked. The rest is history. With our Fall 1977 issue, the photograph, long a hallmark of our back cover, wrapped itself around the front as well. The two colors, another hallmark, were used to create moods that change with the seasons. The band, with us from 1966, is still there—a fine hairline echoing the past. The logotype has grown in size again and moved from left to right. The article titles overprint in black the colors of the photographs. Past and present blend. We are the same, and yet we have a very new look, with more refinements apparent in our Fall 1978 issue. At the beginning of this, our thirteenth, year we say to our cover designer John Solarz: Stand up and take a bow!

* * *

A footnote: Our new cards for gift subscriptions and our new renewal forms also owe their new looks to John Solarz. The gift-subscription cards are printed on a blue-violet textured stock and graced with a flowing script announcing to the recipient that a gift subscription to WORLD ORDER [Page 5] has been entered in his name. The new renewal forms enable one to renew his own subscription and at the same time to enter multiple gift subscriptions. Coming is a tear-out card that will also enable one to enter gift subscriptions and to send in address changes.

To the Editor

JESUS AS GOD’S SON

. . . the article of Juan Ricardo Cole, “The Christian-Muslim Encounter and the Bahá’í Faith,” (WORLD ORDER, Winter 1977-78) deserves special mention. . . . Mr. Cole has offered the reader an incisive presentation of the literature and the doctrines of Christianity, Islám and the Bahá’í Faith as they relate to the subject of Christology. . . . I should like to submit the following two comments which are not intended to detract from the paper’s . . . contribution. . . .

Concerning the epithet “Son of God,” Mr. Cole rightly points out that the term has both a Hellenistic and Judaic origin. For the Greek, it had a mythological meaning in that the gods, particularly of the Olympian cult, generated offspring. Zeus, for example, was frequently called, “The Father of Gods and Men.” The evidence for the Hellenistic use of “Son of God” has been assembled by O. Cullmann in one of the texts that Mr. Cole refers to, Christology of the New Testament (London: SCM Press, 1959), p. 272. Incidentally, Mr. Cullmann feels its New Testament usage is primarily Judaic not Greek. Regarding its Judaic usage, Mr. Cole points out that the term referred to a “divinely appointed leader who was entirely obedient to God,” and was applied as well to the ancestors and forefathers of Israel from the time of Adam and through the period of the Patriarchs and Prophets (p. 19). . . . the term “Son of God” referred specifically to the Messiah, Israel’s sacral warrior-king typified in the person of King David. The term has come to be so often associated with Jesus that the Judaic origin has lost its meaning. In fact, the very language of the New Testament in referring to Jesus as God’s Son and in some more ancient manuscripts as God’s “only begotten Son,” is a Christian reflection of this more ancient Hebrew usage. The messianic second Psalm of David celebrates the proclamation of the Hebrew King as God’s Son: “I will tell of the decree of the Lord: He said to me, ‘You are my son, today I have begotten you’” (2:7) RSV. Oscar Cullmann seems to be undecided about the messianic association of the “Son God” title because of the Messiah’s political implications. Bahá’ís know that Christ’s Messiahship was spiritually dynamic in nature, not political. It is also quite biblical (Mark 14:61; Matt. 26:63).

The second point concerns Mr. Cole’s affirmation about a particular translation of Bahá’u’lláh made by Shoghi Effendi: “The consubstantiality of Christ with God and the twofold nature [of Christ] are the fruits of Nicaea and Chalcedon respectively, and Shoghi Effendi’s translation obviously consciously echoes these doctrines” (p. 25) (my brackets, my emphasis). The passage referred to by Mr. Cole in the Bahá’í writings which he also quotes reads as follows: “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.” Incidentally, there is a typographical error in the copied text. It should read, “of the substance [Page 6] of God Himself.” Mr. Cole then goes on to suggest that Shoghi Effendi has used the terms “born of the substance of God Himself,” which is the Christian doctrine of consubstantiality and “a twofold nature,” also Christian doctrine, in the interests of establishing ecumenical links between the Bahá’í and Christian theological views of the Divine Manifestation’s relationship to God. Paradoxically, in footnote no. 56 on page twenty-five he seems to be arguing against such a doctrinal rapprochement.

While the Bahá’í Faith certainly has the theme of reconciliation as one of its main objectives in the encounter of the world religions, I do not think that a rapprochement between the Bahá’í and Christian “prophetologies” can be justified upon the basis of this particular passage. Upon close examination of the Bahá’í and Christian teachings . . . we find that similarities do not extend beyond those of vocabulary. The twofold definition of Christ’s nature at Chalcedon, the so-called “hypostatic union” and His consubstantiality with God from the earlier council of Nicaea defined Christ as being “of the same essence” as God (Nicaea) and “Perfect God” (Chalcedon). The Bahá’í Faith does not subscribe to either of these points of view. It goes without saying that the Bahá’í Faith does contest that the Divine Manifestation has a physical reality as the above text of Bahá’u’lláh points out. But even here there is a basic difference between the two faiths, since Christianity with its belief in the resurrection of Christ’s physical body and its assumption into the universe denies that His physical reality went the way of all flesh, something that the Bahá’í Faith naturally assumes.

The doctrinal rapprochement to be made in the prophetologies of the two Faiths already exists, I believe, in the notion of the Logos or the Divine Word, something which all three of the Judaic Faiths firmly adhere to notwithstanding the nuances between them. In this connection, I believe that the great contribution of the Bahá’í Faith will be not only in working out doctrinal compromises because of its rich theological concepts but also precisely because of an absence of narrow salvationist doctrine and in the loving acceptance of the members of all faiths regardless of their particular theologies.

JACK MCLEAN

Gatineau, Quebec, Canada

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The God of Bahá’u’lláh

BY JACQUES CHOULEUR

“TELL ME whom you worship; I’ll tell you who you are.” Thus modified, the old saw loses none of its pristine wisdom. In spite of the Bible’s exhortations to man not to take the name of God in vain, this name is often pronounced without explicit reference to the reality that it is supposed to represent. For “God” is, first of all, a word. For many that is all it is. Innumerable are those who use it daily, even in an atheistic milieu, as a simple habit of speech, a fossilized remainder of obsolete beliefs. Such banal expressions as “Thank God!” or “God only knows,” “Good-bye” (unrecognizable relic of “God be with you”), “Ye gods,” do not imply that he who utters them has any intellectual stake in the notion of one or another divinity.

More serious is the fact that many belonging to the great religions—and among them theologians and clerics—continue to use the word without warning their interlocutors of the changes they have mentally applied to the “content” of the word, to the meaning that it has for its users at the moment they use it. At best this procedure displays blameworthy carelessness and at worst, dishonesty. To express the opinion that “God is dead” or that He has never existed is perfectly legitimate, but to hold such beliefs while persisting in using His Name as a talisman or a magical symbol, after emptying it of all genuine content is to be guilty of hypocrisy. For centuries—indeed, millennia—the word “God” for the Jews, the Christians, the Muslims, the Zoroastrians, and many others besides, possessed a significance with uncertain and changing borders certainly, but whose center, whose nucleus, whose essence, has remained immutable. “God,” in the naive concept of the common folk, just as in the ethereal meditations of a Pascal or a Swedenborg, always referred to a supreme and transcendant Being, “Creator of heaven and earth,” the Source, the Soul, and the Prime Mover of the universe. Whether a pure spirit or an incarnate intelligence, God was always a person—that is, He thought and acted, understood and willed, felt emotions or feelings, and served for his creatures as interlocutor. The life of the true believer was an uninterrupted dialogue with that interlocutor, as has been so well perceived by, for example, Martin Buber and Nicholas Berdiayev.

Today many religious thinkers have abandoned such a concept. When they do so explicitly, as Paul Tillich does when he redefines—if we may speak here of definition —God as the “ground of everything that is personal” or the “Ground of Being,” one can only praise their respect for their public. But when certain others use the ancient word, without warning their readers or listeners, to express a concept without any resemblance to the traditional one, or even totally different from that concept—as is done, alas, more and more frequently in the churches, there is fraud, deception, downright crookedness. Of course, God is indefinable and beyond the reach of human words. But one still has the right to expect of any “professional” in the religious field— whether preacher, minister, theologian, or philosopher—that he make as clear as possible the meaning that he personally attributes [Page 10] to the word “God.” There are abysses between the multiple representations that men have made for themselves of Divinity in the course of history, and no one would seriously maintain that all these representatives are of equal worth, or that the worship of them would arouse comparable feelings and virtues among all human beings. What do the grotesque, cruel Baals of the Philistines have in common with the Voice in the Burning Bush, or the pitiable idols of pre-Islamic Mecca with the single, merciful God preached by Muḥammad—or again the amiable residents of Olympus with the Unknown God preached at Athens by the apostle Paul? Or even the God of Abraham with the “God of scholars and philosophers”? All the more reason to expect of a prophet, of the founder of a religion, that he shed all the light possible on the Divinity Whom he announces and serves.

What sort of God is in question, then? That is the real issue. Once again, that light can but be lamentably insufficient and inadequate. The most inspired, the most eloquent of the messengers of God can only communicate of Him Who sends him a partial, truncated, shadowy vision. The most authentic of the prophets is but a man of limited understanding; and his mind, though illumined by Revelation, cannot encompass the Absolute. Human language is itself incapable of saying the unsayable, of expressing the inexpressible; and it is necessarily through the fable, the parable that it can sketch most nearly the substance of the divine discourse. Once transmitted, the message is only incompletely and inaccurately received by those for whom it was destined, human intelligence being what it is. The diversity of temperaments and interests gives rise to a myriad of divergent interpretations, some made in good faith, others not. But one could hardly accuse Moses, Jesus, Muḥammad of not having tried tirelessly to “show” God to their people. With human words this effort takes the form of a portrait rather than a definition, a portrait subject to innumerable little brush strokes made successively by these great wakers of souls. The picture remains unfinished, dark, indeed ambiguous—but the effort has been made, and the disciples at least know to whom their obedience will henceforth go. The Jews know that Adonai is the Eternal One, the Only God, the Jealous God, powerful, strict, but just. The followers of Christ know that the Father is kind and loving, that He sees into the hearts and thoughts and expects of men that they behave like brothers. The companions of Muḥammad hear themselves repeat that Alláh suffers neither rival nor partner, that He is the Merciful and the All-Powerful, that He loves justice. A police artist’s identification kit, however imperfect, is better than a mere question mark.

For those who are interested in the Bahá’í Faith, there is good reason to discern the essential characteristics of the God Whose messenger its Founder, Bahá’u’lláh, claimed to be. The Writings of Bahá’u’lláh are fortunately so abundant that it is relatively easy to discover in them some interesting indications. An assiduous reader of His works perceives at the outset the continuity of the thought—or the vision—that is expressed therein and of the permanence of the image of God thus unveiled. Just as striking is the continuity from Bahá’u’lláh’s conception of God and that reaffirmed by His successors, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá and Shoghi Effendi, and today by the collective leadership of the Bahá’í movement, the Universal House of Justice. As for the resemblances between the Bahá’í concept of God and that found in previous sources of inspiration, be they Jewish, Christian, or Muslim, they would only surprise those who are ignorant of the Bahá’í theory of revelation renewed in successive dispensations, each one of which fulfils rather than abolishes the preceding one, to resort to a well-known formula from the Gospels.

However, extreme care is required at this point. Bahá’ís have always evinced a profound reticence with regard to theology. One could hardly blame them. The very word [Page 11] theology is deceptive. Strictly speaking, theology would be the “science of God.” Now that science does not exist and could not exist. No human being can flatter himself that he knows God, if only because no finite creature can absorb the Infinite, nor measure himself against the Absolute, any more than a vessel fashioned by the hand of man could contain the ocean. “No man hath seen God any time” says the Gospel according to St. John (John 1:18), and Saint Paul wrote, “For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know, even as also I am known” (I Cor. 13:12). To speak of a “science” of God, of almost mathematical human knowledge, as of a measurable object called God, is in this perspective foolish and nearly blasphemous. Bahá’ís know this and take care not to put God in an equation. They are rightly distrustful of the dogmas, the articles of faith, the semantic subtleties that presume to force a superhuman reality into the structure of our puny linguistic arsenal. God is greater than all words, and there are more things in the universe than are dreamt of in our philosophy. The goal of the Bahá’í Faith being the unification of religions and peoples, it is, moreover, understandable why the Bahá’ís keep in mind the bloody history of the holy wars, crusades, persecutions, and tyrannical oppressions caused by the theological differences of the past, some of which were situated on the level of the letter, of semantics, in short, quarrels over words. It was the addition of a single word (filioque) to the Christian creed (in 1014, by Emperor Henry II, nearly ten centuries after the death of Jesus) that provoked the schism between the East and the West, and, indirecr1y, among other catastrophes, the sack of Constantinople and the massacre of its inhabitants in 1204. But words are not reality; the map is not the territory. This Bahá’ís know well, and they avoid excessive codifying and dogmatizing of their beliefs and, moreover, respect the differences of interpretation and the personal opinions of every person: is not the “personal and independent search for truth” one of the most often proclaimed of the Bahá’í principles?

This said, a certain idea of God does necessarily emerge from Bahá’u’lláh’s Writings and from those of His successors and disciples. It is this idea that I am going to try to delineate in its broad outlines. Among the many human conceptions of the divine reality, the opposition between polytheism and monotheism was one of the first to arise, and it is fundamental. But let me note at the outset that, at this level too, words are deceptive. Hinduism, which counts thousands of gods and goddesses, may well be a false polytheism, masking behind these millions of illusory faces a unique permanent essence. Traditional Christianity, which one tends too quickly and without reflection to classify among the monotheistic systems, is perhaps really a tritheism, indeed a tetratheism to the degree that the frequent deification of the Virgin Mary tends to associate the “Mother of God” with the Persons of the Trinity. Actually, the only two great religions that present themselves as absolute monotheisms are Judaism and Islám. The Old Testament never tires of proclaiming the oneness of God: “Thou shalt have no other gods before me” says the Decalogue (Exod. 20:3). “I am the Lord, and there is none else, there is no God beside me” (Isa. 45:5). “. . . there is no God else beside me; a just God and a Saviour” (Isa. 45:21). Islám is the powerful echo of these proclamations: “Know, then, that there is no god but God” (Qur’án 47:21). “God! There is no god but He! Most excellent are his titles!” (Qur’án 20:7). “Your God is one God: there is no God but He, the Compassionate, the Merciful” (Qur’án 2:158). “SAY: God is the Creator of all things! He is the One! the Conquering! (Qur’án 13:17).

Bahá’u’lláh confirms this uncompromising monotheism and besides cites the Qur’án freely in His own Writings. Unceasingly, in the Oriental manner, He calls Him to witness, addresses Him, swears by Him. Nevertheless, the oneness of God is less frequently mentioned [Page 12] in Bahá’u’lláh’s Writings than in the Qur’án, perhaps because it was already taken for granted by the Muslim peoples who furnished the Bábís, and then the Bahá’ís, their first recruits. But, just as in the Qur’án, Bahá’u’lláh insists on the unfathomable character of the mystery of God, on the fact that the divine essence will remain forever incomprehensible and inaccessible to human beings: “Behold, how many are the mysteries that lie as yet unravelled within the tabernacle of the knowledge of God. . . . Shouldst thou ponder this in thine heart, thou wouldst realize that His handiwork knoweth neither beginning nor end. The domain of His decree is too vast for the tongue of mortals to describe, or for the bird of the human mind to traverse; and the dispensations of His providence are too mysterious for the mind of man to comprehend.” “Say, He is that End for Whom no end in all the universe can be imagined, and for Whom no beginning in the world of creation can be conceived.” An infinite distance is at once placed between The Creator and the creature. ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, in Some Answered Questions, confirms this distance, this incommensurability: “for the Divine Essence surrounds all things. Verily that which surrounds is greater than the surrounded, and the surrounded cannot contain that by which it is surrounded, nor comprehend its reality. . . . For the essence and the attributes of the Lord of Unity are in the heights of sanctity, and for the minds and understandings there is no way to approach that position.” Then the Son of Bahá’u’lláh quotes the famous ḥadíth (tradition): “‘The way is closed and seeking is forbidden.’”

So total a transcendence obviously eliminates any anthropomorphic temptation. In any case, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá expressly rejects anthropomorphism. As the Bahá’ís see it, God could not be a man, nor resemble a man, nor “incarnate” Himself as any man whatsoever, be He the Prophet: “If it be said that the mirrors are the manifestations of the sun and the dawning-places of the rising star, this does not mean that the sun has descended from the height of its sanctity and become incorporated in the mirror, nor that the Unlimited Reality is limited to this place of appearance.” The Islamic tradition is maintained here, and the God of the Bahá’ís seems more distant, more unapproachable than the Father evoked in the Gospels. It is no longer a question of man “made in the image of God.” The Godhead is an alien and inconceivable Being nearer to the God of Spinoza than to the God of Genesis—at least in appearance. But appearances can be deceiving, and reality can transcend paradoxes and “contradictions.”

In fact, if “theology” is condemned (“‘The way is closed and seeking is forbidden’”), if one neither can nor ought to claim to “know” God, it is not forbidden to open oneself to Him. Man cannot raise himself to God, but he can “turn toward Him,” as Bahá’u’lláh invites him to, tirelessly, in His Hidden Words: “O SON OF SPIRIT! There is no peace for thee save by renouncing thyself and turning unto Me. . . .” “O SON OF BEING! Love Me, that I may love thee. If thou lovest Me not, My love can in no wise reach thee.” For God loves his creation and likes to be loved by it. “O SON OF MAN! I loved thy creation, hence I created thee. Wherefore, do thou love Me, that I may name thy name and fill thy soul with the spirit of life.” “O SON OF BEING! Thou art My lamp and My light is in thee. Get thou from it thy radiance and seek none other than Me. For I have created thee rich and have bountifully shed My favor upon thee.” After being affirmed, God’s transcendence seems now to [Page 13] have been, if not denied, at least forgotten, and the frightening distance effaced. God remains in His heights, but His Spirit, the Holy Spirit (which is in no way here the “third person” of an impossible “trinity” but, more logically, the spirit of God and of the love given by God), throws a bridge across the chasm and annuls the separation. If He wishes, and if we desire it, God can make Himself very near. Did not the Qur’án already say: “We created man: and we know what his soul whispereth to him, and we are closer to him than his neck-vein” (Qur’án 50:15). Transcendence and immanence are words or signs, opposite and irreconcilable at the level of our logic, but the reality that they evoke knows full well how to reconcile them dialectically. Perhaps transcendence and immanence are but complementary facets of that reality as it is obscurely seen by men. The Bahá’í Writings, like the Qur’án, insist more on the transcendence than on the immanence, in contrast with, for example, the Ṣúfí writings or the Bhagavad-Gītā. But God’s immanence is denied only to a certain level of language. God, who is everywhere, is necessarily also in His creatures. He is the “billowing ocean” and bathes the whole of creation in His limpid waters. Man, if he has the desire and the will, can become “the recipients of a grace that is infinite and unseen.”

The border between immanence and pantheism is often poorly marked, barely perceptible. If the opposition between transcendence and immanence is sometimes mostly verbal, and by this fact entirely artificial, transcendence as Bahá’ís conceive it excludes categorically the pantheistic conceptions of the Godhead. God can visit, even inhabit (with His Spirit) His creatures without the creatures’ being thereby authorized to identify themselves with Him. God, in His essence, does not “descend” into the created world, according to the Bahá’í view, which thus continues the Jewish, Muslim, and Bábí traditions. In a certain way, God “is” in the rock, the plant, the flower, the insect, the star, the water of the torrent, and a fortiori He “is” in man, in the sense in which these things and these beings exist and subsist through Him. But this stone, this tree, this horse, this passer-by—they are not God, nor are they parts or elements of God. God is Other; He is More, and He is Elsewhere, even though He penetrates and knows and envelops and illuminates each atom of His creation. Certainly, in mystical exaltation, the fervent believer can formulate thoughts and pronounce words that seem to convey the feeling of a perfect identification with the Godhead. One might say that there is fusion, absorption, transmutation. The Ṣúfís, sometimes regarded with distrust by orthodox Muslims and by Bahá’ís because of these attitudes which are seen by them as excessive, are particularly prone to this kind of experience. ‘Abdu’l-Bahá nevertheless holds back from accusing the elite of the Ṣúfís, his “initiated savants,” of pantheism. These God-intoxicated men, in their inebriation, utter ambiguous formulas, often incomprehensible to the ignorant mass.

Their intoxication is nonetheless legitimate, much to be preferred to a tepid sobriety. True mystics, even those in whom God dwells, or who are in ardent communion with God, know very well that they are not God or, in another formulation, that their individual person is finite, that their ego is not God. To sum up, the religion of Bahá’u’lláh, if it seems to lean towards transcendence rather than towards immanence, without irrevocably condemning the latter, does repel in any case the temptation of facile, obvious pantheism, although it does not exclude the divine omnipresence or, perhaps better, omnivisitation.

THE MOST DELICATE point of Bahá’í thought seen as a whole is certainly that which concerns the notion of the “Manifestations [Page 14] of God.” Who are the Manifestations of God? They are the great Prophets mentioned by the Bible and the Qur’án: Noah, Húd, Ṣaliḥ, Abraham, Moses. Jesus is added to their number and this from the Muslim point of view, which sees in Him but one prophet among others, a link in the chain of Revelation: “The Messiah, Son of Mary, is but an Apostle; other Apostles have flourished before him; and his mother was a just person: they both ate food” (Qur’án 5:79). Then comes the Báb, Founder of the Bábí Faith and Precursor and Herald of Bahá’u’lláh. Such are the “Manifestations” as they are designated by name by Bahá’u’lláh Himself. Bahá’ís today consider that that is probably just a partial enumeration, and they customarily add Zoroaster, Krishna, and Gautama Buddha to a list which is not necessarily exhaustive. Bahá’ís do not see, even in Bahá’u’lláh, the ultimate Manifestation of God, but only the most recent to date. There will be, they say, more Manifestations, more “dawning places,” but the next one is not to come before the passage of a thousand years at the very least, according to the Bahá’í Writings. For Bahá’u’lláh, the Manifestation for our time, appears to Bahá’í eyes as the dawn and the sun of a new cycle of human and divine history. This Manifestation occurs at the moment when mankind is at last coming of age, capable of understanding its reason for being, of attaining its unity and assuming its destiny. Bahá’u’lláh, as the Bahá’ís see it, is not “superior” to Moses or Jesus or Muḥammad, but His Revelation is “greater” because the moment has come for men to awaken to a new perception of their role in this world and for God to favor their awakening and their arising.

The idea of any “superiority” of one Manifestation to another is vigorously opposed by all Bahá’í commentators. “‘They all abide in the same tabernacle, . . . utter the same speech, and proclaim the same Faith.’” The great Prophets drink at the same source, announce the same Truth. The differences among the Dispensations are only due to circumstances of time and place, to the historical and geographical context, to the varying degrees of receptivity of those to whom they are addressed. The pale sun of the arctic is the same star as burns the Saharan sands. The timid sun of dawn is the same heavenly body as flames at noonday’s zenith. But it must be noted that each Manifestation of God has His own personality, His characteristic traits, His individual soul. No prophet is the reincarnation of a past prophet. When Muḥammad exclaims, “I am all the prophets, I am Adam, Noah, Moses, and Jesus!” He expresses figuratively the continuity of divine revelation. In no case is there an allusion to any kind of reincarnation. Moreover, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá dismisses belief in metempsychosis as “mere imagination.”

For Christian traditionalists the very idea that Jesus is just one “Manifestation” among others is unacceptable. That is due chiefly to the belief in Jesus as “God’s only Son,” in His miraculous birth, and in His Resurrection. This is an ancient and thoroughly respectable belief, but doubtless less fundamental than many Christians think. In the words of Jesus reported in the synoptic Gospels, there is nowhere to be found any allusion to a miraculous birth, and Jesus does not once say, “I am God’s only Son.” He speaks of His Father and says that He has been sent by Him. But since His Father is also “Our Father,” the filial bond loses some of its privileged character. The New Testament says elsewhere that all have the power to become “children of God,” which shows the symbolic nature of these terms. If one holds rigorously to the literal meaning of the words, a father is a man who begets a [Page 15] child by sexual union with a woman. In the classic accounts of the birth of Jesus, most of the criteria of that definition are absent, since there is no sexual union, the woman remains a virgin, and the procreator is not a “man” (unless he pushes anthropomorphism a little further than most Christian churches are disposed to do, the most audacious exception being the Mormon Church). It does seem, then, that the “Fatherhood” of God with respect to His “son” Jesus is, in the firSt place, spiritual, and that to speak of an “only” son does not correspond to the idea that Jesus Himself entertained of His kinship with the Creator of all beings. What many Christians do not see is that they have turned their backs to the Decalogue and to strict monotheism by apotheosizing Jesus. A Jew or a Muslim could well speak of idolatry and would be all the more justified in doing so because, for a good number of “progressive” Christians, the Father whom Jesus worshiped has been almost completely effaced in favor of their idol Jesus, whom such a blasphemy would doubtless have scandalized. In this regard, the words of the Qur’án resound like a severe summons to return to the true law, the pure religion of Sinai: “They say: ‘The God of Mercy hath gotten offspring.’ Now have ye done a monstrous thing!” (Qur’án 19:91). “They take their teachers, and their monks, and the Messiah, son of Mary, for Lords beside God, though bidden to worship one God only. There is no God but He! Far from His glory be what they associate with Him!” (Qur’án 9:31). It is also from this point of view that ‘Abdu’l-Bahá explains the relationship of Jesus to God. For ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, the sonship is essentially spiritual. The birth was no more miraculous than are all births. As to the resurrection, it too should be taken in a symbolic sense.

The fact remains that the “Manifestations of God,” as human as they may be, are nonetheless far above the common run of mortals. They manifest God as a glass manifests light, by the reflections of Divinity that project on mankind. To make use of the favorite Bahá’í image, and also the most expressive, the Manifestations are “perfect mirrors” that reflect the image of the Creator. Jesus, Muḥammad, the Báb, and still others, are these privileged Messengers and Interpreters of the Supreme Being, and it is only through their mediation that one can begin to understand God and to turn to Him. In this sense, Jesus affirms quite legitimately, “I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me” (John 14:6). One can understand also how Jesus can say to Philip, who was asking to see the Father, “He who has seen me has seen the Father. How can you say, Show us the Father? Do you not believe that I am in the Father, and that the Father is in me?” (John 19:9-10). In the same way, Bahá’u’lláh exclaims, “‘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.’” That could also be a Ṣúfí exclamation, in another context.

Is there, then, for Bahá’ís a temptation toward idolatry comparable to the one that the deification of Jesus has presented to certain Christians? In a word: do the Bahá’ís worship Bahá’u’lláh as a god? In my opinion, absolutely not. To make a “god” of Bahá’u’lláh would imply the existence of other gods, and we have seen how the Bahá’í Faith rejects polytheism. To make of Bahá’u’lláh the only God would be even more blasphemous. To take the mirror for the sun that is reflected in it would be a gross and unforgivable error. To use a more modern image, an electric light bulb is not “electricity,” but it is no less true that it makes electricity accessible to our senses. Electric energy, omnipresent, eternal, and invisible, goes through metal filaments [Page 16] and raises them to incandescences, illuminating the light bulb, which in its turn projects its light on the world outside it. The “Manifestations” of God are in a way comparable to these bulbs. Like them, they are traversed by a mysterious force, which “possesses” them completely, but without the reverse being true. Like them, they transmit heat and light, without “being” Heat and Light. The light bulb can break; electricity remains. Other bulbs will make it manifest elsewhere, later. So is it with the carriers of divine light. To worship Bahá’u’lláh, carrier of that light, is as vain, as idolatrous as to worship Jesus or any other “Messenger of God.” But as the essence and the source of the divine light remain forever inaccessible to us, we are obliged to direct our sight and our fervor to the concrete points of its appearance. True Christians worship God in Jesus, not the person of Jesus. True Bahá’ís, in a parallel way, worship God in Jesus (and in Moses, Muḥammad, and so on) and surely in Bahá’u’lláh, the last of the heavenly lamps to have illumined our spiritual horizon, a lamp that is, for them, the most brilliant of all. A deep reverence for the persons of the Messengers of God is a very human, perfectly justifiable, essentially legitimate attitude; besides it is inevitable—so long as emotion, piety, fervor do not culminate in the idolatrous worship of these human receptacles of the divine power, in the worship of Jesus apart from the Father, of Buddha separated from the “Uncreated,” of Bahá’u’lláh separated from God. Admittedly, it is a difficult exercise, as perilous as the just veneration of the holy icons in Greek or Russian Orthodox churches. The icon, the material support of the human representation of the divine, can help the human creature, prisoner of his senses, to communicate with Heaven. As long as one remembers that it is an image, the icon is useful and beneficial. As soon as one forgets that it is just an image, the risk of idolatry appears. The Bahá’í religion invites its adherents to a personal and individual search for and experience of the truth. Thus it is natural that a diversity of temperaments, intellects, and backgrounds—cultural and other—results in a diversity of understandings of the concept of “Manifestations of God.” Just as the Hindus practice simultaneously or alternately the apparently divergent ways of Rājayoga (a very intellectual approach to an impersonal, or rather suprapersonal God) and of Bhakti (an emetional approach and devout worship of God, personalized in the “Avatar”), so Bahá’ís seem to me to count in their ranks representatives of these two equally legitimate “tendencies.” The Bahá’í Faith does not seem to favor either of these two approaches (in their multiple nuances) to the detriment of the other. It appears that among Bahá’ís of Iranian origin the devotion to the person of Bahá’u’lláh, the “Bhakti,” is more intense than among European or American adherents; this is neither abnormal nor disturbing for the unity of the Faith. In Europe the temptation would be, rather, to attach oneself solely to the divine Essence, while consciously or unconsciously minimizing the fact of the Manifestations. Thus the God of Bahá’u’lláh becomes more abstract and also more distant. It coincides more with the God of Spinoza, tending to become that “God of philosophers and scholars” that Pascal would not accept. But is one not again falling into the trap of words, into the snares of semantics? This God of philosophers and scholars —is He not, in the final analysis, the SAME as the God of the saints and the prophets, the God of Abraham and Jacob? Most of the historic religions have tried to depreciate, even forbid, the intellectual approach to God and make of the word “faith” a synonym of blind credulity, unconditional adherence. Almost alone among religions the Bahá’í Faith proclaims the principle of the “agreement of religion with science and reason.” The uncontrolled Bhakti, taken to the point of paroxysm, carries within itself the risk of idolatry and fanaticism. The unbounded intellectualization, the extreme depersonalization of the concept of God carries the risk of the sterilization of the heart and the soul and, [Page 17] in the final instance, the risk of atheism.

Bahá’ís, conscious of these dangers, will have to apply themselves to a prudent progress between these two extremes. It is a question of balance, harmony, the golden mean.

This is no acrobatic trick comparable to that of the ropewalker. Some deviations from the strict middle of the road are permitted provided that they compensate for each other and neutralize each other at the end of the course: this is as true for the individual Bahá’í as it is for the Bahá’í community as a whole. That is why the Writings of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá sometimes give the impression of favoring a rationalist view of the concept of God. In Some Answered Questions He calmly demythologizes sacred history. The Revelation of John is chiefly, though not exclusively, explained in terms of symbolism and allegory (chapters 11 and 13); the dove that appears at the baptism of Jesus is demythologized (chapter 16); the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation is rejected (chapter 21); the resurrection of the Christ is denied as an objective historical occurrence (chapter 23). With respect to the kinship of Jesus with the Creator, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá insists on its spiritual character. Not without humor, he turns aside the question of the progenitor of Jesus, observing that the glory of Christ does not derive from the absence of an earthly father. If it were so, Adam would be superior to Jesus, since he had neither father nor mother, while Jesus had at least a human mother (chapter 17)! In brief, at first blush the positions of the son and successor do not seem to be fundamentally different from those of Ernest Renan, for example. But were not the Catholics of the nineteenth century wrong in stigmatizing Renan’s views as “irreligion” when in fact they only represented a legitimate hostility to obscurantist superstitions? As a matter of fact, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá leaves intact—and even strengthens— the roots of essential religion. His God, if He is no longer the Houdini or the Santa Claus of our legends, a caricature of the true God, is perfectly identifiable with the Eternal One who spoke to the hearts of Moses, Jesus, and Bahá’u’lláh. The lighting is different, but the continuity is assured.

IF THE STUDENT of the Bahá’í Faith has begun his investigation by reading Some Answered Questions, he will be surprised when he opens such Writings of Bahá’u’lláh as The Hidden Words, The Seven Valleys, and the Tablet of the Holy Mariner. He will be particularly struck, at first, by the poetic character and especially the mystic exaltation expressed in them. Bahá’u’lláh was a mystic. To allay the objections I expect will be raised by those of my Bahá’í friends who are chiefly motivated by the social and “global” message of their Faith, I hasten to add that He was not only that, and that his role as prophet, as spiritual leader, as lawgiver, as temporal guide could not possibly be neglected. But He is also (and I would be tempted to say especially) a mystic. The word is not in fashion. There is a tendency, in this century of feverish agitation in which activism passes, wrongly, as the supreme virtue, to see in the mystics gentle dreamers, useless personages because inefficient, as it is claimed, and without any grasp of the so-called real world— that is, the world of matter. In reality, the true mystic is one in whom effectually takes place the junction of the two worlds, the world of the Spirit, of the Creator, and that of the creation, of the creature, of matter and the intellect, prisoner of matter. Buddha, Jesus, Muḥammad, Gandhi—these were mystics. The Spirit of God animated them—and who will claim that they were ineffectual, without power over the real world? Who, more than they, succeeded in acting more to modify our world and those who people it?

[Page 18] The mysticism of Bahá’u’lláh is in conformity with that of the “perennial philosophy” dear to Aldous Huxley, that of Meister Eckhart, Saint John of the Cross, Jakob Boehme, that also which is expressed in the Bhagavad-Gītā and the writings of the great Ṣúfís, for example, those of Muḥíy’id-Dín ibn ‘Arabí. The Seven Valleys of Bahá’u’lláh, which recalls through its formula of composition the famous Pilgrim’s Progress of John Bunyan, describes a very classical spiritual journey, whose desired end is perfection. From the “Valley of Search,” the point of departure of the mystic traveler, to the “Valley of True Poverty and Absolute N0thingness,” his final objective, the believer comes to know the traditional stages of the difficult and sometimes disappointing pursuit of the Absolute. He traverses the “Valley of Love,” the “Valley of Knowledge,” the “Valley of Unity,” the “Valley of Contentment,” the “Valley of Wonderment,” to find the supreme refuge, the supreme ecstasy in perfect union with the divine. Paradoxically, it is the valley of Poverty, not that of Contentment, that is the veritable goal. “This station is the dying from self and the living in God, the being poor in self and rich in the Desired One.” The Beatitudes say nothing different. The traveler’s weapons are patience, perseverance, confidence in the divine guide, the desire for God, and, before all else, renunciation. One must choose between the world and the Kingdom. “O SON OF PASSION! Cleanse thyself from the defilement of riches and in perfect peace advance into the realm of poverty; that from the wellspring of detachment thou mayest quaff the wine of immortal life,” Bahá’u’lláh also says, in The Hidden Words. Pride, envy, frivolity, false wisdom, backbiting must be given up. Bahá’u’lláh, in one of His exhortations, calls men “emigrants” and in another passage, “my traveling companions,” thus focusing on the traditional concept of a life that is nothing other than a voyage towards God, a crossing of the desert. When he arrives at his goal, “the vestiges of all things . . . are destroyed in the traveler, and on the horizon of eternity the Divine Face riseth out of the darkness, and the meaning of ‘All on the earth shall pass away, but the face of thy Lord. . . .’ is made manifest.” The traveler is no more than a receptacle of the divine energy that dwells within him and completely transfigures him.

Sometimes it seems that in the Bahá’í Faith’s attempt to portray itself to the outside world, its “public-relations” spokesmen evince a certain reticence or timidity in exhibiting this mystic aspect of their religion and its Founder. They generally prefer to insist on the great principles of unity of religion, unity of mankind, equality of men and women, and so forth. Certainly those are important, even essential aspects of Bahá’í thought, and it is only in trying to cause the Kingdom of God to shed its resplendent light in the here-and-now that the believers will be correspondingly worthy in the hereafter. It would be regrettable, though, perhaps tragic, if the essentially mystical origin of the Bahá’í Faith were lost from view. It is well to speak of the necessity of education for all, of the abolition of extremes of wealth and poverty, of the promotion of woman, of the usefulness of a universal auxiliary language, but all this is in no way incompatible with the quest—bold and free from all false shame—of the poetry and mysticism to which Bahá’u’lláh invited these “sons of light,” these “sons of the Supreme Being,” which we all are, according to His own words. Whatever their elders may sometimes believe, the children of the new generation are thirsting [Page 19] for spirituality. The transfiguration of this earthly world by the implementation of the Bahá’í principles may be for them a doubtless exhilarating objective, but quite incomplete, insufficient if it is deprived of its natural counterpart of mysticism and contemplation. Total religion is that religion in which, to use the language of the New Testament, the way of Martha and the way of Mary, the way of action and involvement in the world, and that of devotion and contemplation coexist harmoniously. But Jesus added, “But one thing is needful: Mary hath chosen that good part, which shall not be taken away from her” (Luke 10:42). And Bahá’u’lláh, if He commits His servants to the production of “wonderful and beauteous fruits” in this world, also reminds them that “glorious is the domain of eternity, shouldst thou pass beyond the world of mortality.” Though it may have been for a time cast into relative obscurity, the contemplative way would gain in the bosom of the Bahá’í Faith by being, if not rehabilitated (for it was never condemned), at least restored to some measure of esteem. The search for communion with God was for Bahá’u’lláh the only enterprise capable of giving a meaning to our earthly life. If they should happen to forget it, the Bahá’ís would cut themselves off dangerously from the very source of their faith and tradition, and their global commitment, however legitimate and meritorious it may be, would lose in a single-minded activism its deep justification, the divine significance that the Founder of this movement intended to confer upon it.

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[Page 21]

Afterlife and the Twin Pillars of Education

BY JOHN S. HATCHER

A BAHÁ’Í cannot study the history and teachings of his religion without realizing that to a large extent physical existence is preparation for what comes afterward. In the light of this purpose death should be one of the most significant events in life, and yet because the Bahá’í lives in contemporary society, he may often fall prey to prevailing attitudes regarding death: “Death is a subject that is evaded, ignored and denied by our youth-worshipping, progress-oriented society. It is almost as if we have taken on death as just another disease to be conquered.” It is, therefore, with great interest that many Bahá’ís have read some of the recent studies that seem to give scientific evidence of life after death. Such studies not only seem to vindicate belief in the continuation of the soul; they may also help one to face more courageously the transience and injustice of physical life. One might wonder if, in fact, the knowledge these studies impart is the same knowledge to which Bahá’u’lláh alludes when He states:

In the treasuries of the knowledge of God there lieth concealed a knowledge which, when applied, will largely, though not wholly, eliminate fear. This knowledge, however, should be taught from childhood, as it will greatly aid in its elimination. Whatever decreaseth fear increaseth courage.

One phenomenon that might corroborate such a notion concerns the exemplars of courage in Bahá’í history, the thousands of martyrs who so eagerly and joyfully sacrificed their lives, though often they had a minimal understanding of the Teachings of their new religion. One explanation I have heard for their amazing valor is that they had a vision of the afterlife so palpable and intimate that they had no doubts as to the joyous reality lying in store for them only minutes or hours away. Their actions still required immense courage and a staunch faith, but perhaps the divine bestowal helped them meet the challenge of that moment.

Similarly, the inner peace and ostensible fearlessness the subjects in R. A. Moody’s Life After Life possess as a result of their encounters with the afterlife experience seem to confirm that a certitude about what lies beyond this life could eliminate most of one’s fear. Likewise, the observations of Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, perhaps the most widely known authority in the emerging field of death counseling, indicate that an accurate understanding of death would reveal that there is nothing to fear in the transition to another existence:

Death is the final stage of growth in this life. There is no total death. Only the body dies. The self or spirit, or whatever you [Page 22] may wish to label it, is eternal. You may interpret this in any way that makes you comfortable. . . . Death, in this context, may be viewed as the curtain between the existence we are conscious of and the one that is hidden from us until we raise that curtain.

Certainly the parallels between the description of the afterlife experience in Life After Life and the portrayal of the afterlife in many of the Bahá’í writings seem to confirm to a large extent the validity of the model of the afterlife experience that Moody assembles. Conversely, Moody’s relatively scientific evidence may serve to increase the certitude the Bahá’í has in his own convictions. However, a critical examination of these parallels reveals a vitally important omission on Moody’s part, an omission he redresses in his second book Reflections on Life After Life.

I

In Life After Life R. A. Moody constructs a composite description of the afterlife from statements by individuals who have been through clinical death or near-death experiences. Not all of these experiences were the same, but Moody discovered sufficient parallels to enable him to synthesize a model of the afterlife:

A man is dying and, as he reaches the point of greatest physical distress, he hears himself pronounced dead by his doctor. He begins to hear an uncomfortable noise, a loud ringing or buzzing, and at the same time feels himself moving very rapidly through a long dark tunnel. After this, he suddenly finds himself outside of his own physical body, but still in the immediate physical environment, and be sees his own body from a distance, as though he is a spectator. He watches the resuscitation attempt from this unusual vantage point and is in a state of emotional upheaval.

After a while, he collects himself and becomes more accustomed to his odd condition. He notices that he still has a “body,” but one of a very different nature and with very different powers from the physical body be has left behind. Soon other things begin to happen. Others come to meet and to help him. He glimpses the spirits of relatives and friends who have already died, and a loving, warm spirit of a kind he has never encountered before—a being of light—appears before him. This being asks him a question, nonverbally, to make him evaluate his life and helps him along by showing him a panoramic, instantaneous playback of the major events of his life. At some point he finds himself approaching some sort of barrier or border, apparently representing the limit between earthly life and the next life. Yet, he finds that he must go back to the earth, that the time for his death has not yet come. At this point he resists, for by now he is taken up with his experiences in the afterlife and does not want to return. He is overwhelmed by intense feelings of joy, love, and peace. Despite his attitude, though, he somehow reunites with his physical body and lives.

At the heart of Moody’s study are the excerpts from the testimony of these individuals. Before examining their accounts, Moody gives several cautions: not everyone experiences each part of the model; no two experiences are exactly the same; no one subject experienced all the elements in the model; no single element of the model occurred in every experience; the order of the elements varied from one subject to another; the clarity of the experience increased in proportion to the length of time the subject was clinically dead; not everyone who had been clinically dead could recollect experiencing an afterlife.

Moody further qualifies the nature of his findings by mentioning later in the book the shortcomings of his sampling technique: his sampling is limited to those who, in effect, [Page 23] supported what he had begun to observe as a pattern or model—he does not, at least in the main body of his text, discuss those who experienced an alternative afterlife. In addition, Moody admits his sampling is limited with regard to the number of people interviewed and to the lack of cross-cultural cases:

In fact, one of the many reasons I say that my study is not “scientific” is that the group of individuals to whom I have listened is not a random sample of human beings. I would be very interested in hearing about the near-death experiences of Eskimos, Kwakiutl Indians, Navahos, Watusi tribesmen, and so on.

Moody divides the model into about fifteen component parts, beginning with the initial stages where one might hear his death pronounced by attending physicians and ending with statements about how the afterlife experience affected the lives of the subjects. The resulting portrayal of the afterlife as a totally positive and exalting experience has been taken by many, in spite of Moody’s disclaimer, as a scientific study. To the student of the Bahá’í writings, the work may have added weight because so many passages in the writings parallel and corroborate most or all of the model Moody depicts.

For example, in the first part of the model, subjects describe the separation of the mind from the physical body. In this experience, the individual often views his own body:

I was out of my body looking at it from about ten yards away, but I was still thinking, just like in physical life. And where I was thinking was about at my normal bodily height. I wasn’t in a body, as such.

I kept bobbling up and down, and all of a sudden, it felt as though I were away from my body, away from everybody, in space by myself. Although I was stable, staying at the same level, I saw my body in the water about three or four feet away, bobbling up and down.

I saw people come running up and crowding around the car, and I saw my friend get out of the car, obviously in shock. I could see my own body in the wreckage among all those people, and could see them trying to get it out.

While there is nothing in the Bahá’í writings specifically describing the sensation of departing from the body, there are several passages describing a similar relationship between the cognitive faculty, which is a property of the soul, and the physical body. Simply stated, these passages indicate that since the soul is not attached to or dependent on the physical being, one does not cease to be cognitively aware after death:

That a sick person showeth signs of weakness is due to the hindrances that interpose themselves between his soul and his body, for the soul itself remaineth unaffected by any bodily ailments. Consider the light of the lamp. Though an external object may interfere with its radiance, the light itself continueth to shine with undiminished power. In like manner, every malady afflicting the body of man is an impediment that preventeth the soul from manifesting its inherent might and power. When it leaveth the body, however, it will evince such ascendancy, and reveal such influence as no force on earth can equal.

But the mind is the power of the human spirit. Spirit is the lamp, mind is the light which shines from the lamp. Spirit is the tree, and the mind is the fruit.

the rational soul, meaning the human spirit, does not descend into the body; this [Page 24] is to say, it does not enter it, for descent and entrance are characteristics of bodies, and the rational soul is exempt from this. The spirit never entered this body, so in quitting it, it will not be in need of an abiding-place; no, the spirit is connected with the body, as this light is with this mirror. When the mirror is clear and perfect, the light of the lamp will be apparent in it, and when the mirror becomes covered with dust or breaks, the light will disappear.

. . . The personality of the rational soul is from its beginning; it is not due to the instrumentality of the body. . . .

These statements do not describe the viewing of one’s body as an inevitable part of the process of dying, but given the relationship between the body and the cognitive faculty, one can readily accept the feasibility of such a phenomenon.

A second parallel concerns the encounter with other souls shortly afer the initial sensation of departure from the body. Moody’s study describes a sense of comfort and companionship resulting from this experience, and in most cases there is a recognition of the other souls as individuals one has known in the previous existence:

. . . I realized that all these people were there, almost multitudes it seems, hovering around the ceiling of the room. They were all people I had known in my past life, but who had passed on before. I recognized my grandmother and a girl I had known when I was in school, and many other relatives and friends. It seems that I mainly saw their faces and felt their presence. They all seemed pleased. It was a very happy occasion, and I felt that they had come to protect or to guide me. . . . It was a beautiful and glorious moment.

Several weeks before I nearly died, a good friend of mine, Bob, had been killed. Now the moment I got out of my body I had the feeling that Bob was standing there, right next to me. I could see him in my mind and felt like he was there, but it was strange. I didn’t see him as his physical body. . . . He was there but he didn’t have a physical body.

. . . I had the feeling that there were people around me, and I could feel their presence, and could feel them moving, though I could never see anyone. Every now and then, I would talk with one of them, but I couldn’t see them. And whenever I wondered what was going on, I would always get a thought back from one of them, that everything was all right, that I was dying but would be fine.

The Bahá’í writings describe the same phenomenon, the recognition of other individuals after death as well as the comfort and solace that this encounter brings, though in some passages there seems to be qualification of those souls that will have this experience:

Blessed is the soul which, at the hour of its separation from the body, is sanctified from the vain imaginings of the peoples of the world. . . . The Maids of Heaven, inmates of the loftiest mansions, will circle around it, and the Prophets of God and His chosen ones will seek its companionship. With them that soul will freely converse, and will recount unto them that which it hath been made to endure in the path of God, the Lord of all worlds.

Know thou that the souls of the people of Bahá, who have entered and been established within the Crimson Ark, shall associate and commune intimately one with another, and shall be so closely associated in their lives, their aspirations, their aims and strivings as to be even as one soul.

[Page 25]

As to the question whether the souls will recognize each other in the spiritual world: This fact is certain; for the Kingdom is the world of vision where all the concealed realities will become disclosed. How much more the well-known souls will become manifest. The mysteries of which man is heedless in this earthly world, those he will discover in the heavenly world, and there will he be informed of the secret of truth; how much more will he recognize or discover persons with whom he hath been associated.

A third parallel is the panoramic review. In Moody’s study most subjects experience a panoramic review of their previous existence, generally at the request or instigation of the “being of light.” The ostensible focus of such a review is an evaluation of one’s accomplishments and failures, not so much to rebuke or adjudge the subject, but to instruct lovingly:

When the light appeared, the first thing he said to me was “What do you have to show me that you’ve done with your life?”, or something to this effect. And that’s when these flashbacks started. . . .

Now, I didn’t actually see the light as I was going through the flashbacks. He disappeared as soon as he asked me what I had done, and the flashbacks started, and yet I knew that he was there with me the whole time. . . . He was trying to show me something in each one of these flashbacks. It’s not like he was trying to see what I had done—he knew already—but he was picking out these certain flashbacks of my life and putting them in front of me so that I would have to recall them.

. . . There wasn’t any accusation in any of this, though. When he came across times when I had been selfish, his attitude was only that I had been learning from them, too.

In at least two places Bahá’u’lláh describes precisely the same procedure:

Bring thyself to account each day ere thou art summoned to a reckoning; for death, unheralded, shall come upon thee and thou shalt be called to give account for thy deeds.

It is clear and evident that all men shall, after their physical death, estimate the worth of their deeds, and realize all that their hands have wrought.

Since the individuals in Moody’s study are revived, some parallels are not fully borne out, but several other more general similarities to the descriptions of the afterlife in the Bahá’í writings are also evident. For example, all of the subjects acknowledge the ineffable nature of these experiences; they are all unable to describe adequately the afterlife because they find the language of this plane too limited:

Now, there is a real problem for me as I’m trying to tell you this, because all the words I know are three-dimensional. As I was going through this, I kept thinking, “Well, when I was taking geometry, they always told me there were only three dimensions, and I always just accepted that. But they were wrong. There are more.” And, of course, our world—the one we’re living in now—is three-dimensional, but the next one definitely isn’t. And that’s why it’s so hard to tell you this. I have to describe it to you in words that are three-dimensional. That’s as close as I can get to it, but it’s not really adequate. I can’t really give you a complete picture.

Bahá’u’lláh also indicates the immense difference between these two planes of existence and the difficulty of describing the next world to a being still living in this plane:

The nature of the soul after death can never be described, nor is it meet and [Page 26] permissible to reveal its whole character to the eyes of men. . . . The world beyond is as different from this world as this world is different from that of the child while still in the womb of its mother.

Another general similarity is that from both accounts it becomes clear that the purpose of both worlds is individual growth through learning. For example, one of Moody’s subjects states that in the course of his experience he came to understand that according to the “being of light” the attainment of knowledge is the purpose of life:

He seemed very interested in things concerning knowledge, too. He kept on pointing out things that had to do with learning, and he did say that I was going to continue learning, and he said that even when he comes back for me (because by this time he had told me that I was going back) that there will always be a quest for knowledge. He said that it is a continuous process, so I got the feeling that it goes on after death.

There are, of course, innumerable passages in the Bahá’í writings stressing the importance of learning and the possibility of progress through knowledge in this world and the next; two that come most immediately to my mind are the following:

Regard man as a mine rich in gems of inestimable value. Education can, alone, cause it to reveal its treasures, and enable mankind to benefit therefrom.

Know thou of a truth that the soul, after its separation from the body, will continue to progress until it attaineth the presence of God, in a state and condition which neither the revolution of ages and centuries, nor the changes and chances of this world, can alter.

Finally, the overall tone of peace and joy is common to both accounts. The subjects in Moody’s work consistently describe their experience as being so clearly superior to anything they felt in the physical world that many did not want to return:

all I felt was warmth and the most extreme comfort I have ever experienced.

I began to experience the most wonderful feelings. I couldn’t feel a thing in the world except peace, comfort, ease—just quietness. I felt that all my troubles were gone. . . .

As I went across the line, the most wonderful feelings came over me—feelings of peace, tranquility, a vanishing of all worries.

I didn’t want to go back, but I had no choice, and immediately I was back in my body.

When I had this wonderful feeling, there in the presence of that light, I really didn’t want to come back. But I take my responsibilities very seriously, and I knew that I had a duty to my family. So I decided to try to come back.

The sense of joy and release is corroborated in the Bahá’í writings, but with a significant qualification:

Every pure, every refined and sanctified soul will be endowed with tremendous power, and shall rejoice with exceeding gladness.

Every soul that walketh humbly with its God, in this Day, and cleaveth unto Him, shall find itself invested with the honor and glory of all goodly names and stations.

Know thou, of a truth, that if the soul of man hath walked in the ways of God, it will, assuredly, return and be gathered to [Page 27] the glory of the Beloved.

They that are the followers of the one true God shall, the moment they depart out of this life, experience such joy and gladness as would be impossible to describe. . . .

Unlike the initial implications of Moody’s portrait, these passages from the Bahá’í writings seem to limit the sense of joy and peace to souls with certain attributes: “Every pure, every refined and sanctified soul,” “Every soul that walketh humbly with its God,” “the soul of man that hath walked in the ways of God,” and “They that are the followers of the one true God.” One might argue that such qualifications do not deny the afterlife or even a pleasant experience to souls not complying with these criteria, but other passages in the Bahá’í writings do indicate that such a deprivation is quite possible. Furthermore, Moody’s study does not deny or contradict these qualifications. Moody states that all subjects who had this common experience were relatively varied in general background and religious training, but in Life After Life he does not probe the possibility that there may be some qualities, attitudes, or actions these people had in common during their earthly lives.

II

Life After Life gives the overall impression that the afterlife experience is uniformly blissful; the model implicitly confirms statements by Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, who wrote the preface to the work, that there is no need to fear death since God does not judge us—our earthly performance has no bearing on how we are received:

Discussing the aspects of an afterlife as described by patients, Mrs. Kubler-Ross remarked that those involved in the research were puzzled that there seemed to be no fear or punishment connected with death.

“It seemed that a Hitler and a Mother Theresa got the same treatment. Then, we realized that God is not judgmental. We are the ones who discriminate.”

If a Bahá’í were able to ignore Baha’u’lláh’s qualifications about who will be joyous in the next plane of existence, he might agree with the statement of praise on the cover of Moody’s bestseller, in which Richard Bach, author of Jonathan Livingston Seagull, states, “I’m delighted to read straight honest research that dissolves ancient fear and mystery.” These words seem to echo Bahá’u’lláh’s own verse in the Hidden Words: “I have made death a messenger of joy to thee. Wherefore dost thou grieve?” Furthermore, were the Bahá’í to stop his examination of Moody’s work at this point, it might be any easy task to accept this knowledge as explaining Bahá’u’lláh’s promise in Epistle to the Son of the Wolf. But one cannot simply ignore the qualifications in Bahá’u’lláh’s statements, nor should he ignore some other serious considerations.

First, there is a curious indication of an alternative to Moody’s model of the afterlife tucked away in a back section of Life After Life. In response to a question about afterlife experiences following suicide attempts Moody reveals that some subjects had a totally different experience, a negative one that he mentions nowhere else in the book:

I do know of a few cases in which a suicide attempt was the cause of the apparent “death.” These experiences were uniformly characterized as being unpleasant.

As one woman said, “If you leave here a tormented soul, you will be a tormented soul over there, too.” In short, they report that the conflicts they had attempted suicide to escape were still present when they died, but with added complications. In their disembodied state they were unable [Page 28] to do anything about their problems, and they also had to view the unfortunate consequences which resulted from their acts.

A man who was despondent about the death of his wife shot himself, “died” as a result, and was resuscitated. He states:

I didn’t go where [my wife] was. I went to an awful place. . . . I immediately saw the mistake I had made. . . . I thought, “I wish I hadn’t done it.”

Others who experienced this unpleasant “limbo” state have remarked that they had the feeling they would be there for a long time. This was their penalty for “breaking the rules” by trying to release themselves prematurely from what was, in effect, an “assignment”—to fulfill a certain purpose in life.

Even though Moody states that he will give more information about the alternative experience in a later book, it is most unfortunate that he places such important data in an insignificant place—that is, even though Moody does not proffer his study as strictly scientific, one is puzzled as to why he did not use the information as a qualification to his initial model, especially since he goes on to admit that people other than suicide victims experience this same “unpleasant limbo”:

Such remarks coincide with what has been reported to me by several people who “died” of other causes but who said that, while they were in this state, it had been intimated to them that suicide was a very unfortunate act which attended with a severe penalty.

In other words, other actions, other sorts of “breaking the rules” could cause one to have a negative experience, instead of the blissful one Moody has extolled in the bulk of his text. In fact, for all Moody knows, a greater percentage of the total population may have the negative experience than have the positive one.

Of course, a Bahá’í might have guessed as much since, in addition to the previously mentioned qualifications as to who has a positive experience, there are also in the Bahá’í writings various passages parallel to Moody’s observations about the negative model:

they that live in error shall be seized with such fear and trembling, and shall be filled with such consternation, as nothing can exceed.

The souls of the infidels, however, shall—and to this I bear witness—when breathing their last be made aware of the good things that have escaped them, and shall bemoan their plight, and shall humble themselves before God. They shall continue doing so after the separation of their souls from their bodies.

If it be faithful to God, it will reflect His light, and will, eventually, return unto Him. If it fail, however, in its allegiance to its Creator, it will become a victim to self and passion, and will, in the end, sink in their depths.

Perhaps the actions that Moody’s subjects categorize as “breaking the rules” would correspond to what Bahá’u’lláh designates with phrases such as “they that live in error,” “infidels,” and those who “become a victim to self and passion.”

In his second work Reflections on Life After Life Moody amplifies the “unpleasant-limbo” model, but he also introduces some other alternatives, one of which is a variation on his initial model, and another which constitutes a completely different third model for the afterlife experience.

The variation on the first model is, like the “unpleasant-limbo” model, a negative experience, but it results from a sense of judgment that occurs during the panoramic replay. The subjects in this category do not seem to be in [Page 29] a negative environment or the sort of holding pattern described by those in the “unpleasant-limbo” state; they appear to have done enough negative acts, however, that the replay of their lives makes them feel immense shame and guilt:

Then it seemed there was a display all around me, and everything in my life just went by for review, you might say. I was really very, very ashamed of a lot of the things that I experienced because it seemed that I had a different knowledge, that the light was showing me what was wrong, what I did wrong. And it was very real.

Moody’s own conclusion about a mode of experience that would most closely approximate the mythic hell of the scriptures is that this variation would be the most awesome, especially for someone who had perpetrated horrendous acts upon others. Moody notes that his subjects were guilty of only minor transgressions, but he states that if such a replay were proportionately greater according to the act and the subject witnessed the consequence of his deeds on others, Moody could image no worse experience than to have been the perpetrator of atrocities:

If what happened to my subjects happened to these men, they would see all these things and many others come alive, vividly portrayed before them. In my wildest fantasies, I am totally unable to imagine a hell more horrible, more ultimately unbearable than this.

The third model Moody introduces portrays a mode of experience that might account for some of those who, having experienced clinical death, recall no afterlife. This is a realm of “bewildered spirits,” a condition in which spirits seem trapped between the physical and spiritual worlds, dulled, physically dead, but still attached to the physical world:

First, they state that these beings seem to be, in effect, unable to surrender their attachments to the physical world. One man recounted that the spirits he saw apparently “couldn’t progress on the other side because their God is still living here.” That is, they seemed bound to some particular object, person, or habit.

Like the subjects who experienced the “unpleasant limbo,” these spirits were not doomed to dwell in this condition eternally; they were to be there only until they solved whatever problem or difficulty was keeping them in that perplexed state.

Unlike the subjects in the “unpleasant limbo” and unlike the subjects who experience the guilt and shame during the panoramic replay, these “dulled spirits” do not seem to be in a state of guilt or regret; they are, instead, oblivious to what has happened to them, “not knowing who they are or what they are.” They are, in effect, between worlds, unable to return to the physical world, but not interested in finding out what is in store for them. Some even try “unsuccessfully to communicate with persons who were still physically alive.”

The key word in the description of this third model is attachment, a word used commonly by both Moody and Bahá’u’lláh to describe an inability to relinquish a dominating concern for the physical world. In fact, Bahá’u’lláh states that the main purpose in the spiritual education of man has been to facilitate the transition to the next world and, implicitly, to avoid such dilemmas:

The Prophets and Messengers of God have been sent down for the sole purpose of guiding mankind to the straight Path of Truth. The purpose underlying their revelation hath been to educate all men, that they may, at the hour of death, ascend, in the utmost purity and sanctity and with absolute detachment, to the throne of the Most High.

[Page 30] With his second book, then, Moody eliminates the naive acceptance of the blissful model as the only afterlife experience, and to a large extent, he delineates the differences between his conclusions and those of other researchers, such as Elisabeth Kubler-Ross. Not only does he make it clear that there is an alternative to the afterlife model of his first book; he also states there is no limit to the models possible:

I want very much for others to avoid taking my list of common elements as being a fixed, exhaustive model of what a near-death experience must be like. There is an enormously wide spectrum of experiences, with some people having only one or two of the elements, and others most of them. I anticipate that the list I have developed will be added to, modified, and reformulated.

Beyond acknowledging these alternatives, Moody concludes that the experience is not arbitrary, that there is a very important relationship between how one has lived his life and what one experiences after this life. But in order to examine more fully the way that relationship works and whether a knowledge of the process would be more likely a cause of the cessation of fear or the intensification of it, one must first probe some of the principles underlying the process.

III

ONE can infer from both Moody’s works and the Bahá’í writings that there is no point at which human perfection is attained, either in this world or the next. It is true that the joy, release, and sense of fulfillment both sources depict as being the lot of some souls is a veritable heaven, but there is a clear indication that this is not the end point of the soul’s development:

Both before and after putting off this material form, there is progress in perfection, but not in state. . . . There is no other being higher than a perfect man. But man when he has reached this state can still make progress in perfections. . . .

Hence, as the perfections of humanity are endless, man can also make progress in perfections after leaving this world.

In fact, in Moody’s second book subjects describe a “Vision of Knowledge,” an afterlife experience in which “they got brief glimpses of an entire separate realm of existence in which all knowledge—whether of past, present, or future—seemed to co-exist in a sort of timeless state.” Others describe a moment of enlightenment when they seem to have complete knowledge. The subjects describe this experience as being a condition wherein they are aware of universal secrets, as if they were in a school or library where knowledge is readily available, where whatever they want to know is made suddenly accessible.

Clearly, then, the causal relationship underlying the negative experience is not solely the logical consequence of the physical life; there is an educative function to this process. The implications of this continuing purpose are important; it means that there is no point at which growth is completed, no precise point of salvation. In addition, it means that the afterlife experience is not intended to be an exacting fulfillment of strict justice, no eternal relegation of the soul to a fixed condition according to some mathematical, impersonal evaluation of earthly performance. Each life has an infinity of variables that would make an accurate assessment of that life a mystery to all but an omniscient Deity.

For example, even though Bahá’í law forbids suicide, and Moody’s subjects consistently report negative results attached to that act, a Tablet of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá to a bereaved widow indicates that hope is not lost with suicide:

That honorable personage has been so much subjected to the stress and pain of this world that his highest wish became deliverance from it. . . . Thus it is seen [Page 31] that some, under extreme pressure of anguish, have committed suicide.

As to him rest assured; he will be immersed in the ocean of pardon and forgiveness and will become the recipient of bounty and favor.

It may well be that this individual experienced the initial “unpleasant limbo” before he was comforted by the “ocean of pardon and forgiveness,” but the passage still suggests that his ultimate destiny is not a wretched one.

While a negative condition may endure for some time, change or progress to another condition is a distinct possibility. Indeed, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá states that some sort of change is inevitable, whether in this world or the next:

Know that nothing which exists remains in a state of repose, that is to say, all things are in motion. Everything is either growing or declining. . . .

Thus it is established that this movement is necessary to existence, which is either growing or declining. Now, as the spirit continues to exist after death, it necessarily progresses or declines; and in the other world, to cease to progress is the same as to decline. . . .

But the means by which change, positive or negative, takes place is perhaps the most important and intriguing force at work in the afterlife experience. Of course, in the physical world, one must search to find the most positive path and follow it. To the Bahá’í, this search ends in a two-fold obligation—to discover and recognize the Manifestation and follow the guidance He gives for living.

The first duty prescribed by God for His servants is the recognition of Him Who is the Dayspring of His Revelation and the Fountain of His laws. . . . It behoveth every one who reacheth this most sublime station, this summit of transcendent glory, to observe every ordinance of Him Who is the Desire of the world. These twin duties are inseparable. Neither is acceptable without the other.

In the next world progress cannot be expressed through physical action. Likewise, in the sense that life’s purpose will become apparent, there is not the same kind of challenge to recognize veiled truth and light. Nevertheless, it is clear from Moody’s accounts and from the Bahá’í writings, that the soul in the afterlife is not a nebulous entity, unaware, pushed along by other forces, incapable of initiating anything, though one passage by ‘Abdu’l-Bahá is often taken out of context by some to mean exactly that:

The progress of man’s spirit in the divine world, after the severance of its connection with the body of dust, is through the bounty and grace of the Lord alone, or through the intercession and the sincere prayers of other human souls, or through the charities and important good works which are performed in its name.

Without the other statements by ‘Abdu’l-Bahá that explain the part the individual soul plays in its progress, this statement can be taken to mean that the soul is shoved along at the whims of those still “alive” or according to the intervention of God, Who may or may not decide to help out. In such a context the soul itself is perceived to have no ability to effect its own salvation.

But in another important passage ‘Abdu’l-Bahá makes it quite clear that the soul in the next world can communicate with others, pray for other souls, and, if it has died in sin, instigate its own progress:

As We have power to pray for these souls here, so likewise we shall possess the same power in the other world, which is the Kingdom of God. Are not all the people in that world the creatures of God? Therefore [Page 32] in that world also they can make progress. As here they can receive light by their supplications, there also they can plead for forgiveness, and receive light through entreaties and supplications.

The capacity to supplicate, plead, and make entreaties, all of which are expressions of free will on the part of those who have died in sin, is indeed due to the “bounty and grace of the Lord alone,” but so, for that matter, is all progress man makes at any stage of existence, whether individually or collectively. For example, were it not for God’s grace and bounty, He would not continue to send the Manifestations on Whom depends all progress of man on this planet. Thus, I think Gloria Faizi in her book The Bahá’í Faith: An Introduction is somewhat misleading when she implies that one can have no part in his spiritual progress when this life ends:

We should therefore pay constant attention to our spiritual growth now because it will be too late when our life here is over, and any blessings which we may then receive will be dependent on the grace of God alone rather than on what we could have earned by our own efforts in this life.

Virtually inseparable from the force of free will is the concept of the forgiveness of God; since God is described in the Bahá’í writings as “Ever-Forgiving,” one presumably could never be beyond access to this saving grace—that is, forgiveness would always be a possibility, though clearly through God’s mercy, not His justice—we do not, in spite of the implication of the above passage in Faizi’s book, “earn” such progress:

It is even possible that the condition of those who have died in sin and unbelief may become changed: that is to say, they may become the object of pardon through the bounty of God, not through His justice; for bounty is giving without desert, and justice is giving what is deserved.

Of course, this pardon may be gradual, and the initial afterlife experience might still be an awesomely negative one.

Most significantly in this regard, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá states that forgiveness is a “possibility,” not a certainty; whatever other contingencies may govern the pardon, it is clear in the Bahá’í writings that the sinner must request it. Such a request clearly would require, at a minimum, recognition of one’s remoteness, a desire to change, and an entreaty for help:

The sinner, when in a state wherein he finds himself free and severed from all else save God, must beg for forgiveness and pardon. It is not allowable to declare one’s sins and transgressions before any man, inasmuch as this has not been, nor is, conducive to securing God’s forgiveness and pardon. . . .

A sinner must, between himself and God, beg for mercy from the Sea of Mercy and ask forgiveness from the Heaven of Beneficence. . . .

To be “severed from all else save God” might be an easy task in an afterlife where God’s ascendancy is evident, yet this one requisite, that the sinner himself initiate the process, is a tremendously important contingency, whether in this world or the next. It may well be, in other words, that the following verse in The Hidden Words applies to the afterlife as well as to this plane of existence: “Love Me, that I may love thee. If thou lovest Me not, My love can in no wise reach thee.” Here again, the need for free will in the next world seems clear, even if only for the purpose of initiating the process of forgiveness. For example, in spite of Mírzá Yaḥyá’s willful attempts to kill Bahá’u’lláh and destroy the Bahá’í Faith, Bahá’u’lláh told Mírzá Yaḥyá in the Kitáb-i-Aqdas that forgiveness was readily [Page 33] available to him if he would but seek it. Bahá’u’lláh wrote that he should “‘fear not because of thy deeds,’” bid him “‘return unto God, humble, submissive and lowly,’” and affirm that “‘He will put away from thee thy sins,’” and that “‘Thy Lord is the Forgiving, the Mighty, the All-Merciful.’”

It might seem, in view of these mechanisms for our development in the next life that, relatively speaking, Elisabeth Kubler-Ross is correct, that eventually everyone can receive divine education and spiritual reward, but if forgiveness is contingent on an act of free will, of desire and acteptance on the part of the individual soul, the possibility of a fourth model of the afterlife experiences looms before us, a state of relative nonexistence. In other words, while it is clear from the Bahá’í writings that one does not cease to exist, it is conceivable that one could deteriorate to the point where he would be as if dead:

In the same way the punishments of the other world, that is to say, the torments of the other world, consist in being deprived of the special divine blessings and the absolute bounties, and falling into the lowest degrees of existence. He who is deprived of these divine favors, although he continues after death, is considered as dead by the people of truth.

I do not mean to imply that all of Moody’s subjects who could not recall an afterlife experience were in such a state; Moody discusses many explanations as to why subjects would have nothing to report. But such a condition is conceivable, and possibly some of the subjects who seemed to have no experience were simply not aware of their own existence.

By analogy, if a child in the womb had the capacity to choose how he would develop and decided not to grow limbs or develop senses and other tools needed for a physical environment, he might be born capable of existing on the level of a stone, or, at best, a plant, relative to human existence. Such an one would not only be as dead; he would be incapable of discerning his own inadequacies and degraded condition inasmuch as he would be unable to make comparisons, to understand what to strive for, much less how to get there.

Similarly, were one to enter a spiritual environment without having developed spiritual faculties and sensibilities, he might not perceive his environment or his relation to it, nor would he know where to turn for assistance.

If such an afterlife experience exists, one can only guess how it would work, what manner of earthly life would merit such a destiny, or what prognosis there would be for a soul in that condition. Since ‘Abdu’l-Bahá states that in the afterlife a lack of progress is tantamount to regression, one can imagine how through pride, such as that possessed by the character of Satan in Milton’s Paradise Lost, or through such despair as exhibited by Marlowe’s Faustus, a person could refuse to ask for forgiveness or repent of one’s actions. The logical extension of such a phenomenon would be a deterioration which, if unchecked, could lead to a state of relative obliteration. Even in such a state free will would be operant, though to the detriment of the declining soul, which, without the merciful intervention of God, would willfully continue its diminution, like a planet slipped from orbit, following the dictates of its own centrifugal momentum, becoming ultimately so remote from the magnetic attraction of the sun that it flies irretrievably into remoteness.

IV

IN THE FINAL ANALYSIS, a study of the afterlife leaves many questions unanswered and an infinitely more complex situation than Moody’s initial model gives hint of. In the light of alternative experiences to that model and the important relationship between deeds [Page 34] done on the physical plane and one’s experience in the next world, a knowledge of the afterlife might hardly seem to be a means of largely eliminating fear. Indeed, such knowledge might instead produce stark terror.

A further study of the Bahá’í writings, however, indicates that there are two kinds of fear regarding the afterlife, or else this is another of those “delicious paradoxes” in the writings, as I have heard Dr. Daniel C. Jordan, a Bahá’í educator and psychologist, call them. There is one kind of fear which is unnecessary, negative, unhealthy, and ultimately groundless:

Through his ignorance, man fears death; but the death he shrinks from is imaginary and absolutely unreal; it is only human imagination

Ascend to the zenith of an existence which is never beclouded by the fears and forebodings of non-existence.

The conception of annihilation is a factor in human degradation, a cause of human debasement and lowliness, a source of human fear and abjection.

If he dwells upon the thought of nonexistence he will become utterly incompetent; with weakened will-power his ambition for progress will be lessened and the acquisition of human virtue will cease.

This dread of nonexistence that produces despair and inactivity is markedly different from the fear mentioned elsewhere that ensures action, that spurs one to act positively because it involves an awareness that our deeds have consequence:

For the fear of God commands people to do that which is just and forbids them that which is evil.

The fear of God is the shield that defendeth His Cause, the buckler that enableth His people to attain to victory. It is a standard that no man can abase, a force that no power can rival.

The fear of God hath ever been the prime factor in the education of His creatures. . . .

The fear of God hath ever been a sure defence and a safe stronghold for all the peoples of the world. It is the chief cause of the protection of mankind, and the supreme instrument for its preservation.

Put another way, this positive fear is one stimulus in a system of divine education, a system not unlike B. F. Skinner’s concept of operant conditioning in which behavior is modified by means of reward and punishment. I do not mean that the Bahá’í concept of spiritual enlightenment is so easily delineated. Traditionally, educationists perceive man from one of two points of view. The “liberal” sees man as innately good, infused with divinity, most effectively educated when left to himself, severed from the defiling influences of rules, order, control. The “conservative” sees man as innately evil at worst, unformed at best; to educate the beast requires guidance, training, habit, discipline. The Bahá’í view in its broadest sense is a mean between these extremes. On the one hand, the Bahá’í recognizes man’s spiritual nature as the essential reality; on the other, the Bahá’í recognizes the need for training, law, education.

It is not enough, in other words, that man be exhorted to positive action; he must also have a sense of retribution for negative actions:

The structure of world stability and order hath been reared upon, and will continue to be sustained by, the twin pillars of reward and punishment.

The trainer of the world is justice, for it consists of two pillars: Reward and retribution. These two pillars are two fountains [Page 35] for the life of the people of the world.

According to Bahá’u’lláh, there are some individuals who have innate deterrents against negative action, but these individuals are rare: “Indeed, there existeth in man a faculty which deterreth him from, and guardeth him against, whatever is unworthy and unseemly, and which is known as his sense of shame. This, however, is confined to but a few; all have not possessed, and do not possess, it.”

The kind of knowledge imparted by Moody’s work would decrease one’s fear of nonexistence, but it would also increase one’s awareness that acts in this life have consequence beyond this existence, that in ways we can only hazily understand there is a system of reward and punishment beyond this life. To be aware solely of the model of a blissful afterlife experience might increase courage in that one would tend to judge the success of life less in terms of mundane standards and more in terms of the long-term criteria underlying the purpose of man’s existence: “Sorrow not if, in these days and on this earthly plane, things contrary to your wishes have been ordained and manifested by God, for days of blissful joy, of heavenly delight, are assuredly in store for you.”

But while such an awareness might imbue one with stoic forbearance, it hardly exhorts one to action or curtails the machinations of the iniquitous, since all would receive like reward. I do not mean that a virtuous life does not have its own rewards; according to the Bahá’í writings, adherence to moral law is the surest means of success in even the most pragmatic sense; but most people, according to the Bahá’í writings, need the incentive provided by the twin stimuli, reward and punishment, to get them operating in that mode, or to get them back on track should they forget the ultimate consequence of their actions. By analogy, to explain to someone the long-term rewards of physical conditioning might not be sufficient to help him overcome the hard-hitting sensations that exercise is painful and unnecessary. Until one gets to the point where the conditioning itself feels good and thereby reinforces his determination, some additional stimulation is needed to overcome the initial reluctance, such as the threat of declining health or appearance.

Thus the awareness of both extremes of the afterlife experience is necessary to promote spiritual education. The ancient scriptural metaphors for the afterlife experience served the same purpose of exhorting man to positive action and curtailing negative action long before B. F. Skinner invented his box:

Even the materialists have testified in their writings to the wisdom of these divinely appointed Messengers, and have regarded the references made by the Prophets to Paradise, to hell fire, to future reward and punishment, to have been actuated by a desire to educate and uplift the souls of men.

To a certain extent, then, whether a knowledge of the afterlife alleviates fear depends on how an individual assesses his earthly performance. That such a knowledge would have to be taught from childhood makes sense in several ways. First, if the reality of one’s continuation were an intimate, vital part of one’s system of belief, one would be more inclined to shape his life according to that eventuality, to be comforted by the assurance of ultimate rewards and justice, and to be deterred from those acts that might bring about a negative experience.

The reason such knowledge could never wholly alleviate fear is, I think, that no one can be certain about his spiritual condition. Since there is no point of salvation, there is no point in life when one can be sure that his destiny is secure, especially since he is not competing with anyone but himself, and one can never be sure of what his capacity is or whether that capacity will increase. Since [Page 36] from the Bahá’í point of view spiritual growth is not “earned,” one need not be in a constant state of frantic activity, and yet one can never feel he has developed as far as he can or done as much as need be done.

But perhaps the most significant deterrent to the complete elimination of fear is the ever-present possibility of reversal or failure, peripeteia, as the Greek tragedians called it. Here the stories in religious history of covenant-breakers serve well. By definition, a covenant-breaker is not simply someone who rejects the Manifestation; he is someone who, having acknowledged the authority of the Prophet, turns against this authority and attempts to destroy the religion. These indiViduals are not foredoomed to fail; they have the capacity to do quite as well as anyone else. In other words, anyone is capable of boundless growth or abysmal failure, and thus the stories of covenant-breakers provide handy exempla or memento mori to guard against self-satisfaction or complacency.

A good illustration of the respect that one knowledgeable Bahá’í had for this verity is exemplified by a story, albeit an apocryphal one, about Ṭaraẓu’lláh Samandarí. As he lay dying, Mr. Samandarí requested that a prayer for steadfastness be read. A Bahá’í attending him, fully aware of the exemplary life of devoted service Mr. Samandarí had lived, asked why he of all people should feel the need for that particular prayer. The reply was, “There is still time.” Similarly, a statement by Bahá’u’lláh about the uncertainty of the outcome of our lives further emphasizes the fact that any certitude we have about our destinies is always relative:

How often hath a sinner attained, at the hour of death, to the essence of faith, and, quaffing the immortal draught, hath taken his flight unto the Concourse on high! And how often hath a devout believer, at the hour of his soul’s ascension, been so changed as to fall into the nethermost fire!

Whether one concludes that knowledge of the afterlife, or however much of it we can attain, is what Bahá’u’lláh alludes to as having the capacity largely to eliminate fear, such a study does leave one with several important conclusions, some of which are frightening, others of which are hopeful and exhilarating.

Among the most awesome conclusions is that one is stuck with himself eternally. This is not a startlingly new observation, that man lives on and that his actions have consequence; but to be assured that one retains the same consciousness, the same identity, and perhaps the same regrets and attachments— all this has a profound impact. It means, in effect, that one cannot dissociate himself from himself, become someone else, or start over again. Reformation is best begun immediately, since the state of the soul at death directly affects the afterlife experience, and since the deeds that we may be able to conceal on this plane of existence will be recalled in the afterlife:

He Who is the Eternal Truth knoweth well what the breasts of men conceal. His long forbearance hath emboldened His creatures, for not until the appointed time is come will He rend any veil asunder. His surpassing mercy hath restrained the fury of His wrath, and caused most people to imagine that the one true God is unaware of the things they have privily committed. By Him Who is the All-Knowing, the All-Informed! The mirror of His knowledge reflecteth, with complete distinctness, precision and fidelity, the doings of all men.

Among the more heartening results of such knowledge are the realizations that life has a purpose, which is logical and benign; that one need not fear nonexistence; that one [Page 37] need not be hardened by the injustices of this life; and that progress and forgiveness are always possible. To be assured of these verities from childhood would, I feel, provide a courage and fearlessness, a kind of nobility that would not be easily undermined. Such knowledge would not totally eliminate fear or ensure success in spiritual development, but it would provide one with the twin pillars of his education and help one to understand better the divine justice underlying all creation so that one could relinquish more easily his attachment to earthly standards as the gauges of successful living.

[Page 38]

[Page 39]

Inheritance: In a Churchyard in Sweden

In the thin-fingered

rain of this June

afternoon, I stand

on the bleak territory of ghosts,

this green turf

where a stone crumbles

beneath the name of a man

I never saw:

My grandfather, the father

my father never loved.

On one pure autumn

day, grandfather, you sold

the summer’s crop of wheat

and spent the twilight hidden

by tavern lamps

and let the golden

liquor

run in wild and sinful

pathways around your secret

heart. The boy who waited

out in the cold white evening,

grandfather, told me of the jolting

ride down the black banks

of night hung with shouts

of your fury; the whip

in your hand snapped

like fire at the horse

and the boy

and even, in the still hungry

home, at the broken face

of your wife.

My father locked his mouth

against you. He swept

all the filial ashes

from his life.

I, too, was left

a vacancy.

[Page 40]

But someone has planted

pansies at the stone’s

base: the golden

petals tremble, a crowd

of pocked faces lifted

to the drifting rain.

Ah grandfather, lost from all

love and knowing,

the water trickles across the stone

letters of your name;

in this foreign afternoon

I hear you walk

through the white columns

of rain. Your name trembles

across the stone

of my life.

In a time altogether my own

I hear you walk, and behind

you those others,

those hordes of ghosts

walking the deep

pasts of my blood.

I listen.

I listen to the long march

of shaking souls

that come and come over these foreign

lands into the burning shame

of my heart.

My hungers beat

against the cold, locked stone:

grandfather!

—Mary Hedin

[Page 41]

[Page 42]

Health, Nutrition, and the Future of Children

BY ELIZABETH L. BOWEN

TODAY’S young children will be reaching their prime in the year 2000. What is their current health status? How does it influence their behavior and their ability to learn? How does it affect their ability to develop into productive world citizens? These questions and their implications for the near future must be examined in order to arrive at some conclusions as to what can be done by nations and by individuals to improve children’s health in the United States and throughout the world.

The United Nations Declaration of the Rights of the Child proclaims the right of each child to affection, love, and understanding, as well as to adequate nutrition and health care. It supports the premise that health is a fundamental human right rather than a privilege and that health involves both physical and psychological nurturance. The World Health Organization defines health as “A state of complete physical, mental, and social wellbeing and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.” To attain these goals for children an environment must be created that will support good health, optimum nutrition, and human growth.

What kind of environment do most children now live in? Seventy-five percent of the world’s children live in underdeveloped nations. Nearly 90 percent of those children have no access to basic health services, such as prenatal care or routine immunizations. Seventy-five percent do not even have reasonable access to safe, clean water. Indeed, to most of the world’s children a safe water supply does not mean running water in the household. A pump or a well within a mile or so of their house would be considered a “modern convenience.” Over 60 percent are malnourished. One in three dies before his fifth birthday, and over half of the survivors suffer chronic malnutrition that stunts their physical growth, weakens their resistance to disease, and impairs their mental development. Thus the lives of most children are gravely jeopardized by poor health. In fact, in underdeveloped nations, over 50 percent of all deaths occur among children, whereas in the United States that figure is only 5 percent.

On the international level what is being done about the health of children? Perhaps the most significant recent development is a joint effort by UNICEF and the World Health Organization to stress primary health care throughout the world. In September 1978 at the First International Conference on Primary Health Care, which was held in the Soviet Union and attended by representatives of 140 nations, Henry Labouisse, the Executive Director of UNICEF [Page 43] said, “The developing countries have come to realize that the conventional approach inherited from industrial countries was hopelessly inappropriate when it came to meeting, within a reasonable period of time, the health care needs of their vast populations.” He also questioned the ability of the conventional, expensive, highly technological medical approach to meet the health care needs of industrialized nations and called for a fundamental worldwide shift in approaches to the delivery of health care services.

The conference agreed upon the following guidelines for the provision of essential, first-level health care to everyone, to eliminate the “gross inequality” in the health status between developing and industrialized nations and between diverse communities within nations. It stated that primary care includes at least:

Education concerning prevailing health problems and methods of preventing or controlling them; the promotion of food supplies and proper nutrition; an adequate supply of safe water and basic sanitation; maternal and child health care, including family planning; immunization against the major infectious diseases; prevention and control of locally endemic diseases; appropriate treatment of common diseases and injuries; and the provision of essential drugs.

Under the leadership of the World Health Organization and UNICEF many nations are organizing their health planning strategies within the context of the above guidelines. By setting priorities for the accomplishment of manageable objectives within given brief time periods nations can focus limited resources in ways that vastly improve the quality of people’s health and simultaneously monitor and evaluate progress. This type of systematic planning is one of the key tools to developing appropriate and effective grass roots health care delivery systems. The recent International Conference on Primary Health Care provided unprecedented stimulus and encouragement to nations to apply this approach and to move in the direction of increasing international cooperation and coordination in resolving world health problems. The global response to this challenge will probably be a major factor in determining the health attained by children by the year 2000.

WHAT about the health of children in the United States today? Are there marked, health contrasts between diverse income groups similar to those between underdeveloped and industrialized nations? If so, could the application [Page 44] of the UNICEF/WHO primary health care guidelines, such as immunizations and maternal and infant health care services, improve children’s health in these groups?

The following examples concerning blacks and American Indians illustrate the health needs of children who live under adverse social and economic conditions. Most of the health problems that affect them so disproportionately in comparison to the rest of the population are preventable—that is, measures are known, which, if applied, would bring their health up to that of the general population. For example, total immunization against all major childhood diseases (such as polio, rubella, measles, mumps, diphtheria, pertussis, typhoid, and tetanus) costs only $2 per child. Yet, fewer than 60 percent of nonwhite children in the United States have been immunized against any of them. Until immunization levels are raised, outbreaks of epidemics can be expected.

Maternal and infant mortality rates among white and nonwhite populations also differ markedly. In the United States at present the black infant has an 80 percent greater chance of dying during the first year of life than the white infant. This sharp contrast is evident in all other age groups as well; and, in most cases, it is widening rather than diminishing. Maternal mortality rates demonstrate the point. In the early 1900s the maternal death rates were high for both blacks and whites. Although the rates for both races have decreased dramatically, the black rate, which was formerly twice as high as the white rate, is now almost four times as high.

One sees similar patterns among American Indians. Over 20 percent of all deaths befall infants and children, in contrast to approximately 5 percent among the U.S. population as a whole. Such death rates can be attributed, in part, to economic factors. The average family income of American Indians is only one-third that of black families and one-fifth that of white families. Extreme poverty is usually accompanied by significant health hazards, including unsafe housing, inadequate nutrition, and an inability to obtain basic health services. It is clear that all efforts to promote health in such communities must be coupled with intensive economic development programs.

To raise the health of black and American Indian children to the level of the general American population will require both a more equitable economic policy and a wider application of primary health care measures, such as those outlined at the UNICEF/WHO Conference. These should certainly be priorities in any plan to improve the health of American children.

But what about the health of the children in the general population? Are [Page 45] they in optimal condition? The nutrition of children is increasingly gaining attention. A 1977 report by the Senate Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs entitled Dietary Goals for the United States stated that the major causes of death and disability in the United States are directly related to diet. These causes include heart diseases, cerebrovascular diseases, stroke, many forms of cancer, hypertension, diabetes, cirrhosis of the liver, obesity, and dental decay. Evidence indicates that most of these conditions begin to develop in childhood and are sustained by lifelong poor eating habits. Therefore, efforts to deal with their basic causes and to prevent them must be directed toward children and their parents.

In the United States almost all children have dental decay, and by age fifty-five almost half of the adults have no teeth at all. One tends to accept this as “normal,” although it is not. Numerous studies of native populations on traditional, unrefined diets have shown that the incidence of dental decay is often quite low. Only when our modern highly refined and sugar-laden diets are introduced do their dental decay rates resemble ours.

Another common nutritional problem that develops over a lifetime and can often be traced to childhood and adolescent eating habits is obesity. In the United States it affects approximately one in five children and almost half of the adults. In addition to being directly implicated in several disorders, such as diabetes and cardiovascular diseases, it is in itself a severe physical, psychological, and social handicap. It is perhaps one of the major indicators that millions of Americans, rich and poor, are eating inappropriate diets that are undermining their health.

At the other end of the spectrum chronic hunger and malnutrition affect one in six American children. Though these take a particularly severe toll on low-income children, other socioeconomic groups are not exempt. Half of all infants and children living in poverty fall below the twenty-fifth percentile for weight and height on standard growth charts; in other words, they are shorter, smaller, and lighter than their more affluent peers. Nearly 60 percent of pregnant women living in poverty have such severe nutritional deficiency that the brain development of their unborn children is apt to be impaired. These infants and children are probably at a biological disadvantage, having sustained nutritional deprivation in utero and throughout childhood. Action must be taken to ensure that they obtain at least the basic nutrition required for adequate brain development.

[Page 46] Also, various vitamin and mineral deficiencies are common among some groups in the United States; their prevalence varies widely. For example, almost 50 percent of Spanish-American children have vitamin A deficiencies in comparison to 10 percent of white or black children. Between 5 and 50 percent of children, depending on their age, income, and location, suffer from iron deficiency anemia.

WHAT is the effect on children of improper diet? Any form of nutritional imbalance, whether it is a deficiency or an excess of protein, calories, vitamins, minerals, or other dietary constituents, can affect children’s health and behavior in many ways. Iron deficiency anemia, for example, reduces children’s resistance to disease and lessens their stamina, endurance, vitality, and ability to pay attention and to learn. Learning takes place best when a child is in good health, is properly nourished, and is full of energy. When a child is sick or malnourished, his limited energy must be channeled to the maintenance of bodily functions; thus little learning can take place. His motivation drops, and he loses interest in setting goals or pursuing academic tasks. He becomes unresponsive to all aspects of his environment—people as well as books, toys, and other educational materials. If this disinterest and lack of motivation persist, the child’s personal relationships and his general development suffer. In fact, one of the first clinical signs of improvement in children who have suffered malnutrition or other serious illness is that they show a greater interest in their surroundings and seek to communicate and interact more with the people around them.

How well a child feels is an important determinant of his behavior and of the quality of his performance. Any interference with a child’s health, even for a short time (for example, when a child has not had enough rest or a proper breakfast) disrupts his ability to learn. Dr. Herbert G. Birch and Dr. Joan D. Gussow have written that

As an organism, the child is not only a mind and a personality capable of being unmotivated, unprepared, hostile, frustrated, understimulated, inattentive, distracted, or bored; he is also a body which can be tired, hungry, sick, feverish, parasitized, brain damaged, or otherwise organically impaired.

Thus a child’s health and nutrition have profound effects on his psychological welfare, his energy levels and moods, and his motivation to learn.

Indeed, a growing body of research suggests that a majority of learning disabilities and behavior disturbances are related to nutritional imbalances and associated health disorders. One of the pioneers in this field is Dr. Ben F. [Page 47] Feingold, a pediatrician and allergist who has done extensive research into the relationship between food additives (particularly artificial colors, flavors, and preservatives) and hyperactivity, behavior problems, and learning disabilities. As an allergist he realized that any substance, natural or synthetic, could cause an adverse or allergic reaction in a susceptible individual. He searched the medical literature and found that food additives were known to trigger adverse and allergic reactions resembling traditional allergies in every system of the body: skin problems, such as hives, itching, and swelling; respiratory problems, such as asthma, coughs, laryngitis, and nasal inflammation; gastrointestinal problems, such as indigestion, constipation, and heartburn; problems in the skeletal system, such as pain and swelling in the joints; and, perhaps most important, central nervous system problems, such as headaches and behavioral disturbances. The affected individuals rarely realized that additives might be a cause of their afflictions.

Dr. Feingold began to suspect that perhaps food additives were one of the causes of hyperkinesis (hyperactivity) and learning disabilities, which affecr some 10 to 20 percent of American children. Although symptoms vary greatly from child to child, the basic pattern of this kind of problem often includes some or all of the following characteristics: The child is in constant motion, is markedly fidgety, restless, uneasy, excitable, impulsive, and often aggressive. He has a short attention span, wide mood swings, is unable to concentrate, is easily distracted, has little patience, and has a very low tolerance for failure or frustration. He is often uncoordinated and clumsy in both large and small muscle movements, and he frequently has sleeping problems. Boys are involved more often than girls, and there may be one or several children with the problem in a single family. The hyperactive child is generally of normal or high intelligence, yet fails at school. Adults may suffer similar symptoms.

Dr. Feingold prescribed the elimination of artificial food additives from the diets of hundreds of children who showed many of the behavioral symptoms cited above. When all of the offending chemicals were removed, a large number of the children tested showed remarkable improvement. They were calmer, better able to pay attention, better able to sit still, more peaceful, and generally far more in control of themselves. However, if the offending food or food additive was reintroduced, either deliberately or accidentally, the problem behavior returned within two to four hours and persisted from one to four days. In other words, it was possible to turn on and turn off these children at will by adding or removing certain ingredients from their diet. Thus Dr. Feingold established a tentative cause-and-effect relationship between food additives and behavior disturbances.

In the past five years this relationship has been confirmed 1n several major studies, including double blind cross-over studies. Similar reports have also come from several countries, including England, Sweden, Canada, Australia, [Page 48] and France. Yet some reports have failed to support Dr. Feingold’s findings. Nonetheless, his research raises serious questions about the immediate problems the additives may pose to a significant portion of the population (10-20 percent). Whereas one out of every five or ten people has genetic variations that cause him to demonstrate marked adverse reactions to food additives, it is not known to what degree everyone else is affected. For instance, are there subtle or incremental effects on others that escape notice?

Also, Dr. Feingold and other allergists report that many children with learning disabilities and behavior problems often have adverse or allergic reactions to other dietary constituents in addition to the food additives. Their approach to discovering which food or foods might be causing problems is to obtain a detailed health and nutritional history, including a food diary of everything the child eats or drinks. Any food that is used in excess, such as sugar, is suspect. The other most common offenders are cow’s milk, chocolate and cola, corn, eggs, legumes, wheat and other grains, citrus fruits, tomatoes, and other foods containing salicylates, a natural compound related to aspirin. If a child is very sensitive to a substance, any amount may provoke symptoms.

The diagnosis rests on an elimination and challenge process where the most suspicious food or foods are completely removed from the diet for three weeks. Each food is then returned to the diet, as a challenge, at three day intervals to see if it provokes either physical or psychological symptoms. If it does, it is avoided for a few months and then retested. If it again causes problems, it must be avoided indefinitely and other foods used in its place. If there is no problem, it can be eaten in moderation.

Throughout this process, the parents keep a careful food diary and note any changes in behavior, moods, or health conditions. A common example is the elimination of sugar from the diet of an irritable and moody child who usually experiences wide mood swings and marked changes in his energy levels. For the first few days without sugar, he goes through a withdrawal process where he craves sugar and is even more irritable, moody, and depressed than usual. He may also complain of aching all over and feeling as though he is coming down with the flu. Then after three or four days he begins to feel better, has more energy, and is in a more cheerful mood. His mood swings stabilize, and he has a fairly steady energy level and personality throughout the day. After three weeks, when sugar is reintroduced by letting him go back to his former diet, the mood swings and marked changes in energy levels reappear within hours and persist until he again eliminates sugar from his diet.

Elimination and challenge diets often uncover food allergies and intolerances that have been causing chronic, low-grade illness or psychological disturbances for years. Certainly, many psychological and behavorial disorders are due entirely to disturbances in human relationships. However, as in the above case of moodiness, many such disorders that may appear primarily [Page 49] psychological (as opposed to physiological) in nature have significant nutritional components. Feingold and others reported this with children who were hyperactive or had difficulties learning; Leonard Hippchen and others reported similar patterns with juvenile delinquents.

One of the themes running through these works is that certain susceptible individuals have unusual biochemical intolerances to common substances found in their environments. Exposure to such substances produces adverse or allergic reactions that result in physical or psychological symptoms. Any organ or system of the body, including the brain can be affected. When the site of adverse reaction is the central nervous system, a wide variety of “psychological” symptoms result, ranging from hilarity, hyperactivity, and aggression to loss of memory, depression, and confusion. An example is the effects of alcohol on the brain and behavior.

Any substance, natural or synthetic, can cause symptoms in a susceptible individual. Also, a single substance, such as milk, may cause virtually any allergic manifestation in any organ, including, for example, asthma, headache, recurrent ear infections, nasal and bronchial congestion, constipation, diarrhea, diffuse abdominal pain, foul breath, excessive sweating, tension, and fatigue.

Frequently children do not outgrow food allergy, but, the allergy simply switches organs. A child might have recurrent ear infections until age five, then have alternating constipation and diarrhea until age ten, and then develop migraine headaches as a teenager, all due to the original milk allergy. Since all these conditions can have other causes, and many people have no trouble at all with milk, it requires careful detective work to determine the true source of the problem. The main tools are an exhaustively detailed history, food diaries, elimination and challenge diets, and various kinds of laboratory and allergy tests.

AN EMERGING BRANCH of allergy and general medicine that deals with intolerances to foods, chemicals and other environmental factors in addition to the common pollen, mold, dust, and dander allergens dealt with by traditional allergists is clinical ecology. It owes its origins to Dr. Theron Randolph, Dr. Lawrence Dickey, and others who have been working in this field since the 1930s. It focuses on the interaction of the whole person (rather than any particular organ or system) with his entire environment. It recognizes that each person is biochemically unique and may have unusual sensitivities to substances commonly encountered in food, water, air, buildings, or other components of the environment. It also investigates the influences on health of weather, light, ions (the electrical quality of the air), and pollution.

[Page 50] Another closely related emerging branch of medicine that focuses more specifically on nutrition is orthomolecular medicine. Linus Pauling coined the term “orthomolecular” to mean the provision of the right nutrients (molecules) in optimum amounts. Whereas much of traditional nutrition is concerned with the provision of minimal daily requirements, orthomolecular nutrition stresses the provision of optimal, rather than merely adequate, amounts of essential nutrients. From this perspective many physical and psychological conditions may spring from biochemical imbalances amenable to correction by the provision of various nutritional factors native to the body, such as vitamins, minerals, and amino acids, in optimal amounts. Even with excellent diets (or so-called well-balanced diets) many people require additional vitamin and mineral supplements to give them optimal health. By means of biochemical tests orthomolecular physicians can discover which patients have unusually high requirements for certain vitamins, minerals, or other dietary constituents.

Some of their work is similar to that of the clinical ecologists in that they also try to determine which dietary factors certain patients may need to avoid due to food allergies or intolerances. They too are holistic in their approach and consider other environmental and lifestyle factors, such as stress and exercise, in addition to nutrition. In general, both groups prefer to reserve the use of drugs for problems in which exhaustive search and trials of nutritional and ecological measures have failed.

The two fields of orthomolecular medicine and clinical ecology may well serve as the foundation for the future direction of medicine. They view each person’s health in the context of the total environment and determine which factors to add (such as vitamins) or subtract (such as food additives) to bring the person’s health back into balance. Because both approaches require that the patient be a close collaborator in diagnosis and treatment, they strongly emphasize health education and the need for each individual to understand and take responsibility for meeting his unique health and nutritional requirements. They also feel it is particularly important to educate parents and children to develop appropriate health attitudes and habits to ensure a sound foundation for children’s lifelong health and nutritional practices.

WHERE do most American children (and adults) get their ideas and attitudes about nutrition? The 1977 Senate Report Dietary Goals for the United States stated that television and other advertising, were certainly major influences and that in 1975 over a billion dollars was spent on food advertisements on [Page 51] television alone. The report noted that most food advertisements actually promote poor eating habits and suggested that ads be used exclusively to present the public with wholesome rather than negative food choices.

The report expressed concern over advertising that encourages children to eat nonnutritious, highly processed junk foods, such as sodas, candies, sweetened cereals, and most snack foods. Not only are these foods unhealthful because they take the place of more nutritious foods, they also add unnecessary sugar, salt, fat, and artificial colors, flavors, and other additives to children’s diets, undermining children’s health and affecting their behavior. Until public opinion and public policies force the food industries to abandon harmful advertising practices, the responsibility of protecting children from miseducation will rest primarily upon parents. One encouraging sign is that the Congress and the Federal Trade Commission are seriously considering banning all advertising directed at children on the grounds that it is immoral and destructive.

In the meantime we must carefully scrutinize whether many of the foods we have accepted into our diets and our children’s diets on the basis of such ads or for other reasons are good for us. If they are not, we need to stop eating them and substitute more nutritious ones. The following guidelines adapted from the Senate Report give some selective criteria based upon the best scientific information available. It is essential to remember that nutrition is a science, albeit a developing one. Thus our dietary decisions can and should be based upon something more reliable than the views expressed in mass media advertisements or the unexamined assumptions of popular common knowledge. In the light of scientific evidence, then, we need to examine and perhaps modify our nutritional ideas and practices. We need to consider both aspects of nutrition: what to select and what to avoid.

The Senate report summarized its concerns by stating:

Our diets have changed radically within the last 50 years, with great and often very harmful effects on our health. These dietary changes represent as great a threat to public health as smoking. Too much fat, too much sugar, or salt, can be and are linked directly to heart disease, cancer, obesity, and stroke, among other killer diseases. In all, six of the ten leading causes of death in the United States have been linked to our diet.

The risks associated with eating this [typical U.S.] diet are demonstrably large. The question to be asked, therefore, is not why should we change our diet but why not? What are the risks associated with eating less meat, less fat . . . less sugar, less salt, and morefruits, vegetables, . . . and . . . whole grain cereals. There are none that can be identified and important benefits can be expected.

[Page 52] The report suggested several guidelines for making changes in food selection and preparation, including the following:

1. Eat less refined sugar and foods with high sugar content.
2. Eat less salt and foods with high salt content.
3. Eat less red meat; and substitute poultry, fish and other protein sources such as grains and legumes
4. Eat fewer foods that are high in fats.
5. Eliminate food additives, especially artificial colors, flavors, and preservatives, to the greatest degree possible.
6. Eat more fruit, vegetables, and whole grains.

How can we translate these dietary guidelines into practice? Some suggestions of ways to apply each of the guidelines, along with brief rationales, follow.

1. Eat less refined sugar and foods with high sugar content. This refers to refined sugars such as regular white or brown sugar and does not include the naturally occurring sugars found in fruits, vegetables, and whole grains. Refined sugar has been linked with many health disorders, including dental decay, mood swings, obesity, and heart disease. The Senate report suggests reducing refined sugar intake by 40 to 50 percent so that it makes up about 10 to 15 percent of one’s daily calories. One may want to consider eliminating it completely, particularly for children. The problem with sugar is that for many people, it is addicting in the sense that they will continue to eat it even when they are full, and they will choose to eat it instead of eating more nutritious foods. Because sugar is pure carbohydrate and contains no vitamins, minerals, enzymes, protein, fat, or other nutritional elements, its calories are known as “empty” calories. Yet its digestion requires both vitamins and minerals, so the body must draw these nutrients from its own stores. Thus the other foods in the diet must be extremely rich in nutrients in order to compensate for sugar’s “empty” calories.

To cut back on sugar replace cold cereals with old-fashioned oatmeal, or try other kinds of food for breakfast such as soup and sandwiches. Any food that is nutritious for supper or lunch is also an appropriate food for breakfast. Rather than buying commercial snacks or baked goods, one should make his own with far less sugar. Eliminate soft drinks and sugared fruit drinks and substitute water, fresh fruit, or pure fruit juices. Judging from the sweetness in nature, it appears that fruits should serve as the major source of sweetness in our diets, so it makes sense to move in that direction and to educate children and adults to prefer fruits to synthetic sweets.

2. Eat less salt and foods with high salt content. Salt has been linked with hypertension, heart disease, and obesity and should be used very sparingly, if at all. Although people rarely think of excessive salt consumption in relation to children’s nutritional problems, the Senate report said that one in five people in the general population is prone to hypertension and “Millions of [Page 53] children and youths are moving toward hypertension.”

The report recommends cutting salt consumption by 50 to 85 percent and states that most people eat at least ten times more salt than they need. The goal set for adults is approximately three grams of salt per day, which is less than a teaspoon. Most people can meet this goal without adding any salt to any food or eating any foods to which salt has been added. One will obtain ample salt in such foods as milk, cheese, fish, chicken, and meats. Substitute herbs and spices for salt and salty seasonings such as catsup and soy sauce. Avoid artificial salt or sugar substitutes, too, because, aside from being questionable substances in themselves, they stimulate one’s continued craving for sweet and salty foods. This includes diet sodas.

3. Eat less red meat; and substitute poultry, fish, and other protein sources such as whole grains and legumes. A major reason for this guideline is that red meat usually has a high fat content, and excessive fat in the diet has been linked with obesity, cancer, heart disease, and other major health disorders.

Beef is also very expensive and wasteful, both financially and ecologically. It takes approximately ten pounds of grain to produce one pound of beef, as against two or three pounds of grain to produce one pound of chicken, and one or two pounds of grain to produce one pound of fish. Furthermore, the grain (wheat, corn, oats, rice) fed to these animals is usually an appropriate food for people. To feed the world by the year 2000 we are going to need to rely far more heavily on plant proteins and less expensive animal protein sources such as fish and chicken rather than on beef.

When eating less beef, one should substitute for it various kinds of fish, chicken, turkey, eggs, whole grains, legumes, nuts, and seeds. One should also be sure to include in his diet ample sources of iron, such as fish, poultry, egg yolks, green leafy vegetables, dried beans, peas, and lentils.

4. Eat fewer foods that are high in fats. The American diet now derives over 40 percent of its calories from fat. Although there has been a great controversy about the role of fats in diets, there is general agreement that one should eat much less fat. Fats are the most concentrated sources of food energy, and in high doses they have been linked with obesity, heart disease, and cancer. To reduce fat consumption avoid fried foods, use fewer oils, and replace fatty meats with lean ones or poultry, fish, beans, and whole grains.

5. Eliminate food additives, especially artificial colors, flavors, and preservatives, to the greatest degree possible. This is extremely important and is just beginning to be appreciated by the general public. Serious questions are being raised concerning the safety of food additives and their relationships to cancer, allergies, hyperactivity, and behavior disorders in children and adults. The technological feasibility of removing these substances entirely from the food supply has been demonstrated by many European countries that have banned most additives because of their suspected link with cancer. For instance, Britain bans BHA and BHT, which are among the most common preservatives used in the United States. There are safer alternatives.

[Page 54] Meanwhile, the American food industries, operating on the assumption that additives are harmless, continue to produce over a billion pounds and over 3,800 different kinds of them yearly. The average American eats an estimated five to ten pounds of additives yearly.

Highly refined and processed foods, such as white bread, fast foods, and convenience foods now constitute over half of the American diet. By making most of one’s foods from scratch and from primary ingredients such as fresh fruits and vegetables and whole grains, one can avoid most additives as well as sugar, salt, and fat. Whenever one uses any packaged foods, read labels carefully, and choose foods with the fewest additives.

6. Eat more fruits, vegetables, and whole grains. Only 20 percent of the calories in the average American diet come from these sources. This figure should be raised to approximately 70 percent. Fruits, vegetables, and whole grains are excellent sources of vitamins and minerals and are high in the bulk and fiber that are essential for the proper functioning of the intestines.

In rural communities in the less-developed countries that have adequate food supplies, where some 70 percent of the diet is made up of whole grains, vegetables, and fruits, food only takes from twelve to twenty-four hours to pass through the body. By contrast, because of the extremely refined nature of the American diet, and its lack of fiber and bulk, food often takes from thirty-six to seventy-two hours to pass through the body; Medical and epidemiological data gathered by Dr. Denis P. Burkitt suggest that the lengthened intestinal-transit time and other internal changes caused by low-fiber diets may be factors in the development of intestinal and rectal cancers and several other disorders.

Fiber may also play an important role in the prevention and alleviation of obesity, as fiber-rich foods cause people to feel satisfied more quickly than low-fiber foods with the same caloric value. Also, fibrous foods take longer to chew, which tends to make people eat more slowly and to eat less.

To increase the fiber content of one’s diet replace refined grains such as white flour and white rice with whole grains and whole grain products. Use bran, wheat germ, whole wheat, brown rice, oats, corn, rye, and millet for your flour, breads, pasta, cereals, and crackers. In addition, add rice bran, wheat bran, or wheat germ to breads, muffins, cereals, yogurt, soup, or salads to increase the fiber content and nutritional value.

Eat lots of fresh vegetables, and eat at least half of them raw. Salads are excellent. Ideally, roughly half of one’s diet should be vegetables and fruits, in a ratio of two or three servings of vegetables for each serving of fruit. If one cannot get fresh produce, frozen vegetables and fruits are preferable to canned ones. Right now, less than 15 percent of the average American’s diet [Page 55] consists of fruits and vegetables, so most people will need to eat two or three times as many as usual to meet this goal.

These guidelines suggest the following changes for food selection and preparation: Use less refined foods, fat, sugar, salt, and additives. Use more fiber, whole grains, fresh fruits and vegetables, low fat animal proteins, and plant proteins. Eat a wide variety of foods, and explore new ones.

One word of caution: Be moderate. Changing one’s diet requires thought, time, and energy. One is most likely to achieve lasting changes by making gradual substitutions rather than by leaping from one extreme to another. It is important to understand what you are doing and why.

It is also important to teach children how to nourish themselves and to take responsibility for creating and sustaining their own health. In the context of families’ nurturing practices, food has powerful symbolic value, indicating the giving and receiving of love. One way children can participate in this nurturing process is by learning to prepare, serve, and share delicious, attractive, pleasing meals in a warm, peaceful, and loving atmosphere. The emotional aspects of these interactions are just as important for creating and maintaining excellent health as the physical ones. By learning such attitudes and practices in their families, children can begin to extend their nurturing skills to other relationships. By exercising choice in the kinds of physical and spiritual nurturing they give their children, parents hold the power to shape the future.

The main purpose of the United Nations International Year of the Child is to mobilize efforts on children’s behalf on all levels. The advancement of the United Nations’ goals and aims for children begins in one’s own home. Each one can make a significant contribution to the Year of the Child by applying many of the ideas outlined above in his own life. This is one of the best and most basic ways we can enhance children’s opportunity to enjoy a fulfilling future. By improving children’s health and nutrition we enhance their ability to learn and to have an immediate and lasting impact on their ability to develop into happy and productive world citizens.

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Continuing the Survey of Bahá’u’lláh’s Writings

A REVIEW OF ADIB TAHERZADEH’S The Revelation of Bahá’u’lláh: Adrianople 1863-68 (OXFORD: GEORGE RONALD, 1977), XVII + 314 PAGES + APPENDICES, BIBLIOGRAPHY, REFERENCES, INDEX

BY FIRUZ KAZEMZADEH

IN THE SECOND VOLUME of his book, The Revelation of Bahá’u’lláh, Adib Taherzadeh continues the survey of Bahá’u’lláh’s Writings, concentrating on the short but incredibly fruitful years 1863-68. As in the first volume, Mr. Taherzadeh introduces the various works of Bahá’u’lláh by providing the historical context. Thus the first chapter of the volume under review tells of Bahá’u’lláh’s arrival in Constantinople in August 1863. The second describes and analyses His Mathnaví, a poem of three hundred lines, each “a book in itself with infinite depth and profound significance.” The West is not yet familiar with Bahá’u’lláh’s poetry, translation of Persian verse being a task of almost insuperable difficulty. The meaning of the poem, however, is clear. It is a proclamation of the Advent and a celebration of divine springtime.

The next chapter again sets the stage, sketching the events of Bahá’u’lláh’s exile to Adrianople. There follow chapters on the Súriy-i-Aṣḥab, the Tablets of Aḥmad—the well-known one in Arabic and the less well known in Persian, the Súriy-i-Mulúk (Súrih of the Kings), the Kitáb-i-Badí‘, the Súriy-i-Ghuṣn, and, interspersed with these, chapters on Bahá’u’lláh’s opponents, on some early pilgrims, on faithful disciples, and on illustrious martyrs.

To survey the entire corpus of Bahá’u’lláh’s Writings is an awesome undertaking. There are numerous problems that must be faced. What criteria does one apply to sacred texts of one’s religion? How does one pass judgment on the relative importance of this or that Tablet, this or that book? What relevance do temporal circumstances have to the understanding of Scriptures, especially where their authenticity is unquestionable? Mr. Taherzadeh does not deal with such issues. He tells a story, summarizes a text, quotes a passage, and, whenever possible, cites the authoritative comments made by Shoghi Effendi. Though this method has its limitations, it minimizes the danger of tampering with the text and lets the Writings speak for themselves.

Though not intended as a biography, this book provides more information on Bahá’u’lláh’s life than any other in English. It also gives glimpses of early heroes and martyrs, among them Ḥájí Mírzá Ḥaydar-‘Alí, Mírzá Muḥammad-‘Alíy-i-Nahrí, Mírzá ‘Alíy-i-Sayyáḥ, Siyyid Ashraf, and Abá-Baṣír of Zanján, and Ḥájí Imán. Historical anecdotes and vignettes of personalities help the reader feel the past, make him a witness to the origins of a new religion.

Of course, no work is without its weaknesses, particularly when it breaks new ground. However, in this case the value of Mr. Taherzadeh’s contribution heavily outweighs every defect of his book. The Revelation of Bahá’u’lláh, both volume one and volume two, and, one may confidently predict, the subsequent volumes, will be for a long time, a standard introductory text for the study of the Bahá’í Writings. At summer schools, in study classes, at small gatherings and large, Bahá’ís will find Mr. Taherzadeh’s book ready to give systematic guidance for [Page 58] their first steps. Non-Bahá’ís may find the book uncritical and excessively worshipful. They should remember that Mr. Taherzadeh is a committed believer who does not conceal his faith. Perhaps his attitude will help them perceive the nature of Bahá’í commitment, the love of a believer for Him Who has come in the name of the Lord.

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Authors & Artists

ELIZABETH L. BOWEN has an interdisciplinary background in nutrition, public health, environmental biology, and psychology. She received her doctorate in education from the University of Massachusetts, specializing in the relationship of health and nutrition to human development, learning, and behavior. She currently serves on the staff of the Gesell Institute of Human Development in New Haven, Connecticut, where she collaborates with a family physician to educate patients, the general public, and medical and educational professionals about nutrition and preventive health. She is also engaged in clinical research on the relationship of health and nutrition to learning disabilities and juvenile delinquency. For recreation she enjoys choral and orchestral music, composing for and playing the guitar, singing, hiking, swimming, cross-country skiing, and horseback riding.

JACQUES CHOULEUR, whose “The Bahá’í Faith: World Religion of the Future?” appeared in our Fall 1977 issue, teaches American Studies at the Centre Universitaire d’Avignon, in France. He specializes in the history of religions in the United States in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and has written a book on the Mormons. Dr. Chouleur has often served as visiting professor in American colleges and universities.

JOHN S. HATCHER is an associate professor at the University of South Florida at Tampa, where he teaches medieval literature and creative writing. He holds B.A. and M.A. degrees in English literature from Vanderbilt University and a Ph.D. in Middle English literature and linguistics from the University of Georgia. Dr. Hatcher has published poetry in numerous magazines and literary journals (including the Summer 1975 issue of World Order). He is preparing, with a colleague, a five-volume study of Old and Middle English literature for the University of Oklahoma Press. His “Metaphorical Nature of Physical Reality” appeared in our Summer 1977 issue.

MARY H. HEDIN, who holds an M.A. degree from San Francisco State College, teaches English at the College of Marin in Kentfield, California. She has published many short stories, her most favored being “Places We Lost,” which was one of the best American short stories in 1966; it has been reprinted and anthologized in a number of countries. Ms. Hedin delights in travel and is interested by all the world: music, art, sports, even movies.

FIRUZ KAZEMZADEH is master of Davenport College and professor of history at Yale University. He is also editor of World Order.

ART CREDITS: Cover, design by John Solarz, photograph by Richard Thompson; p. 1, photograph by Richard Thompson; p. 7, photograph by Richard Thompson; p. 8, photograph by Camille O’Reilly; p. 20, photograph by Richard Thompson; p. 38, photograph by Richard Thompson; p. 41, photograph by Lori Block; p. 56, photograph by Richard Thompson; p. 59, photograph by Glenford E. Mitchell.

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