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World Order
SPRING 1968
- THE RELIGIOUS CRISIS
- OF THE MODERN WORLD Alessandro Bausani
- ETHICAL THOUGHT
- James C. Haden AND ETHICAL ACTION
World Order
A BAHÁ’Í MAGAZINE • VOLUME 2 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 FISHER
- HOWARD GAREY
- ROBERT HAYDEN
- GLENFORD E. MITCHELL
- Art Consultants:
- GEORGE NEUZIL
- LORI NEUZIL
- Subscriber Service:
- PRISCILLA STONE
WORLD ORDER is published quarterly, October, January, April, and July, at 112 Linden Avenue, Wilmette, Illinois 60091. Subscriber and business correspondence should be sent to this address. Manuscripts and other editorial correspondence should be addressed to 2011 Yale Station, New Haven, Connecticut 06520.
The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the publisher, the National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of the United States, or of the Editorial Board. Manuscripts and suggestions for articles and subjects to be treated editorially will be welcomed and acknowledged by the editors.
Subscription: Regular mail USA, $3.50; Foreign, $4.00. Single copy, $1.00.
Copyright © 1968, National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of the United States, World Rights Reserved. Printed in the U.S.A.
IN THIS ISSUE
- 1 The Basis of Human Rights
- Editorial
- 2 Ethical Thought and Ethical Action
- by James C. Ḥaden
- 9 The Religious Crisis of the Modern World
- by Alessandro Bausani
- 16 Notes on Persian Love Poems
- by Marzieh Gail
- 23 Ode from Senna
- by Ali-Kuli Khan
- 25 Toward the New Eden
- by David S. Ruhe
- 34 Shkake-Ne-Yah of the Diné
- by Russell I. Boyce
- 46 Echoes from Southampton County
- A Book Review by Edwin S. Redkey
- 50 Letters to the Editor
- 52 Authors and Artists of This Issue
The Basis of Human Rights
EDITORIAL
NINETEEN SIXTY-EIGHT has been designated by the United Nations as Human Rights Year. At no time in history have the rights of man been more widely or persistently sought than now. In the United States, it is the rights of blacks to equal treatment with whites; elsewhere it is the right of colonial peoples to self-government, the right of believers to profess and practice their religion, of women to equal status with men, of children to education, of youth to the respect accorded adults.
Paradoxically enough, the assertion of human rights has only increased confusion as to their source. A publication of the United Nations states that human rights “are based on mankind’s increasing demand for decent, civilized life . . .” But upon what ground is the demand itself made?
On the basis of a materialistic view of man that reduces him to the level of animal, it is impossible to argue for rights. Animals have no rights save the right of the strong. Granting rights to those who cannot obtain what they want by force, implies the existence of higher values. These are ultimately religious.
BAHÁ’ÍS BELIEVE that the very notion of human rights is inseparable from faith in the inherent dignity of man, a dignity conferred upon him by his possession of mind and spirit. Thus human rights are grounded in religion and derive from values promulgated through history by Divine Educators: Moses, Zoroaster, Buddha, Jesus, Muhammad, Bahá’u’lláh.
Today Bahá’ís believe, the paramount task of man is the recognition and achievement of the oneness of mankind: the painful but inevitable broadening of each man’s allegiance from his own ethnic, racial, cultural, national, and religious group to all humanity. Only the recognition of the essential unity underlying the seeming diversity of the human family can provide the firm foundation upon which to build the edifice of the rights of man.
ETHICAL THOUGHT AND ETHICAL ACTION
By JAMES C. HADEN
THE AMERICAN nation has passed through a summer of social and moral travail, a crisis in which the defects and failures in our attitudes and institutions concerning race were pitilessly illuminated by the light of burning slums. James Baldwin warned us of “the fire next time,” and the warning is dangerously close to fulfillment.
We are faced with a continuing and ever-mounting uneasiness of conscience over our national embroilment in the irrationalities of war in Asia; the uneasiness is driving deeper the wedge between the conventionally respectable middle class and both those who involve themselves with issues such as the racial problem and those who are temporarily opting out of all involvement via Haight-Ashbury and hallucinogens.
Although these things monopolize our attention, there are far graver crises in the making, which will be upon us within the next generation or two. Psychological and pharmacological developments will permit those who govern to control the behavior of the governed, even without the latter’s knowledge. The appearance of the “chemical mace” as a means of riot control in the past few months is a harbinger of this. This will clearly necessitate a reconsideration of political institutions if we care to keep free of such insidious controls.
BY THE YEAR 2000 it will undoubtedly be possible, thanks to the knowledge and skill of the biologists, to keep alive human reproductive cells of both sexes, and even functioning ovaries and testes. We will then be able to produce at will human beings of whatever breeding strain we wish. By then, or not long thereafter, it will moreover be possible to synthesize chromosomes so as to combine the characteristics we want in a living thing. This power, coupled with the pressure of overpopulation which is rapidly growing intolerable in many parts of the world, will confront us with choices of a profound nature.
There never has been a period in human history, of course, without voices proclaiming the downfall of established values and the advent of darkness and corruption. Ours may prove to be an era whose transitional character is illusory. On the other hand, there have been times which were truly transitional, when the old institutions were indeed in rapid process of change, when the moral quality of the future was hard to determine in the confusion. It is that which may be the nature of our times, and if so it is important for us to recognize it and do all that we can to meet the situation.
It hardly seems superfluous, then, to find such statements as this:
- Only a prolonged and profound attention by many of the wisest men of our time, men of philosophy and religion, students of society and of government, and representatives of the common interests of men throughout the world, together with scientists, may achieve a wise and sober solution of the crisis evoked in our world by scientific discoveries and their applications.
The quotation happens to be taken from a
speech by a professor of biology, Bentley
Glass; to it could easily be added references
to racial and political problems and many
other current quandaries. The important point
is that the faith of the common man—and,
in many important respects even a distinguished
professor of biology must be counted one
[Page 3] [Page 4]
of them—is pinned on the presumed wisdom
of “men of philosophy and religion, students
of society and government” (this has a nicer
ring than “sociologists and political-scientists”),
as well as of scientists and other experts.
It is this supposition which demands
some reflection. Does this faith in expert wisdom
in fact receive support from the philosophical
activity of today in the field of ethics?
Consider the following specimen of philosophical prose:
- I propose to say that the test whether someone is using the judgment “I ought to do X” as a value-judgment or not is, “Does he or does he not recognize that if he assents to the judgment, he must also assent to the command ‘Let me do X’?” Thus I am not here claiming to prove anything substantial about the way in which we use language; I am merely suggesting a terminology which, if applied to the study of moral language, will, I am satisfied, prove illuminating.
The author, one of England’s best-known writers on ethics today, goes on to describe value-judgment as “the class of sentences containing value-words,” rather as Bertrand Russell defined a cardinal number as “the class of all classes similar to a given class.” This is not an isolated example; it is, in fact, quite typical of contemporary books and articles on moral and ethical questions accepted and discussed without question almost everywhere in the Anglo-American philosophical domain.
This sample suggests that the general tone on contemporary Anglo-American ethical philosophy is hardly calculated to induce trust among those who look to it for guidance in our present troubles and confusions. The classical vein of moral philosophy was one which presumed to tell the listener what was good and right, and what was wrong and evil; this is the region of normative ethics. The latter-day tone avoids the conflicts and contradictions of the old approach by retreating to what is customarily called meta-ethics. The prefix “meta” literally means “after” or “beyond.” Metaphysics is the study of the principles underlying the principles of physics. Meta-ethics is the examination of ethical theories so as to discover, if possible, how such theories are formulated, and what their limitations might be. It will not give you a reasoned doctrine of what is right or good, but it does aim to say something about how others try to determine what is good, which accounts for its passive, abstract quality.
This is cold comfort for the man faced with a real problem. The theory of combustion is not precisely irrelevant for someone whose house is on fire, but it doesn’t provide what is needed at the moment. The philosopher will, of course, reply that he never claimed to be a fireman, that his profession naturally and normally operates in the domain of pure theory. There is nothing objectionable in this, taken by itself. But unfortunately the professional philosopher is also inclined to look haughtily on those who do undertake to provide concrete evaluations and recommendations. When the philosophers are not engaged in their standard employment, they unite in lifting their eyebrows over the judgments of ordinary men, ministers, politicians, biologists, and others on contemporary behavior. A classic example is that of the philosopher Morris Cohen, who was approached by a young student at the end of a philosophy course. The student said, “Professor Cohen, you have taken away all the beliefs I had when I began this course, and I have nothing left.” To which Cohen replied, “Young lady, my task is only to cleanse the Augean stables, not to refill them.” Under the wit of the remark lies the philosopher’s vision of himself as Hercules, and concrete values and beliefs as dung. The common man must either give up his vague idea of the philosopher as a moral hero, or give up his notion that somehow theory can yield sound answers to his questions and problems.
YET THE PHILOSOPHER IS right when he
points out that those who set themselves up to
[Page 5] give pronouncements on contemporary morals
are very often confused and even more
often unthinking, merely parroting somebody
else’s dicta. The tendency toward empty
formalism among the professional moral philosophers
is matched by a tendency to intellectual
inertia among the non-professional,
everyday moralists, whether scullery maids or
statesmen. The great unsolved problem of
ethics is how to bring clarity of insight to the
practical man and humanistic purposiveness to
the theoretician. The appalling lack of this is
the measure of the profound failure of our
educational institutions, both formal and informal.
The Anglo-American style of philosophy has always inclined to be detached and dispassionate. (The pragmatism of William James and John Dewey was an exception, and not so far a major one.) This is, I think, because at bottom there is a fundamental choice which a thinker must make, namely whether he is to value knowledge or action as higher. The lure of knowledge, especially in the form of natural science, has proved stronger in most cases. This is illustrated clearly in the emotive theory of ethics, which was potent a generation or so ago, and which is still the hobgoblin of semi-learned moralists. According to this view, the true and proper function of a declarative sentence is to give knowledge about something, but a sentence like “Murder is wrong” does not give any knowledge (about murder), but only expresses the speaker’s private emotions concerning murder. Therefore ethical discourse is noncognitive, and hence it is literally meaningless, equivalent to a series of exclamations like “Hurrah!” or “Ouch!” Indeed, the fact that ethical talk masquerades as cognitive discourse by adopting the grammatical structures of cognitive discourse makes it reprehensible. (The temptation is to call it “immoral” but the emotive theory doesn’t permit that.) The bias towards cognition is clear in this theory and is not far from the surface in most Anglo-American ethical views.
IF WE LOOK beyond the English-speaking realm, we detect a marked difference. There has always been a divergence between Continental philosophy and its counterparts across the Channel and across the Atlantic. The distinction can be expressed in a drastically oversimplified way as the difference between a rationalistic (Continental) and an empirical (Anglo-American) tone in philosophy. Obviously, no form of philosophy with any claim to adequacy can avoid either experience or reason, so the separation should not be taken too absolutely. The Continental philosophical consciousness was deeply affected by the devastating experience of the Second World War, and turned to the human questions of responsibility, heroism, brotherhood, and the like. Fused with the technical philosophical tradition, this concern emerged as existentialism in its many facets. What the war did was to induce the creative thinkers to build their structures on a fundamentally ethical base. This appears as the recognition of a primordial act of decision performed by each individual, which cannot itself be said to be determined but which determines the observable pattern of his life. To exist is, in fact, to decide; no one can avoid some decision, even the decision to avoid further decisions, and thus from that point on to be shaped by forces outside himself instead of acting from himself, i.e. “authentically.”
Existentialism’s insistence on individual
responsibility coupled with clarity and honesty
about oneself and the world about one
probably did more than anything else to
arouse a widespread interest in the philosophical
consideration of ethical problems. True,
existentialism was grossly misinterpreted,
both by those who claimed to favor it and
those who objected to it. But nonetheless it
filled a void in the lay consciousness, which
recognized that the old questions and answers
[Page 6] were inadequate in the face of the enormities
of the age of cataclysmic warfare.
However, existentialism has gained virtually no academic foothold in England or America, and seems unlikely to in the foreseeable future. The empirical tradition is one reason for this, and the other is the operation of the academic market place; it is simply easier to make one’s reputation by sound, though unexciting work in what happens to be the orthodox vein. There may also be a temperamental block, although this seems unlikely, for the reason that existentialism, in one form or another, has proved congenial to a host of semi-professional moral thinkers, in particular theologians, in America. The “Death of God” movement is only the most recent and most radical extension of this assimilation of the central lessons of the existentialists; the situation-ethics form of religious morality is the one most generally accepted.
Existentialism is not the only kind of technical philosophy that has helped to shape the practical thinking of theologians, judges, and other intelligent persons who function between the rarefied atmosphere of the academies and the layman’s ground level. There is a small but growing influence from the technical, dispassionate Anglo-American form of philosophy, even though its current apostles, unlike those of existentialism, do not themselves care much about applications. Van Buren’s book, The Secular Meaning of the Gospel, is an example. Since the average layman does not yet know much about this movement, a few words on it here are in order.
ONE OF THE PARADOXES about this movement, which is broadly known as “ordinary language philosophy,” is that it owes its existence to one man, not only in virtue of his brilliance but also because of what can only be called his philosophical passion. His name was Ludwig Wittgenstein; born an Austrian, he died in 1951 after having lived principally in England as a don and Fellow at Cambridge for twenty-two years. In almost every respect, Wittgenstein was the antithesis of the orthodox professor of philosophy. How many of his colleagues would honestly deplore their influence on their pupils, outspokenly prefer pulp detective magazines to Dorothy Sayers, or unself-consciously commune with birds? Yet his effect has been greater than probably any other philosopher’s of modern times, despite the fact that he is a man of essentially only two books (one of them posthumous) and almost no separate journal articles. Only now are the major commentaries on his first book, published in 1921, appearing. That volume, which in English translation has the cumbersome title Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, belongs principally to the era of logical empiricism, which was dominated by the figure of Wittgenstein’s early friend and mentor, Bertrand Russell. (It was logical empiricism that sired the emotive theory of ethics.) The other volume, entitled Philosophical Investigations, is Wittgenstein’s repudiation of his earlier intellectual self and his working out of a new and profounder view of man’s knowing and being.
The basic stimulus for this development was Wittgenstein’s conviction that previous philosophy, including the logical empiricism of his own time and earlier thought, was too constricting. The difficulty, he thought, was that the philosophers persisted along avenues which generate insoluble problems—which are for that very reason, in Wittgenstein’s opinion, pseudo-problems. One of his characteristic remarks is:
- A man caught in a philosophical confusion is like a man in a room who wants to get out but doesn’t know how. He tries the window but it is too high. He tries the chimney but it is too narrow. And if he would only turn around, he would see that the door has been open all the time. (Quoted in Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir, by Norman Malcolm, p. 51.)
[Page 7]
His object was to show men how to turn
around and to exit from an artificial confusion
by a natural door.
Although the problems with which Wittgenstein chiefly concerned himself were longstanding ones in traditional technical areas, such as the theory of knowledge, his approach was radically different. In the first place, it contained an intense measure of humility; he struggled successfully against the professional philosophical hauteur which leads to the elevation of a highly refined language—or even jargon—as the sole proper way of expressing or knowing something. Against this, Wittgenstein placed the view of all language as a kind of game—indeed, as a whole interrelated family of games—played naturally and immediately by men, so that all types of language have their proper roles to play. Common, ordinary language is the right one for the sort of human problems with which philosophy has perennially busied itself, such as the reality of an external world; certain other more specialized languages, such as mathematics, function properly within more restricted contexts and should not be transferred from those contexts and imposed generally as modes of solution to larger questions, as the logical empiricists had done with symbolic logic as a language.
It is by that sort of mistake that philosophers have both exerted a kind of hieratic grip on ordinary men, and entangled them in debilitating confusions. The “door” consists of recognizing the expressive propriety and force of ordinary language, and utilizing it unself-consciously as an ingredient in life’s work. Thus, the net effect of ordinary language philosophy is intended to be a liberating one for the mass of mankind. No longer should one feel inadequate in respect to the technicians who have elaborated their special modes of language.
For the professional philosopher, his recommendation was to devote himself to accurate studies of how words are in fact used —studies, as it is customarily put, of their “logic”—without objecting or depleting, and then showing how abuse of these natural logics has generated fruitless conceptual knots and puzzles.
Finally, although Wittgenstein himself did not stress this, ordinary language philosophy has the effect of sanctioning discourse in many areas including religion and ethics—as basically meaningful and proper when certain limitations are respected. There is an “ordinary language” of morals, just as there is an ordinary language of barter.
It is the second of these two mandates that has been most explicitly followed. The philosophers of Britain and America have published countless articles exposing the erroneous ways of their predecessors, from Plato to Bertrand Russell. Some of them have turned to the minute empirical study of language uses, in a few cases becoming almost indistinguishable from the professors of linguistics who operate under different auspices. In general, however, these people have not been much concerned with the fate of the common man, except insofar as he is encountered in their classrooms. The tradition of keeping one’s hands clean of popularization has remained strong, reinforced, perhaps, by the fact that Wittgenstein himself found it difficult to communicate with laymen. His reason, however, was that he demanded a dedication to inquiry comparable to his own in his hearers.
IN THE FACE or all this, what are we entitled to say about the possible future impact of technical ethical theory on the vital problems of the mass of people?
It would be reassuring if we could simply
rest in the notion that calling the philosophers
together would set in motion the processes by
[Page 8] which our deepest problems would be solved.
We might even wish, with Plato, that philosophers
should become kings or kings philosophers,
which is but a step from relying on the
judgments of “men of philosophy and religion,
students of society and of government . . . together
with scientists.”
If philosophers were cut to the pattern that Nietzsche envisaged, scholars with no paralyzing gap between their concepts and the dusty turbulence of life, then this might be a welcome prospect. If kings were customarily selected for their sensitivity and receptiveness to the nuances of thought, then the same would be true. But in our present world the scholars are selected by a mechanism which militates against their practical involvements, and the rulers prevail by their blunt, purely pragmatic abilities, so that these avenues are closed.
It seems, therefore, as though the burden falls squarely on the man in the street, together with those whom we might generically call his “ministers.” (There is no specifically religious reference intended by that term, although it does include religious leaders.) The point is that there is at least a potential middle ground, where theory and action can meet, which is all too little developed. It is probably the case that this ground is most effectively cultivated by those with religious or what we might call “inverted religious” concerns—such as some members of the contemporary hippie movement (though not the most publicized ones) and some men of letters such as Paul Goodman. But to say that it is “most effectively cultivated” here is not at all to say that it is cultivated effectively enough. There is too much vague and inconsequential “liberalism,” which repeatedly proves itself impotent in the face of any strong recrudescence of blind, irrational, activist conservatism. The “liberal” should continually torment himself with a question such as: “Would I assassinate a tyrant?” In regions like this the polite formulas of technical ethics are unlikely to be of much direct help. But the formulas both of existentialism and of ordinary language philosophy warn us against expecting to find automatic solutions; both of them return us to the obscurity and confusion of everyday life with the message that we must rely on ourselves and not on the presumed experts.
No convocation of the “wisest men of our time” will be of any help unless it merely supplements the thoughts and the acts of the most ordinary of us. The important distinction is not between the expert and the common man, but between those who think and act in honesty, responsibility, and humility and those who do not.
The Religious Crisis of the Modern World
By ALESSANDRO BAUSANI
DOES THE MODERN WORLD have religious origins? I think it does. However, it is obvious that first we must define “modern world” as against a “pre-modern” or “archaic” or “traditional” world. The basic difference between modern and archaic civilization lies in the way in which it understands “history.”
In archaic civilization, history is not a positive element, it is a fall in Time, to be avoided, or to be repaired through a reintroduction of that which was sacred in the primordial. What counts is the absolute, not the relative; eternity, not time; the idea, not the single fact; astrology, rather than astronomy; alchemy, rather than chemistry. In the pre-modern world, the most perfect form of motion is the cyclic, not the rectilinear. Cyclic motion returns to the beginning and does not lose itself in vague novelties ad infinitum. For that world, our science would be pure doxa, “opinion” based on very ordinary separate facts, whereas to us their science seems like empty metaphysical talk not based on any fact. The great historian of religions, Mircea Eliade, maintains in his fascinating book, The Myth of the Eternal Return, that Plato is the most perfect codifier of the ideology of the archaic, pre-modern world. If science, in the technical naturalistic sense of the term, did not develop in the ancient world (which did have many great minds), this was not due, as some people still instinctively believe, to an innate weakness of thought in the ancients, caught up in mystic fancies, nor to their not having had time to create such an elaborate naturalistic science (in our world a few years have been sufficient to make enormous scientific progress), but to a question of “choice”, of will, a question of direction.
It is not true that the ancients (and this is equally applicable to practically all Asian and non-European civilizations in general) could not and did not know how to develop a science of the modern technological type; but they did not want to do so because they considered that direction (that some people here and there did follow; especially the Greek atomists—among the astronomers, we recall, Aristarchus of Samos in the third century B.C. had already developed a heliocentric system which did not square, however, with the accepted Weltanchauung of the period) wrong or inadvisable since it was inadaptable to the cosmic religious vision of the ancient world. The religions of the archaic type are, to simplify, by tendency monistic or pantheistic (the sacred is spread everywhere), impersonal (there is no God, but to theion—“the divine”, the noumenal, and then many divine personalities, the deities), traditional-national (there are gods of nations, there is an innate sacredness to monarchic or aristocratic institutions), mythological and historical (the institutions are sacred because founded in illo tempore, outside historic time in the mythical epoch), looking at the past rather than the future as a sacred period (the legend of the four ages) and seeing in the passage of time dangerous decadence, having no idea of progress.
THE REMOTEST ORIGINS of the modern world
lie in the break-up of this traditional cosmic-religious
system under the blows inflicted
upon it by the Hebraic personalistic monotheism.
It is not a paradox to maintain that if
technical science has, at first slowly and then
with increasing speed, developed in the direction
that will in a few years permit us to go to
[Page 10] the moon (I am citing the most spectacular
example) it is due to the fall of the
traditional Weltanchauung which had barred
to itself such a direction and to the birth of a
very different religious vision. In this new
vision (to make only a few rapid illustrative
allusions parallel to those made above concerning
the traditional vision), all the sacred
is concentrated in a single point outside the
universe, in a transcendent God. The cult of
the person of God is reflected in the value
placed on the individual person, an evaluation
which has been victorious over the pagan
sacral mentality. The national gods are defeated
by a God Who, because He is very far
away and sovereign, easily becomes the God
of all (a universalist religion, as against a
national religion). History, in this new
religious view, takes the place of mythology
and, while it still remains sacred history, is no
longer seen solely as a cyclic process, but as a
linear one, open towards future progress.
Happiness, as E. Renan said, in comparing
Hebraism with the classical world, is in the
future (the Messiah, the Kingdom of God)
rather than in the terrestrial paradise of the
primordial, and thus is introduced the idea
of a roughly linear progress.
Of course, even this new concept, which in our world specifically assumed the form of Christianity and in the Near East, at a later date, the form of Islam, is amply permeated with archaic elements. Suffice it to recall the two fundamentally archaic Christian ideas: That of the divinity of Christ, and that of the substitution of the sacramental-sacerdotal element for the myth. The first makes it possible to interpret history as bipartite, progressively ascending (from the primordial to Christ) in the first period and in the second period as pessimistically declining (from Christ to the “end of the world”). The second idea makes it possible to substitute for national religion a theocracy which is, indeed, universal, but which takes the form of a sacerdotal caste operating with semi-magical “sacraments”. Indeed, without the overwhelming impact of monotheism, we would still be in an archaic platonic world definitely closed to the desire for progress, rather than to the possibility of progress. Also, Islam, the other great offspring of Hebraic monotheism, in Asia, was not invulnerable to certain “dangers” of reaction, first, because of its heavily tendentious anthropomorphism that turned God into a kind of absolute sultan, giver of immutable laws which substitute a ponderous canonic legalism for Christian sacramentalism; and second, because of its closing of history through the idea that Muhammad was the last voice of God, the ultimate valid legislator after Whom nothing was left but the constant expectation of the “end of the world” which, if conceived in an entirely miraculous way, was itself a residue of archaic concepts.
In spite of all this, it was not by chance that in the Islamic world, in contrast with the Greek, there was such a development of the taste for experimental sciences. The first experimenters such as Al Bíruní, Ibn al-Haytham (10th-llth centuries) and many others, were born in the Islamic world, and their works influenced the medieval and pre-Renaissance European scientific revival. Little by little—to establish the historical stages is not within the scope of out task—our “modern” world welcomed ever more eagerly the effects of the new directional concept, abandoning more and more, or forgetting, its antique religious causes, in this partly justified by the irritating “archaic” residues that Christian and Islamic monotheism still harbored. The crucial point of the disagreement can be placed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries when the modern world, having freed itself of the last traditional obstacles of religion, developed with an extraordinary and “miraculous” speed in the direction which it had already taken in the distant past, and rejected—with singular historic ingratitude— its monotheistic matrix.
THUS WE ENTER into the heart of the religious
crisis of the modern world, which presents,
from the religious point of view (constantly
[Page 11] keeping in mind the interpretation of
its origins as given above), the following
tendencies and directions: First, the tendency
to deify (i.e. make absolute, to radicalize,
etc.) the “direction” itself, progress, through
a religion of progressive atheism, as I would
define Communism as it is practised (leaving
aside Marxist theory); second, the tendency,
little known but alive in certain circles today,
clearly opposite to the first one, to cultivate
a nostalgia for the archaic world, though it is
by now utterly irresurrectible, the tendency
to consider totally wrong the direction of
“technical progress” and to idolize a return
to tradition which is now physically inconceivable;
third, the school of Guénon, of
Schüon, and others, the Catholic-progressive
(or Islamic-progressive, or Judaic-progressive)
tendency which, while correctly admitting
the religious derivation of modern civilization,
wants to tie it to the already obsolete
forms of religious confessionalism (inseparably
connected with the profoundly reactionary
elements already alluded to), attempting
a new union between science and religion,
which too many centuries of concrete and historical
struggles have rendered impossible
(the highest, most respectable peak of this
tendency I see in Father Pierre Teilhard de
Chardin); fourth, the tendency to look for
this new union in some religious revival
which gives the impression of ignoring, methodically
and deliberately, monotheism, aiming
above all at the Hindu or Buddhist
philosophical conceptions erroneously taken
for Hindu or Buddhist religion, as possible
sources of religious revival.
The crisis, then, springs above all from the
lack of religious authenticity of all the above-mentioned
movements. But, one might object,
is a religion for the modern world still
necessary? Could not the world rather come
to elaborate and “open” religion free of dogma
and cult, reduced to pure ethics, a sort of
super-refined Christianity free of ecclesiastical
and organizational authority (“the religion of
Einstein”)? My answer to this objection is
that such a solution, elaborated only by the
Western world and fruit of an extremely developed
occidental culture, would contradict
other effects of technological evolution of
the Western world itself. Here lies the most
[Page 12] painful difficulty with which the modern
world is struggling, that is, that while modern
science leads to extremely ingenious solutions
of certain problems, as a technique, it leads
to a shrinking of space—through the incredible
speed of communications—between very
diverse cultures. Modern science also leads
to such rapid technical progress that one cannot
expect ethical and spiritual progress,
which is by nature so much slower, to catch
up with it. If just a century ago Europe was
separated from the Congo by months of
travel, now the distance is only a matter of
hours. The two cultures stand face to face
and have neither time nor opportunity for
mutual adjustments.
“Colonialism” is just one more inevitable result of this situation. Here is another example of our ethical unpreparedness for the technical speed of progress: The rapidly increasing accessibility to great numbers of people of technical processes constitutes a problem in itself; for instance, means of transportation are becoming cheaper. Consider for a moment the ill-concealed irritation with which certain European families of inherited wealth look upon the butcher’s son who has bought himself a Lancia, or the garbage man who drives a station wagon. Compare this with the even greater crisis (not just social, but racial and international as well) which may occur when small and very speedy means of air transport come within financial reach of practically everybody, and an African from the Congo will land in his helicopter or supersonic plane at Fiumicino airport, or go for a spin to Paris or Berlin. In other words, the speed of technological progress (which has its own scientific and cultural history that brought it into being —a history unknown to those, outside of certain cultivated European circles, who utilize its means) has suddenly united physically a world which is still disunited spiritually.
ALL THIS HAS consequences of enormous weight in thinking about the modern religious crisis, consequences of which many people seem strangely unaware. If we reject the colonialist solution—obviously the simplest, converting, more or less by force, all other cultures to the European type—a solution already attempted and now rejected as a failure, the following must be the consequences of the above:
1. The great universal religions such as Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism, in their organized form, find themselves obliged to renounce their universal function as unique religions, and therefore to lose their theological foundations (“Only Christ saves;” “Muhammad is the last and final Prophet-Lawgiver for the entire world;” etc.). Therefore they have failed in their object, unless they declare themselves stepping stones to unity, not the fulfillers of the spiritual unity of the world.
2. The idea that refined philosophical religion without institutional organization, the “religion of Einstein”, can resolve the urgent problem of the coexistence of fetishists of primitive Amazonia and nuclear physicists at European and American universities, has proved a failure. Its idea is a more hypocritical and subtle colonialism. Rather, the situation seems to require a new religious inspiration, a simple one, a maximum of whose doctrines are easily put into practice, endowed with solid unifying institutions that can be accepted by all without feeling that they are accepting Western colonialistic culture.
This idea, senseless only to those who do not
want to accept the evidence of facts, namely,
that the modern world may still need a new
religion, has been in the air for some time:
from the day when Mazzini wrote, “I believe
that a religion is disappearing and that a higher
concept of the ideal is about to emerge . . .
Christianity for me is exhausted because it is
no longer productive, it does not dominate
life . . . .” (from a letter to G. Elia Bensa,
August 1840), to the time biologist A. Russell
Wallace, co-founder with Darwin of the theory
of evolution, wrote, “. . . I venture to add
that those ever more profound mysteries that
appear everywhere before us as we progress
in our knowledge of the universe serve now
[Page 13] and will serve in the future to furnish material
for a religion based on science that will rise in
place of all the existing religions amply based
on totally inadequate concepts and beliefs of
bygone eras,” and to that of Teilhard de Chardin,
who said:
- All these spiritual reserves intuited and touched lightly, are they not perhaps indicative of the fact that creation still continues and that we cannot yet express the natural greatness of the vocation? I know that this hope does not seem to be part of the Christian perspective, and therefore the majority of those who describe it discover in it, at least implicitly, the emergence of a religion destined to uproot all the religions of the past . . . (G. Vigorelli, Il Gesuita proibito, pp. 39-40).
3. The person who is open to faith and wants to search should now turn to the study of the possible solutions to this problem; that is, he should try to ascertain which one could be the unifying religion that, if we are religious, must be considered as God-given, not created by man, especially if we believe, as good religionists, that God never leaves humanity without His life-giving Word. However, if we want to proceed from a purely pragmatic point of view and search historically among the attempts at spiritual reawakening, among nascent or renewed religions— most of them, coming like Christianity and Islam from Asia—our study would take us in Toynbee’s direction. He maintains that a civilization, towards its end, results in a universal state within which there appears, usually from the outside, a universal religion which then develops simultaneously with the decadence of this universal state (without being the cause of the decadence) to become the chrysalis of a new civilization. In the diagrams appended to his works we find that paralleling Christianity’s role in Greek civilization (that is, in the Roman Empire), Toynbee places as a nascent religion in this age of fruition and decline of Western civilization, the Bahá’í Faith. This religion, already known in hundreds of countries and territories of the world, displays certain characteristics of particular interest for our inquiry.
The Bahá’í Faith declares itself a religion. Though its doctrines are so simple that some have taken it for a philosophical or humanitarian movement, the history of its founding and of its first heroic period belies such an interpretation. Formed in the middle of the last century in a Persian environment around the great figures of the Báb (executed in 1850, the martyr-hero of the new Faith) and of Bahá’u’lláh (Who died in 1892, an exile in Palestine, where He had been sent through the hatred of the Ottoman and Persian governments, which saw in Him One Who would have destroyed the privileges of the Muslim clergy and states), the new religion immediately displayed the character of enthusiastic adherence to the teaching of a Prophet, a teaching taken as divine revelation. This concept, obviously very difficult from the “advanced point of view” of Western intellectuals, is indispensable to the creation of religious enthusiasm. No one has gone to his death for the sake of Kant’s or Hegel’s theories, but the Bahá’í Faith watered the plant of its teachings with the blood of some twenty thousand martyrs, the last of whom were killed only recently.
The doctrines taught by the new Prophet
constitute another important aspect of the
Bahá’í religion which answers exactly the
needs pointed out above. Its doctrines have a
two-fold character: they are a confirmation
of the fundamental ethical character of all
religions, to which they add modern ideals
treated as religious principles. ‘Abdu’l-Bahá,
son of the Founder and greatest propagator
of the Bahá’í Faith in the West, summed
them up in twelve principles which sound
familiar to our “modern” ears: search after
truth, universal education, elimination of the
extremes of poverty and wealth through nonviolent
means, equality of sexes, elimination
of religious, national, racial and class prejudices,
harmony of religion and science, and
so on. Therefore these are not complicated
metaphysical lucubrations, as some might
[Page 14] think on hearing the name, Bahá’í, which
sounds strange to Western ears, but a modern
rebirth of the ancient monotheistic ethic. The
only Bahá’í metaphysic rests in the affirmation
that God exists, that He is in His essence
unknowable to man, that He speaks through
His Prophets, great personalities Who successively
reveal His will (rather than His mysteries)
in different epochs. Therefore all religions
are valid, but each one for its own
time (this is not religious syncretism). The
aim of these successive revelations of Divine
will is to create an ever-increasing practical
unity in the world which will reflect the theological
fact of Divine unity. Thus Adam,
Noah, Abraham, Moses, Christ, Muhammad,
and, in lands further removed from our tradition,
Zoroaster, Buddha, and others, were not
so much revealers of doctrines as shepherds
of peoples, guiding them to organize themselves
in ever greater forms of unity.
God, the Bahá’ís believe, could not have shown the religious means for the unity of the whole world when parts of it were still unknown to each other. It is now through Bahá’u’lláh that God has commanded man to search for the unity of the entire world and has provided him with practical means thereto, namely a renewed religious enthusiasm, simple laws valid for all nations, which, being brought together by technology, enter into dangerous conflict. Among organized religions the Bahá’í Faith alone admits that upon the completion of its historic cycle other still greater cycles can follow, and that after Bahá’u’lláh may appear other Prophets. It is also the only organized religion to declare explicitly “that religious truth is relative, not absolute” and thus to attempt that reconciliation of history and religion which has hitherto failed. Relative truth in respect to eternity, metaphysically, but absolute truth juridically, so to speak, inasmuch as in each prophetic cycle man must obey the dictates of the prophetic civilization of his time or (in the past) of his people.
This triple aspect of being a religion with its martyrs and its shrines, of having very simple doctrines devoid of dogmas and sacraments, of possessing an organization which is felt as given by God for the unification of the entire world and, to repeat, of being a historicistic and institutional religion, makes of it a unique phenomenon in the panorama of living religions.
HERE ARE some excerpts that will very briefly illustrate the three characteristics mentioned above:
Religion. Bahá’u’lláh writes:
- The Revelation which, from time immemorial, hath been acclaimed as the Purpose and the Promise of all the Prophets of God, and the most cherished desire of His Messengers, hath now, by virtue of the pervasive Will of the Almighty and His irresistible bidding, been revealed unto men. The advent of such a Revelation hath been heralded in all the sacred Scriptures (Gleanings from the Writings of Bahá’u’lláh, p. 5).
The Bahá’ís believe that this day is the “end of the world”, the “return of Christ”, the return of the Imám or the Mahdí of the Muslims, of “Sháh Bahrám” of the Zoroastrians, interpreting in a symbolic manner the prophecies of the various religions on the “end of the world”, which is in reality, for the Bahá’ís, the end of an era. In a modern renewal of religious enthusiasm there died in Persia twenty thousand martyrs whom Renan, in his book, Les Apôtres, has compared to the early Christians.
Historical continuity of religion. Shoghi Effendi, Guardian of the Cause of God, who died in 1957, writes:
- The fundamental principle enunciated by Bahá’u’lláh, the followers of His Faith firmly believe, is that religious truth is not absolute but relative, that Divine Revelation is a continuous and progressive process, that all the great religions of the world are divine in origin, that their basic principles are in complete harmony, that their [Page 15]
aims and purposes are one and the same, that their teachings are but facets of one truth, that their functions are complementary, that they differ only in the nonessential aspects of their doctrines, and that their missions represent successive stages in the spiritual evolution of human society (Shoghi Effendi, The Faith of Bahá’u’lláh, p. 6).
Institutions. Bahá’u’lláh says:
- Know verily that the essence of justice and the source thereof are both embodied in the ordinances prescribed by Him Who is the Manifestation of the Self of God amongst men, if ye be of them that recognize this truth. He doth verily incarnate the highest, the infallible standard of justice unto all creation. Were His law to be such as to strike terror into the hearts of all who are in heaven and on earth, that law is naught but manifest justice. The fears and agitation which the revelation of this law provokes in men’s hearts should indeed be likened to the cries of the suckling babe weaned from his mother’s milk, if ye be of them that perceive. Were men to discover the motivating purpose of God’s Revelation, they would assuredly cast away their fears, and with hearts filled with gratitude, rejoice with exceeding gladness (Gleanings from the Writings of Bahá’u’lláh, p. 175).
THE MOTIVATING PURPOSE has already been stated above: the practical realization of the unity of mankind is impossible without an “organization”, sometimes irritating for us, the refined inheritors of European liberalism, and equally impossible without laws. The Bahá’í organization, which is simultaneously democratic and theocratic, without being entirely one or the other, is realized in assemblies elected by the believers who vote while praying and who consider themselves instruments of God’s will and not themselves the source of power; the assemblies have ever greater power from the local spiritual assembly to the national, to the Universal House of Justice, elected for the first time in 1963, which can be defined as the first world-wide assembly elected on the basis of equality by representatives of all races, including Australian aborigines, Germans, Samoans, and Africans together with the English, the Americans, and the Persians. To these assemblies, which are periodically reelected, and not to their individual members, the Bahá’ís owe absolute loyalty and obedience, and they consider them as the first nucleus of a great organism which, they believe, will embrace all humanity.
For this united humanity ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, the long persecuted son of the Founder of the Bahá’í movement, wrote from His exile in Palestine under the menace of the Ottoman authorities the following beautiful prayer with which I close my reflections:
- O Thou kind Lord! Thou hast created all humanity from the same original parents. Thou hast intended that all belong to the same household. In Thy Holy Presence they are Thy servants and all mankind are sheltered beneath Thy tabernacle. All have gathered at Thy table of bounty and are radiant through the light of Thy Providence. O God! Thou art kind to all, Thou hast provided for all, Thou dost shelter all, Thou dost confer life upon all. Thou hast endowed all with talents and faculties; all are submerged in the ocean of Thy mercy. O Thou kind Lord! Unite all, let the religions agree, make the nations one so that they may be as one kind and as children of the same fatherland. May they associate in unity and concord. O God! Upraise the standard of the oneness of humankind. O God! Establish the Most Great Peace. Cement the hearts together, O God! O Thou kind Father, God! Exhilarate the hearts through the fragrance of Thy love; brighten the eyes through the light of Thy guidance; cheer the hearing with the melodies of Thy Word and shelter us in the cave of Thy Providence. Thou art the Mighty and the Powerful! Thou art the Forgiving and Thou art the One Who overlookest the shortcomings of humankind (Bahá’í Prayers, p. 45).
NOTES ON PERSIAN LOVE POEMS
By MARZIEH GAIL
ARTHUR GUY tells us that Háfiz, Persia’s great fourteenth century poet known as the “Tongue of the Invisible World,” found his way into Latin in 1680: Meninsky got out the translation in that year. A hundred more years went by and European versions appeared, mostly fragmentary. A number were, Guy says, “beautiful but unfaithful”—but at least that of von Hammer in 1812 attracted the attention of Goethe, who wrote:
- If you call the words a “bride,”
- And for the “groom,” say soul,
- You have a wedding known to those,
- Who this Háfiz extol.
“Great is the divergence,” continues Guy, “between the purest mysticism with
its symbols, predicated on a transcendental solution to the problem of existence,
which some find there—and the cynical epicureanism strongly tainted with
pessimism, which others do not hesitate to take literally in his verses. Is Háfiz
[Page 17] the poet of sensual love—of woman, wine, nature, unbelief? Or rather of Divine
Love, of the joys of contemplation, of self-surrender, and a purified faith?”
Showing the wit with which Háfiz manipulates his symbols, Guy then repeats the often-described confrontation between Tamerlane the earth-shaker and Háfiz the poet. The reason for the interview, which, if it happened at all, took place in 1387 when Tamerlane first entered Shíráz, was the poet’s having written these lines:
- If but that lovely Shíráz maid
- Would take my heart in her fair hand,
- For that black mole of hers I’d trade
- Bukhárá town and Samarqand.
The king summoned the poet and roared at him: “What! With my sword I have conquered most of the inhabited world. With the plundered spoils of a thousand realms I have adorned my two capitals of Samarqand and Bukhara. And was all this so that a miserable insect like you should offer my cities up for a single mole on the cheek of a girl?”
“Sire,” answered Háfiz, “it is this very prodigality that has reduced me to my present straits.”
“A LOWER DEGREE CANNOT comprehend a higher although all are in the same of creation . . . Degree is the barrier . . .” ‘Abdu’l-Bahá says. The animal is at our side but his degree of existence keeps him out of our world. A child’s degree keeps him from understanding what constitutes an adult mind: you need make no effort to hide the nature of adulthood from him, his degree of consciousness automatically keeps this a well-guarded secret. No need, for example, to hide private documents from an infant. In the same way many things all about us are secret simply because of our own limitations. The afterlife is one of them. The love of God as passionately felt by the mystics is another. The secret itself is visible everywhere, to every eye: “Every eye,” ‘Abdu’l-Bahá once said, speaking of the promise that every eye should see the returned Christ: “But not the blind.”
Since degree is the barrier, those who have progressed farther than others in God’s love are hard put to it to initiate the rest. This seems to be what the mystics, the súfís, the lovers of God, mean by their eternal symbols and cryptic pronouncements. They try, this way and that, to communicate (while yet hiding) what they see mirrored in their hearts, and feel running in their veins. They write, even monotonously, about “the secret.” They hopelessly try to embody their knowledge in the vocabulary of human love, since none other will serve: “Often the same ode,” R. A. Nicholson says, “will entrance the sinner and evoke sublime raptures in the saint.”
Typical of countless other verses, this fragment from the great Jalál-i-Dín Rúmí explains itself:
- Our desert has no end, our heart no bed.
- World within world is with Form’s image sealed;
- Which of the images to us is wed?
- If on the path you see a severed head,
- Rolling along its way to our wide field,
- Ask it, Oh ask it what we never said,
- And let it tell the secret we concealed.
Rúmí’s own love for God pours out in his verses to Shams-i-Tabríz, “weird figure, wrapped in coarse black felt, who flits across the stage for a moment and disappears . . .” This man was a Persian, so often on the wing that they nicknamed him Parandih, the Flier. Shams, who is likened by Nicholson to Socrates, felt he was the chosen mouthpiece of the Lord—for the mystic’s love makes him identify with the Divine, and his insights make him seem arrogant. He used to call his learned disciples “oxen and asses.” His theme was ecstasy and rapture, and he spread everywhere “the enchanted circle of his power.”
Nicholson goes on to quote von Kremer: “The real basis of their [the súfís’] poetry is a loftily inculcated ethical system, which recognizes in purity of heart, charity, self-renunciation, and bridling of the passions, the necessary conditions of eternal happiness . . . a pantheistic theory of the emanation of all things from God, and their ultimate reunion with Him . . . and frequently the thought . . . that all religions and revelations are only the rays of a single eternal sun; that all Prophets have only delivered and proclaimed in different tongues the same principles of eternal goodness and eternal truth which flow from the divine Soul of the world.”
One night when Rúmí and Shams were seated together, there was a knocking at the door and a voice calling. Shams rose and said, “I am called to my death.” He left Rúmí, and walked out to the darkness, where seven murderers fell on him with their knives.
It was in memory of him that Rúmí founded the order of dancing dervishes who spin and spin down the centuries, copying the motions of the planets and listening to music sung by the stars—all because of that long dead love.
Browne explains that to the súfís the doctrine of Divine Oneness (tawhíd) means not only, as Islam has it, that “There is no god but God”—but that “there is nothing but God.” God “is Pure Being, and what is ‘other than God’ . . . only exists in so far as His Being is infused into it, or mirrored in it. He is also Pure Good . . . and Absolute Beauty: whence He is often called by the mystics in their pseudo-erotic poems, ‘the Real Beloved.’” Beauty desires to be known, Browne continues, and a thing can be known only by its opposite. Thus Evil “is a necessary consequence of this manifestation [of Eternal Beauty] so that the Mystery of Evil is really identical with the Mystery of Creation, and inseparable therefrom. But Evil is merely the Not-Good, or . . . the Non-Existent.”
About here in a commentary of this type the usual procedure is to mention
John of the Cross, but for a change we shall remind the reader of Catherine of
[Page 19] Siena or any number of others resembling those saints them. George Herbert, in
England’s seventeenth century, was still another mystic to whom God was a
lover, seeking and being sought; he writes:
- My God, what is a heart,
- That Thou shouldst it so eye, and wooe,
- Pouring upon it all Thy art,
- At if that Thou hadst nothing els to do?
Or this:
- How sweetly doth My Master sound!
- My Master!
- As amber-greese leaves a rich scent
- Unto the taster:
- So do these words a sweet content,
- An orientall fragrancie, My Master.
Or again:
- When first Thy sweet and gracious eye
- Vouchsaf’d e’en in the midst of youth and night
- To look upon me, who before did lie
- Weltring in sinne;
- I felt a sugred strange delight,
- Passing all cordials made by any art,
- Bedew, embalme, and overrunne my heart,
- And take it in.
MANIFESTATIONS OF GOD are not as the mystics—for Manifestations in the Bahá’í context are “something not ourselves” and differ from us in kind, the mystics only in degree—but Their writings do take on a mystical cast, and whatever Divine love is, They are “the supreme embodiment of all that is lovable.” The Báb exchanged this love with Bahá’u’lláh, Whom He never met. Nabíl, Their chronicler, says: “Such love no eye has ever beheld, nor has mortal heart conceived such mutual devotion. If the branches of every tree were turned into pens, and all the seas into ink, and earth and heaven rolled into one parchment, the immensity of that love would still remain unexplored, and the depths of that devotion unfathomed.”
This kind of ecstasy and single-minded love has determined many a believer’s
life and death. “Many a chilled heart, O my God,” writes Bahá’u’lláh, "hath
been set ablaze with the fire of Thy Cause . . .” Among the Persians, one who
caught on fire was a young thug, the refuse of the streets. He was standing in a
[Page 20] crowd, watching some believers being pushed and mocked and tortured along
to their graves. What he saw in their faces we do not know; only that he broke
from the crowd, ran to the executioner and shouted, “Take me with them—
I am a Bábí too!” Another was the son of a high-ranking officer. He embraced
the new Faith, saying that to him the world was carrion. He is the one who, to
drums and trumpets, walked through a screaming mob with lighted candles
burning in his wounds. Passing there he chanted from Persian odes. When they
heard him sing, the executioners laughed. One of them said, “Why not dance?”
And so as he died he danced, raising his arms, snapping his fingers, moving
his red body to a song that Rúmí had written for Shams-i-Tabríz:
- In one hand the winecup, in one the Loved One’s tress,
- So would I dance across the market place!
It was such martyrdom that years afterward ‘Abdu’l-Bahá described, almost re-enacted it for Juliet Thompson (who wrote about it in her diary) and Other Bahá’ís on a veranda in Montclair. As He spoke He was transfigured for an instant; and lifting His arms, “With that godlike head erect, snapping His fingers high in the air, beating out a drum-like rhythm with His foot,” ‘Abdu’l-Bahá danced a wonderful brief dance and “triumphantly” sang the martyr’s song. Then He sank back into His chair. “Tears welled in my eyes,” Juliet says, “blurring everything. When they cleared I saw a still stranger look on His face. His eyes were unmistakably fixed on the Invisible. They were filled with delight and as brilliant as jewels . . . This was what the Cause meant . . . This was what it meant to ‘live near Him’! . . . So low that it sounded like an echo He hummed the Martyr’s Song. ‘See,’ He exclaimed, ‘the effect that the death of a martyr has in the world. It has changed my condition.’”
THERE WAS ANOTHER among thousands changed by this love. He was born
in Káshán, Persia, about 1879. His family moved to the capital Tihrán—and
his father became Mayor of that city. The boy received a good schooling which
included French and English. Because of some inward prompting he used to
trot after his English teacher on the street, asking him words and carefully
writing them down. When the boy was fourteen, hewever, his father died. This
was a disaster in the Persia of that day; a widowed mother, an older brother and
various other relatives, some influential, could not compensate the loss. More
studies, and working as a tutor in his uncle’s home, and becoming aware of the
condition his country was in, increased his restlessness. His father had prophesied
that one day the boy would become a Bahá’í; at this time, however, seeing what
the Islamic hierarchy had done to Muslim Persia, he believed religion was only
for the ignorant mass. When some of his sophisticated young friends began attending
secret meetings, held late at night in rooms giving onto the back alleys
of Tihrán, the young man came along to expose the Bahá’í teachers, to show
how wrong they were and win his friends back to more mundane pursuits. As the
[Page 21] months passed, he found himself listening. Some were travelers, with current
news of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, far away in the prison city of ‘Akká on the Mediterranean
Sea. ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s own Father, still a prisoner and exile, had very recently died,
left a world which had scorned and rejected Him. But He had made a compact
with His followers that they should turn to ‘Abdu’l-Bahá as the Center of His
Covenant with them. Here was the Master, with strength and love and a world
vision of hope. Here now was a Cause to live and die for; a point toward which
a youth could direct his heart.
The young man, who had gone on a journey by then and was in the town of Senna, wrote a poem in which he offered his life to the great Son of Bahá’u’lláh and begged permission to be there with Him in the prison city. The lines of this ode show his familiarity with Persian mystic poetry and also his ecstatic love. ‘Abdu’l-Bahá understood. He did not turn the youth away. His answer, the original of which, illuminated by a Persian artist, now hangs on a wall in New Hampshire, said to praise not ‘Abdu’l-Bahá but Bahá’u’lláh, the Manifestation of God. This is the text:
He is the All-Glorious of the All-Glorious!
O thou who art drunk with the wine of the Covenant!
Thy verses were full of savor; they were running waters, a fount of learning, and most sweetly eloquent. Reading them cheered and refreshed us. From the consuming blaze of that yearning heart a flame was kindled in ours and our whole being responded and caught fire.
- Light up Love’s fire,
- Throw on the pyre
- All things that be.
- Then with one step (it is not far)
- Enter the place where the lovers are.
The way to praise this servant is to adore the Holy Threshold, to worship humbly at the doorstep of the one Lord. This is perpetual grace; this is heavenly bestowal; this is achieving the uttermost goal; this is “the Sadrah tree that marks the boundary” (i.e., the Manifestation of God). Speak thou of this almighty Height, this wondrous Station, open thy lips in praise of Him. Pluck thy strings on the theme of servitude of Him, and with the song of this bondage awaken thou a world.
. .These are the cleansing waters; this is the flaming up of splendor; this is the lauadable grace; this is the paradise of all delights; this is bounty pressed down and running over; this is ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s most burning wish—the supreme desire of this embodiment of indigence, of nothingness . . . Al-Bahá be upon thee.
He signed it with His initials, Ayn-Ayn, and affixed His seal, that reads:
“O my companion, the prison.” An older person was present, when the
youth’s Tablet was read. “It is too great a Tablet for him,” this person commented.
[Page 22] “There must be some mistake.” Yet the name was on it, in ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s
own unerring hand. And although the young man was unaware of it
then, he would in after years indeed help mightily to awaken a faraway
world to the message of Bahá’u’lláh. (He would be known in that world
as Ali-Kuli Khan. His other name, Nabíli’d-Dawlih, was a title given him,
for services to his country, by the Sháh. But his pen name was Ishti‘ál—
Aflame.)
Many a time, before he finally did get to ‘Akká, he must—being literary-minded —have remembered these lines from Háfiz:
- There’ll be no end to longing till I find my heart’s desire
- Either I’ll win my own Heart’s Life or lose my life entire.
- But this I know, though I be dead, my body will burn on:
- Open my grave when I am gone
- And see my shroud on fire.
Such thoughts must have moved him when he set out, one snowy afternoon, left his home with no good-byes and walked away through the city gates. Part of his journey was on foot to the Caspian, by ship to Baku, then steerage from some Caucasian port to Constantinople, and finally at long last, to the prison of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá. It is a long time ago now, and he and Those he sought have left this earth, but the letters and verses are still here; the love is still alive.
Opposite Page
Poem written to ‘Abdu’l-Bahá by Ali-Kuli Khan (Ishti‘ál Ibn-i-Kalántar) in Senna, capital of Persian Kurdistan, during the month of Safar, 1317 A.H. Translated by Marzieh Gail.*
*Students of mystic Persian love poetry will recognize the classical style and terminology, noting the Joseph story from the Qur’án, the lover’s madness and ill-repute, the lover’s disregard of reason, the Zoroastrians’ secret drinking place (wine was forbidden to Muslims), the symbolic wine, the Majnun story, the Beloved’s tangled hair, the Beloved’s likeness to a cypress tree, the author’s pen-name in the closing lines. The Sun of Truth stanza refers to the author’s recognition of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá's station, then recently conferred by Bahá’u’lláh. M.G.
ODE FROM SENNA
- Now that I am tied and tangled in Thy floating hair,
- Am become Thy half-crazed lover, with peace of mind at war,
- Life in hand I stray and wander, looking for Thee everywhere.
- Thou art Egypt’s beauteous Joseph, I the wife of Potiphar;
- Like that grayhair who bought Joseph, I would suffer for Thy face.
- When the pangs of longing for Thee struck the knocker on my door,
- From within me faith and reason fled their home.
- Then in the wineshop of Thy love I drank my own heart’s core.
- All for Thee, O spirit’s guide, I emptied out this room—
- Now behold me mocked and mad and half seas over for Thy face,
- In the Magians’ secret tavern, O sweet the brimming glass,
- O sweet it is to seize Thy snaring hair.
- O sweet for me to weep out my blood as along love’s way I pass,
- Sweet to receive this cup from Thee with no outsiders there,
- And my eyes athirst since time began, drinking in Thy face.
- Except for Thee, for neither world have I a care,
- From any words save Thine, from all desire free,
- A distracted lover I—of men’s lives I’ve no share,
- I but the dust beneath Thy feet, O swaying cypress tree,
- For me there is no place of flowers except Thy face.
- O good is this tossing and turning on the sickbed of love,
- Sickness that never will heal, but by love’s crying.
- Though reason warn me as to the perils of love,
- Against the anguish of love I am not one to be sighing—
- I, bound from time’s dawning to the hyacinth hair that frames Thy face.
- When like Majnum I fled to the desert of the mad,
- I set the land on fire with my burning sighs.
- I put men out of my heart but Thee, and was glad,
- And my cupped hands brimmed with tears from weeping eyes,
- And I thought, let all men know that I love Thy wondrous face.
- The day I filled my glass with Thy love’s wine,
- This tavern-corner gloried over Heaven’s dome.
- Yes, the envy of Heaven would be this ruined heart of mine
- Should Thy bright brow shed its rays into my lowly room—
- Therefore my soul’s eye never leaves Thy matchless face.
- As the Sun of Truth rose out of this earthly world of His,
- He opened up before Thee His secret treasure-store.
- The effulgence of Thy beauty flashed from that world into this,
- And from nothingness, the Divine Decree stood humbly at Thy door,
- And said: “Obedient to Thy wish and will, I bow before Thy face.”
- O people of Bahá, the Covenant hath come, be glad!
- He is the balm for every aching heart,
- And now is the earth in His Father’s splendor clad.
- When He unto my soul a welcome did impart,
- It answered: “Save me! for I drown in the ocean of Thy face.”
- Save me, great Mystery of God, I faint and fall.
- Save me, without Thee I only burn and sigh.
- Save me, I am as nothing in the eyes of all,
- Save me, in every city: “He is mad!” they cry,
- Of this lost, distracted wanderer in the desert of Thy face.
- O Thou, O Thou from whose sunbright brow the moon hath drawn her rays,
- The thought of whom illumines many a weary lover’s soul,
- But to behold Thy face I have no dream in all my days.
- Then fulfill my hopes, in grace, grant me leave to reach my goal,
- A desert wanderer I, and yearning for the garden of Thy face.
- Without Thee, only a prison to me is Heaven and its flowers,
- Without Thee, only a place of thorns, the blissful bowers.
- O Thou whose brow so moonlight fair is the envy of spring hours,
- In his love for Thee,
- He is torn free,
- Is Isti‘ál, from all that be,
- And again and again,
- Cries this refrain:
- I am lost in the glory of Thy face.
Ishti‘ál Ibn-i-Kalántar
. . . Toward the New Eden
By DAVID S. RUHE, M.D.
IT WAS 1,750,000 years ago, more or less, when a creature just about to become a man ran across the grasslands of upland Africa, caught rodents and fish, and made crude hand tools. This creature ran on two legs, saw keenly with binocular predator eyes, and took its omnivorous diet deftly with the prehensile fingers of its forelegs. More important, this pre-man showed those characteristics of generalized primate brain skills which made him the greatest threat to all other life forms that God had yet created. Dr. Louis S. B. Leakey and his wife Mary, from bone fragments discovered in the Olduvai gorge in Tanzania, have inferred that these first little African hominoids were the dawn-men who, in the millenia since then, have spread across the world.
Some time during the four glacial periods
as the Ice Age waxed and waned, about 300,000
years ago probably, came the great mutation
of man, as Tilly Edinger and Loren
Eiseley have speculated. The volume and convolutions
of the forebrain increased rapidly,
from an evolutionary standpoint. Simultaneously
there emerged that astonishing thing
[Page 26] called human love among male and female
and their children, a phenomenon that supplied
a great evolutionary purpose. Through
the power of love, the weak young of the extraordinary
new hunter received adult protection
for its perilous long growth to maturity.
Although the extended growth period
was one of the body, more importantly
was it the necessary time of prolonged learning
from the parents, since these human
young possessed minds freed of instinctual
responses.
Through the great mutation of the forebrain, “the Eden that the animal world had known for ages was shattered at last. Through the human mind, time and darkness, good and evil . . . entered the world and possessed it . . .” So Loren Eiseley, a twentieth century scientist, describes the crucial meaning of the great leap forward. Yet 3,000 years earlier the Old Testament seer who composed Genesis 2 and 3 had focussed in his mind faint traces from the collective memory of mankind and thus produced “a greater allegory than man has ever guessed . . . .” For Jahweh’s Garden of Eden in Mesopotamia was thus symbolically identified as the place of the coming of man’s conseiousness, the emergence of mind in the human sense. No matter the place or even the probability that it was an African garden. It was the most important event of all history, for it began history.
The animal Eden of the eternal present had been outgrown by Adam and Eve, the first true man and woman.[1] In truth God gave them no alternative but to eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge, for thus came the recognition of the goodness of creation. Thus also came the power of human choice called free will which, for the first time in history, could produce acts properly termed evil. An instinctual animal world offered no choices. The human world opened the hard door to values and their decisive roles in human existence. To Eve and Adam came also the knowledge of time, revealing the mindless terror-filled darkness of the past and the long thoughtful darkness of a frightening future.
Further characterizing Adam with his
newly gained power of imagination as “the
dream animal,” Eiseley confirms that “it was
truly man who, walking memoryless through
bars of sunlight and shade in the morning of
the world, sat down and passed a wondering
hand across his heavy forehead . . . time and
darkness, knowledge of good and evil, have
walked with him ever since.” On that morning,
perhaps a quarter of a million years ago,
“for the first time in four billion years a living
creature had contemplated himself and heard
[Page 27] with a sudden unaccountable loneliness the
whisper of the wind in the night reeds. Perhaps
he knew, there in the grass by the chill
waters, that he had before him an immense
journey.”[2] An immense journey! A wondrous
and inexorable voyage in time to a new Eden,
and doubtless to yet other Edens in the dim
future!
Long-Ago Men of the Future
IT IS NOT ENOUGH to read old cave bones with scholarly mind or to listen to the vague mutterings of seers, although the clues are there. One may also look to groups of men who survive today, men who are the living memory of the great mutation of the time when consciousness came to man. In Australia, in New Guinea, on Hokkaido, at the Brazilian foot of the Andes, and in the Arctic there are men who live in cultures with Stone Age attributes. They have “modern” men’s brains, as pointed out by Wallace, Darwin’s unsung but great contemporary. Unequivocally they are Homo sapiens. Primitive in some respects, each people displays a low culture of survival which is the source of much of modern man’s misunderstanding. Civilized in other ways, each has a high culture of thought and esthetics. One striking example of the living memory of human evolution is found in the aboriginals of Australia.
In Arnhemland in desert northern Australia there now live a few thousand families whose ancestors probably crossed to the Australian continent unknown centuries ago, ages before the eighteenth century invaders from western Europe. The Europeans came in ships with their steel tools and weapons, justifying their land seizure by “intrinsic superiority” and asserting their power through “the bloody virtues of gunpowder.” But in honest standards of high culture, these Europeans never compared themselves on a true value scale with the natives whom they called savages simply because they were naked and inured to the weather, were preliterate and unacquainted with Christianity. Contrary to the optical illusions of supposed European superiorities, both the low and high cultures of every Arnhemlander were and are formidable, given the kind of nomadic life he is forced to lead in his pre-scientific desert world.
Every Australian male native knows skills of work and combat. Each takes serious part in his tribal government as a full citizen. Each participates in a religious life so extensive and pervasive that “commonplace activities are properly to be called sacramental.” Each aboriginal knows a tremendous lore of his society: “thousands of songs, hundreds of rituals, legends, stories, dances, particulars of tribal history . . . [Each has] easy mastery of his complex kinship system, and a range of difficult crafts appropriate to bush life.” Each is likely to know “several native languages in addition to his own, as well as sign language and pidgin-English.”[3]
Most striking of all, the esthetic experiences
that in our “civilized” cultures we consider
rare and precious are ordinary or even universal
among the aboriginals. For they compose,
perform, dance; they invent and listen to
poems, songs, stories. All persons fashion
things of beauty and utility for every aspect of
life. Literally every man is an artist and
embellisher. Every aboriginal is expected to
develop his widely varied potentialities in
order to share in a rich tribal life whose high
cultural demands have a startling range.
Indeed, it is as though everyone in New
Haven or in Atlanta were to paint, write
poetry, engage in folk drama, sing, dance,
debate, share rites of birth, maturity and
marriage, and were thereby to gain an intense
feeling of kinship each with the other.
[Page 28] That most of their esthetic expressions are
evanescent, and that the meanings of their
arts are not understood by the missionaries and
traders only demonstrate the typical failure
of communication between cultures.
The aboriginal sees his kinship in all of life. He feels one with the prey he hunts, and gives wallaby, lizard or whale a totemistic membership in his tribe. He has the savage’s intimacy with weather and his acceptance of catastrophe. In many ways he lives still in God’s garden, a contemporary Adam. On the other hand he shares a group consciousness with his fellows; he shares in their creative experiences —experiences which he recognizes as being intrinsically religious. Indeed, in many senses each Arnhemlander is “the long-ago man of the future.”[4]
In observing these residual Adams, one is moved to ask: does not the modern man of the twentieth century seek a high culture shared by equals, a culture wherein each has developed his every potential? A culture in which one feels kinship with all other men, oneness with all of life and with the Creator of the universe? Does modern man seek to win back the inner life of the Arnhemlander but with the outer life of science, and with a new ethos?
Whither Man the Scientific?
WE WESTERNERS ARE the highest product of a scientific age that is both our hope and our despair. We have the method of science and the somehow equivocal fruits of that science. Our women survive childbirth, and our babies live to be octogenarians often without a single grave illness throughout their lives. Already we have the tools in hand to conquer disease and starvation. Within our national societies we generally avoid murder; only at the inter-tribal level do we fail to prevent mass murder called war. Yet our conquests which bring physical survival, health and nourishment, our growing control of a sometimes fearsome natural world are not our most important achievements, marvelous as they are. Rather, those events which are happening to man’s mind and spirit are the truly critical things in this day of a new dawn-man. We have become Homo sapiens scientificus. But we are incomplete. We must yet become Homo sapiens scientificus spiritualis.
Today the new Adam stands at Times Square, or is it at Red Square or the Champs Élysées or on the seventh hill of Kampala? He passes his wondering hand across his usually clean-shaven chin amid the roar and the riot; and he asks, if he asks, understandably in confusion: “How did I happen to get here? What’s this rat race all about? Do I belong here? Can I ever mean anything to anybody, including myself? Does anything mean anything?” Man, a conscious chip on the unfathomable oceans of time and space, wonders. And wondering, he is ready for journeys to the stars and to the hearts of the atoms. Wondering, he is ready, too, for the new Eden which, with God’s help, he is preparing for himself. It will not be a Mesopotamian wilderness; it will be a developed planet. It will not be a primeval couple, conscious of lonely selves and nakedness; it will be all of mankind conscious of its loneliness and nakedness in an expanding universe.
OF SPACE AND TIME AND THINGS MATERIAL. We who are the new Adams must look about our four-dimensional physical world, for never did we know the wonder of it before.
As for space, what an overwhelming
expansion and contraction in these last
[Page 29] hundred years! Now everybody who is anybody
has made a trip around the world. Very
soon everyone of adventuresome disposition
will make a Moon or Mars excursion in his
lifetime. Soon all men will be travelers into
the depths of seas, just as we all now casually
jet through the oceans of the air. Our flesh
crawls and our lives shrink when we look out
those astronomer’s miles into the deep space of
the far galaxies whose distances, as Einstein
puts it, are “rigorously inconceivable.” Conversely,
the rigorously inconceivable diminutiveness
of electrons whirling in their orbits of
minute space makes our material bodies so insubstantial
that we tingle at our own
physical insignificance.
Time, too, has both expanded and contracted. Our great astronomer-physicists spin theories of the beginnings of the cosmos and describe the infinitely long-ago formation of nebulae from incandescent primal hydrogen, as though we could understand or really believe. Fred Hoyle has recently asserted that there was no beginning of the universe at all and that we need not worry about first causes; God, the first Cause, was always, is always. But the expanding universe theorists still have their shift of the red band of the spectrum to suggest an explosion of the galaxies. Scientists now deduce what may have been the finite lives of our sun and our planet earth, and what may have been the creation of life, of species, of man and of thinking man. Thus, as Pierre Teilhard de Chardin[5] projects it, through cosmogenesis to bio-genesis to anthropogenesis to noogenesis[6] the creation has changed in a direction and in a manner which now we call evolution.
The speed of change itself has become almost self-defeating, as the philosopher Max Ways emphasizes in defining his four eras of change. There was the era of imperceptible change of pre-history, when any man’s lifetime did not show gross changes from his father’s; through a new grain, a new domestic animal, the wheel, the wedge, the lever, man the hunter became man the farmer. The era of slow change brought within any lifetime innovations which tangibly expanded man’s powers and perceptions; thus it was throughout historic time. The era of rapid change began with the coming of the scientific method in the seventeenth century and accelerated to the 1950’s. Just yesterday we entered the era of radical change, when even the landmarks have begun to shift, so rapid is the progress in our day of computers and systems and automation, of atomic power and ion engines and space exploration.
We who live on this dust mote in the heavens are overcome with awe at those aspects of our material universe which our limited powers can fathom. At the same time we have a proper pride in our strides toward the control of nature, for our physical and biological scientists are sure that we will conquer the problems of food and housing and survival. We will create power and communications and transportation, indeed all the physical tools for man’s liberation.
Thus, as we continue to eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge, we begin to see that the direction we are taking is a great circle, bringing us back to a new relationship to the universe and its Creator. For are we not all gods already, in this age of science? And one day soon will not the circle bring us back to the foot of the tree of life? What then must be our concepts of life and self and God?
[Page 30]
THE IMPLOSION OF MAN. The powers and
effects of scientific technology have increased
so inexorably in volume and speed that we
modern men stand as though on the shivering
surface of an avalanche already far down an
unknown mountainside. The first industrial
revolution was aimed at substituting machines
for men’s muscles and happily has freed men
from the gloom of merciless physical toil.
But the second industrial revolution has begun
to substitute machines for men’s minds, and
we feel shivers of fear. The release of atomic
energy now gives prospect of those stocks of
power necessary for the substitute muscles and
brains, so that together the two revolutions
can produce leisure and the universal opportunity
for high culture, if only we knew how
to look into man himself for his own guidance.
Science has taken us far along the road toward understanding man, so far that an implosion threatens. The biologists have told us much about the essential composition of man; we are all of the same substance. The psychologists are probing the personality of man, his needs, and his growth; psychologically he seems to be about the same, whether Australoid or Caucasoid or Negroid or Mongoloid. The social scientists and anthropologists are cutting through the cultural overlays of every kind and group of man; common needs and common directions appear to be shared by group man everywhere. Psychiatrists, philosophers, and men of religion are moving toward common denominators, from Wiktor Frankl’s supra-Freudian psychiatry of the human spirit to Teilhard de Chardin’s revolutionary concepts of planetary group thought which envisage all men as evolving toward the ultimate Point Omega, the Creator God. However, as man conquers and creates and expands and unifies his thought world, he himself must voluntarily enter the cage of a world-wide discipline which, paradoxically, is a new freedom. For thus only will mankind enter a new time and a new state of being.
Despite all, because of all, we the riders of the avalanche are uneasy. We do not perceive what hand, if any, is upon the controls, if there are controls.
At this hour, then, man is confronted with the classic dilemma of a new Genesis. God the Creator has given him a planetary garden rich beyond the singing of it, even beyond the yearning for it; but he cannot inhabit it yet. God again has told him, in the words of the new Seer Bahá’u’lláh, what he must avoid and what he must do. Soon, the spirit of man will eat again, this time of the fruit of the new tree of true life. There is always a risk in great decisions; but man shall surely die as a species if he does not eat. And eating, he shall even more surely die, but only to an outworn past. And thus will he gain new life for a new man.
The twentieth century must resolve the explosion of the knowledge of things, and the implosion within man. To achieve that resolution man must recognize and espouse with full heart the ideas and the ethics by which modern Adam can really live.
Toward the Garden of Mankind
To ENTER the new state of being we, mankind, must be reborn. Before we can be allowed to enter the new Eden, as individuals, as the family of man, we must cast aside much of the past. We must stand upon new ethical pillars erected on the old foundation. The new ethical culture can build and flower only through its rediscovery of individual self, of group self, and of God. The Teacher of the Bahá’í Faith, Bahá’u’lláh, is the new Seer of the new culture Who has written the new Bible for the new Genesis. He came from east of Eden, in Iran. He penetrates to the heart of our needs. He sets the true north of our compasses in great new ways.
He teaches the concept of the intrinsically
good man, the requirement for development
of all potentials of each man, and the
need for the dominance of the higher self.
He brings at least two new principles of
ethics: that work performed as service is worship,
and that affluence with leisure must be
[Page 31] the emancipating mechanism for optimal human
development. He devises and implements
that social cooperation which is one expression
of the group spirit.
THE ESSENTIAL GOODNESS OF MAN. Bahá’u’lláh makes clear that we must cast aside the concept of man as intrinsically sinful and evil. “O Son of Spirit!” He calls to man, “Noble have I created thee.” He follows immediately by asking the sorrowful question which reveals man’s free will: “Why hast thou abased thyself?” Then the sharp summons: “Rise thou unto that for which thou wast created.”
Bahá’u’lláh's positive dictum of man’s nobility, enunciated in the 1850’s, has its negative counterpart in Trappist philosopher Thomas Merton’s 1966 assertion that “we are living in a world without original sin.”[7] The new Faith dares to say that we live in a world of original goodness. Bahá’u’lláh has proclaimed to man that to enter the new Eden he must now believe in the fundamental concept of his own intrinsic goodness. Thus the responsibility for personal salvation from personal wrongdoing falls upon the individual. The Way to that salvation is shown by the new Great Educator.
TOWARD MAN’S FULL POTENTIAL. The powers of science will bring to us who live in a “high culture” the opportunity to explore our personal talents and actualize our potential. Not only an aristocratic few, but all men can discover themselves through art, music, poetry, drama, and the dance. All can share in the experience of beauty.
Bahá’u’lláh says that we must “regard man as a mine rich in gems of inestimable value.”[8] He speaks of “those gems which lie hidden within the mine of our true and inmost selves.” He promises that the “potentialities inherent in the station of man, the full measure of his destiny on earth, the innate excellence of his reality, must all be manifested in this promised day of God.”[9] With religious motivation at the center of life, man can be at peace with radical change. He can adjust to accelerating discovery and innovation. In the new Eden, Bahá’u’lláh has directed all men to live in the marketplace of life, participating fully. Each man must develop a fullness and variety of life within his own person, a life which blends his low and his high cultures into that sacramental devotion which alone can bring happiness.
THE DOMINANCE OF THE HIGHER SELF.
Bahá’u’lláh enunciates the Higher Golden
Rule for the first time: “Blessed is he who
prefers his brother before himself.”[10] In this
statement he brings a new concept of the
highest level of dedication to others, of a kind
never before possible. It is a life purpose which
[Page 32] probably can be successfully pursued only in
a cooperative society of physical affluence,
leisure, safety, and dedication to service. The
murderous society devoted to grasping and accumulating
for self will one day be a mere
memory. For the people of the new Eden Bahá’u’lláh
has commanded the development of
a new type of spiritualized scientific man who
will live for others in a cooperative society of
competitive creativity. As each individual matures
he will find his highest personal worth
in his service to others, as he obeys the admonition:
“O People of God! Do not busy
yourselves in your own concerns; let your
thoughts be fixed upon that which will rehabilitate
the fortunes of mankind and sanctify
the hearts and souls of men.”
WORK AS SERVICE AS WORSHIP. Bahá’u’lláh demands that we assume a new ethic of work, saying that “work performed in the spirit of service is worship.” In a world of diminishing craftsmanship and of lessening pride in labor, where the worth of work is obscured by the parasitism of leisure without direction, of mind-deadening assembly-line routine, and of automation, it is a summons. Out “low culture” of work for survival must now be invested with that religious spirit of service. All work must be examined for its intrinsic value; and if it is valueless or corrupting, man must cleanse his society of it. In the new Eden, all work must be invested with the religious meaning of service to others. All workers must feel their own dignity and intrinsic merit. All work must befit and not demean the devotion, the dignity, and the virtue of each child of God.
AFFLUENCE AS OPPORTUNITY AND OBLIGATION.
The powers of science have brought
us affluence and leisure. With wealth produced
for all, it is good for all to be freed from
the bondage of want, knowing that “God hath
ordained every good thing . . . for such of His
servants as truly believe in Him.”[11] Galbraith
was perhaps the first to point to the need for
an ethic of affluence combined with one of leisure.
The new ethic makes clear that wealth
is fitting if dealt with as obligation and as
[Page 33] opportunity. Bahá’u’lláh’s admonition to the
wealthy repeats also the Higher Golden Rule:
“Well is it with the rich who bestow their
riches on the needy and prefer them before
themselves.”[12]
When want was the baseline of human existence, voluntary and selfless poverty could be a virtue. But when affluence is the baseline, then selflessly directed wealth becomes the pathway of service. When physical want essentially disappears, the new man is unshackled for his spiritual and intellectual purposes in life. The men of the new Eden will see the forces of economics as benign tools to be manipulated for the benefit of man and for the creation of wealth to be shared.
THE SPIRIT OF SOCIETY. At this critical moment in history Bahá’u’lláh affirms the cardinal principles of social organization for cooperative man, while fully recognizing the needs of each man as a unique individual. He describes His World Order as “this wondrous system, the like of which the world hath never witnessed.” His civilization will have “a fullness of life such as the world has never seen, nor can as yet conceive.” It is a creative society which He predicts, guides, impels. Indeed, Bahá’u’lláh recognizes that man is innately and predominantly cooperative. One look about this dangerous world suggests that the survival of the fittest today, as anthropologists note, will be determined by cooperative men rather than by men of the bomb.[13]
For the society of the new Eden, Bahá’u’lláh sets the framework for a body politic which fittingly can house the group spirit of its people. His divine polity promises that one day we shall truly be “one soul and one body.” “. . . the people of Bahá . . . shall associate and commune intimately with one another, and shall be so closely associated in their lives, their aspirations, their aims and strivings as to be even as one soul.”[14]
Energies like Angels
“WHAT IS MAN, that Thou are mindful of him?” sang the psalmist thirty centuries ago.
Man is the greatest creation, and he is coming closer to his Creator in what will be the great new Day of God, the “day whereon the ocean of God’s mercy is poured out upon men.” The aboriginals of Arnhemland will appear in modern clothing in Chicago and Manila and Lagos. They will be men at peace with themselves and with their fellow men, developing their powers, serving in worship; they will be the people of light. All men then will eat of the fruits of the trees of knowledge and of life. That day of God will come through the impelling spirit of Bahá’u’lláh, Who will split us who are as rocks, that we may release the undiscovered suns within ourselves. “Energies like angels” will “dance glorias of recognition” of “the Word made flesh again in Him.”
The coming of a new High Prophet is the time of rebirth. Bahá’u’lláh, accepting His supernal destiny in the garden of Riḍván in Baghdád in 1863, became the Voice calling us back to the garden of fulfillment. We the sleepers can join in the great awakening, the return to Eden, which is the next giant step in the ascent of man.
- ↑ ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, in Some Answered Questions (Wilmette, Ill.: Bahá’í Publishing Trust, 1964), pp. 139-144, states that the story of Adam and Eve as contained in Genesis 2 and 3 “contains divine mysteries and universal meanings, and is capable of marvelous explanations . . . these verses of the Bible have numerous meanings.” Explaining one of these meanings, He shows that Adam is the spirit of Adam, and Eve his soul, with the serpent symbolizing attachment to the human world. From “the world of freedom,” which is the Eden of the animal world of “purity and absolute goodness,” he enters “the world of bondage . . . the human world . . . of good and evil.”
Adam may also be seen as “Adam, the Father of Mankind,” and as the first Prophet of the present cycle. Reference is made to “generations that were before Adam” and “the differences that have arisen since the days of Adam.” Gleanings from the Writings of Bahá’u’lláh (Wilmette, Ill.: Bahá’í Publishing Trust, 1952), pp. 172-175. Elsewhere in the Bahá’í Writings Adam is indicated to be the first Prophet, the pre-historic discoverer and proclaimer of free will and of values now called “human” because they are that new realm of consciousness which came with the human estate.
‘Abdu’l-Bahá, in Bahá’í World Faith (Wilmette, Ill.: Bahá’í Publishing Trust, 1943), p. 233: “His Holiness Bahá’u’lláh addressing all humanity, said that Adam the parent of mankind may be likened to the tree of nativity upon which you are the leaves and blossoms. Inasmuch as your origin was one, you must now be united and agreed . . . .”
Carl G. Jung, in Answer to Job (Great Neck, N.Y.: Pastoral Psychology Book Club, 1955), pp. 54-55; “Adam and Eve: images of God’s masculine essence and its feminine emanation . . . Eve taken out of Adam’s body as an afterthought.” - ↑ Loren Eiseley, The Immense Journey (New York, N.Y.: Random House, Inc. 1956; Vintage Books,1958), p. 210.
- ↑ Edward L. Ruhe, Bark Paintings from Arnhemland (Lawrence, Kansas: University of Kansas, 1966), p. 28.
- ↑ There were and are penalties, of course, for being “noble savages.” There was and is disease that kills the babies, and sooner or later most aboriginals die before their full life span. There is a clan system of feuds that kills the men. The women haven’t made it to equality, are yet beasts of burden and often die of childbearing. Hardship keeps all lean, and some starve. There is endless pressure just to survive, with too little of that precious leisure which allows for the full expression of their high culture.
- ↑ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man (New York, N.Y.: Harper and Row, 1965), p. 320.
- ↑ from Nous (Greek), meaning mind or reason. Hence noogenesis connotes the origin of thought in the sense of the group.
- ↑ Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1966), p. 328.
- ↑ “The Great Being saith: Regard man as a mine rich in gems of inestimable value. Education alone can cause it to reveal its treasures, and enable mankind to benefit therefrom.” Gleanings from the Writings of Bahá’u’lláh, p. 260.
“The purpose of one true God, exalted be His Glory, in revealing Himself unto men is to lay bare those gems that lie hidden within the mine of their true and inmost selves.” Gleanings from the Writings of Bahá’u’lláh, p. 287. - ↑ Gleanings from the Writings of Bahá’u’lláh, p. 340.
- ↑ Bahá’í World Faith, p. 185.
“Forget your own selves, and turn your eyes toward your neighbor. Bend your energies to whatever may foster the education of men. Nothing is, or can ever be, hidden from God. If ye follow in His way, His incalculable and imperishable blessings will be showered upon you.” Gleanings from the Writings of Bahá’u’lláh, p. 9.
“O people of God! Do not busy yourselves in your own concerns; let your thoughts be fixed upon that which will rehabilitate the fortunes of mankind and sanctify the hearts and souls of men. This can best be achieved through pure and holy deeds, through a virtuous life and a goodly behavior. Valiant acts will ensure the triumph of this Cause, and a saintly character will reinforce its power.” Gleanings from the Writings of Bahá’u’lláh, pp. 93-94. - ↑ “Should a man wish to adorn himself with the ornaments of the earth, to wear its apparels, or partake of the benefits it can bestow, no harm can befall him, if he alloweth nothing whatever to intervene between him and God, for God hath ordained every good thing, whether created in the heavens or in the earth, for such of his servants as truly believe in Him. Eat ye, O people, of the good things which God hath allowed you, and deprive not yourselves from His wondrous bounties.” Gleanings from the Writings of Bahá’u’lláh, p. 276.
- ↑ Gleanings from the Writings of Bahá’u’lláh, p. 202.
- ↑ Anthropologist Ashley Montagu asserts that man’s current destructiveness derives from “the unsound values by which, in a highly competitive, overcrowded, threatening world, he so disoperatively attempts to live.” See “Original Sin Revisited”, Vista, Vol. II, No. 4, January-February 1967.
- ↑ “He Who is your Lord, the All-Merciful, cherisheth in His heart the desire of beholding the entire human race as one soul and one body.” Gleanings from the Writings of Bahá’u’lláh, p. 214.
“Know thou that the souls of the people of Bahá, who have entered and been established within the Crimson Ark, shall associate and commune intimately one with another, and shall be so closely associated in their lives, their aspirations, their aims and strivings as to be even as one soul.” Gleanings from the Writings of Bahá’u’lláh, pp. 169-170.
Shkake-Ne-Yah of the Diné
A father writes a letter to his son about his experiences with a Navajo family and then elaborates in a lengthy postscript.
By RUSSELL I. BOYCE
Dear Richard:
I told you that I would write to you about being on the Navajo Indian Reservation, so here goes.
Last Thursday evening Franklin Kahn and I left Flagstaff and went out to Gallup, New Mexico, a distance of 206 miles, where we stayed overnight at Jim Stone’s. Jim and Roan had just left on a pilgrimage to Haifa but people who were renting from them let us in. That evening, rather late, we visited Franklin’s brother and sister-in-law, Chester and Annie Kahn, in Gamerco. It was my first meeting with Chester; Annie I had met at the Window Rock Indian Fair a little over a month earlier. In fact I had helped with Annie to man the Bahá’í booth at the fair. They were just completing a fireside and I met Mr. and Mrs. Preston (Monongye), Hopi Imdians, who had just become Bahá’ís. Friday morning we went up to Window Rock which is the location of the administrative center of the Navajo Tribe and met several people including Mr. George Meyers and Mr. Edward Plummer. Plummer told me that I am still under consideration for the position of civil engineer with the tribe but that appointment must await the construction of an office building to house the expanded organization in which the position falls. This was a business, as well as pleasure, trip for Franklin. I went to several offices with him and met a few of his friends who are members of the tribe.
After we got through with Franklin’s business calls he asked me if I would like to stay overnight in a hogan. You see, Franklin is a Navajo and grew up in the nearby area, on the reservation. I jumped at the chance, so he invited me to go to his parents’ home which is about five miles north of Pine Springs, Arizona, and is on the reservation. It is reached from Window Rock by going to St. Michaels and south down that road we took in July where Tommy and Cheryl saw that giant jackrabbit. Just outside of Window Rock we stopped at a grocery store and bought some food to take to Frank’s parents. We purchased some potatoes, bread, country style cornflakes, evaporated milk, coffee, hamburger, and canned fruit, which we gave to his parents when when we arrived. This was about an hour before dusk.
About a mile before reaching their home,
we came to the site of the hogan in which
Frank had been born. It was no longer there,
but near the site was a hogan owned by his
parents. A very short distance from there, perhaps
a half a mile, as the crow flies, is an elevated
area from which one can see for miles
in all directions. This, by Indian tradition, is
a holy mountain. Before going on to his parents
we drove to the top of the holy mountain
and said a few prayers. Frank said that a group
of four stones—white, turquoise, red, and
black—has special significance by Indian tradition.
The mountain is covered with stones of
[Page 35]
[Page 36] this kind. I picked up two groups, one for your
mother and one for me; and also a larger one
of turquois which is in the car. They can be
polished up and made into ornamental pieces.
We left the holy mountain, made holy by the Ever Changing Woman, who, by tradition, laid down the turquois, and went on to his parents. They live in a hogan in a little clearing in a lightly wooded area. In the clearing was a more modern, one-room, stucco cabin, an out-house, a small shed, and a brush stockade for sheep and goats. Frank’s parents have a flock of sheep and goats. When we arrived, it was just dark and his father was setting out to try to find fourteen of the flock which were missing. He got back after dark saying that he thought the missing sheep and goats had probably joined a neighbor’s flock, and that he could get them in the morning.
The hogan is a one-room, one-story octagon with the entrance door facing east. It is about twenty-five feet between opposite walls and has a cement floor. It has two windows. Inside were a bench, three chairs, two tables, two cot beds, a small wood heating stove right in the center, and an old fashioned wood-burning kitchen cooking stove. It was lighted from an old fashioned kerosene lamp. The lamp and cooking stove were just like those we used in our home down in Clintonville where I grew up. Frank’s mother cooked us a delicious supper of fried potatoes mixed with hamburger, Indian fried bread, and coffee. It was good.
After supper Frank conversed with his parents in the Navajo tongue. Neither can speak English, so any communication between us was done through Frank, as interpreter. They asked about me; and I told them about being out in Arizona, our family, and other things. They said they thought that I have a kind and loving heart; and that time would probably show that we would become good friends. I told them about you, and Svenska, and that I knew you both would have enjoyed being there, and that I hoped we could all visit them next summer. During the evening Frank’s father told about the legend of the ‘Ever Changing Woman’ but I must confess that I didn’t understand it very well. His mother said very little but was busy spinning. She was running thread, loosely woven, from a skein of store thread onto a twirling stick, like a bobbin. The stick was about three feet long and an inch in diameter. About six inches from the bottom was a four inch diameter wooden collar which acted as a stop, thus preventing the thread from running downward and off the lower end of the stick. She had the skein of thread on a table beside her and let it run through her left hand. She held the upper end of the stick against her right leg, just above the knee, with her right hand and with the right hand set the stick to spinning. This spinning wound the thread from the skein into a ball on the stick and tightened up the fibers making the balled thread much stronger for weaving purposes.
Frank and I slept in twin beds in the one-room stucco cabin. There was no heat in the cabin, but we were in sleeping bags, under blankets, and I slept soundly. I wasn’t cold but Frank was. He covered his head with a coat because his face got cold, and he thought it was still night long after daybreak. To me it wax just like being back in the old house in Clintonville. There the house was unheated upstairs in the bedrooms, and I used to sleep all winter long with a window open.
Frank’s mother made breakfast for us. It was about like the supper: very tasty and satisfying. Right after breakfast we went to the neighbor’s about a mile away on the reservation. Of course they were Navajos, also. The missing sheep and goats were there and I helped herd them back. When we got back Frank helped his father shear a goat with hand shears and clippers. It seemed that the government was offering a premium price for goat hair because it was needed in some phase of the defense industry.
We left Frank’s folks about mid-morning
and went on to Pine Springs. Pine Springs has
an all Indian Bahá’í Assembly. All of Frank’s
family are Bahá’ís. Frank and his wife, Mary
Jane, were the first Bahá’ís on the Navajo
[Page 37] Reservation. They were directly responsible
for bringing the message of Bahá’u’lláh to
the Navajos. The way Frank became a Bahá’í
is one of the great sagas of the Faith. When
he first heard about the Faith he was a devout
Christian. The new teachings had a profound
effect upon him hut he struggled against
them for several years. During this period he
had three dreams, all of which came true. He
accepted the fulfillment of the last of the
dreams as a command from God to accept the
Bahá’í Faith, a command which he could not
refuse. Some day I will tell you all about it.
After leaving Pine Springs, we went further into the reservation, to a place near Dilken, just west of Indian Wells, Arizona. This is the area in which Mary grew up, and they are building a cabin there. We met Mary Jane at the cabin at about noon on Saturday, she having driven in from Flagstaff that morning. We had lunch at the cabin and then left for home by way of the Indian hospital at Winslow on Highway 66. Mary wished to see her sister who was under observation there. Frank took a different route from the cabin than did Mary Jane and I because he wished to see someone who lived away from the direct route.
Mary Jane and I stopped at a hogan in which a third sister of hers lived. This hogan had a dirt floor. Her sister had just finished weaving a beautiful saddle blanket. Frank had been commissioned by a friend back in Flagstaff to purchase a saddle blanket if he could get one for twenty dollars. We had looked in the Indian store outside of Window Rock but those that were suitable were too expensive, so Frank hadn’t yet bought one. Mary Jane’s sister was willing to sell the one she had just finished for twenty dollars. Mary bought it with a little trepidation. However, when Frank saw it, he was pleased.
We left the sister at about four in the afternoon and arrived at the hospital around eight o’clock. Frank wasn’t there yet but arrived a short time later with the husband and two children of the sister who was in the hospital. I met the sister, who was able to come into the front hall of the hospital, and, after a short visit, we took off for Flagstaff. We arrived back in Flagstaff at about midnight.
Well, son, it was a very enjoyable trip for me. I enjoyed every minute of it, except for the fact that Mary’s sister was ill. I know that you and Svenska would have enjoyed it also. I will close this letter, now. Tell everyone that I miss them, and love them, and will be glad to see them when I get back for Cheryl’s wedding.
- Love from
- Dad
- Phoenix, Arizona
- October 26, 1966
Bravery Arrived
ON MAY 25, 1934, a Navajo boy of the Folding Arms Clan was born on the breast of the Holy Mountain of the Ever Changing Woman. He was born in a hogan about a half a mile from the crest. As is the custom he was named by his grandmother immediately upon birth, after some memorable event which had occurred in the recent past. She named him Shkake-Ne-Yah for what event we do not know. Translated this means “Bravery Arrived”.
As was also the custom, Indians who associated with the white man often Americanized their names by taking the name of one whom they respected, usually that of an Indian trader. Following this custom Shkake-Ne-Yah’s father had, sometime before his birth, taken the name of Kahn, which means King. For this reason we know Shkake-Ne-Yah as Franklin Kahn. This is his story. It is a true story. It is a story obtained from his lips and those of his wife and parents.
Franklin is the oldest of eleven children,
three of whom died. His folks, as far back
[Page 38] as his great grandmother, were Christian. He
grew up and lived with his parents on the
Navajo Reservation. His formal schooling
began when he was eight years old, but it
was sketchy and intermittent for the next four
years. During those early years he had to
help make a living for the family. Among
his chores were milking fifteen goats twice a
day; herding and shearing the goats and three
hundred sheep; caring for a hundred head of
cattle; and working in the fields planting,
cultivating, and harvesting such products as
corn, barley, beans, squash, watermelons, and
potatoes. Franklin says that he rode a cow
while herding and that, in addition to being a
lot of work, it was a lot of fun.
Indian parents give great love to each and every child. Children are allowed to sleep in the same bed with their parents until well along in years. This, it is felt, gives them a foundation of great security which affects their characters throughout their lives. It helps to develop the feelings of great respect which all Indians have toward their elders. This feeling is instilled in them so strongly that it is difficult for an Indian to break with the past and go against the wishes, advice, or traditions of his elders. This makes it psychologically difficult for an Indian to make any abrupt change in thinking, habits, or religion, even though he may wish intellectually to make such a change because of his education. Revolutionary action is quite foreign to an Indian’s concept of proper conduct.
ALTHOUGH FRANKLIN BEGAN his formal education at an older age than most American children, we may, perhaps, agree that this late beginning was all for the best. In his early years he received great spiritual training from his parents and grandparents. When he was about seven years old, he began to learn the simple basic designs of sand painting as brought down by tradition. His grandmother taught him to use his hands and to learn symbolic Indian designing by studying nature. She helped to develop the great ability he now possesses to portray spiritual messages in such media of the fine arts as oil paintings, sand paintings, water colorings, and pen and ink drawings. She taught him legends with circular string with which he learned to make all sorts of things, such as rabbits, owls, coyotes, stars, shooting stars, spider webs, etc. For each there is a legend such as the legend of the spider, and the legend of the rainbow.
The rainbow is a symbol of protection and beauty to the Indian. The spider, with its web, symbolizes a home with its love, kindness, patience and well-being. The spider makes its web, very carefully, then sits back and patiently meditates near the center. When it needs exercise it runs around a bit, but otherwise has nothing to do since its food comes into its web. The web also collects rain and dew, and when the sun hits it rainbows are formed. These legends teach the young that health, wealth, happiness, and all of the good things of life can be achieved by leading a patient, meditative, and spiritual life just as does the spider.
Franklin’s grandfather was a medicine man, but he was blind. When people were sick, in trouble, or unhappy, they would send for the medicine man of their area. He would go to the one in distress and give beauty chants which conveyed messages of love, comfort, and good cheer. These would help to bring things back into natural and spiritual balance. The Indians believe that troubles come from an unbalancing of the natural and spiritual forces which govern man.
When his grandfather was called upon to
serve as a medicine man, Franklin would get
the horses from the reservation and ride bareback
to the hogan. Here he would saddle up,
help his grandfather to mount, and lead him
to the hogan where his services were desired.
Often the chants would last for two nights,
and Franklin would listen as long as he could
before falling asleep. He went with his grandfather
on many of these visits and from them
got great understanding of the meaning of life
and the world about him. He heard chants
which gave the prophecy that a New Spirit,
bringing love and unity to the Indians, and the
[Page 39] world, would be brought by a great chief from
the east.
School Bells Ring
WHEN FRANKLIN was eight years old he was enrolled in the one-room day school at Pine Springs which he attended until he was twelve. Mrs. Moore, his first teacher, used to become upset because of his rather poor attendance record. It was poor for two reasons. The main one was that he liked to get back close to nature and herd the flocks, so he “took off” quite frequently. Playing "hookey" is not unique with white boys. Sometimes, though, his parents kept him home to help with necessary work and chores. After four years at the school, this happy period of his life, when he was close to nature and the loving-kindness of his family, was agonizingly interrupted. He was sent to the Shiprock, New Mexico, Boarding School.
By the terms of the treaty of 1868, when the subdued remnants of the Navajo Indian tribe were allowed to return to part of their ancestral land after the exile imposed upon them by the Kit Carson campaign, the Federal Government agreed to furnish a school for every thirty Indian children. Through the years performance on that contract has been pitifully inadequate and misguided. It was a difficult obligation to fulfill because the Indians did not congregate in communities but lived in hogans, miles apart, scattered across the reservation. To try to meet the requirements the government developed the idea of the boarding schools. The children attending these boarding schools were forced to live through the terrifying experience of leaving their loving homes and adjusting to a foreign, unsympathetic environment at ages so young that few felt anything but great insecurity. Franklin was forced to undergo this experience when he was sent to Shiprock.
He remembers being thrust into a “forcefully fearful” world away from the loving-kindness of his hogan, and among strangers. He knew no one. The other children were all strangers to one another and in the same agonized state of mind. The government teachers and the pastors at the nearby chapel, which he was obliged to attend, impressed upon him their beliefs that all of the traditional ways of living and the things he had been taught by his family were wrong. They told him he was to cast away and forget all the Indian teachings he had learned, that those teachings were unsound and false, that those ways of life were bad and unhealthy. To this day he has agonizing moments of doubt and uncertainty when the good teachings of his heritage conflict with the ways of life he finds away from the reservation.
This points up the great defect in the white man’s method of helping the Indian get an education. Through arrogance, ignorance, and laziness he has refused to learn the heritage of the Indian and to build upon its most solid foundation. He has, rather, approached him with the attitude that because the Indian’s economic level and inventive achievements are comparatively low and his heritage strange, that heritage is unworthy of consideration, that it is necessary to destroy that heritage in order to begin to develop an educated Indian. This approach has caused most of the pitiful lack of communication between the two races. The forces of the century-long conflict between the Indians and the Whites as the West was developed resulted in the Indian’s acquiring a deep-seated humility which the white man has not, as yet, been forced to acquire. This humility is the Indian’s crowning glory. It is making him a great spiritual leader in bringing God’s Kingdom to this earth.
Franklin attended the Shiprock Boarding
School for two years and then transferred to
the Indian School at Stewart, Nevada. Here
he studied and learned to be a commercial artist.
He had as a classmate Mary Jane Gishie,
a Baptist Navajo Indian of the Spanish Clan.
Throughout these school years Franklin attended
Christian School classes and was active
in church affairs. He learned to love the Christian
faith because it gave him great spiritual
uplift and satisfaction. Franklin and Mary
[Page 40] Jane attended the Stewart Indian School until
1955 when they were graduated. He was
twenty-one.
Time for a Change
AFTER GRADUATING, Franklin and Mary Jane were married and settled down in Reno, Nevada, where Franklin got his first job as a commercial artist. He also studied portrait painting under Caroline Edmunson at the Reno High School and fine arts under Professor Yates at the University of Nevada.
In 1956 the Kahns met Charlotte Nelson, who now resides in San Mateo, California, and Norma Gimlin, who now resides in Salinas, California. They were Bahá’ís and were living in Sparks, Nevada. This meeting heralded for Franklin another distressing period of six years’ duration. Up to this time he had felt secure in the Christian faith but when he heard of the Bahá’í symbolism of the number nine as that of highest unity and of the twelve principles of the new faith, he realized that here was the fulfillment of the prophecies he had heard in the chants of his grandfather. He felt that the teaching of progressive revelation was something he could not reject. It made him resentful because of the conflict it set up with his Christian faith. This was a period in which he ran the gamut from ignorance, through resentment and uncertainty, to a beautiful moment of truth, certainty, and acceptance.
Franklin first felt that the Bahá’í teachings were spiritually sound and that he couldn’t escape from them. Nevertheless he desperately desired to escape. He had dreams about the
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NAVAJO LAND, U.S.A.
THE NAVAJO INDIANS, who call themselves Diné, meaning “The People”, by tradition hold dominion over that vast area of land which encompasses the “Four Corners” section of the United States; so called because here, alone, four states have a common corner. The four states are New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, and Colorado. Most of the area lies within the states of Arizona and New Mexico and includes all of the present Navajo and Hopi reservations.
It is somewhat circular in shape and is more than ten times as large as the state of Connecticut. Its limits are roughly delineated by the Rio Grande on the east, the San José and Puerco rivers on the south, the Little Colorado on the southwest, the Colorado on the northwest, and the San Juan and Rio Grande rivers on the north. Four “Holy Mountains” lift their heads high above the encompassed plains and plateaus. They are located near the cardinal points of the compass. The Mountain of the East, called the “White Mountain” to symbolize the white light of the rising sun, is Blanca Peak, (elevation 14,390 feet) of south central Colorado. The Mountain of the South called the “Turquois Mountain”, symbolizing the blue of the sky during the daylight hours as the sun traverses the heavens to the south of the observer, is Mount Taylor (elevation 11,389 feet), west of Albuquerque, New Mexico. The Mountain of the West called the “Red Mountain” to symbolize the red of the setting sun, is the San Francisco Peaks (elevation 12,670 feet), just west of Flagstaff, Arizona. The Mountain of the North, called the “Black Mountain” to symbolize the darkness of night when the sun has disappeared, is Hesperus Peak (elevation 13,225 feet), northwest of Durango, Colorado. The vast expanse of land is considered by the Diné to be a circular area of love and happiness. This is Navajo Land, USA.
The most precious and prized jewel of the Navajo is turquois because it is scarce, yet available, and beautiful when polished.
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[Page 41]
Faith and became so disturbed that within two
weeks he decided to escape by quitting his job
and leaving Reno. Accordingly the Kahns
used all their money to buy a new house trailer.
They put all of their worldly goods in it and
on about the first of October 1956 started for
Phoenix, Arizona. Daughter Eunice was then
one month old. Before leaving, Franklin had a
nightmare. In the nightmare, disaster struck
him because he was running away from Reno
and the Bahá’í Faith. Franklin felt guilty but
was not deterred from flight. They were seventy-five
miles on their way when disaster did
strike. The trailer brakes failed and Franklin
lost control of his car. Car and trailer rolled
over and over, traveling about two hundred
and fifty feet before coming to rest. Fortunately
no other car was involved, and the Kahns
suffered only minor scratches and bruises.
They were taken to the hospital in Carson City
for observation but immediately released.
Their car and trailer were completely demolished
and their goods destroyed or stolen. They
had no alternative but to go back to Reno.
The accident was written up in the Reno
newspapers, but Franklin says, “Our Christian
brethren didn’t offer to help but the Bahá’ís
did. They gave us a complete set of household
goods, and food, and found us a place to stay.”
The whole episode made a great impact upon
Franklin. He said, “I found that you cannot
turn your back upon Bahá’u’lláh. This accident
was meant as a spiritual teaching. It signalized
a sharp break between my Christian
faith and that of Bahá’u’lláh even though the
actual break didn’t come for another five
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Highly prized also are white shell, coral and jet stones. These precious stones represent the four directions of the Holy Mountains. Their spiritual significance as well as their beauty are honored by the Navajo in chant and legend. Any area upon which is found turquois in combination with white, red, and black stones is considered to be holy. There are several such areas in Navajo Land. One of these is a high, flat-topped mountain on the breast of which snuggles Pine Springs, Arizona. On it are found in abundance white, turquoise, red, and black stones. This mountain is near the south central part of the Navajo Circle of Love. The crest commands a view for miles around. It is a beautiful view. It is the legendary home of the Ever Changing Woman—the Encircled Mountain. It is one of the most holy grounds of the Diné.
Since until recently the Navajos had no written language, their folklore, history, traditions, and discoveries have been maintained and passed down from generation to generation by the “medicine men” or “medicine women.” Medicine men functioned as educators, historians, spiritual advisors, and doctors. They performed their services by chanting what they called beauty messages and prayers. The chants were often quite lengthy, sometimes lasting nine days. In conveying messages by chanting, a medicine man would combine singing, speaking, dancing, and making sand paintings with the use of herbs and vegetation from which he made incense and medicine for both internal and external use.
From the medicine man the Indians received solace for their sorrows, alleviation of their fears, and hope for the future. In him was reposed the utmost love, respect, and confidence. The legend of the Ever Changing Woman has been brought down to the present by medicine men. It is an Indian legend of creation. Her home may be likened to an Indian version of the Biblical Garden of Eden.
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[Page 42]
years.” The Kahns stayed in Reno for another
year and a half. Franklin remained steadfast
in his faith, but, withal, regularly attended
Bahá’í firesides. Then in May of 1958 they
moved to Flagstaff, Arizona, where Franklin
accepted his present position as a commercial
artist with the Federal Signs & Signal Corporation.
When they made this move,
Franklin says that he was still trying to escape
from the Bahá’í Faith. However, it would seem
that Bahá’u’lláh had no intention of letting
him succeed for, although they had no more
accidents, Bahá’ís were the first to greet them
upon arrival in Flagstaff.
The Bahá’ís helped find them a place to stay and kept in constant touch with them. The Kahns regularly attended Bahá’í firesides and enrolled their now three children in the Bahá’í children’s classes. They also joined the local parish of their Christian church. Franklin was not allowed any relief from the conflicting faiths, for in June, Norma Gimlin induced Franklin and Mary Jane to invite Franklin’s family to a “get-together” at at her folks’ ranch in Verde Valley, Arizona. Attending, in addition to the Franklin Kahns, were Franklin’s mother and father, who cannot speak English, and his brother and sister-in-law, Chester and Annie. Franklin was very much interested in finding out how his family would react to the Bahá’í Faith. Remember, the members of his family were life-long Christians, and he had the Indians’ great respect for the feelings and opinions of his parents.
This get-together turned out to be a very important episode in the development of the Bahá’í Faith among the Diné. In Franklin’s words, “This was an extremely important affair because of the treatment given by the Bahá’ís to my parents. It was the first time they had ever been invited off from the reservation. They were given the best room to sleep in, the best food to eat, and complete equality in all respects. No other faith would have given such a sincere welcome. This was the first Bahá’í-Navajo meeting. It was a two-day get-together and my folks were given royal treatment. It was spiritually uplifting.”
In 1960 Norma Gimlin entered what is now Northern Arizona University at Flagstaff. She desired to get a Master’s Degree so that she could teach on the Navajo reservation. For the next two years she maintained her contact and friendship with the Kahns; while they, in turn, continued their affiliation with Christianity but also their attendance at Bahá’í firesides and sending the children to the Bahá’í classes. After about a year and a half of this emotional religious dualism, Franklin had a vivid dream. It was the third, and last, of the series which had started back in Reno just before the abortive attempt to go to Phoenix.
Franklin dreamed that as he was driving to work one morning he passed through an intersection; that there were some school children at one side; that there was a school bus on a side street picking up the children; that he was driving slowly, carefully, and obeying all traffic rules and regulations; that the pastor of his parish was standing nearby and had him arrested for passing a standing school bus, driving too close to the children, speeding, and reckless driving; that he was obliged to put up a bond of thirty-five dollars; that he subsequently appeared before a judge in court; that his pastor appeared to press the charges; that the judge asked him if he wished to plead guilty, or not guilty, that he struggled within himself as to whether or not to contradict his Pastor; that he resolved the struggle by pleading not guilty; that he told the judge the story of what had happened; that the judge found him “not guilty”; and, finally, that his bond money was returned. That was the dream.
The next morning, as Franklin was driving
to work and passing through the “Y” intersection
[Page 43] of Elder Drive and Steves Boulevard,
at school bus was stopped on the southerly
branch of the Elder Drive “Y” intersection
picking up school children. His pastor
was nearby. Franklin proceeded onto Steves
Boulevard, driving slowly and obeying all
signs. He did not pass the school bus, since
he was going down the northerly branch of
the “Y”. Just as in the dream, the pastor had
Franklin arrested and he was obliged to put
up a bond of thirty-five dollars. A little later,
at the end of February of 1962, Franklin appeared
before Judge Warren of the Flagstaff
City Court to answer to the charges. His pastor
testified against him, and Franklin had to
decide whether to take the easy course—plead
guilty and pay a small fine; or plead not guilty,
challenge his pastor by contradicting his
sworn testimony and tell the truth for truth’s
sake.
Franklin faced his duty, pleaded not guilty, contradicted his pastor, and told Judge Warren, the world, and God the truth for truth’s sake. The judge listened to Franklin’s testimony, weighed the evidence, and found him not guilty. The bond money of thirty-five dollars was returned. In that moment of truth Franklin justified the name, Shkake-Ne-Yah, his grandmother had given him at the time of his birth; for in that moment, indeed, “Bravery Arrived.” The next day Franklin and Mary Jane Kahn declared themselves for Bahá’u’lláh.
It seems that it was necessary before Franklin
Kahn could declare himself a Bahá’í that
he be shown that the Christianity which he
had loved so well, as taught by the pastors,
was fallible; that only in this way could the
inner conflict between what he really knew
was the truth and the false teachings of the
pastors be resolved. The fruition of his vivid
dream, in which his pastor gave unsustained
testimony, resolved the conflict and laid clear
and open the path ahead. Was it important
for the Faith of Bahá’u’lláh that Franklin and
Mary Jane Kahn become Bahá’ís? Was their
[Page 44] declaration an important milestone in the
advance of the Bahá’í Faith? Let us look to
what has developed since for the answer. Let
us see where this open path has led, to date.
The Gathering
AT THE BEGINNING of March 1962, when they declared themselves, there was only one Bahá’í on the Navajo Reservation, one whom the Kahns have not met to this day. Within two weeks Chester and Annie Kahn, who now live in Gamerco, New Mexico, declared themselves; but immediately, even before those declarations, Norma Gimlin and Charlotte Nelson began planning with Franklin and Mary a small “get-together” of Indians at Pine Springs. It was intended to be similar to the one held at the Gimlin Ranch in 1958, with only a few people invited. But then an amazing thing happened: the outside Bahá’ís heard about it, rallied to the opportunity, and offered their services for the affair scheduled for the firSt three days of June 1962.
The six: Charlotte, Norma, Franklin, Mary Jane, Chester, and Annie accepted their offer and also the duty of detailing and executing the plans for the affair. It was agreed that the “get-together” would be called “Different Races Gathering with Prayer”. What happened is a thrilling, magnificent page in the history of man’s strivings to achieve the Kingdom of God on Earth. Instead of being a small affair it gained world-wide attention. About fifteen hundred Navajos, practically everyone from the area of the Holy Mountain of the Ever Changing Woman, attended. Bahá’ís from Africa, Alaska, Hawaii, and other parts of the world attended and participated. The spiritual message and outpouring of love was tremendous. The Diné had received, and accepted with joy, the message of Bahá’u’lláh. Several Indians declared themselves at the meeting and within a year Franklin’s parents, and almost all of his family, had declared themselves, and the Pine Springs all-Indian Spiritual Assembly was formed. The Ever Changing Woman was nurturing her loved ones on the breast of her Holy Mountain. This was only the beginning. Four years later, on November 6, 1966, Over a hundred and seventeen Indians, scattered across Navajo Land had become Bahá’ís. Many more have declared themselves since that day; not only Navajos, but also Hopis, Apaches, and Zunis. Hopis say that all they have to do to accommodate their traditional tribal religion to that of the Bahá’í Faith is to acknowledge, as a fact, that the Manifestation of their Great Spirit is Bahá’u’lláh. Their traditional teachings are the same as His. Is a groundswell of acceptance of the Faith of Bahá’u’lláh sweeping through Navajo Land? Apparently, its force is irresistible and its success inevitable, for the Diné are spiritually attuned to His message. The position of Franklin Kahn in this great spiritual advance is clear. He is the viaduct which bridges the chasm separating the new faith of the future from the old, conglomerate faith of the past, and which conveys the refreshing and regenerating waters of spiritual hope and truth to the eager, parched lips of the Indians of Navajo Land.
WHAT KIND OF PEOPLE are Mary Jane and
Franklin Kahn with their three children:
Eunice, Flora, and Kevin? A description will
allow you to judge for yourself. They own
their small, modern home on Steves Boulevard
in the City of Flagstaff. One has to be
in it only a short time to feel the great love
which exists between the members of the
family, and also the spiritual fiber which is the
core of its being. The children, about a year
and a half apart in ages, attend the public
schools in Flagstaff. Franklin and Mary Jane
each has the greatest of patience in dealing
[Page 45] with the children; each pays attention to the
most minute request, requirement, or demand.
In turn, the children perform their regularly
established chores with none of the bickering
which takes place between the children of so
many of us. If the children are to go out on
an unusual, and perhaps rather dangerous,
project, such as climbing one of the nearby
mountains, the parents explain ahead of time
problems and dangers they may encounter.
The children respond by having the utmost
faith in their parents; they do not get as emotionally
upset, when faced with new situations
or challenges, as do so many children; their
self-reliance is very noticeable. In the several
times I have visited with them on the reservation
or in their home I have never heard the
children or the parents raise their voices in
anger, or make any emotional outburst. I have
never seen a more happy family. The members
really enjoy life together.
In the outside world Franklin and Mary Jane are outstanding successes. Mary Jane is active in her community and on Parent-Teachers Association programs. Franklin is an artist and has painted many pictures of horses, landscapes, and Indian scenes. These paintings are beautiful and portray the delightful symbolism of Navajo traditions. Many of his paintings have been displayed in exhibits in Arizona and California. He has sold many. Two of them are the originals for postcards which will be distributed throughout the world. He is an expert in the field of commercial sign painting, from which he derives his livelihood. In partnership with his brother, Chester, he is about to step into the business world by building and operating an apartment house in Flagstaff. Franklin and Mary Jane are so well thought of that Franklin was elected to the presidency of the Parent-Teachers Association. Both Franklin and Mary Jane are very active in working for the Bahá’í Faith and conduct children’s classes every Sunday. Franklin was elected, as one of Arizona’s five delegates, to go to the April 1967 National Bahá’í Convention at Wilmette, Illinois, which chose the 1967 National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of the United States. He is a member of the Bahá’í National Teaching Committee. In the words of a friend: “He is quite a guy.”
Echoes From Southampton County
A review of William Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner (New York: Random House, 1967)
By EDWIN S. REDKEY
WHAT WAS IT LIKE to be a slave? What was it like to be owned by another man, to have one’s life forever controlled by a master, to be considered a farm animal?
The question may seem remote in the modern world where slavery is long past, where in recent years Negroes have made so much progress. But we cannot easily escape the heritage of slavery. Like a receding flood it left a thick coat of mud on the land; and wherever we walk, North and South, city and farm, the clay of racism clings to our feet.
At the root of our current racial problem lies slavery. The traditions of segregation and prejudice stemmed from it. It was slavery that started us thinking of black people as the lowest class in American society. Black ghettoes got their start in the slave quarters of antebellum southern cities. To change the racial climate we must understand our racism, whether it be blatant, obvious and cruel, or subtle, sophisticated, and just as cruel; we must know what it was like to be a slave.
The “civil rights revolution” brought with it a new interest in the slave system. Historians have revised old ideas about the economic and institutional aspects of slavery. They have studied the slave trade and the African background, they have compared North American slavery with that of the Latin Americans, and they have investigated the impact of slavery on white men as well as black. But they still cannot tell us what it was like to be a slave. Professor Stanley Elkins, in his book Slavery, A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life, tried to describe the mentality of the slave by comparing it to the psychology of the victims of Nazi concentration camps in World War II. The analogy was useful but had many shortcomings. And we still could not know what it was like to be a slave.
In the final analysis, perhaps only the fiction writer can make us know how slavery affected the slave. After all the history and psychology have been studied, it takes a work of creative imagination to put us into the place of a bondsman, to let us experience through him the thoughts, frustrations, hopes and hates of an American Negro slave. William Styron, author of several well-received novels, has undertaken to tell us how slavery affected one group of slaves. To avoid the vast anonymity of the slave system and to provide the dramatic action necessary for a good tale, Styron chose to resurrect Nat Turner, leader of a bloody but unsuccessful rebellion against whites in Virginia’s Southampton County in 1831.
Nat Turner’s revolt was the only slave rebellion
in the United States to result in large-scale
violence. Some fifty whites and, after reprisals,
probably two hundred Negroes died.
Driven by a religious vision, Nat led about
[Page 47]
[Page 48] seventy slaves on a desperate break for freedom.
The revolt failed, the rebels were captured,
tried and hanged. Before his execution
late in 1831 the leader of the revolt talked at
length with a lawyer who recorded Nat’s account
of the affair, an account soon published
as a pamphlet entitled, “The Confessions of
Nat Turner.” From that pamphlet historians
know some of what went on in the minds of
the rebels. From the accounts of whites near
and far, from the records of southern state
legislatures and from the reports of travelers,
we know that the shock waves of Nat Turner’s
revolt traveled far and fast throughout the
slave states. New fears of slaves once considered
docile, new laws to control the blacks
and a general hardening of relations between
the races resulted. They were accompanied
by new bitterness toward abolitionists who
were just starting the campaign of agitation
that culminated in the Civil War. Thus Styron
chose an incident both vivid and historically
significant.
AS FICTION the book is a success. Although we know from the very first page that Nat led a rebellion which failed, Styron weaves the story so skillfully that interest and suspense are maintained throughout. The author speaks through the voice and consciousness of Nat himself, an important feature which heightens the sense of reality—slavery as seen by the slave. Through Nat’s reflections while in prison, Styron imagines what the rebel’s youth and experience might have been, what his motives for the rebellion could have been, what he possibly envisioned as its final result. Through flashbacks Styron reveals layer after layer of Nat’s supposed reactions to his plight as an intelligent, educated slave in whom despair and hope combine to bring a cataclysm. It is a well-told tale, eminently worth reading for the story alone.
But The Confessions of Nat Turner will be read for more than just the story. Because of its popularity and persuasiveness it will surely become a widely accepted portrait of slavery, the only history of slavery that many readers will ever see. It is important, therefore, to ask how valid is Styron’s history.
The rebellion itself is described accurately. By balancing the original “Confessions” with the historian’s findings, Styron has produced a version which is as close to telling how it happened as any one will ever know. Although the author took some liberties to enliven the story, although he gave some of the rebels arguable motivations, the time and place of the violence, its course and its aftermath, are all historically accurate.
THE SLAVERY BACKGROUND of Nat’s revolt raises questions, however. To be sure, Styron has done his research diligently and has been coached by the most prominent scholars. He portrays tidewater Virginia in economic decline as exhausted soil failed to support the large plantations of tobacco once grown there. When long-established communities collapsed, planters sold slaves to raise capital and often moved both black and white toward the fresh cotton lands of Alabama and Mississippi. The author recognizes, furthermore, that most Virginia slaves in 1831 worked on farms with one or two other blacks rather than on large plantations—their owners, rather than being southern aristocracy, were closer in attitude, education and class to the poor whites of later times. The problem, then, lies not with Styron’s vagueness or ignorance but with his precise picture of place and time. It would be erroneous for readers to generalize from his vivid account that slavery was always and everywhere as he describes it. The institution was a flexible one, changing to meet the economic and social problems of the day. There were vast differences between, say, the Virginia tobacco plantations of Nat Turner’s time and the days of young George Washington, or between the cotton fields of the Carolina Piedmont and the cane brakes of Louisiana, or the cotton plantations of Alabama and the slave quarters of the cities. Styron’s accurate view of Nat Turner’s environment is to be appreciated but not generalized.
[Page 49]
Even more caution is necessary when considering
Styron’s interpretation of the effects
of slavery on the slaves themselves. He introduces
us to a number of slave personalities
ranging from table servants to field hands,
from would-be-white sycophants to nasty,
foul-mouthed rebels to religious zealots. None
of them fits the stereotype of “Sambo”, the
happy, thoughtless, dependent Negro so popularized
by Southern defenders of slavery. But
none of Styron’s slaves lived on large plantations
or worked in cotton fields or had been
sold into the deep South. Each of the Negroes
he portrays reacts to life in different but thoroughly
believable ways. It is unsafe, however,
to generalize that all or even most slaves were
like them. After all, this was the only major
slave uprising to reach the level of violence,
and Styron must motivate his characters to
their actions. Were he to deal as fully with
the masses of slaves who did not openly rebel,
the experience of slavery might look quite
different.
Nat Turner, of course, was unique. In his education, his experiences under various masters, his religious views and his leadership ability, he was unlike any other man, black or white. Styron has made the most of Nat’s uniqueness by seeing the entire story through his eyes, by reacting to opportunities and insults as be imagined Nat would have done, and, in general, making Nat think as Styron himself might have thought about being a slave. This achievement has great appeal and interest for those of us who think as Styron thinks about the almost unthinkable fate of being enslaved. Herein lies not only the genius of the book but also its greatest potential pitfall. The author makes us know what it might have been like to have been Nat Turner, the rebel slave, but we still do not know what it was like to be one of the millions who did not rebel. These cautions notwithstanding, Styron has created a remarkable novel which teaches us much, not only about Nat Turner and slavery but about the human spirit and its perennial search for freedom.
THE TIMING of this book is remarkable. Although it appears at a time when Negro unrest, black power and racial violence are in everyone’s mind, Styron began work on the novel many years ago, settling into serious writing on it during the heyday of the nonviolent protests. He could not know, of course, that the racial picture would turn to violence. But after studying Nat Turner’s revolt and its causes, he might have predicted that oppression would once again drive Negroes to rebellion. Read this book, but beware—in learning of the past you will become painfully aware of the present.
Letters to the Editor
. . . what has meant most to me in World Order have been the articles on history which may be because at least one of the magazine’s editors is a historian and also because I am a student of history myself and collecting material for a book involving Bahá’í history.
I was also much interested in your articles on a universal language, having been in touch with the Association for a World Language in New York . . .
I congratulate you on the excellence of your magazine and predict that it will develop into a discussion medium of truly cosmopolitan scope that no statesman will dare ignore.
- Guy Murchie
- Marlborough, N.H.
. . . I have enjoyed the magazine so much
that I would like to have all the issues
of it from now on.
I do have one comment on the magazine itself. While I am personally delighted with its high intellectual content, I wonder whether it is perhaps a bit too high for most people to really enjoy. I can judge only by my own reaction and that of my husband, of course, but we are both teachers with Master’s degrees, and have struggled through a great deal of difficult reading material. Even so, we found some of your articles, particularly in the spring issue, rather difficult to get through. We wonder if perhaps “World Order Magazine” will therefore appeal to a very restricted audience. In our opinion this would really be a shame, as it is basically a very fine endeavor.
- Edith P. Saccuzzo
- Wapping, Conn.
INTERCHANGEABLE HUMAN PARTS?
Though I agree with most of the ideas in the article by Mary Fish in the last issue of the World Order, I take exception to the statement: “Medicine will use the principle of interchangeable parts, exchanging new hearts for old.” Considering the wide-spread publicity given heart transplants attempted in Africa and here, I cannot believe that man can be considered a mechanism, as an automobile or washing machine with interchangeable parts.
For every heart transplant someone else must die, in an auto accident which might have been prevented if we had more respect for life, or from some disease which will be or could be prevented by medical research. The sensational publicity given a doctor who performs a heart transplant is in itself, I believe, a moral hazard. The question arises, Could there be a temptation to perform a heart transplant knowing it would fail but increase the prestige of the doctor? Being a professional person does not guarantee humility and selflessness. Some doctors and other professional people are, some are not.
In his book, Success Is Within You,
Howard Whitman reports on 142 executives
of a large corporation at Mayo’s,
their heart problems, ulcers, nervous and
mental diseases caused in part by their
drive to success. Two doctors in 1941
checked the correlation of heart attacks
on Wall Street with the stock market
ticker. Of one patient he writes, “Obviously
he did not need physical patching
up, but philosophical rehabilitation.”
He draws the conclusion that many such
[Page 51] men have an adolescent philosophy of
life.
It would be interesting to have an article on the medical practices of the future, if any such trends are evident today, as suggested by Bahá’u’lláh and ‘Abdu’l-Bahá and the effect of a wholesome philosophy of life on health and the probable decrease of heart problems and some other diseases when present day stress on material gain and possessions changes to other values.
- Alma Sothman
- Grand Island, Nebraska
RACE AND BRAZIL
I am writing to congratulate you on the wide variety of subjects treated in your magazine. I was particularly gratified to find the scholarly article on “Racial Attitudes in the United States and Brazil,” by Russell Hamilton, in the Summer 1967 issue. It seemed especially appropriate and timely since recently in Nashville, Tennessee, there had gathered nearly 200 teachers of Spanish and Portuguese, and school administrators, in response to an invitation issued by Vanderbilt University which was sponsoring the first of conferences for the promotion of the teaching of Portuguese in the public high schools of the United States. The Conference on EMPHASIS HIGH SCHOOL PORTUGUESE was held June 6, 7, 8, 1967, and I had been among those guests and participants newly impressed with the importance of Brazil as a neighbor country.
The continuing and intensifying interest in Brazil ought indeed to be considered even more desirable if, as indicated in Mr. Hamilton’s article, we in the United States can look to Brazil for a model of how the adjustment to racial differences in a population can be made more smoothly, and more equitably than we have thus far been able to achieve in our own North American “melting pot” venture, to which the mainland in Europe and the African continent had both contributed the major elements.
Portuguese culture borh in the Iberian peninsula and again in the Brazilian society of the New World reflects the fortuitous heritage of an age-old and deeply imbedded essentially democratic spirit of “oneness” evidenced by a frank admission of amalgamation and intermarriage. This fact is corroborated by the scholarly conclusion of the researcher’s sociological findings in Mr. Hamilton’s article.
Mr. Hamilton’s reference to the “cult of the morena” reminds one of a similar focus in the European period of the Middle Ages and the early Renaissance in Spain and Portugal when there was developed the “cult of my lady-fair” reflected in an exaggerated set of patterns for social behavior and extreme gestures of courtesy in courtly manners now come to be known as “chivalry.” The deliberate exaltation of the image of her ladyship and the high esteem in which the woman was to be held by the true and valiant knight is often reflected in the poetry and prose fiction as a recognizable “cuadro de costumbres”, realistic in its portrayal of the factual attitudes of men toward their ladies at public occasions, and romanticised colorfully in literature.
I want to thank you for making available to the public this highly scholarly and carefully researched as well as honestly objective study pointing up the superior handling of the real or imagined problems of racial differences and the more brotherly and human solution which Brazilians have found workable in their land.
- Sarah Martin Pereira
- Professor of Spanish
- District of Columbia Teachers College
- Washington, D.C.
Authors and Artists
JAMES C. HADEN is Professor of Philosophy at Oakland University and author of articles in his field.
ALESSANDRO BAUSANI, a renowned Orientalist, is Professor of Persian Literature and Islamistics at Rome University and author of more than 12 books. Dr. Bausani serves also as Vice Chairman of the National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of Italy.
MARZIEH GAIL has distinguished herself as a versatile writer and translator. Among her works are The Sheltering Branch and Avignon in Flower. Her articles “The Bright Day of the Soul” and “The Voice from Inner Space” appeared in our Spring and Fall 1967 issues, respectively.
DAVID S. RUHE, M.D., former Professor of Medical Communication and Associate Professor of Preventive Medicine and Public Health at the University of Kansas School of Medicine, is presently Secretary of the National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of the United States. His varied accomplishments in the medical field include authorship or co-authorship of over 45 articles and books and the production of approximately 60 medical motion pictures. Dr. Ruhe is also a Reserve Medical Director and member of many honorary and professional medical societies.
RUSSELL I. BOYCE is a civil engineer who has worked in his profession and taught the Bahá’í Faith among Navajo Indians.
EDWIN S. REDKEY is Assistant Professor of History and American Studies at Yale University where he teaches Negro history.
ART CREDITS. p. 3, lithograph by Sue Shappert; p. 11, woodcut by Sharon Reilly; p. 16, lithograph by Sue-Shappert; p. 25, lithograph by Sue Shappett; p. 32, Australian aboriginal bark painting by Milingimbi, from the collection of Edward L. Ruhe; p. 35, casein by Franklin Kahn; p. 43, pen and ink drawing by Franklin Kahn; p. 47, lithograph by Lori Neuzil; back cover, Australian aboriginal bark painting by Gowarrin, from the collection of Edward L. Ruhe.
SUE SHAPPERT, a highly creative lithographer, is a 1968 candidate for a degree in Fine Arts from Layton School of Art in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
SHARON REILLY, a promising young artist, attends the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee.
FRANKLIN KAHN, a member of the National Teaching Committee of the Bahá’ís of the United States, is a Navajo commercial artist.
LORI NEUZIL, an art consultant for World Order, is a colorist-painter and a candidate for a degree in in Fine Arts from Layton School of Art.
Correction
“Unsuspected Effects of Religion on Your Personality,” by James J. Keene, Winter 1967 issue, pp. 37-46.
P. 38, col. 1, line 34: “experiences and observations of members”; p. 38, col. 2, line 44: “social rigidity and inhibition, and fear of and”; p. 40, col. 1, line 16: “ied is also true. for most readers of this article.”; p. 41, col. 1, first line of subhead: “Personal Well-Being in an”; p. 42, col. 1, last line: “non-affiliates tend to think that the most important part of religion is not doctrine and ritual, but rather inner, personal experience. These differences between non-affiliates and members of old estab-”; p. 44, col. 1, line 13: “Bahá’ís also distinguish between two as-”