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Spring 1983

World Order

To Be Coming From

Editorial

Martha Root: Traveling Star

M. R. Garis

The Bahá’í Faith and Mormonism

Further Reflections

William P. Collins

Return of Enoch

Anna Stevenson

Literature’s Cracked Mirror

Frederick Glaysher

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World Order

VOLUME 17, NUMBER 3 • PUBLISHED QUARTERLY

WORLD ORDER IS INTENDED TO STIMULATE, INSPIRE AND SERVE THINKING PEOPLE IN THEIR SEARCH TO FIND RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARY LIFE AND CONTEMPORARY RELIGIOUS TEACHINGS AND PHILOSOPHY

Editorial Board:

FIRUZ KAZEMZADEH

BETTY J. FISHER

HOWARD GAREY

Consultant in Poetry:

WILLIAM STAFFORD

WORLD ORDER is published quarterly by the National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of the United States, 415 Linden Avenue, Wilmette, IL 60091. Application to Mail at Second-class postage rates is pending at Wilmette, IL. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to WORLD ORDER, 415 Linden Avenue, Wilmette, IL 60091.

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. Send manuscripts and other editorial correspondence to WORLD ORDER, 415 Linden Avenue, Wilmette, IL 60091.

Subscription rates: U.S.A., 1 year, $10.00; 2 years, $18.00; single copies, $3.00. All other countries, 1 year, $12.00; 2 years, $22.00; single copies $3.00.

Copyright © 1983, National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of the United States, All Rights Reserved. Printed in the U.S.A.

ISSN 0043-8804

IN THIS ISSUE

2 To Be Coming From: Editorial

4 Interchange: Letters from and to the Editor

9 Martha Root: Traveling Star

by M. R. Garis

23 On Time

poem by Bret Breneman

25 The Bahá’í Faith and Mormonism: Further

Reflections

by William P. Collins

35 Return of Enoch

by Anna Stevenson

43 I Never Learned the Name of Flowers

poem by Thomas Washington

45 Literature’s Cracked Mirror

book review by Frederick Glaysher

48 Authors & Artists in This Issue

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To Be Coming From

ABOUT ten years ago we began to hear a new idiom in English, “to be coming from”—as in “I (don’t) see where you’re coming from.” It has nearly the same meaning as “. . . what (you’re) driving at,” but its perspective is different. Whereas “What are you driving at?” demands to know what conclusion you are leading up to, and to know immediately, “Where are you coming from?” is a more thoughtful question, more interested in causes than effects, more concerned with motives than with aims, more curious about the unique subjective experience than about the objective end-point.

A religion, an ideology, any system of shared goals may be viewed from these two perspectives. It is, indeed, important to know the creed, doctrine, tenets, goals of a community that defines itself by them—that is, by what it is “driving at.” But a different perception of reality comes from the knowledge of the varied paths that the members of such a community have traveled to join it. There is a basic difference between an “interest group,” which, however diverse in origin it might be, is bound together by one narrow purpose (for or against capital punishment, abortion, or prayer in school; price supports for milk or tobacco; particular kinds and methods of taxation) and a spiritual community whose members have a common faith and a common vision. As for the “interest group,” its members are concerned about particular results; though they may be aware that their fellows “come from” positions that may be in other respects different from their own—or even incompatible —they tolerate or overlook these differences in their single-minded pursuit of a particular piece of legislation.

The spiritual community is another matter. Unity is its watchword, a unity of spiritual and ethical values, which in some instances are rooted in a common cultural and ethnic inheritance. Such a community, while tending to be cohesive and steadfast, would also tend to be conservative to the point of rigidity, self-limited in numbers and influence. However, if to unity the spiritual community joins a potential universality, that community cannot be founded upon a uniformity of cultural inheritance, or personality types, or any such exclusivist self-categorization. Its members must “come from” a variety of origins—religious, ideological, racial, cultural, social, educational —while “driving at” unifying goals, so that by whatever roads they have arrived at their common highway, their fellowship will be driven as with a single will to a world of peace, love, progress, and justice.

It is not in the name of such abstractions alone that the people of Bahá, recruited from the ranks of the most devout of all religions, whether Southern Baptist or Shiite fundamentalist, or of the most liberal Christian or Jewish intellectual groups, or the hardheaded agnostics of the scientific community, or the traditionalists of the villages of India or of Native America, have joined forces to create such a world or that they have found the confidence that such a world is within human reach. The former adherents of exclusivist religions have widened their view of salvation and the means of attaining it; the former atheists have convinced themselves by their study of the Bahá’í Writings in confrontation with the disciplined, critical thinking and results [Page 3] of their own scientific work, that the world is, indeed, in need of salvation, and that salvation will not result from a totally nonspiritual approach to human problems, and, further, that Bahá’u’lláh has revealed the way to discover the ultimate unity of the spiritual and material dimensions, neither of which can be effective without the other. These discoveries cannot be made without love—love for man, for the creation and its Creator, a love which makes it credible that, as these words were being written, the news came in that sixteen Bahá’ís, of whom ten were women, had just been executed in Iran. Incredible as that criminal act may appear, it is even harder to imagine how, in the absence of such love, these martyrs could have freely chosen this martyrdom, for a word of recantation would have spared their lives.

They cannot be written off as fanatics, if only because of the universality and selflessness of their motives: they are doing it for us, for the future of the world, a world that will be free of the fanaticism that withers the soul and imposes the harshest of rules on the nonconformist, in short, of the fanaticism that has decreed their death. They died believing that their sacrifice will contribute to the end of all the tyrannies that poison today’s world, and that, in the absence of the will to put their lives where their belief is, the world would truly be doomed. This is where they are coming from and what they are driving at. Let our ardent prayer be that, in our turn, our belief will have the same strength to transcend rhetoric.

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Interchange LETIERS FROM AND TO THE EDITOR

WE ARE well aware that our readers have a strong interest in religions and the relationships among them. Over the years WORLD ORDER has run articles that explored various aspects of Hinduism, Buddhism, Zoroastrianism, Christianity, and Islam, and some that attempted to present Bahá’í views of these faiths. In the Fall 1980/Winter 1981 issue we published William P. Collins’ “The Bahá’í Faith and Mormonism: A Preliminary Survey,” an article that raised a number of questions that needed further examination. In the current issue Mr. Collins continues the endeavor, probing some Mormon beliefs in the light of Bahá’í teachings.

Through fortunate coincidence we have scheduled for this issue another article inspired by an interest in Mormonism, the reflective and impressionistic piece by Anna Stevenson. Together the two articles demonstrate not merely the tolerance but the affection we feel for religious traditions that hold beliefs at variance with our own but in whose teachings we gladly discern truths common to all religions.

* * *

Our congratulations go to William Stafford, professor emeritus in English at Lewis & Clark College, poet laureate of the state of Oregon, and WORLD ORDER’S consultant in poetry. In 1982 Harper & Row published Mr. Stafford’s new volume of poetry A Glass Face in the Rain. One of Mr. Stafford’s friends refers to him affectionately as “truly one of the greatest contemporary poets of the United States.” The reviews of A Glass Face in the Rain bear out the enthusiastic assessment. Suzanne Juhasz, from the English Department of the University of Colorado, Boulder, wrote in Library Journal, that “It is a pleasure and privilege to read Stafford’s newest collection: to take part in his admirable way of being in the world; to have the excitement and satisfaction of experiencing his language. Stafford’s poems, like the world he writes about, have a simplicity that resonates, ‘where talk finds truth, slides near / and away.’”

Booklist provides even more insight into the special treat one finds in Mr. Stafford’s poems: “With typical modesty and accuracy, Stafford has described his poetry as ‘much like talk, with some enhancement.’ Enchantment might have been an even more apt term, as his large new collection consistently shows. Directly and without pretension, these short lyrics charm with images, insights, and, yes, inspirations, as he looks on the world, relationships, the comforts of familiar things, and sends back the message that everything counts. Speaking of his poems as bridges, he hopes that through them we ‘hear another world for a minute / that is almost there.’ He returns here often to examine the nature of fantasy, dreams, hopes, and why we need them, but his basic strength is his moral vision (though he might not call it that) and his ambition ‘to listen with sympathy / to speak like a child.’ As with few other recent books of [Page 5] poetry, one feels better for having read Stafford’s words and entered briefly into his quietly magical world.”

Somehow, though, we are not surprised by the reception of A Glass Face in the Rain, nor by the reviewer’s observation that Mr. Stafford’s poems are momentary bridges to another world. Mr. Stafford’s new book is his eighth volume of poems, and the sixth published by Harper & Row. He has been honored with a National Book Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship and has served as consultant in poetry at the Library of Congress. In the short time he has been WORLD ORDER’S consultant in poetry we have had ample opportunity to observe how he imbues the tedious job of reading and selecting poems for publication with wit, insight, and genuine interest in the neophyte as well as in the accomplished poet. A Glass Face in the Rain is one more testimony by Mr. Stafford showing how work can truly be elevated to the service of mankind.

To the Editor

THE HEROISM OF MARTYRS

I’d like to express my appreciation of the “Three Accounts of Love Sacrificed” (Fall 1982). Previously we have only had Nabíl’s Narrative [The Dawn-Breakers] as a portrait of the heroism of the martyrs of our Faith which was apt to leave one feeling that these brave souls were superhuman in their steadfastness and fortitude. The current accounts . . . , however, have greatly served to illustrate the more human side of martyrs, who were not exempt from grief, fear, anxiety. Yet through these accounts we can witness that mysterious transforming power born of the love of God . . . it is that power—that assistance promised to us all—that enables them to endure the unendurable. . . .

. . . as the Bahá’ís know, this transcendent power is a Divine bestowal: “How can I succeed unless Thou assist me with the breath of the Holy Spirit, help me to triumph by the hosts of Thy glorious Kingdom, and shower upon me Thy confirmations which alone can change a gnat into an eagle, a drop of water into rivers and seas, and an atom into lights and suns?”

Thank you for presenting us with these illuminating and most noble testimonies of the power of faith.

KATHLEEN L. BABB

Hiroshima, Japan

THE HUMAN SOUL

I deeply appreciated the article by Raymond Jeffords in the Fall, 1982, issue, dealing with the human soul. The writer has assembled an amazing amount of pertinent material from a variety of Bahá’í sources, and this, combined with his felicitous style, resulted in a piece of work which is not merely educational but inspirational. At the same time, it appeared to me that there were two areas which needed some clarification, and my comments following are offered in this sense, being intended as a helpful contribution to his research. The two areas may be designated as (a) confusion of the terms “soul” and “rational soul,” and (b) overlooking the special and unique role of the heart in the acquisition of faith.

(a) Soul and Rational Soul: These are two distinct terms, which can never be considered as synonymous even though closely related. (1) The [Page 6] soul is an entity, or object possessing a real existence. “The soul is not a combination of elements, it is not composed of many atoms, it is of one indivisible substance and therefore eternal. . . . The soul . . . can suffer neither disintegration nor destruction” (PT 91). “The soul or spirit of the individual comes into being with the conception of his physical body” (Shoghi Effendi, Messages to Alaska, 71). (2) The rational soul is not an entity, but a function or faculty of the soul. As ‘Abdu’l-Bahá says, “the soul has two main faculties” (PT 86). The rational soul is called by several different names in the Writings:

“The human spirit which distinguishes man from the animal is the rational soul; and these two names—the human spirit and the rational soul—designate one thing” (BWF 317).

“The mind is the power of the human spirit” (BWF 317).

“Unlike the animal, man has a rational soul, the human intelligence” (PT 96).

From these references, it seems clear that such terms as rational soul, human spirit, mind and intelligence all refer to the same concept. ‘Abdu’l-Bahá summarizes this subiect as follows:

“Now regarding the question whether the faculties of the mind and the human soul are one and the same. These faculties are but the inherent properties of the soul, such as the power of imagination, of thought, of understanding; powers that are the essential requisites of the reality of man, even as the solar ray is the inherent property of the sun. The temple of man is like unto a minor, his soul is as the sun, and his mental faculties even as the rays that emanate from that source of light” (BWF 346-47).

(b) Indispensable Role of the Heart: In His discussions of the five levels of spirit (BWF 316-17, 370-71, old SAQ 163-66, new SAQ 143-45), ‘Abdu’l-Bahá indicates a vast difference of degree separating the third level (human spirit, rational soul) from the fourth level, which He designates as the “spirit of faith” (BWF 370-71) and the “heavenly spirit”: “The fourth degree of spirit is the heavenly spirit; it is the spirit of faith and the bounty of God; it comes from the breath of the Holy Spirit, and by the divine power it becomes the cause of eternal life” (old SAQ 165, new SAQ 144). I have found nothing in the Writings to indicate that the rational soul (mind) could be identified as the agent, or recipient, of the spirit of faith. That which is the seat of faith is designated over and over again as the heart. To mention merely a few of many familiar references:

“Thy heart is My home; sanctify it for My descent” (AHW 59).

“All that is in heaven and earth I have ordained for thee, except the human heart, which I have made the habitation of My beauty and glory” (PHW 27).

“Sow the seeds of My divine wisdom in the pure soil of thy heart, and water them with the water of certitude, that the hyacinths of My knowledge and wisdom may spring up fresh and green in the sacred city of thy heart” (PHW 33). Elsewhere, Bahá’u’lláh tells us “the spirit that animateth the human heart is the knowledge of God” (Gleanings 291).

Clearly, the heart-qualities are separate and distinct from the mind-qualities, and it is not too much to say that salvation ultimately depends on the heart, not the mind. In the words of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, “the human spirit [i.e., mind-faculty], unless assisted by the spirit of faith [i.e., heart-faculty], does not become acquainted with the divine secrets and the heavenly realities” (old SAQ 244, new SAQ 208).

In conclusion, those who may be interested in delving more deeply into this subject are advised to study . . . Taherzadeh’s discussion (The Revelation of Bahá’u’lláh, vol. 2, pp. 216-17), where he clearly delineates the separate roles but essential interrelationship of mind and heart.

DAVID M. EARL

Dededo, Guam

AUTHOR’S RESPONSE: I am most grateful to Mr. David M. Earl for his comments and, indeed, regard his letter as a helpful contribution to research on this subject. I am in fundamental agreement with both of the issues he raises and hope that his insight and perspective on the nature and development of the human soul will help others who may have found similar shortcomings in the article.

Writing on the subject of the human soul with clarity and precision is a difficult challenge. For example, I agree with Mr. Earl that the terms “soul” and “rational soul” are distinct though closely related. My intent in the article was to begin [Page 7] with a detailed consideration of the rational soul and proceed to show that this could not be regarded as the complete reality (or soul) but only as a specific and limited level of functioning; that the term “soul” was, in fact, an entity capable of functioning at a vastly higher level—the spirit of faith. Perhaps my developmental approach in distinguishing between these two terms was too lengthy and indirect. I appreciate the clarification which Mr. Earl has provided.

Regarding the second point, the real issue seems to be the term “heart”—exactly what does this term represent? In the references cited by Mr. Earl, I believe the term refers to one’s innermost essence, the core of one’s being—i.e., the soul. Since I have already acknowledged that the “rational soul” refers to a limited functioning of the total reality of the soul, then, of course, the rational soul is not the recipient of the spirit of faith—the recipient is the heart or soul.

I wish to reiterate, however, a major point of the article. Although I agree with Mr. Earl that “salvation ultimately depends on the heart, not the mind,” the article stressed the fact that the first step on the path to salvation is knowledge: “that which is the cause of everlasting life, eternal honor, universal enlightenment, real salvation and prosperity is, first of all, the knowledge of God” (SAQ 300). Knowledge must first be admitted to the mind before it can gain access to the heart. When the mind deeply ponders the Word of God and embraces the Truth, the mind becomes an unobstructed channel to the heart. In this sense only does salvation depend upon the mind. A closed mind never allows the light of Truth to penetrate the heart.

Bahá’u’lláh states: “The Word of God is the king of words and its pervasive influence is incalculable. . . . The Word is the master key for the whole world, inasmuch as through its potency the doors of the hearts of men, which in reality are the doors of heaven, are unlocked. . . . How regrettable indeed that man should debar himself from the fruits of the tree of wisdom while his days and hours pass swiftly away” (Tablets of Bahá’u’lláh, pp. 173-74).

RAYMOND JEFFORDS

Redondo Beach, California

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Martha Root: Traveling Star

BY M. R. GARIS

MARTHA ROOT, one of the outstanding heroines of the first century of the Bahá’í Faith, was a small, frail American woman. But with reckless courage, and motivated solely by her determination to serve the cause she had embraced, she traveled over most of the world at a time when it was not thought seemly for a woman to go about alone, visiting country after country, talking to people whose customs might seem strange and unfamiliar to an ordinary traveler. Born in Ohio in 1872 and spending her early life and youth in Cambridge Springs, Pennsylvania, Martha turned first to teaching and then to journalism, which provided ampler room for her creative talents. When she became a Bahá’í in 1909, she had already established herself as a successful Pittsburgh journalist who reported the comings and goings of the wealthy but who, when she saw the first automobile appear 1n town, persuaded her boss to let her start a regular feature on the new phenomenon. During the next thirty years Martha’s canvas would expand a thousandfold as she set out to let the world know of the new religion. By the time she died in 1939 she had circled the globe five times; had spoken to hundreds of audiences and reached millions through her newspaper articles and pioneering radio broadcasts; had befriended simple villagers and commoners, kings and maharajas, scholars and world leaders; and had mastered Esperanto and participated in countless Esperanto and peace congresses. Most important, she left behind permanent traces, for many of the countries where the Bahá’í Faith is now established first heard of it from Martha Root.

In this issue we are bringing our readers excerpts from a new biography of this indomitable woman—M. R. Garis’ Martha Root: Lioness at the Threshold, published by the Bahá’í Publishing Trust, Wilmette, Illinois, in May 1983. The book does not pretend to be definitive; almost every stop Martha Root ever made during the last thirty years of her life would make a book. Nor is it a scholarly work. Rather, Martha Root is intended for the general reader. The vast scope of Martha’s endeavors is, at first, intimidating. But her utter humility, her lack of pretension, her sometimes comic escapes from disasters, her fear of taking a trolley across town balanced with her fearlessness in crossing the world in pursuit of her goal win one over. In the end this indefatigable champion of peace awes one, but in a friendly, accessible way that causes one to reassess the goals of his or her own life.—EDITOR

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These two chapters, “South America” and “The Other Side of the Mountain” are reprinted from M. R. Garis’ Martha Root: Lioness at the Threshold, Copyright © 1983 by the National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of the United States.

THERE was about Martha Root a literalness that translated the writings of Bahá’u’lláh and the messages to the Bahá’ís from ‘Abdu’l-Bahá into directives for action. This is exactly what they were meant to do. Most people agreed with the ideas and hoped that someone would follow them. Martha took them personally. She tried to fit into her life as much of the proposed programs as her circumstances would allow. But she was restless and felt that she could not wait until the perfect arrangements could be made to begin the work of spreading the Bahá’í Faith.

Martha committed her thoughts to paper as easily as most humans breathe and frequently sent them off to ‘Abdu’l-Bahá in Haifa. On 7 November 1918 she wrote to Him of her desire to travel the world on behalf of the Faith. This was a source of joy to ‘Abdu’l-Bahá. In His response He replied, “My hope from the blessings of His Holiness Baha’o’llah is that thou mayest forget rest and composure and like unto a swift-flying bird, thou mayest reproduce the melody of the Kingdom and engage in songs and music in the best of tunes.” If Martha needed incitement or additional stimulus for her already strong desires to travel and teach, the Master provided it with His colorful directives. It was like a clarion call, a trumpet blast, for He added: “As ears are awaiting the summons for Universal Peace, it is therefore advisable for thee to travel . . . to the different parts of the globe, and roar like unto a lion the Kingdom of God. Wide-reaching consequences thou shalt witness and extraordinary confirmations shall be exhibited unto thee.” General statements had been turned into a personal summons with promises of divine help and success. Martha was on fire.

The war in Europe was ending. The eleventh day of November 1918, the eve of Bahá’u’lláh’s birthday, saw the cessation of hostilities. The armistice was signed on the day of the Unity Feast at Evergreen Cabin, West Englewood, New Jersey, 28 June 1919, the event that still annually commemorates ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s memorable visit there in 1912. Martha wrote of the spirit of unity and rejoicing that permeated the gathering in 1919.

The annual Bahá’í convention in 1919 had been held at the Hotel McAlpin in New York, where the Tablets of the Divine Plan, written by Abdu’l-Bahá, were presented. These Tablets were the charter for all future national and international teaching plans and delineated in specific terms the work the Bahá’ís were to achieve for centuries to come. For many Bahá’ís the 1919 convention was their first opportunity to hear Abdu’l-Bahá’s directives for America’s spiritual mission. The Tablets were potent, and Martha, especially, felt their force. The story persists that when the session was over Martha Root was nowhere to be found. She was upstairs packing her bag to leave, losing not an hour before acting on the instructions of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá to teach the Bahá’í Faith.

When a few of the Tablets were first read in Boston two years earlier, Martha’s mother had died only a few months before. Martha was comforting a grieving father at the time and was not in a position to act. Now she felt that she must respond to this overwhelming desire to spread the word of Bahá’u’lláh. Apart from the United States and Canada, Abdu’l-Bahá [Page 11] also urged that South America receive the Bahá’í message.

Which area should she choose? How could she leave her father? Martha was in Pittsburgh when she was seized with the idea of making travel arrangements at once: Go to South America. Uncertain, unhappy, trembling, she nevertheless committed herself to sail on the Albah, Lamport & Holt Lines, from New York to South America on 21 June 1919.

Martha was torn between duties, each as demanding of her love and time as the other. She suffered violent pangs of conscience on both levels. She could not go and leave her elderly, ailing father. She must go. She must follow ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s instructions.

Although Cambridge Springs was populated with Root relatives, brothers and sisters of T. T. Root, his two sons and their families, plus scores of cousins, the responsibility and care of her father was squarely on Martha’s shoulders. Nevertheless, prodded by the certainty that she was doing the right thing, and with her father urging her to do what she must, with tears streaming down her face, Martha started to pack. The doorbell rang, and there at the door was a neighbor wanting to rent the flat for relatives from Philadelphia during the months when Martha would be gone. They would be happy to take care of Mr. Root. He would retain his own room and bath, and in all other ways they would live as a family. Martha’s prayers had been answered.

In 1915 Martha had circled the globe to discover how Bahá’ís lived in other countries and to ply her trade as a reporter. Now, four years later, Martha Root was about to begin the first of her historic journeys for the Bahá’í Faith. Here she set the style for her future trips, and the blueprint, which would develop over the next twenty years, was being drawn.

Martha arrived in New York several days before her ship was to sail and spoke on the Bahá’í Faith every day or evening. On the second night she met the head of a newspaper syndicate who was interested in her South American venture, and he arranged to buy her articles, which he would send to more than one hundred newspapers. He also offered to publish a short article on the Faith, which would he syndicated. The doors were opening.

But tests were on the threshold, too. A seamen’s strike delayed the 21 June sailing. The problem had its advantages, for it enabled Martha to go to West Englewood, New Jersey, and attend the Unity Feast commemorating ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s visit in 1912. While there, she visited the home of architect Louis Bourgeois, near Evergreen Cabin, and viewed his model of the Bahá’í House of Worship to be constructed in Wilmette, Illinois.

On the Albah the tensions mounted as the ship lay in port, passengers aboard. Week followed week, and the situation was stagnant. Then Chinese sailors were brought out to replace the strikers, and a threatening climate resulted as antagonisms mounted. On board Martha described the scene:

The ship stood out at the Statue of Liberty. . . . The seamen who refused to sail were given the Message. Abdul Baha’s views of the economic situation were explained to them, so there was a little feeling of love and sympathy and blue booklets taken back to the union men through the sailors who did not go.

Strikebreakers took over, for which Martha was grateful. A longer delay would have made the trip impossible because of her commitments in Cambridge Springs, but “in her heart she KNEW they would sail, for the guidance had been so clear at every step.” After a month’s delay, the Albah sailed out of New York on 22 July.

But the strike had taken its toll. Martha was ill and overcome with an intense fatigue, partly induced by apprehensions of her own limitations [Page 12] for the task she had undertaken and by the vast differences in life-style between her and the other passengers, who smoked, drank, and gambled; she did none of these, nor did she harbor any enthusiasm for sports. For two days pain took over, but she read and was revived by words of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá:

Let not conventionality cause you to seem cold and unsympathetic when you meet strange people from other countries. . . . Be kind to the strangers. . . . Help to make them feel at home; . . . ask if you may render them any service; try to make their lives a little happier. Let those who meet you know, without your proclaiming the fact, that you are indeed a Bahá’í.

As it was written, so Martha responded. All the bon voyage gifts that she had received were distributed for the comfort of others. She prayed for greater capacity to serve more intelligently and lovingly. Again the doors opened.

The men had given money to buy prizes for the sports events aboard the ship. Martha took “the best small article of her apparel,” perhaps a scarf, wrapped it in the artistic Japanese style, and took it to the sports committee to be used as a prize. It was the only woman’s gift. She told them she did not know much about sports, but in order to join in the “‘family party’” she was going in for all “except the heavy weight contests.”

TWO DAYS after the ship left New York, Martha asked the captain’s permission to speak in the evening, since it was a Sunday, on the Bahá’í Faith. A large notice was put on the bulletin board. Although no one had ever heard of the Bahá’í Faith, all came except a few Catholics. The first to enter the room where the talk was being held were the men of the sports committee; they had done much to make the event popular by talking about it and by bringing their friends. The captain, purser, and several officers were there.

The sea was not calm; and as Martha spoke, the ship pitched and rolled so that she had to hold on to a pillar to keep herself upright. She spoke for over an hour. Then a bishop, who had never heard of the Bahá’í Faith, got up and spoke against it. “He said,” Martha wrote, “one could never be a Christian and believe in these other religions too. M replied to him point by point and from that evening they have been friendly—his very arguments against the movement later made friends for it.” The lecture, so early in the voyage, created questions, which were answered, and generated an atmosphere of trust. There were many quiet talks on deck as a result.

Martha used other latent skills. She had once studied palmistry, and “just in fun” she read a passenger’s hand. Once again the right note was struck. It was an instant success. So many rushed over to have their palms read that the captain lined them all up to take turns, he first, with both palms up. She made many friends. Three days later the captain questioned her skills before the crowd. He was sure that Martha could not read his hand exactly the same a second time. “‘If you prove you can,’” he challenged her, “‘I’ll put it on the records of the [Albah] . . . among the distinguished passengers that you are the first Bahai ever to ride over these lines and that they can find out all about what a Bahai is by reading the book you put in the ship's library.’” The second reading was identical to the first. It was a triumph for Martha and for her mission.

The drinking on the ship was great and constant. The bar, which was next to Martha’s room, was open from 6:00 A.M. until 2:00 A.M. in order to be as accommodating to drinkers as possible. Martha’s roommate was the champion poker player and stayed up half the night proving it. She also owned two monkeys, which shared the cabin. Now Martha understood [Page 13] what ‘Abdu’l-Bahá meant in a letter to her when He wrote, “Thou mayest forget rest and composure. . . .”

When Martha went to the smoking room one night, as usual, to say good night to her card-playing roommate, one of the businessmen wanted her to drink a champagne toast for his birthday. She wished him many happy returns but declined the drink. He offered a toast to the Bahá’í Faith, asked for a blue booklet, and later had several conversations with Martha about the Faith.

Martha Root never sidestepped her own principles or her way of life. Yet in the midst of sophistication and questionable behavior she was the most popular, and surely the most unique, woman on board. And she shared in the gala festivities. At a fancy dress ball she went as a Persian woman and was chosen by the captain to present the prizes.

The chief steward suggested that Martha tell the help about her religion, which she did. The Chinese seamen had the message, including ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s letter “China, China, China, China-ward,” sent down to them since the captain did not permit Martha to go where they worked. With the time growing closer for her to give the message to the South Americans as well, she found time during the voyage to study the Catholic religion, which was predominant in South America, so that she could present the Bahá’í teachings from the Catholic point of view.

After two weeks at sea the first South American city on the northern tip of Brazil came into view: Pará (now Belém), with 175,000 residents. Martha’s unusual and fortuitous experiences began to occur. Most of the cities along the coast were stopping-off points for the passengers, who left the ship for two-hour jaunts or sometimes full-day excursions. Martha’s plan was to leave the ship at Bahia, on the eastern shore of Brazil, which had been especially mentioned by ‘Abdu’l-Bahá as a place where “its efficacy will be most potent.” Her other main goal was Panama, also singled out by the Master, which lay on the other side of South America. Access to both places was to present great difficulties, but Martha loved a challenge.

In Pará Martha left her companions and made her way to a newspaper office. This was not easy since she did not speak the language, but by using sign language and props she reached her destination. After conversing “badly” in French, she tried to explain the Bahá’í Faith to the editor and staff. They asked her to write about it in one thousand words, in English, and they would have it translated.

Then the newspaper people “jumped up in excitement” as a man entered whom they introduced as the best lawyer in Pará, who spoke English. She discovered that he had entertained a relative, Elihu Root, a few years earlier. He translated her article into Portuguese, the language of Brazil, and the paper agreed to run it and to print any future articles of hers. Blue booklets were given out to the newspapermen, and Martha Root became the first Bahá’í to visit Pará. As the attorney brought her back to the ship in his motor car, she discovered that he was the lawyer for the line on which she was traveling. Martha and the Bahá’í Faith had a new friend. Thus had Martha spent her first day on South American soil.

Some of the stopovers were brief and difficult to negotiate. In Ceará (now Fortaleza), those passengers who wanted to go ashore had to jump into small sailboats, pitching wildly in the rough ocean, presenting the large possibility of involuntary immersion. Martha risked it. Wearing the long dresses of the period, carrying her blue booklets, the light fading, she jumped from the Albah into the bobbing sailboat, lamenting that she had only two hours in the gathering dusk to present her booklets and the message.

[Page 14] Martha was going about the cities as a woman alone, which was frowned upon by South Americans, although they did make some exceptions for women from the United States. She compared these social restrictions and niceties with the behavior of the South American women on shipboard, which she found shocking. Yet, although a solitary female traveler might have provoked a social taboo, Martha pursued her mission.

The Albah stopped at Pernambuco (now Recife), the fourth largest commercially important city in South America, from where the ship would sail down the coast to Bahia. But in Pernambuco it was learned that Bahia was closed because of yellow fever. If Martha left the ship and made her own way to Bahia, her goal city, despite the yellow fever, it meant the loss of the ticket from Pernambuco to Rio de Janeiro, several hundred miles away. And there were other problems. “Added to all this,” she said, “there were four cases of yellow fever developed that day in Pernambuco and a revolution started in which several were killed, street cars burned, bridges bombed. . . .”

Four American businessmen who had planned to stay in Pernambuco changed their minds. Martha was advised to stay with her ship. But ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s mention of Bahia stayed with her. Her diary reported:

Throwing herself down on the bunk in the stateroom after this perplexing day, M could look through the port hole into the darkness where Jupiter alone shone brightly, steadily, unmoved in his course. She rose up, ordered her bags ashore, where she had made reservations with two steamship companies, in hope of getting a passage to Bahia on a Brazilian ship. She took the chance, insane as it looked to other passengers.

Although only Portuguese was spoken, Martha learned that an American businesswoman was staying at the Hotel Parque. Martha sent in her card, “with the right hand corner turned down which means less formality in South America,” and prayed that if it were right for her to go to Bahia she would meet this American woman who might help her. They met, and almost the first words to come from Martha were, “‘I am a Bahai.’” The American woman asked, “‘Did you ever know my cousin, Lua Getsinger?’” A new friendship was begun.

Martha’s new friend, Lillyan Vegas, to whom she refers as “Mrs. Z.,” had a cot brought in so that Martha could share her quarters, for there were no rooms available at the Hotel Parque. When Martha went back to say good-bye to her shipboard family, she discovered that Mrs. Z. was well known among the passengers as an astute and successful business person. The businessmen were impressed by Martha’s good fortune. Some of the passengers gave her gifts and escorted her back to the hotel, along empty streets guarded by soldiers. Before she left, the captain asked for more blue booklets.

The friendship of Mrs. Z. was a boon to Martha for several reasons, but especially because she spoke Portuguese fluently. After conversing haltingly in French with the press, Martha was writing an article about the Bahá’í Faith for the largest newspaper in Pernambuco; but when Mrs. Z. came on the scene, she took Martha to the editors of five leading newspapers and conversed with them in their native language, giving the message as Martha directed. The light of understanding in their faces and attitudes forcibly brought home to Martha the need for an international language. They all took articles that Martha had prepared, and they promised cooperation with her work.

On 16 August Martha and Mrs. Z. sailed from Pernambuco bound for Bahia on the Itapuhy. Martha’s first goal was within sight. The passengers represented many nations, and in this two-day voyage they heard about Bahá’u’lláh, the latest messenger from God, and about [Page 15] the road to universal peace. Those bound for America were given letters of introduction to Roy Wilhelm.

One morning the cadences of an Oriental chant reached Martha’s ears. She followed the sound, and when the Arab had finished chanting his prayers, she introduced herself. Through an interpreter she learned that he lived in Akko and had often shared meals in ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s home. His father had actually known Bahá’u’lláh. She gave him a blue booklet, and he promised to carry a gift from Martha to ‘Abdu’l-Bahá.

A six-hour stop in Maceió, a city of seventy thousand, was blessed by meeting a merchant friend of Mrs. Z.’s, who transported them in a sailboat to a car and then showed them the city. Like others he responded to Martha’s mission and drove them to all the newspaper editors. Those who were not in the office were called on at home. Martha wrote an article on two international thefts, as she felt, rightly, that this work would bring her in closer touch with the commercial world.

Because of yellow fever raging in Bahia, Lua Getsinger’s cousin decided against stopping there but would go on to Rio. Martha, undaunted, left the ship, engulfed by a violent rainstorm. It had been a stormy trip throughout, and Martha was one of the few to escape seasickness. Once again she braved the enormous waves, almost eclipsing the little boats, bobbing like corks in the ocean, waiting to take the passengers ashore.

Like waving a magic wand, two young English-speaking missionaries appeared, who took Martha to a hotel in Bahia “as easily as violets spring up in spring.“ They also took her to call on friends from the Albah, who lived only four doors from where Martha was staying.

Having arrived in Bahia, which in 1919 had a population of some 280,000, Martha set about studying facets of both the city and the state of the same name, later sending a report of several hundred pages, not brief, to ‘Abdu’l-Bahá. She learned of their commerce (one of the richest states in Brazil), their religious views and tendencies, their intellectual pursuits. This information would be used not only for Martha’s benefit during her visit but to aid Bahá’ís in other places to know the needs of the area and the opportunities available in this young giant of a country. Among her observations were that

The Portuguese and Brazilians are born aristocrats. If Bahais come to Brazil they must learn the Portuguese language (not hard to learn) and learn the customs of these Latin peoples. South Americans meet strangers socially before they do any business. “Paciencia amanha!” (Patience, tomorrow! . . .) is the first lesson to be learned, Brazilians do everything slowly and with ceremony.

Like others, the missionaries were drawn to Martha, and they came to call on her at the Hotel Sul Americano before they left for the vast interior of Brazil. She learned from them about the high rate of illiteracy (90 percent) among the indigenous people and about their lack of medical care. One missionary, she was told, rode six days to reach a doctor.

Martha was still concerned about disregarding the social rules by going about alone. She continued to seek opinions in support of her mode of travel and welcomed those that were favorable. One American businessman, a Mr. S., approved and assured her, regarding females from the United States, that “she would be shown fine respect if she is a good woman. . . .”

There was in Martha Root an indefinable quality that made others eager to lend assistance. One of her shipmates who lived in Bahia took part of each day to introduce Martha to distinguished and influential friends, and Mr. S. made appointments with newspaper editors, escorted her, and interpreted for her.

She placed books, given to her by American Bahá’ís, in the local library, where the books were immediately sought after. Articles began to appear in the newspapers, together with pictures [Page 16] of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá and of Martha; a friend had taken her picture, which was made available to the papers. She carried twelve pictures of the Master but once remarked, “One ought to carry two hundred.”

People came to Martha, asked for literature, offered to help teach the Faith, gave her dinners, flowers, gifts, and when she was leaving, escorted her to the ship. “Abdul Baha did it all,” she would say. Mr. S. also wrote letters of introduction for Martha to his wife and sister in Rio de Janeiro. Before her departure he had requested a variety of Bahá’í literature and had become another staunch friend for Martha and the Faith.

The charmed atmosphere stayed with Martha, and to everyone’s surprise she was able to leave Bahia after six days, upsetting predictions of her being marooned there for months. She sailed on the Itassuce, a highly disinfected ship, after being examined and allowed to leave. Passengers’ baggage was also disinfected. Martha quipped, “It was heroic—quite brimstone enough for this world and the next!”

The small Brazilian ship rolled incessantly during the four-day voyage from Bahia to Rio de Janeiro, and almost everyone was seasick. Martha was the only woman in the dining room. These were the winter months in Brazil, and the rough seas reflected the less benign climate, which was wet and cold. Martha used her now well-practiced French and was able to talk about the Faith. One friend she made was a Curitiba resident, who was given six books to place in his city library.

Finally, they arrived in Rio, which proved to be a gem. Martha, responding like a runner whose course is laid out, moved from consulate to newspapers, to acquaintances, to libraries, donating books, always making friends, and enjoying their offers of translation, transportation, and introductions. The articles flowed; their publication in newspapers and magazines opened the way for future conversations and discussions because the word Bahá’í had already been seen in print. The relatives of her American business friend in Pernambuco were a valuable link to the Rio de Janeiro community, and they entertained and assisted Martha throughout her stay.

The Esperantists were especially active in Rio, both as individuals and groups and as publishers of Esperanto periodicals. Like most South Americans, they enjoyed entertaining and hosted a gathering for Martha as well as a lecture by her. She discovered that the language was greatly respected in Rio and that a street was named “Dr. Zamenhof.” While in Rio Martha also spoke at the Brazilian School of Naval Aviation and the Brazilian Army School of Aviation.

The worldliness of the city was an ever-present factor, but Martha looked askance at it. Nevertheless, she saw in this worldliness the means of employment for pioneers. She compiled a list of possibilities; in the midst of more esoteric recommendations she wrote, “A catsup maker could do well, good canning establishments are needed. . . .”

She also recommended printing the blue booklets in Portuguese, not Spanish. She would use Spanish booklets in Argentina, where Harry Randall was sending five thousand, which she hoped would be waiting when she arrived.

On 5 September Martha left Rio for São Paulo, which she called the Chicago of South America. The journey by train was “like riding 12 hours in a Paradise whose wealth is not yet discovered. . . .” Despite its commercial orientation the beauty of São Paulo touched Martha’s soul. The business block was nestled in gardens. The exotic plants, the concerts, the violinist playing in a grocery store—all these plucked at Martha’s aesthetic sensibilities.

But São Paulo was expensive. Manha shopped for a hotel where she would be among [Page 17] people other than Americans. She found one with a room on the fifth floor, no elevator, and had to pay New York prices. Still having no knowledge of Portuguese, she was able to get by once again with her French. The libraries were always a focal point for Martha, where she presented gifts of Bahá’í literature. She had been especially impressed by the one in Rio.

The vitality of São Paulo was left behind as Martha took the train, heading for Santos. She was struck by the enormous feat of engineering that created a railroad through almost impenetrable forest. The skill and the beauty equally commanded her praise: “The train hovers like a bird around the mountain sides, and one is thrilled, awed by the grandeur of millions upon millions of forest trees, above and below.”

In Santos Martha again chose a small hotel where only Portuguese was spoken. She relied not on language but on her ability to read character to accomplish her tasks. She loved the Brazilians, loved their courtesy, their manners, their thoughtfulness of her needs as a woman traveling alone.

The Theosophists of Santos, having seen an article by Martha Root in a local paper, a speedy accomplishment, were excited by the implications of the Bahá’í message and wanted her to address their society. A talk was impossible because her ship was sailing on the day they contacted her, but they sent a committee to call on her. One of the members had heard briefly about the Faith in 1914 and had been seeking further information ever since. He had written an article and had made a presentation on the Bahá’í revelation for his society, using his limited history. Martha’s article opened up new vistas for him. He was a waiting soul and wanted to write about the Faith, translate its literature, and travel around the world to spread the teachings.

The three-day visit to Santos, and Martha’s publicity on the Bahá’í Faith, had uncovered this gem in a mine of stones. All those she met were extremely interested in the teachings, which emphasized the oneness of humanity, and they completed plans to publish five thousand blue booklets, translated into Portuguese, with several Theosophists participating to ensure a perfect translation.

Following this fruitful meeting Martha’s new friends put her aboard the ship sailing for Argentina. She seems never to have synchronized her love of warm weather with her voyages. The Brazilian winter was not kind, and ocean travel was extremely unpleasant. The cold, the sleet, the mountainous, raging seas made seasickness a normal state of health, and Martha found herself “a little laggard in giving the Message.” But the memory of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s unfulfilled desire to travel the world and endure hardships to spread the word spurred Martha on. A shipboard conference grew out of the interest of a few. Almost everyone on board attended, and the interest was high.

The Bahá’í literature that Martha carried with her was almost gone, but the “gift of love to South America,” in the form of several thousand booklets that Harry Randall had printed and was sending to Argentina, would fill the response to Martha’s presentation. Names and addresses were taken, and literature would be sent. One Frenchman said, “‘I have not always understood well ze words you speak me but I understand ze life you have and it is for that I am interested.’”

The ship made a twelve-hour stop in Montevideo, Uruguay, where Martha’s card-playing roommate of the Albah lived. Martha stopped at the family business address, and a touring car was sent to bring her to the family home. They, too, after entertaining Martha, helped to put Bahá’í books in English clubs and libraries and took her to a newspaper editor, who used an article on the Faith. Then she was off again.

The ship arrived in Buenos Aires, Argentina’s capital, on 20 September. Martha settled [Page 18] into this Spanish city, where she stayed until 4 October. She used every contact that came her way—chambermaids, doctors, teachers, translators, newspaper editors—all embracing a variety of religions from Christian Science to Catholicism.

That mysterious element in Martha’s personality that made others want to serve her greatly aided her work in new places. One of the most prominent magazine editors offered to go to all of the Italian newspapers with Martha’s articles, during two days of torrential rains, while she visited all the English papers. There were four hundred newspapers and magazines in Buenos Aires. How many of these were actually visited is not known, but, in Martha’s words, all those contacted responded favorably to the Faith and used her articles. She had a good press, and her stories were everywhere.

The Theosophists in Buenos Aires as well were enamoured with the Bahá’í Faith and its disciple. She was elaborately entertained with dinners and receptions, and letters of introduction to influential persons were given to Martha. They sent to her pension “beautiful books, flowers, candy, [and] clippings of articles.” She, in turn, wrote letters of introduction to those soon to visit the United States.

As she had done in other parts of South America, Martha gave many talks. Before leaving home she had prepared well for presentations on some of the principles of the Faith and had researched her topics and canvassed friends, especially for material on the economic solution. This and the equality of men and women, a universal language, and universal education, were all magnetic ideas for the mentally alert and seeking friends of South America.

So impressed was one person with these teachings that he had an office outfitted with furniture and a telephone for Martha to use during her stay. She was touched by such a display of faith and generosity; but she could not accept, as many persons were calling at the address first given in the newspaper. He also offered to pay for a hall for three years, as a meeting place, if a Spiritual Assembly could be formed. Such was the ardent response of those who heard about the Bahá’í Faith through Martha Root.

The Other Side of the Mountain

IN THE WEEKS since Martha had left New York Harbor, she had accomplished much of what she had set out to do. She had spoken about the Bahá’í Faith to hundreds of persons, made friends, given public talks, supplied individuals with literature about the Faith, written articles, put books in libraries, and gone to Bahia. Her second goal, traveling to Panama, still lay ahead, and it threatened to be a more difficult accomplishment than that of reaching Bahia.

But Martha was never one to sacrifice a destination because of troublesome obstacles, inconvenient weather, or mode of traveling. She would leave Buenos Aires and cross the Andes to reach the west coast of South America, where she would make her way north to Panama. The journey was always hazardous, but in the winter the risk and dangers mounted alarmingly. Martha’s friends tried unsuccessfully to dissuade her. A newspaper article described the journey she was about to take: “‘If you would consider riding around the edge of the Woolworth building [then one of the world’s tallest buildings] (when it is covered with ice and snow) on a gentle mule a safe pastime, then have no fears regarding the inconveniences in crossing the Andes in winter.’” Stories of frozen faces, fingers, and toes reached Martha, but she was adamant, determined to fulfill ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s hope of taking the message up the west coast of South America and into Panama.

The friends Martha had made showered her with gifts of books, fruit, flowers, lunches, dinners, and candy. Some brought heavy underwear, woolen garments, even a fur coat that could be passed on to a New York relative, and additional food from friends of all nationalities.

[Page 19] Inevitably, a protector appeared, a New York “business diplomat” who was crossing in the same group, who said “he would do anything he could for M.” She seemed to touch a wellspring in people, and they wanted to shield and comfort her.

The trip would begin by train, then shift to mule-back. Martha was fortunate in having as her roommate in the camorata, or sleeping compartment, a young, intelligent Italian woman who spoke French and Spanish fluently. Martha’s Buenos Aires friends, still thinking of her comfort, had wired ahead to friends that she would be coming through. Even brief stops had a contingent to meet Miss Root, who in turn gave them her finest gift, the Bahá’í message in print.

Although a landslide had washed out the route that Martha was to have driven, other means of transportation were found. Seventeen years after Martha Root was setting a speed record through French villages in Mr. Berg’s automobile, she climbed on a mule to cross the snowcapped Andes. She recorded the experience in her diary:

The trip by mule back over the “top of the world”, for the Andes are among the highest ranges, the Aconcagua rising to a height of 23,300 feet, was thrilling enough for the most sensational. To pray the Greatest Name among these minarets of God was to glimpse the glory of the Eternal, Unknowable. The ancient trail led 10,400 ft. above sea level. The people on mule back were infinitesimal specks clinging to mighty terraces that bear no other appearance of humanity except the cavalcade. As “ants in an endless and boundless forest” so they huddled on the edge of jagged peaks, frozen chasms, and stiffened mountain torrents. Everybody felt very small and a wonderful feeling of camaraderie sprang up. Fortunately the sun shone brightly and the acute cold was not so terrible as all had expected. . . .

A detour through one dark tunnel took over an hour in stumbling, slipping blackness in which the frightened mules shied and fell. M, as her mule plunged downward into the mouth of the tunnel gripped the pommel, threw her body far back, closed her eyes and prayed the “Ya Allah El-Mostaghos” for all. Over and over again in that black uncertainty, the clear, vibrant voice of the Italian girl would ring down the line of mules: “Mademoiselle, are you all right?” Then and even now to write about it, tears of deepest tenderness spring to the eyes at the thought of such a friend. . . .

Later, out from the tunnel, when the procession came to precipitous downward slopes towards Chile, M could not even see that “one inch” margin that had been promised by the man in his newspaper account—to her this was by far the most dangerous part of the journey. So it was with tremendous joy she saw the men getting off their mules and walking farther in down the mountain side. She did the same, for the mules would sometimes slip a yard in this perpendicular path and they were frightened also. Taking the guide’s hand they made the descent together and when they could not walk they could run! The warm sun had melted the crisp snow just enough that they could get a foothold. They stopped every few minutes to breathe as one’s breath is very short in this altitude. Some fainted, some had “puna”, which is bleeding of the nose and ears. Everything given M was passed along to those who needed it.

The descent was finally complete, and the other side of the Andes was a victorious reality. Martha, her Italian friend, and her New York businessman counted it as one of the happiest events of their lives. Later, in describing this Andean crossing in winter, Martha said, “I wore three suits of woolen underwear, two sweaters, two coats and a steamer rug, and then nearly froze to death.”

[Page 20] Martha gave Bahá’í booklets to the guides and customs officials and then boarded a train. From icy mountain peaks she now rode into the tropical gardens and orchards of Valparaiso. Once again she was absorbed into others’ lives. The quality that had drawn the Buenos Aires friends was felt in this new city:

The New Yorker’s firm in Valparaiso treated M as a sister. They put her bags through the customs, had them taken by their own porters to the ship, called a messenger boy to escort her to the Theosophists, later took her to lunch with the New York guest of honor, and all three men took her in a launch to her ship. She explained the Bahai Cause.

The scheduled four-day stopover in Valparaiso had been whittled down to four hours, because of the violent storm that had resulted in the tunnel detour in the Andes. After the strenuous physical and emotional stress of the Andean adventure and the flirtatious with danger, it would have been natural to use the brief respite relaxing and gathering strength for the next leg of the journey. But this was not Martha’s way. These hours were used to call on the president of the Theosophical Society, whom Martha presented with a letter of introduction. Martha left articles with him to be given to the newspapers, both in Valparaiso and in Santiago, another schedule victim, with no time at all for a visit.

Martha described cities, apart from their physical and commercial attributes, by population and the number of newspapers published. Santiago was a city of three hundred thousand and eleven daily papers. She translated these figures into the number of publications that could carry the Bahá’í message to them, and she felt she was the instrument to create the occurrence. Therefore, she could not, must not, rest those four hours in Valparaiso, nor anywhere else. She might miss an opportunity. Someone who could become a vibrant apostle of the Faith might be waiting while she rested. Everyone was a vessel waiting to be filled with the Water of Life, and Martha was the handmaiden ready to pour the Supreme Elixir. That mission was the source of the fire, the radiance, the love, that emanated from her being; it was the magnet that drew her fellow travelers to her. “Every friend met on this trip,” she felt, “is just the beginning of a long friendship. Letters and literature can be exchanged and other Bahais traveling to South America or the friends coming to North America will be joyfully received.”

The trip, with its variety of temperatures and experiences, had taken its toll, and Martha came down with a severe case of grippe while on shipboard. But she did not allow herself the luxury of resting and healing. She was off telling about Bahá’u’lláh and His teachings.

Grippe had to be the shadow to make one appreciate the sunshine, so the first few places are but memories of trying to get ashore to the newspaper offices to explain the Bahai Message, then leaning against the friendly lamp posts for strength to drag one’s self back to the boat. . . . The paper in Coquimbo is “El Longitudinal”; the newspaper in Antafogasta is “El Mercurio.”

New friends from Chile went ashore with Martha to act as interpreters. And so it went in city after city along the coastal route when the ship put in to port—Iquique, Arica, and other places where articles would be used. Passengers themselves acted as peace doves, carrying the message for newspapers back to their native lands—New Zealand, Australia, Mexico, Venezuela, Spain, Panama.

The passengers were making mostly short junkets via the ship, and there was not enough time for Martha to give a talk; but one told the other, and another, and so the grapevine carried the message throughout the ship. As she had given away all of her Bahá’í books and pamphlets, she spent fifty dollars, a small fortune in 1919, on South American newspapers and periodicals that carried her articles, and most of those were gone.

It was on this ship, sailing up the west coast [Page 21] of South America, that Martha started to learn the basic principles and pronunciation of Spanish, which she felt to be a better tool for communication in South America than French or Esperanto, still in its infancy. She urged Bahá’ís to learn as many languages as possible until a universal auxiliary language took over.

With a three-hour stop near Lima, Peru, Martha wanted to use her introductory letters to a newspaper owner, a senator, and two physicians. It was a thirty-minute ride to Lima from the port of Callao, in addition to the time it would take to get to the train, make contacts, and reverse the process. How was she to get there, find these men, and get back on time?

Full of faith, Martha got on the electric tram. Almost as if she had rubbed a magic lamp, two young English-Spanish-speaking men appeared who took her to the leading hotel to find out how to reach these persons. The hotel manager led her to a chair and suggested that she write out a message to each one. He took these, along with her letters of introduction, Bahá’í booklets, and the newspaper articles, saved for this use, and assured her that he would take them personally to the individuals and that they would be used. The two young men became interested and mailed the Bahá’í message to their families in Australia and New Zealand. It was neatness and heavenly dispatch all the way.

The very last day on the ship Martha was asked to give a lecture. It was translated by a Mexican passenger so that both English and Spanish heard the words of hope. “There was such a warmth of love and interest, everybody seemed happy.” It was a cosmopolitan gathering, and they would take these seeds back to Japan, Spain, France, Germany, Panama, Venezuela, Iowa, California, Oklahoma, and New York. “Each one has a clipping or something which explains a little of the Cause to carry with him.”

The ship sailed into Panama on 25 October 1919. As Martha set foot on its soil, that link between the North and the South, between the Orient and the Occident, her second goal was reached.

There was a pattern in Martha’s visits to a new spot: her credentials were presented, letters of introduction were shown, interpreters appeared, resistance melted away, and the message of the dawn of a new day was welcomed. Speaking opportunities opened up, and magnanimous acts by eager hosts followed in the wake of Martha’s message and her outpouring of love.

Panama was no exception. In one week the measure of Panama was taken and Bahá’u’lláh’s message given. She used her professional credentials to visit sites and persons otherwise out-of-reach, such as the heads of all the government works, and medical authorities. Her Esperanto and her sense of spiritual mission worked to reach other groups. As a result, practically every publication, group, or association became a channel for Martha’s presentation of the Bahá’í Faith.

The one place Martha could not land was the Leper Colony at Palasaco, near Panama. Because the high winds had sent some passengers plunging into the sea when they were attempting to land the little boats, all others were ordered back. But Martha’s spirit reached them through two books and four boxes of candy.

She saw and appreciated the unique aspects of Panama and predicted that “Some day, some one will build a mighty university on the heights of the Panama Canal Zone, how glorious if it could be a Bahai seat of learning!” Today, on one of those heights, is the Bahá’í House of Worship, dedicated on 29 April 1972, its architectural brilliance a beacon of spirituality and hope overlooking the region. One day there will be a seat of learning on the mountain, which will fulfill the wish of this first Bahá’í to carry the hope of Bahá’u’lláh’s revelation to Panama.

Martha made the five-day voyage to Havana, received the captain’s permission to lecture on the Bahá’í Faith, and presented the only program on board during the entire trip. [Page 22] She did not wait for opportunity to knock but rather took the first step:

If any one feels timid about asking [for] opportunities to speak let him remember that no day comes twice to any servant in the Cause and Abdul Baha has said to “roar like a lion the Words of God” and “sing like a bird the Melodies of the Kingdom”. The great heart will not falter—and the world is ready!

One day and two nights in Havana gave Martha time to sow seeds. Every minute was used to make contacts and give lectures. Near the end of her stay she had just a few hours of rest, which she took, fully clothed, before the ship would sail early in the morning. But the brief sleep was “very sweet for the singing of her heart told her the Holy Spirit had wafted Fragrances over Havana.”

Martha was soon back in the United States. From Key West, Florida, to Washington, D.C., where she spent three days, Martha visited every major city and its newspaper editors along the coast. Eventually, she headed toward home, and on 15 November 1919, five months after leaving Cambridge Springs, she returned.

T. T. Root, now eighty-two, had been sitting at the window watching for the first glimpse of Martha. He shared the joy of reunion with his daughter, whose absence had left its striations on the days and weeks as they moved on to this time of homecoming.

Martha Root, apostle of the Bahá’í Faith, had completed her first major journey for the sole purpose of spreading the teachings; her response to the Tablets of the Divine Plan of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá was absolute. South America was a pod, and Martha had deposited the seed. Tens of thousands of minds were now aware of the spirit that would permeate the planet when human hearts would respond to the teachings.

Her journey was singular. She had set a pattern for herself, and for others, if they chose to follow. One Bahá’í later lamented that although she and her husband had gone for several months to teach in South America, they could point to little progress when compared to the achievements of Martha—a lament that would be repeated in later years from other souls in all parts of the globe.

Martha did not settle down and take time to internalize the spectrum of adventures that had occurred on her trip—the trains, the ships, the high seas, the mules, the mountains, the gardens, the articles, the lectures, the new friends. The morning after her return to Cambridge Springs she went to the high school and started classes to master Spanish. She felt that she must make the most of her new friends and contacts and reach them in their own language.

Within a short time she was reading their letters in Spanish, although still writing to them in English. She had left their shores but did not leave them to fend for themselves in a spiritual desert. She considered their needs and responded:

One thousand Spanish Bahai booklets have been mailed to South America. M has written four hundred letters. The Spanish speaking friends are getting out booklets in their own country now and the Portuguese speaking friends have published five thousand in their own language. Over $500 worth of Bahai books have been sent by Bahai friends who have read part of these Pilgrimage letters. Two or more souls are going to teach. One thousand sets of addresses have been entrusted to steadfast Bahais who will write to the new friends.

Like her forebears Martha had opened up a new territory, which she infused with the spirit of Bahá’u’lláh. It was the first time that the Bahá’í Faith had been carried to South America; it was also the first time that a Bahá’í, totally selfless, detached, and with only the promulgation of Bahá’u’lláh’s message the motivating factor, had undertaken a voyage of such magnitude and with such a plethora of physical risks.

During her tour Martha sent ‘Abdu’l-Bahá detailed accounts of the states and cities visited; the geographical and cultural settings; the [Page 23] newspapers, libraries, and schools that received Bahá’í literature; the individuals she met; and the places where she spoke. ‘Abdu’l-Bahá was deeply moved. In a letter to Martha He wrote:

It is clear and evident that the power of the Kingdom is aiding thee, that the glances of the eye of His loving kindness are turned toward thee, the hosts of the Supreme Concourse are helping thee, and the power of the Holy Spirit is supporting thee. Before long the results of this mighty undertaking will be uncovered and laid bare before the eyes of all men.

Therefore be thou assured that this call to the Manifestation of Bahá’u’lláh, this proclamation of the Word of God and the promulgation of His Covenant shall influence stone and clay, how much more the children of men. . . .

In brief, thou art really a herald of the Kingdom, a harbinger of the Covenant. Thou art self-sacrificing, and showing kindness to all the peoples of the earth. Thou art now sowing a seed that in the long run will yield thousands of harvests. Thou art now planting a tree that shall everlastingly put forth leaves, blossoms and fruit and whose shadow shall grow in magnitude day by day.

On Time

Riding my days like humpbacked whales

or dolphins that dauntlessly dart,

wondering when it will start:

the Day of Light with its timeless sails.

Riding leviathan-style—

above, beneath, and in-between—

can’t view the sun-struck scene

or see supernal smile.

Riding the creature He formed for me

that dies when we once arrive,

hoping to get there alive

where the sun is the essence of sea.

Dolphins, whales, must you dive,

must you plunge so endlessly?

—Bret Breneman

Copyright © 1983 by Bret Breneman

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The Bahá’í Faith and Mormonism: Further Reflections

BY WILLIAM P. COLLINS

Copyright © 1983 by William P. Collins.

IN THE BAHÁ’Í INTERPRETATION of history the advent of a new messenger of God is assumed to have both a direct and an indirect influence on civilization. Bahá’ís have long held that the coming the Báb and Bahá’u’lláh exercised such influence on a number of nineteenth-century religious groups that were predicting that imminent return of Jesus Christ—the Millerites, followers of William Miller and predecessors of today’s Seventh Day Adventists; and the Templars who gathered in the Holy Land to await Christ’s second coming. George Townshend thus describes the subtle spiritual influence of the new messengers:

there swept quietly into the minds of European men the impulsion of a new spiritual force, an impulsion the beginnings of which can hardly be traced but which gradually brought into men’s minds a new spirit of hope and enterprise and happiness and creative vigour and which by steady gradations . . . during the early years of the nineteenth century took the definite shape of the dawning on earth of a New Age, of the divinely-aided appearance of a new and better world, and in Christian circles of the return of Christ and the descent of the Kingdom of God from heaven. . . .

. . . the generality of the people in town and in country, high and low, learned and unlearned, felt this new transcendent power stirring creation. The time was one of religious revival, of church building, of missionary expansion, the central motive being always the belief in the imminent coming of Christ. . . . Adventist sects were started, a few of which remain to the present day, such as the Latter Day Saints. . . .

The Latter-day Saints, or Mormons, are of particular interest not only because they have become a church numbering nearly five million persons but also because Shoghi Effendi and the Universal House of Justice have made a number of significant references to the Mormons as a group, to Joseph Smith, and to the Book of Mormon. In an unequivocal statement about the indirect influence of the Bahá’í spirit on the development of Mormonism, the Universal House of Justice writes:

As for the status of Joseph Smith, founder of the Mormon Faith, he is not considered by Bahá’ís to be a prophet, minor or otherwise. But of course he was a religious teacher sensitive to the spiritual currents flowing in the early 19th century directly from the appearance of the Báb and Bahá’u’lláh and the Revelation of Their Messages of hope and divine Guidance.

It is noteworthy that the Universal House of Justice does not detail the ways in [Page 26] which Joseph Smith could be said to have been influenced or inspired by the impulse released by the two new messengers of God. Hence one can speculate about how Joseph Smith was sensitive to the advent of the Bahá’í era. Was it in the finding of metal plates on which was written an ancient record of a lost American civilization? Was it in some miraculous means of “translation” of this record? Was it in the founding of a new church? Or was it in certain of his teachings that show an astonishing similarity to Bahá’í tenets? It is these questions and their implications that I wish to explore in this further consideration of the Bahá’í Faith and Mormonism.

The Origin of the Book of Mormon and Its Claims to Historicity

ALTHOUGH Shoghi Effendi has very clearly stated that Joseph Smith is neither a messenger of God (a major Prophet) nor a lesser prophet, Bahá’ís are left to themselves to deal with orthodox Mormon claims of the miraculous translation of the Book of Mormon from golden plates and with corollary claims of that book’s historical accuracy as a narrative of an ancient American civilization founded by Jews who fled the Holy Land about 600 B.C. However, Shoghi Effendi, in two letters written on his behalf, has provided a key to a Bahá’í approach to these questions of historicity:

We cannot possibly add the names of people we (or anyone else) think might be Lesser Prophets to those found in the Qur’án, the Bible and our own Scriptures. For only these can we consider authentic Books. Therefore, Joseph Smith is not in our eyes a Prohpet. (emphasis added)

As there is nothing specific about Joseph Smith in the teachings, the Guardian has no statement to make on his position or about the accuracy of any statement in the Book of Mormon regarding American history or its peoples. This is a matter for historians to pass upon.

It is quite unmistakable that Shoghi Effendi regarded the Bible, the Qur’án, and the Bahá’í Scriptures as the only Holy Books that can be accepted as authentic; and since Bahá’ís do not look upon Joseph Smith as a prophet, the Book of Mormon cannot also be regarded as a divinely revealed scripture in the same category as those he lists.

There is not, however, a simple choice of becoming a total believer in, or a total skeptic about, the Book of Mormon and the gifts of Joseph Smith. This is particularly [Page 27] the case if one turns to the Book of Mormon as an historical document. A number of scholars well-known in Mormon circles, including members of the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints who believe in the divine inspiration of the Book of Mormon, have questioned whether the Book of Mormon can be viewed as a reporting of historical fact. They approach the problem from a number of directions: comparison of questions addressed by the Book of Mormon with questions of great interest in early nineteenth century New York where Joseph Smith lived; investigations of anachronisms in the Book of Mormon, such as the report of horses in the New World in 590 B.C., or the application of the term Jews at a time when it was not applied to the Hebrews; and the comparison of biblical texts quoted in the Book of Mormon, many of which were not written down in a Jewish canon until centuries after the Book of Mormon emigrants, Lehi and his family, were told by God to leave Judah and flee to the New World to escape the Babylonian destruction of Jerusalem. All of the conclusions point to the Book of Mormon’s being not the annals of a lost pre-Columbian civilization but rather the product of the mind of a nineteenth-century New Yorker with a fervent religious imagination. Moreover, there is lack of independent evidence from the archeological record to confirm the events or places described in the Book of Morman.

One would be unwarranted, however, in dismissing Joseph Smith as pure fraud and the Book of Mormon as falsehood simply on the basis of these findings. When one speaks of truth, he is liable to equate it with historical fact. One is dealing, however, with two different levels or strata of truth. The recounting of what has actually happened in a given circumstance may leave one unaffected, whereas a fictitious construction may cause him to be deeply moved. Today’s newspaper might contain the account of a man robbed while on the way from Jerusalem to Jericho. Such a story, while a statement of historical truth, would probably contain little or no truth that is relevant to one’s life and how he lives it. The parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:30-37), on the other hand, while perhaps not a recounting of historical fact (though it contains the same story outline as the newspaper account), is a greater statement of relevant (“existential”) and spiritual truth. The question of historicity or pure historical fact is out of place in dealing with many apsects of writings claimed as sacred scripture, because the question of what is historically true or false is inadequate in the face of the power and influence exercised [Page 28] by the spiritual and relevant truths embodied in those scriptures. The Catholic theologian Hans Küng writes:

The poem, the parable or legend has its own rationality. It underlines, stresses, brings out, gives concrete shape; the truth announced can be more relevant than that which is contained in a historical account. . . . [T]he main interest is not in what really happened . . . but in the practical question of what it means for us. . . . (emphasis in original)

If one recognizes the distinction between historical truth and relevant or “existential” truth, he can look at the Book of Mormon in two ways. As an historical document, the Book of Mormon is unconfirmed by the evidence, whether internal or external. William Russell compares current study by Mormon scholars with earlier biblical scholarship:

The Christian Churches faced a quite similar problem one century ago—when Biblical scholars concluded that Biblical writings [which] claimed to be historical were actually fiction or myth. Some claimed that Biblical scholarship would demolish the foundations of Christian faith. Apparently it did not, and it can be concluded that a much more vital and intelligible Christian faith emerged from the reinterpretation that scholarship required.

If we apply historical scholarship to the Book of Mormon, a similar reinterpretation for Latter-day Saints seems required. It is the judgment of this writer that Latter-day Saints must move forward with this reinterpretation, particularly if we want to both preserve our intellectual honesty as well as find value in an interesting book that a farm boy from New York published in 1830.

When one turns to an examination of relevant truth in the Book of Mormon, his reading reveals that, even if the stories are not historical fact, they embody powerful, eternal, spiritual meaning that is capable of changing and guiding the lives of men. The Book of Mormon is a parable of the struggle between good and evil, between those who heed the commands of their Creator and those who turn from His precepts and sink to the level of the animal. It is not an abstract statement, for it breathes with the excitement of the cosmic confrontation of light and darkness, mirrored in the archetypal personalities and characters who people the book. Thus it is at this level of relevant truth that a Bahá’í may find a method of approach to the Book of Mormon that is at once sympathetic and yet in conformity with the statements of Shoghi Effendi on the subject.

The Nature of Joseph Smith’s ‘Revelatory’ Experience

TO UNDERSTAND what constitutes the inspiration that Joseph Smith received through the advent of the Báb and Bahá’u’lláh it is necessary to grasp what Bahá’u’lláh and Joseph Smith describe as revelation and how the two may differ from each other. This discussion is necessarily tentative, as no full-scale studies have been made of the Bahá’í Writings to discover what Bahá’u’lláh may have experienced as the process of revelation.

[Page 29] Bahá’u’lláh describes His experience of revelation in a number of ways: (1) God’s voice speaks directly to Bahá’u’lláh, as in The Fire Tablet in answer to His anguished cry; (2) God speaks to Bahá’u’lláh through an intermediary, such as the Maid of Heaven; (3) God imbues Bahá’u’lláh with His own Spirit in such a way that Bahá’u’lláh’s person and deeds become the revelation; (4) knowledge is revealed to Bahá’u’lláh in the form of a Tablet which appears before His face. All of these modes of revelation, while appearing to the rest of mankind to be internal to Bahá’u’lláh, are described by Him as objective phenomena arising outside Himself.

joseph Smith’s experiences, as he describes them, are a distinctive form of “revelation.” In speaking of the experience of “translating” the Book of Mormon, he writes: “But behold, I say unto you, that you must study it out in your mind; then you must ask me if it is right, and if it is right I will cause that your bosom shall burn within you. . . .” (Doctrine and Covenants of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints 9:8, hereafter abbreviated as D & C) (emphasis added). And in a telling description of the process of “revelation” Smith says: “A person may profit by noticing the first intimation of the spirit of revelation; for instance, when you feel pure intelligence flowing into you, it may give you sudden strokes of ideas. . . . [T]hus by learning the Spirit of God and understanding it, you may grow into the principle of revelation. . . .” (emphasis added)

In contrast to the experience of revelation spoken of by Bahá’u’lláh, Joseph Smith described his as a subjective phenomenon—one that arose within Smith’s own mind and that required the recipient’s own initiative and discovery. This is not to say that Bahá’u’lláh’s own human personality did not participate in the revelatory process. Bahá’u’lláh was often asked questions to which He responded, either in writing or verbally, and these can certainly be seen as revelation also. While many aspects of revelation, as spoken of by Bahá’u’lláh, can be seen as external phenomena where God takes the initiative, our understanding of this aspect of the Manifestation’s reality is too limited to make categorical statements as to its nature.

Bahá’ís may, therefore, see in these different descriptions of revelation the possibility that the Book of Mormon arose through a process in which Joseph Smith had “sudden strokes of ideas” in which he followed the injunction to “study it out in your mind.” Even if one does not accept the Book of Mormon as a translation [Page 30] from literal golden plates, the book can, nevertheless, be viewed as the product of Joseph Smith’s genuine religious experience. Thomas F. O’Dea, a well-known Catholic sociologist, states it most succinctly:

There is a simple common-sense explanation which states that Joseph Smith was a normal person living in an atmosphere of religious excitement that influenced his behavior as it had so many thousands of others and, through a unique concomitance of circumstances, influences, and pressures, led him from necromancy to revelation, from revelation to prophecy, and from prophecy to leadership of an important religious movement and to involvement in the bitter and fatal intergroup conflicts that his innovations and success had called forth. To the non-Mormon who does not accept the work [The Book of Mormon] as a divinely revealed scripture, such an explanation on the basis of the evidence at hand seems by far the most likely and safest.

Joseph Smith’s Inspiration

IN WHICH of his teachings did Joseph Smith show himself to be in touch with the inspiration of the Bahá’í age? Comparisons already made between Bahá’í and Mormon teachings show a few similarities and some wide divergences on important doctrines. Nevertheless, a few salient points are striking in similarity of approach.

Progressive Revelation. It is a basic tenet of Islam that God left no nation without guidance: “Indeed, We sent forth among every nation a Messenger, saying: ‘Serve you God, and eschew idols.’” (Qur’án 16:38). The teachings of Bahá’u’lláh carry this notion further in the concept of progressive revelation, which holds that God has revealed Himself successively in a series of Manifestations of His Self Who lift mankind to ever wider spiritual and social horizons, and that God will continue to send these Manifestations in the future:

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in every age and dispensation the Prophets of God and His chosen Ones have appeared amongst men. . . .

Can one of sane mind ever seriously imagine that . . . the portal of God’s infinite guidance can ever be closed in the face of men? Can he ever conceive for these Divine Luminaries, these resplendent Lights either a beginning or an end? . . . There can be no doubt whatever that if for one moment the tide of His mercy and grace were to be withheld from the world, it would completely perish. For this reason, from the beginning that hath no beginning the portals of Divine mercy have been flung open to the face of all created things. . . .

I testify before God that each of these Manifestations hath been sent down through the operation of the Divine Will and Purpose, that each hath been the bearer of a specific Message, that each hath been entrusted with a divinely revealed Book. . . .

It is a fundamental tenet of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints that revelation has not ended and that the Word of God has been given to other nations and peoples. In verses reminiscent of the words of Bahá’u’lláh and strikingly akin to the Qur’án, the Book of Mormon testifies that the portals of God’s grace have been open to all nations in many revealed books:

Woe unto him that shall say: We have received the word of God, and we need no more of the word of God, for we have enough! For behold, thus saith the Lord God: I will give unto the children of men line upon line, precept upon precept, here a little and there a little. . . . (2 Nephi 28:29-30). Know ye not that there are more nations than one? Know ye not that I, the Lord your God, have created all men, and that I remember those who are upon the isles of the sea; and that I rule in the heavens above and in the earth beneath; and I bring forth my word unto the children of men, yea upon all the nations of the earth? . . . Wherefore I speak the same words unto one nation like unto another. . . . And because that I have spoken one word ye need not suppose that I cannot speak another; for my work is not yet finished. . . . For I command all men, both in the east and in the west, and in the north, and in the south, and in the islands of the sea, that they shall write the words which I speak unto them; for out of the books which shall be written I will judge the world, every man according to their works, according to that which is written. . . . And I shall also speak unto all nations of the earth and they shall write it. . . . And it shall come to pass that my people, which are of the house of Israel, shall be gathered unto the lands of their possessions, and my word also shall be gathered in one. (2 Nephi 29:7-14).

Return of Christ. It is a cornerstone of Bahá’í belief that Bahá’u’lláh fulfills the prophecies of all the revealed religions concerning a Messenger who would return in the Last Days to establish justice and the reign of righteousness. Among these prophecies Bahá’u’lláh places particular emphasis upon His station as Christ returned in the glory of the Father. “Followers of the Gospel,” Bahá’u’lláh addressing the whole of Christendom exclaims, “behold the gates of heaven are flung open. He [Page 32] that had ascended unto it is now come. Give ear to His voice calling aloud over land and sea, announcing to all mankind the advent of this Revelation—a Revelation through the agency of which the Tongue of Grandeur is now proclaiming: ‘Lo, the sacred Pledge hath been fulfilled, for He, the Promised One, is come.’”

At the period when the Báb (ministry, 1844-50) and Bahá’u’lláh (ministry, 1853-92) were preparing for the revelation of Their missions, Joseph Smith was organizing the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (1830-44), in preparation for that second advent of Jesus Christ which was “near, even at the door” (D & C 110:16), a time when “he shall manifest himself unto the nations” (1 Nephi 13:42), when “I will reveal myself from heaven with power and great glory . . . and dwell in righteousness with men on earth a thousand years” (D & C 29:11) for “I am in your midst and ye cannot see me” (D & C 38:7).

Investigation of Truth; Individual Responsibility. The Revelation of Bahá’u’lláh has given a tremendous amount of independence and spiritual responsibility to men and women. Bahá’u’lláh prohibited priestcraft and enjoined upon everyone the duty to investigate reality. He considers that “first and foremost” among the “favors, which the Almighty hath conferred upon man, is the gift of understanding,” the purpose of which is to enable man to “know and recognize the one true God.” ‘Abdu’l-Bahá widens this “greatest gift” to include “intellect,” “the power by which man acquires his knowledge of the several kingdoms of creation, and of various stages of existence, as well as much which is invisible.” This power is “the eye of investigation” by which man “may see and recognize truth,” for “each human creature has individual endowment, power and responsibility in the creative plan of God,” so that he may become “completely purified from the dross of ignorance.” This independent investigation of truth and its concomitant responsibilities is based in part upon the Bahá’í belief that men are responsible for their own sins, since the concept of original sin is “unreasonable and evidently wrong, for it means that all men . . . without committing any sin or fault, but simply because they are the posterity of Adam, have become without reason guilty sinners,” which is “far from the justice of God.”

Joseph Smith, in keeping with the spirit of a new age, records the command “that there be no priestcrafts” (2 Nephi 26:29) and writes of “intelligence, or the light of truth” that “is independent in that sphere in which God has placed it, to act for itself, as all intelligence also” and that is the basis for “the agency of man” (D & C 93:29-31). This power of intelligence, this light of truth, is to be used to know God’s commands, to “seek . . . out of the best books, words of wisdom; seek learning, even by study and also by faith” (D & C 88:118) for “if there is anything virtuous, lovely, or of good report or praiseworthy, we seek after these things” (Articles [Page 33] of Faith 13). Man must be a free agent, able to investigate truth, for “men will be punished for their own sins, and not for Adam’s transgression” (Articles of Faith 2).

The Bahá’í, it seems safe to say, may posit that Joseph Smith, along with William Miller and many other religious prodigies, enunciated a number of ideas that had formed in the collective unconscious of mankind over a long period of incubation, finally to emerge in the early nineteenth century. That the expression of these ideas should occur at the appearance of the Báb and Bahá’u’lláh is a monumental coincidence. Joseph Smith, in founding a highly successful missionary movement and in tapping and channeling the spiritual current of a new age, showed himself to be a religious genius of a most profound kind.

Bahá’ís may regard Joseph Smith not as a prophet, but as a seer—one endowed with extraordinary powers of insight. This understanding is a result of viewing Joseph Smith’s “revelatory” experience as being different in kind from that of messengers of God. The Book of Mormon, the Doctrine and Covenants, and the Pearl of Great Price can be seen by Bahá’ís as repositories of a certain amount of relevant truth, though not necessarily as documents recording historical fact or produced by supernatural means. The distinction between relevant, or existential, truth and historical truth makes this understanding possible.

In the final analysis, however, there is no purely scientific proof of connection between the advent of the Báb and Bahá’u’lláh and the rise of Joseph Smith and Mormonism. Proofs resulting from the accumulation of circumstantial evidence rest in the realm of conviction born of faith:

The humanitarian and spiritual principles enunciated decades ago in the darkest East by Bahá’u’lláh and moulded by Him into a coherent scheme are one after the other being taken by a world unconscious of their source as the marks of progressive civilization. And the sense that mankind has broken with the past and that the old guidance will not carry it through the emergencies of the present has filled with uncertainty and dismay all thoughtful men save those who have learned to find in the story of Bahá’u’lláh the meaning of all the prodigies and portents of our time.

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[Page 35]

Return of Enoch

BY ANNA STEVENSON

Copyright © 1983 by Anna Stevenson.

ADAM died, and his son Seth after him, and his son Enos. Cainan, Mahalaleel, and Jared, in orderly sequence and full of years, died. But Enoch ben Jared “walked with God: and he was not; for God took him.” So fall the cadences of the King James Bible, Genesis 5:24. In later generations Abraham would give up the ghost and die at a good old age; Jacob would gather up his feet into the bed and yield up the ghost; Joseph would die and be embalmed and put into a coffin in Egypt. But their ancestor Enoch was not, or disappeared, as other versions have it.

A well-known history seems implied in the cryptic statement. Something has been lost, and explanations of many sorts have burgeoued in Jewish sources to fill the gap: Enoch was a righteous person who died suddenly and at an early age; he was among the nine righteous men who entered paradise without going to the netherworld; he was transported to heaven on God’s command and given the name Metatron the Great Scribe; he became a sign of knowledge to all generations and during his lifetime was the guardian of the secret of intercalation and of the staff with which Moses would perform miracles in Egypt. Or maybe he was really a sinful man whose life was cut short by divine decree, a vacillator between righteousness and sin until God mercifully “took” him on the upswing and so forestalled another relapse.

Of all the legends about Enoch the following one seems to be the favorite: Enoch lived in a secret place as a hidden righteous man until an angel summoned him forth to teach the people. Through 243 years he taught with great power and persuasion until peace and prosperity reigned on earth. and the kings themselves proclaimed him their ruler. When his mission was accomplished, he was carried to heaven in a flaming chariot drawn by fiery steeds. But the angels protested the presence of a mortal among them. To this God replied:

“Be not offended, for all mankind denied Me and My dominion and paid homage to the idols. I therefore transferred the Shekinah [Divine Presence] from earth to heaven, and this man Enoch is the elect of men.” God arrayed him in a magnificent garment and a luminous crown, opened to him all the gates of wisdom, gave him the name “Metatron,” prince and chief of all heavenly hosts, transformed his body into a flame, and “engirdled him by storm, whirlwind, and thundering. . . .”

Scholars have associated Enoch with the Babylonian king, Enmeduranna. Seventh of the kings before the Flood, this legendary ruler was close to the Sun-God, to whom his capital city was dedicated. Enoch, seventh of the Adamic patriarchs, became known as the proponent of the solar calendar; his life span of 365 years corresponds to the solar year. He has been identified, too, with the Quranic prophet Idris the Learned, expounder of books (mentioned in Suras 9:56, 57, and 21:85), with al-Khiḍr, and with Elijah.

Another tradition presents Enoch as the guardian of esoteric knowledge:

The Patriarch Enoch—whose name means the Initiator—is evidently a personification of the sun, since he lived 365 years. He also constructed an underground temple consisting of nine vaults, one beneath the [Page 36] other, placing in the deepest vault a triangular tablet of gold bearing upon it the absolute and ineffable Name of Deity. According to some accounts, Enoch made two gold deltas. The larger he placed upon the cubical altar in the lowest vault and the smaller he gave into the keeping of his son, Methusaleh, who did the actual construction work of the brick chambers according to the pattern revealed to his father by the Most High. In the form and arrangement of these vaults Enoch epitomized the nine spheres of the ancient Mysteries and the nine sacred strata of the earth through which the initiate must pass to reach the flaming Spirit dwelling in its central core.

According to Freemasonic symbolism, Enoch, fearing that all knowledge of the sacred Mysteries would be lost at the time of the Deluge, erected the two columns. . . . Upon the metal column in appropriate allegorical symbols he engraved the secret teaching and upon the marble column placed an inscription stating that a short distance away a priceless treasure would be discovered in a subterranean vault. After having thus faithfully completed his labors, Enoch was translated from the brow of Mount Moriah. In time the location of the secret vaults was lost, but after the lapse of ages there came another builder—an initiate after the order of Enoch—and he, while laying the foundation for another temple to the Great Architect of the Universe, discovered the long-lost vaults and the secret contained therein.

A gentle tale of special luminosity comes from the German Hasidim of the thirteenth century:

The patriarch Enoch, who according to an old tradition was taken from the earth by God . . . , is said to have been a cobbler. At every stitch of his awl he not only joined the upper leather with the sole, but all upper things with all lower things. In other words, he accompanied his work at every step with meditation which drew the stream of emanation down from the upper to the lower (so transforming profane into ritual action), until he himself was transformed from the earthly Enoch into the transcendent Metatron, who had been the object of his meditation.

A remarkably similar legend comes from a Tibetan tantric text:

The guru Camara (which means shoemaker) receives instructions from a yogi concerning the leather, the awl, the thread, and the shoe considered as the “self-created fruit.” For twelve years he meditates day and night over his shoemaking, until he attains perfect enlightenment and is borne aloft.

A Book of Enoch might have been part of the Christian Bible, as, indeed, it has always been for the Coptic Christians. A compilation known as Ethiopic Enoch dates from the stirring period between about 200 B.C. and 200 A.D., when the empires of Persia, Egypt, and Rome battled for dominion over the Mediterranean world, the Maccabees lived out their heroic saga, and Christianity was born.

Even though Ethiopic Enoch did not become part of the Biblical canon, it has had, according to one Jewish source, “tremendous influence. From it, or at any rate through it, the Manual of Discipline [Dead Sea Scrolls] received the solar calendar and it also served as an exemplar for the burgeoning apocalyptic genre.” R. H. Charles, a renowned scholar of Biblical materials, has stated that “The influence of 1 Enoch [Ethiopic Enoch] on the New Testament has been greater than that of all the other apocryphal and pseudepigraphical books put together.” [Page 37] He has compiled “a formidable list of passages in the New Testament which either in phraseology or idea directly depend on, or are illustrative of, passages in 1 Enoch.”

In its present form the Book of Enoch consists of five distinct works:

(1) In the Introduction Enoch relates the good in store for the “elect” after the “Day of Judgment” and describes the rebel angels, sons of God who lust after the daughters of men, and sire children who consume the labor of others and teach mankind the arts of magic and weapon making. Uriel, Gabriel, and Michael are sent to deal With them by binding them in Sheol. Enoch carries a petition from them to God and journeys through the universe, seeing all the elements of creation.

(2) In The Last Day the Messiah, here called the “Elect One,” is envisioned as having been “under the wings of the Lord of the Spirits" since time immemorial. He is destined to be the final Judge of all mortals. The ministering angels, lifting their voice in song, greet first the “Lord of the Spirits” (or Ancient of Days) and then the “Elect One.”

(3) The Book of the Heavenly Luminaries describes the courses of sun, moon, and stars, the falling of dew and rain, the recurrence of the seasons, the nature of the “true” (solar) calendar.

(4) Dream-visions and Symbols relates the story of the Deluge and the history of Israel down to the beginning of the Hasmonean (Maccabean) era.

(5) The Apocalypse of Weeks divides history into ten “weeks” of which seven have already occurred (creation, flood, Abraham, revelation on Sinai, Temple, destruction of Temple, election of a “righteous shoot”). Three others belong to the future: the triumph of the righteous, the rebuilding of the Temple, and the Day of Judgment. A Book of Noah follows, similar in content to the Genesis Apocryphon and the Book of Noah found at Qumran. Finally, come Enoch’s counsels to mankind.

Christian congregations used the work freely and regarded it as a genuine revelation, but “the book was discountenanced by many of the church fathers—Hilary of Poitiers, John Chrysostom, Jerome and Augustine—and by the second century A.D., it seems to have lost acceptance.”

It has been suggested that the Book of Enoch, with its blending of Iranian, Greek, Chaldean, and Egyptian elements survived (and was, therefore, “discountenanced” by the orthodox) because of its fascination for Gnostics, Manichaeans, and other so-called marginal groups. Elaine Pagels considers that a firm demarcation between orthodoxy and heresy was vital to the survival of the infant Church: “Had Christianity remained multiform, it might well have disappeared from history, along with dozens of other cults of antiquity. I believe that we owe the survival of Christian tradition to the organizational and theological structure that the emerging church developed.”

In short, Jerome and Augustine, Hilary and John did well to rule against Enoch. By the end of the fourth century the Book of Enoch was officially all but forgotten. It did not become even one of the Apocrypha, those hidden away books that were withheld from public reading because of questionable origin, or contents, yet were always part of the Christian Bible until Luther’s time. They have remained in the King James version, but the Puritans are said to have “demanded a Bible without Apocrypha,” and this thinner volume they implanted firmly in their New England.

So again Enoch was not, disappeared except for a few direct Biblical references, except for very considerable influence on New Testament thought and style and for continuing enrichment to artists of many sorts, particularly those whose approach to the infinite is through imagery and symbol.

Another age of apocalyptic terrors and wonders [Page 38] is upon us, a new age taking shape even as the old destroys itself. Among the spiritual adventures and discoveries rocketing about us in the upheaval I call attention, through two nineteenth-century examples, to a return of Enoch, arch-pilgrim and explorer of celestial spaces.

The first example is a “restored” history of Enoch found in The Pearl of Great Price, one of the official Scriptures of the Latter-day Saints, the Mormon Church. Here the history of the writer/visionary himself, Joseph Smith, and the circumstances surrounding the coming forth of his account are well documented. Joseph Smith claimed that the ancient writings came to him through inspiration. In June 1830 he dictated chapter 1 of Writings of Moses; and in December, the remaining seven chapters.

The story follows the basic tradition of Enoch, but differs in important respects. Enoch here is called to preach at the age of sixty-five. He protests that he is “but a lad, and all the people hate me; for I am slow of speech.” Sixty-five could be thought callow among patriarchs who died young at six hundred, but may not the description point more directly at Joseph Smith himself? At the age of fourteen and a half he had had a vision of God that set the course of his life thenceforth. He had gone with it to someone important to him, a Methodist minister, and had met with immediate and harsh rejection. Ridicule, abuse, and hatred had followed from many sides.

Joseph Smith was also painfully “slow of speech” there at the beginning. Moreover, he had had minimal schooling, was obviously drawn to the resounding rhythms of the King James Bible, but must have stumbled in his first attempts to share in that special language. “Open thy mouth and it shall be filled,” Enoch is promised by the Lord. “My Spirit is upon you, wherefore all thy words will I justify.” By the time Joseph Smith was dictating these lines to a scribe, he had published The Book of Mormon, delivered many sermons, caused many revelations to be written down, all in language that has been experienced as memorable and moving. He was now twenty-five years old.

Enoch in The Pearl of Great Price is concerned about doctrinal matters of great importance in the nineteenth century. He stresses baptism by immersion and in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost; he explains that in the language of Adam Man of Holiness is the name of God, and the name of His Only Begotten is “the Son of Man, even Jesus Christ, a righteous Judge who shall come in the meridian of time.” He establishes Zion, the City of peace and harmony, where all are of one heart and one mind and none is poor. When he is taken to heaven, his entire City goes with him, to return again with him in the Last Days.

Safe there in the bosom of God, he looks down upon earth and sees the Flood overwhelm the rest of mankind; he witnesses the weeping of God over His handiwork, hears the earth lament: “Wo, wo is me, the mother of men. . . . When shall I rest?” He sees Satan holding a great chain that shadows the earth, sees him look up and laugh. “Will the earth rest when the Son of Man comes?” asks Enoch. “Look,” says the Lord. Enoch sees the Son of Man “lifted up on a cross after the manner of men.”

The generations flow on beneath his gaze until, after a final conflict, the heavenly Zion comes down and unites with Zion on earth, and the earth herself attains rest for a thousand years.

Back in pre-Millennial, nineteenth-century Ohio, Missouri, and Illinois, Joseph Smith [Page 39] went on to experience a crescendo of revelations and visions. Confrontations and mortal dangers increased, too. At the age of thirty-eight his youth and his life were silenced by bullets from a mob. The burial had to be secret because for a while his enemies prowled about, ghoulishly demanding the body. So a legend grew of a hidden grave from which the saints would see their beloved leader rise again. In the early years of this century a poignant little song, The Unknown Grave, was still sung occasionally in church. I like the song, however apocryphal, but I look for Joseph Smith, the Prophet-Hero of my own youth, in his vision of Enoch. There high in the heavens, and barely discernible in the dazzling light—is it Enoch he had shown us? or Joseph Smith?

A curious association of the two names appears twice in a chapter of Mormon Scripture, Doctrine and Covenants 78:1 and 4. “The Lord spake unto Enoch [Joseph Smith, Jr.],” begins verse 1. Essentially this is the explanation given in the preamble to the revelation: by this time (1832) it had become unwise to have the actual names of prominent church brethren appear plainly in the revelations, so other names were given, and, later, when circumstances had changed, the real names were added in brackets. Did Joseph Smith sense a mystical identification with the ancient and enigmatical seer?

The Book of the Secrets of Enoch is a different sort of restoration. Later than Ethiopic Enoch cited above, it may still date from shortly before the Christian Era. “R. Ishmael, a martyr of the Hadrianic persecutions, is claimed to be the author, but the composition belongs most probably to a later date.” Perhaps it was an Alexandrian Jew who gave it form. In any event, the original manuscript, probably in Greek, has been lost, and by the seventh century even the memory of its existence seems to have disappeared. In the late 1800s two versions of it, one incomplete, came to light in Russia and Serbia, translated into a Slavic tongue. It was seen to be distinct from Ethiopic Enoch and was called Slavonic Enoch. An English translation appeared in 1896.

The book draws on the earlier materials but seems to be the work of a single gifted writer, a treasure house for Fra Angelico and Dante, Michelangelo and Blake. No wonder there was difficulty in containing it between the covers of a book. It has overflowed frescoed walls and ceilings and swelled out in countless angelic choruses. Painters and singers of this age may soon turn to it as a resource of compelling luminosity. It leads us into the story with this preamble:

There was a wise man, a great artificer,

and the Lord conceived love for him and received him,

that he should behold the uppermost dwellings

and be an eye-witness of the wise and great and inconceivable and immutable realm of God Almighty,

of the very wonderful and glorious and bright and many-eyed station of the Lord’s servants,

and of the inaccessible throne of the Lord,

and of the degrees and manifestations of the incorporeal hosts,

and of the ineffable ministration of the multitude of the elements,

and of the various apparition and inexpressible singing of the host of cherubim,

and of the boundless light.

Enoch has accomplished his 365 years, is alone in his home this first day of the month. He wakes from sleep in a fit of despair and weeping that he cannot understand. Two huge men appear, clothed in purple, with wings brighter than gold, hands whiter than snow, faces shining like the sun, fire flashing from eyes and lips. They carry him on their wings to the First Heaven whence he looks down on a sea greater than the earthly sea. He beholds more angels, “the elders and rulers of the stellar [Page 40] orders, the 200 angels who come around all those who sail.” He sees, too, the terrible treasure houses of the snow stewarded by angels who go in and out of the surrounding clouds. And, “they showed me the treasure-houses of the dew, like oil of the olive, and the appearance of its form as of all the flowers on earth.”

In the Second Heaven he sees darkness greater than earthly darkness, and in it prisoners hanging, awaiting judgment, dark angels who weep incessantly. The guides explain:

“They are God’s apostates . . . who turned away with their prince, who is also fastened on the Fifth Heaven.” And I felt great pity for them, and they saluted me, and said to me: “Man of God, pray for us to the Lord;” and I answered to them: “Who am I, a mortal man, that I should pray for angels? Who knoweth not whither I go, or what will befall me, or who will pray for me?”

From the Third Heaven he looks down on “all the sweet-flowering trees . . . all the foods borne by them bubbling with fragrant exhalation.” In their midst is the Tree of Life,

gold-looking and vermillion and firelike, and covers all, and it has produce from all fruits. Its root is in the garden at the earth’s end. . . . And there are 300 angels very bright who keep the garden, and with incessant sweet-singing . . . serve the Lord through all days and hours. And I said: “How very sweet is this place.”

On the Northern side he is shown the terrible place where there is no light, only murky fire,

and there is a fiery river coming forth, and

the whole place is everywhere fire, and everywhere there is frost and ice, thirst and shivering, while the bonds are very cruel, and the angels fearful and merciless, bearing angry weapons.

In the Fourth Heaven Enoch beholds the sun:

Its passage and return are accompanied by four great stars, and each star has under it a thousand stars to the right of the sun’s wheel, and four to the left each having under it a thousand stars, issuing with the sun continually.

And by day fifteen myriads of angels attend it, and by night a thousand. And six-winged ones issue with the angels before the sun’s wheel into fiery flames, and a hundred angels kindle the sun and set it alight. . . . [At daybreak] the elements of the sun, called Phoenixes and Chalkydri, break into song, therefore every bird flutters with its wings rejoicing at the giver of light. . . . The sun is a great creation!

He tells of the moon and her times, her gates, and also of the continual and indescribable singing of the angels throughout this level.

Now in the Fifth Heaven there is silence. He sees

many and countless soldiers called Grigori, of human appearance, and their size was greater than that of great giants, and their faces withered, and the silence of their mouths perpetual. . . . And I said: “Wherefore are these very withered and their faces melancholy, and their mouths silent?”

And they said to me: “These are the Grigori who with their prince Satanail rejected the Lord of light, and after them are those who are held in great distress on the second heaven, and three of them went down on to the earth from the Lord’s throne . . . and broke through their vows on the shoulder of the hill Ermon, and saw the daughters of men how good they are, and took to themselves wives, and befouled the earth with their deeds. . . .”

And I said to the Grigori: “I saw your brethren and their works, and their great torments, and I prayed for them, but the Lord has condemned them to be under earth till heaven and earth shall end forever.”

And I said: “Wherefore do you wait, [Page 41] brethren, and do not serve before the Lord’s face . . . lest you anger your Lord utterly?” And they listened to my admonition, and spoke to the four ranks in heaven, and lo! as I stood with those two men four trumpets trumpeted together with great voice, and the Grigori broke into song . . . and their voice went up before the Lord pitifully and affectingly.

Affectingly, indeed! The sudden blast of long-silent trumpets, withered mouths surging again into song! Will the awesome Throne, the ineffable Face be more moving than this?

Up to the Sixth Heaven now where seven bands of shining angels, all alike in form and dress,

make the orders, and learn the goings of the stars, and the alteration of the moon, or revolution of the sun, and the good government of the world. And when they see evil-doing they make commandments and instruction, and sweet and loud singing, and all songs of praise.

These are the archangels who are above the angels, measure all life in heaven and on earth, and the angels who are over every grass, giving food to all, to every living thing, and the angels who write all the souls of men, and all their deeds, and their lives before the Lord’s face; and in their midst are Phoenixes and six-winged ones continually with one voice singing . . . and it is not possible to describe their singing, and they rejoice before the Lord at his footstool.

In the Seventh Heaven he sees fiery troops of great archangels, incorporeal forces, dominions, orders and governments, cherubim and seraphim, thrones and many-eyed ones. He is shown the Lord from afar in His very high throne (it extends up into the Tenth Heaven). “Have courage,” say the two guides, and, their mission accomplished, they slip away. Alone now, Enoch falls on his face and says, “Woe is me, what has befallen me?” Gabriel is sent down to him, catches him up like a leaf in the wind, sets him before the Lord. On the way he passes through the Eighth and Ninth Heavens, home of the Twelve signs of the Zodiac.

In this Tenth and final Heaven, Aravoth, he sees the face of the Lord,

like iron made to glow in fire, and brought out, emitting sparks, and it burns . . . but the Lord’s face is ineffable, marvelous and very awful, and very very terrible. And who am I to tell of the Lord’s unspeakable being . . . ?

Quite overwhelmed Enoch is assisted by the Archistratege Michael, who anoints and clothes him befittingly. The learned Archangel Pravuil brings out the books of God, and a reed of quick writing, and instructs him in every branch of knowledge. Then it is Enoch’s turn. He is to write all the souls of mankind, “for all souls are prepared to eternity before the formation of the world.” He works for double thirty days and nights, writes three hundred and sixty-six books. This chore accomplished, the Lord summons him to sit down at His left with Gabriel, and says to him:

Enoch, beloved . . . take in these words, for not to my angels have I told my secret, and I have not told them their rise, nor my endless realm, nor have they understood my creating, which I tell thee today.

For before all things were visible, I alone used to go about in the invisible things, like the sun from east to west, and from west to east. But even the sun has peace in itself, while I found no peace, because I was creating all things, and I conceived the thought of planting foundations. . . .

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

On the sixth day I commanded my wisdom to create man from seven consistencies: one, his flesh from the earth; two, his blood from the dew; three, his eyes from the sun; four, his bones from stone; five, his intelligence from the swiftness of the angels and from cloud; six, his veins and his hair from the grass of the earth; seven, his soul from [Page 42] my breath and from the wind . . . and I placed him on earth, a second angel, honourable, great and glorious, and I appointed him as ruler to rule on earth and to have my wisdom, and there was none like him on earth of all my existing creatures.

God calls the man Adam, a name whose four letters in Greek stand for the initials of the four directions. He shows him the two ways, the light and the darkness. He puts sleep into him, takes a rib and makes woman, “that death should come to him through his wife.” The two live on in Paradise amid singing angels and gloomless light. Satanail, as we might guess, seduces Eve, but does not touch Adam. They are driven out onto the earth whence they were taken. “I cursed ignorance,” God tells Enoch, “but what I had blessed previously I did not curse. I cursed not man, nor the earth, nor other creatures, but man’s evil fruit and his works.”

The seven-day week has been finished, seven thousand years. The beginning of the eighth thousand is to be a time of not-counting, endless, with neither years nor months nor weeks nor days nor hours. Enoch is now to return to earth for thirty days with all the books and wisdom he has acquired. His former guides, Samuil and Raguil, will again conduct him. But first one of the older angels, “terrible and menacing . . . white as snow and his hands like ice” is called up to freeze the face of Enoch; otherwise, no man will be able to look on him.

So Enoch comes back to his own couch where his son Methusal is keeping vigil. Enoch’s household and the elders of the people are called together. He tells them everything, in the course of many chapters, and tearfully exhorts them to virtue. When the thirty days are over, darkness covers the earth, and no one sees how Enoch is taken up again to the highest heaven. When the darkness lifts, a scroll is found lying there, on it inscribed The Invisible God.

WHO then was Enoch? Excluded by the Hilarys and Jeromes of the day, he shines forth from a wide coverless book of the human spirit. If the Puritans had been more hospitable with the bright angels of Persia and Chaldea, they might have escaped the trap of their meager and literal Bible, might have been spared the murdering of witches. Somber tight-faced Grigori could have taught them.

Throughout millenia conjectures and mythic creations have clustered about the slight thread of Enoch’s recorded story. He is Metatron, nearest the Throne, a flame engirdled by storm, whirlwind, and thundering; he is a simple cobbler who spends his days bringing uppers and lowers together; he is guardian of arcane wisdom and writer of many books; he is a lad slow of speech who, transformed, takes his people with him to heaven; he receives from God five hundred thousand three hundred and sixty eyes with which to see all things in the entire universe.

The constant in all the traditions is that he walked with God, minuscule human stumblings accommodating somehow to the Measureless, and that thereafter he was not known to his fellows in any ordinary way. Does he stir in us today, an archetypal force that impels us to explore the universe without, and the cosmos within? Is his an ancient name for our present need to see with our own eyes and know of our own knowledge?

[Page 43]

I Never Learned the Names of Flowers

a name? what fragile root

seeks for a transitory rain

of words

that neither nourish

nor define:

just the fragrances here of blossoms

which vie with colors

in the intimate unfolding

of intense

self-definition.

* * *

no less than moss I too

have known

the shaded candor of the vine

and recognize

familiar blooms in unfamiliar

faces

although I must confess

I often do not

know

the names of flowers.

—Thomas Washington

Copyright © 1982 by Thomas Washington

[Page 44]

[Page 45]

Literature’s Cracked Mirror

A REVIEW OF GERALD GRAFF’S Literature Against Itself: Literary Ideas in Modern Society (CHICAGO: UNIV. OF CHICAGO PRESS, 1979), 239 PAGES, NOTES, INDEX

BY FREDERICK GLAYSHER

Copyright © 1983 by Frederick Glaysher

POSTMODERN literature and critical theory have shattered and discarded the ancient metaphor that literature is a mirror held up to the world. Among some thinkers the figure itself is considered passé. They loathe not only the metaphor but the very belief that reality exists. Such fundamentally nihilistic thinking permeates many disciplines today. In literature this interpretation reveals itself mainly by evincing derision for the belief that literature is able to refer to external reality. Professor Gerald Graff’s Literature Against Itself analyzes this loss of referentiality and traces its development from romanticism through modernism and New Criticism and on to the current postmodernism. Although his book may he more perceptive about the problems than about the possibilities of restoration, it boldly rejects the solipsism of contemporary literature and calls for a return to an aesthetics centered in reality.

Graff accurately perceives that the major affliction of literature is its loss of referentiality. He locates the beginning of this loss in romanticism. Blake, Shelley, Wordsworth, Emerson, as well as many others, tended to exaggerate the “legislative” power of poetry while negating the utter dependence of poetry upon an external standard for justification and validation. As they moved away from an objective standard, they progressively substituted for it a literary creation—one for which no verifiable or believable authority existed. This weakened the claim of literature to truth and simultaneously began its social and intellectual alienation. Despite the extravagant claims of romanticism, it went awry. Far from creating more order in an increasingly materialistic civilization, it led to only a more rampant subjectivism.

Graff maintains that the next logical step was into the extreme autonomy of our century. Rilke and Yeats come readily to mind. They both developed esoteric “systems” to compensate for their inability to discern any coherent exterior reality, Yeats achieving by far the more arcane and idiosyncratic one. The presupposition of such a system is that there is no inherent design; the artist must contrive one. Rilke and Yeats differ from a few of the romantics in that their thinking is thoroughly secular, despite half-hearted assertions of some type of tenuous mysticism. Yet what differentiates the modernists (such as Riike and Yeats) from postmodern writers is that the modernists remained, for the most part, humanists. They continued to believe, as the romantics did, that poetry gives order and meaning, somehow or another, to reality. Wallace Stevens’ idea that poetry is the “supreme fiction” exemplifies this position. He, along with Yeats, Rilke, and others, persisted in believing that a humanistic world view was essential to poetry. In criticism, the New Critics were central to the loss of referentiaiity, for it was they who worked the autonomy of romanticism into a critical doctrine. T. S. Eliot and I. A. Richards were particularly responsible for the development of the seminal ideas of close textual reading and of disregarding the content of a literary work. The autotelic, self-sufficient text and the further trivialization of literature were the offspring of the romantic inheritance of the period.

Postmodern literature indisputably “extends rather than overturns the premises of romanticism and modernism.” Most of Graff’s [Page 46] book is dedicated to proving the truth of this statement. He painstakingly documents that postmodern literature concludes “with better logic, that, if humanism is indeed a fiction, we ought to quit this pretense that it can be taken seriously.” Hence we have Barthes, Derrida, de Man, semiotics, reader-response criticism, and all of the writers who celebrate some vague form of energy—for example, Jerzy Kosinski and John Hawkes along with the “Beat” poets.

However, to repudiate humanism is, as Graff recognizes, a slightly honorable position for these critics and writers. They at least are honest enough to accept the inevitable conclusion that must follow from their ungrounded thinking, something that most of the romantics and modernists could not face:

Knowing and naming itself as fiction, literature becomes a vehicle for a nihilistic metaphysics, an antididactic form of preaching. In a world in which nobody can look outside the walls of the prison house of language, literature, with its built-in confession of its self-imprisonment, becomes once again the great oracle of truth, but now the truth is that there is no truth.

This is the postmodern “breakthrough”: the grim truth at last confronted. Drawing upon Vico, Saussure, Russian formalism, and modern linguistics in general, some postmodern thinkers and writers hold that linguistic elements cannot signify anything in the objective world and that, as a result, no intelligible reality exists. All is reduced to arbitrary codes of signifiers.

Although Graff does allow that linguistic signs are indeed arbitrary and that it is a valuable lesson for literature and criticism to learn this, he points out that it does not follow that the concepts referred to are arbitrary. External conventions, as well as internal, determine meaning. An example he gives is the ambiguous statement “Keep off the grass.” Without external indication of the intention of the writer or speaker, one does not know how to understand this simple statement. Does it mean to stay off someone’s lawn or off marijuana? Only an intentional, external sign can clarify the meaning. In the same way, writing demands intention by the author. Literature is not a Rorschach test, a contention that much of modern literary culture is dangerously close to holding.

Graff brilliantly exposes why “avant garde” ideologies fail to challenge contemporaneity: “They are the entrenched ideologies, or at least play into them.” The alienated psychology of the postmodern artist has been so thoroughly absorbed into the general society—or the postmodern artist has so thoroughly absorbed the alienation of modern, fragmented society— that there is no longer any fundamental difference between their thinking. The various coteries basically embrace the same values of irrationality and antiintellectualism, skepticism, and nihilism that pervade contemporary world civilization. They mistakenly redefine their failure as a “breakthrough.” Much of the writing of contemporaneity, as Graff observes, is a symptom of the malady instead of an exploration of it. In a strange way, referentiality has almost been restored; the mirror is cracked, but it reflects the condition of our age.

Graft demonstrates that literature has conspired against itself to bring about its own loss of referentiality:

From the perception that “poetry makes nothing happen,” as Auden in our century has said, we move to the imperative that poetry ought to make nothing happen, and finally to the axiom that it is not real poetry if it aims at practical effect. By this logical route, the alienated position of literature ceases to be an aspect of a particular historical condition and becomes part of literature’s very definition.

Although he states that the reason for this deflating redefinition is due to literary thinkers having accepted a certain conceptual bill of goods, he still tends to locate the causes of it in the political arena, in the appearance of modern mass society, and in the pressure upon literature of scientific advancement. Nowhere in his book does Graff approach the understanding that for man to lose touch with true external authority means he has lost touch with objective reality. Anomie, in the old sense of the word, is all that can possibly follow. And regardless of his beliefs that literature is dependent [Page 47] upon a convincing conceptual and theoretical understanding of the world and that literature has denied itself such an understanding, he himself fails to elucidate what one might be. Suffice it to say that the result of such a redefinition is not only the loss of referentiality but significance as well. The writer turns to mythology, linguistic games. This redefinition is not, however, a recent phenomenon. Literature has been, as Graff states at one point, “in the process of telling us how little it means for a long time, as far back as the beginnings of romanticism.” That this redefinition of literature has found doctrinal expression in Auden and other writers and critics should come as no surprise. But poetry does and must make something happen; it repairs and polishes the mirror; it perceives the order that exists in reality; it leads to practical effect; it opens our eyes to new possibilities of life and thought. As Robert Hayden wrote, “Poetry does make something happen, for it changes sensibility.” Such change, incontrovertibly spiritual in nature, is the prerequisite for any transformation in the objective, quotidian world.

As a remedy for the problems of referentiality and redefinition, Graff offers mimesis:

The writer’s problem is to find a standpoint from which to represent the diffuse, intransigent material of contemporary experience without surrendering critical perspective to it. Since critical perspective depends on historical sense, on seeing the present somehow as part of a coherent historical process, this task demands a difficult fusion of the sense of contemporaneity with the sense of the past that gives contemporaneity distinct definition.

Graff’s mimetic “fusion” is indeed difficult given contemporary assumptions about history and society, assumptions that, in the end, Graff shares. Without an understanding of the major motivating events of history, any effort at “fusion” is doomed to failure. He primarily proposes that a new “fusion” be based on a view of history as degenerating into the mass society of today. That this has occurred during the last century is undeniable. Such a phenomenon has certainly, as he contends, vitiated the rational, critical capacity of society and replaced it with mass forms of thinking that are lacking in content. Yet such a fact is itself merely the symptom of a much larger problem. And his “fusion” would actually result only in another personal, willed mythology, which is precisely what he argues against throughout his book.

Nevertheless, Graff is definitely seeking to restore coherence to life. He cites Saul Bellow’s Mr. Sammler’s Planet as an attempt to reaffirm the meaning of such words as truth, honor, compassion, virtue. But ultimately such an attempt remains for Bellow and Graff as deprived of any respectable authority as the attempt by the romantics and modernists to affirm humanistic values. The religious ground for such verities has not been restored; rather, they are asserted solely out of a nostalgia that can command no more respect than earlier attempts by scholars and writers to impose, by themselves, order on existence. Similarly, in his chapter “English in America,” he claims that the collective efforts of scholars are required “to reconstruct our history” This is presented after acknowledging the manner in which literary scholars and teachers have collaborated during the last century to drain literature of its referential ability. How this tendency may be reversed is not explained any more than the assertion that respectability must be returned to the “old words.”

Although Graff demystifies in a masterly way the thinking of many scholars and writers, he meets some of them in the end in a vague and ungrounded program of revision. At the same time, it seems that perhaps Graff understands the predicament in which he, modern literature, and contemporaneity find themselves. Between the lines of his book one senses perhaps an awareness of the futility of political and academic solutions to the spiritual perplexities of today. In an age as disjointed as ours, to understand such a large part of the problem is a formidable and admirable accomplishment.

[Page 48]

Authors & Artists

BRET BRENEMAN is an English instructor at the University of Hawaii College of Continuing Education.

WILLIAM P. COLLINS, the librarian of the Bahá’í World Centre in Haifa, Israel, holds a B.A. in Persian and French from Middlebury College and a M.S. in library science from Syracuse University. His “The Bahá’í Faith and Mormonism: A Preliminary Survey,” appeared in our Fall 1980/Winter 1981 issue.

M. R. GARIS, a long-time resident of Amherst, Massachusetts, is the current writer of the Uncle Wiggily stories.

FREDERICK GLAYSHER, a first-time contributor to World Order, has until recently been a lecturer in English at Gunma University in Maebashi, Japan. He holds a Master’s degree in English language and literature from the University of Michigan, the University Press of which has accepted for publication his edition of The Collected Prose of Robert Hayden.

ANNA M. STEVENSON is a graphic artist who has taught art both on the high school and college level. She has spent half her life as a Mormon (of the fourth generation) and half as a Bahá’í.

THOMAS WASHINGTON, who holds a Ph.D. in Latin American literature, is writing a book on self-defense for women.

ART CREDITS. Cover, design by John Solarz, photograph by J. M. Conrader; p. 1, photograph by Raymond I. Moore; p. 8, photograph by courtesy of National Bahá’í Archives, Wilmette, Illinois; p. 24, photograph by Lori Block; p. 34, photograph by Camille O’Reilly; p. 44, photograph by David L. Trautmann.

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