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Spring/Summer 1987

World Order

Faith, Reason and Society in Bahá’í Perspective

Nader ‎Saeidi Saiedi‎

The City of Tomorrow

Alexander Garvin

Images of Peace in World Literature

Bret Breneman

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World order

VOLUME 21, NUMBERS 3 & 4 • PUBLISHED QUARTERLY

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

Editorial Board:

FIRUZ KAZEMZADEH

BETTY J. FISHER

HOWARD GAREY

JAMES D. STOKES

Subscriber Service:

CANDACE MOORE HILL

WORLD ORDER is published quarterly by the National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of the United States, 415 Linden Avenue, Wilmette, IL 60091. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to WORLD ORDER, 536 Sheridan Road, Wilmette, IL 60091.

The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the publisher, the National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of the United States, or of the Editorial Board. Manuscripts can be typewritten or computer generated. They should be double spaced throughout, with the footnotes at the end. The contributor should send three copies—an original and two legible copies—and should keep a copy. Return postage should be included. Send manuscripts and other editorial correspondence to WORLD ORDER, 415 Linden Avenue, Wilmette, IL 60091.

Subscription rates: U.S.A., Canada, Mexico, 1 year, $10.00; 2 years, $18.00; single copies, $3.00. All other countries, 1 year, $15.00; 2 years, $28.00; single copies, $3.00. Airmail, 1 year, $20.00; 2 years, $38.00.

WORLD ORDER is protected through trademark registration in the U.S. Patent Office.

Copyright © 1989, National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of the United States. All Rights Reserved. Printed in the U.S.A.

ISSN 0043-8804

IN THIS ISSUE

2 Toward a New Social Reality Editorial

4 Interchange: Letters from and to the Editor

9 Faith, Reason, and Society in Bahá’í Perspective by Nader ‎Saeidi Saiedi‎

23 Sand poem by Bob Mullin

23 Starting poem by Terry Ofner

25 The City of Tomorrow by Alexander Garvin

47 Images of Peace in World Literature by Bret Breneman

64 Authors & Artists in This Issue

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Toward a New Social Reality

HOW CAN one react other than with dismay and despair to the recent cluster of such events as the natural catastrophe in Armenia, the vicious destruction of Pan Am Flight 103, or the violence in Beijing and other cities of China? The magnitude of suffering defies easy sermonizing and seems to attack the idea of reason itself.

But even in the context of such painful moments and without presuming to underestimate their tragic dimensions, one can, without straining, find encouragement in countervailing signs of basic human goodness growing out of these events. The Armenian earthquake produced a cooperative international outpouring of assistance and an unprecedented Soviet willingness to accept it. The conflict in China evoked widespread sympathy. In many other areas of life those who seek answers and solutions to problems as diverse as transportation safety, the environment, or economic dilemmas increasingly speak of comprehensive approaches based on consultation and principle. Every day one sees evidence of an emerging shared perception that universal solutions are not only possible but are the only approach to problem-solving. The superpowers seem to be arriving at the now shared goal of the abolition of nuclear weapons; and on the environmental front progress is being made in international agreements concerning the cleansing of life-giving air and water.

The contradictions between the frequent disasters and the strength of will for the universal good remind us of the biblical light under a bushel; invisible though it be, the light is there and will inevitably show itself. In the unending search for solutions by untold men and women of goodwill are evidences of the finest, most reassuring human qualities.

The immediate response to crisis has its counterpart in the larger geopolitical reality. In the midst of border clashes, trade wars, and many other kinds of conflicts, one can see there, too, the gradually but persistently emerging outlines of new social structures based on the premise that universal principles are inseparable from the public interest. The identification and declaration of such principles are becoming an integral part of public discourse at all social and political levels, whether by political leaders or advocates of public causes.

The most significant pattern in recent events is not created solely by the recurrence of violence but is interwoven with the parallel evidence that humankind is moving toward a fundamentally new social reality, tangibly closer to “The Great Peace towards which people of goodwill throughout the centuries have inclined their hearts. . ”

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Interchange LETTERS FROM AND TO THE EDITOR

NADER SAIEDI has conducted a controversial, illuminating, novel, original inquiry into the classic problem of faith and reason, but with surprising twists. He presents a clear demonstration of what Bahá’ís mean when they say that their faith is a religion for our time. His treatment of what he calls the “historicity of the divine mind” is challenging and controversial, in that his view of it as subject to change in reaction to temporal or historical necessity is not shared by all Bahá’ís, nor would it be, we imagine, by most Jews and Christians. A view apparently more commonly held among Bahá’ís is that the divine intellect transcends space and time and that its essential principles, though unknowable by human beings in their most abstract state, are realized in human affairs as time-bound, history-bound Revelations that give rise to Dispensations. As of this writing, there does not seem to be any Bahá’í text or set of texts that would resolve this difference of interpretation. But read what he has to say; he may convince you. We shall probably hear more on this subject in future letters to the editor! It does not appear, however, that the resolution of this question one way or the other would affect the rest of Mr. Saiedi’s argument, which, at certain moments, made us want to cheer.

• • •

ALEXANDER GARVIN, on three previous occasions, has drawn our attention to choices we make about our city environments: “Three Faces of Harlem” (Winter 1967), “Could Robert Moses Do It in the Seventies?” (Fall 1974), and “We Can Solve Urban Problems” (Winter 1982-83). In this issue he gives us a clear discussion of the pros and cons of urban renewal, in terms of Le Corbusier’s dream of the City of Tomorrow, and shows a nice balance between ideals based on attractive theories and the exigencies of real life. Once again he makes it clear that we can, if we choose, opt for environments that foster our physical and spiritual well-being.

• • •

BRET BRENEMAN in an interesting series of images/archetypes sets forth recurrent figures in mystical literature, sacred and profane, and explicates them with enviable clarity.

• • •

WE HAVE received a remarkable letter in response to Joseph Weixelman’s article (Fall 1985) on the Navajo religion. Jeffrey Kiely’s communication is substantive and thoughtful, and it is critical in the best sense of the word. Fully recognizing the value and interest for our readers inherent in Weixelman’s piece, he notes, kindly and firmly, certain lapses from the highest standards of scientific scholarship. We editors are taking his lesson much to heart, particularly with respect to such practices as peer review. The perusal of his letter is rewarding, not only for what additional light he sheds upon the Navajo religion but also for the clarity of [Page 5] his view of the methodology that should be observed in any kind of serious, fact-based writing. That is why, in spite of its being rather longer than one expects a letter to the editor to be, we are reprinting a major part of it.

To the Editor

THE NAVAJO RELIGION AND THE BAHÁ’Í FAITH

Many of us who are involved in the development of the Bahá’í Faith on the Navajo Reservation were excited to find Joseph Weixelman’s article “The Traditional Navajo Religion and the Bahá’í Faith" included in your Fall 1985 issue. . . . I commend the editorial board for seeing its value as a unique contribution toward a broader understanding of the diversity of culture and thought found within the Bahá’í Faith. I also suspect it must be very stimulating for WORLD ORDER subscribers to read about a coherent, living religious tradition which is neither “Eastern” nor “Western” in conventional terms (though similarities with certain Eastern, as well as many rural/indigenous, religions are sometimes strong).

Mr. Weixelman has performed a great service by sharing his reflections on and research into the interplay of Navajo Tradition and the Bahá’í Faith. He would enjoy knowing that it is a subject which many Bahá’ís on the Reservation think about quite often! It is, moreover, a subject which deserves further research and dialogue—an effort in which I hope an increasing number of Navajo Bahá’ís will enjoy participating. I see Mr. Weixelman's article, then, as a step toward an understanding of the subject, rather than as a conclusive, definitive statement. From various tentative statements contained in the article, I sense Mr. Weixelman would agree. My response here, too, should be considered as part of the dialogue, rather than as definitive (except with respect to a few points of fact which I may raise).

Given my generally positive feeling toward Mr. Weixelman’s article, I nevertheless have some concerns regarding the research methodology, and I feel somewhat nervous about some of the conclusions he derived from his research. With regard to the methodology, I can appreciate the constraints Mr. Weixelman must have been under in preparing his academic paper back in 1981. To have secured interviews with the four Navajo men selected (and they were fine selections!), and in such a short time frame, should be considered a major achievement, as many of us who have tried “tracking down” these same men can appreciate! They are extremely active, much in demand, and not always prone to adhere to predictable time frames. Further, the task of placing the thought of Navajos into mental categories constructed by a non-Navajo must have been tricky indeed. Added to these challenges must have been that of securing, in short fashion, the trust of the interviewees. In all of these respects Mr. Weixelman’s efforts are admirable, as is the work of synthesizing and organizing all of the diverse information gathered, including his clear overview of Navajo religious thought.

On the Other hand, I feel that the paper could have been strengthened (especially in preparation for publication in WORLD ORDER magazine) through consideration of the following points:

[Here Mr. Kiely offers advice of a scholarly and editorial nature, recommending strengthening of interviewing techniques and books on ethnographic methodology and making further recommendations of a technical nature. The letter is on file and is accessible to any of our readers who might request a copy. We offer the following summary, in our own words, of points that would have general interest:

1. The interviewing might have benefited from the inclusion of a Navajo co-interviewer.

2. The essay might have benefited from prepublication review by non-Navajo Bahá’ís living on or visiting the Reservation.

[Page 6] 3. Navajo women should have been included among those interviewed.

4. Six years have elapsed between the initial preparation of the article and its publication in WORLD ORDER. Some updating would have been useful, in that there have been interesting developments in the progress of the Bahá’í Faith on the Reservation, and that personal facts— changes in occupations, places of residence—may have changed during that time.

The rest of the letter follows]:

5. With regard to the conclusions drawn by Mr. Weixelman from his research, his generalizations must be considered limited by the scope and methodology of the research—as salutary and constructive as they were. One wonders, for instance, whether it is appropriate to categorize the Navajo Tradition and the Bahá’í Faith as “different and distinct” religions, inasmuch as the Bahá’í Teachings affirm that “this [the Faith of Bahá’u’lláh] is the Ancient Faith of God, eternal in the past, eternal in the future,” and that all the religions of the world are one in essence and purpose. Further, do the Navajo Bahá’ís really see their Tradition as distinct from and “other than” the Bahá’í Faith—or do they see the Faith as a continuation, revitalization, and upliftment of their own ancient Faith? Does the developmental experience of the Bahá’í Faith on the Reservation represent the coming together of two disparate “religions,” or the infusing of the Navajo “Beauty Way” with the new universal spirit of the Bahá’í Teachings?

On the other hand—and Mr. Weixelman does attempt to address this in different terms—one might say that the religious practices of most pre-Bahá’í religious societies have greater or lesser points of variance from the pattern of Bahá’í life. The Navajo Way, as it has evolved and changed over the centuries, is no different. The challenge which the Navajos face, then, may be to discover points of contact between their traditions and the new Faith of God now spreading its benevolent influence throughout the planet. Indeed, they may discover that those points of contact are, in fact, enduring elements of that eternal Reality which is the one Religion of God of which the Bahá’í writings teach, and from which the Navajo Way derives the essential part of its heritage. Their challenge might also be to retain the unique beauty and strength of the Navajo religion and culture, while letting go of the nonessentials— i.e., certain social practices, rules, taboos, and arrangements which will be outgrown in this New Age, as well as certain residual beliefs which have accrued to the Navajo traditional religion over time, but which, the Navajo friends may find, lie outside the Path of Truth as revealed by Bahá’u’lláh.

Mr. Weixelman was able to discover numerous “points of contact” between Navajo traditional religion and the Bahá’í Faith, and in interviewing four prominent Bahá’í men, he found that “for none of these four people did the religions seem to conflict.” He found that some Navajo Bahá’ís are re-attracted to the traditional ways upon becoming Bahá’ís and that they feel comfortable supporting and engaging in traditional religious and healing ceremonies. In our experience, there is some diversity of feeling and opinion about such matters among the Navajo Bahá’ís, but there does appear to be a more general teaching which attracts one and all—namely, the spirit of respect, cultural support and appreciation, religious and racial tolerance which the Bahá’í Faith expresses, as well as the “urge toward unity” which is a uniquely Bahá’í contribution to the revitalization of all peoples.

The discrepancies between modern-day Navajo religious practice and the Bahá’í Faith, which Mr. Weixelman refers to, will in time be resolved by the Navajo Bahá’ís themselves—with the help of others. I trust that Mr. Weixelman's study will contribute to such resolutions.

In conclusion, I would like to reaffirm my appreciation of and gratitude for Mr. Weixelman’s efforts to understand the interplay of Navajo Tradition and the Bahá’í Faith and to share his findings with the Bahá’í world. I look forward to further exploration of this fascinating subject by an ever-broader group of Navajo and non-Navajo Bahá’ís and scholars.

JEFFREY G. KIELY

Houck, Arizona

SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT

I recently had occasion to re-read your Spring/ Summer 1985 issue on social and economic development, about which I would like to make two comments.

The articles by Breneman, Dahl, and Hein are, I feel, extremely valuable for your Bahá’í readers. As Bahá’ís enter the arena of social and economic development, we need to have confidence in our own capacity to recognize the practical utility of spiritual principles in solving the problems that confront our societies. The profession of development is gradually becoming disillusioned with the grassroots approach as a development panacea —it is not the magic formula that people [Page 7] hoped it would be. We need clear, inspiring examples —such as your authors provide—which demonstrate that development does not just happen when power is given to the people; it happens when people have power, and vision, and assurance of their purpose, and pure motives, and the willingness to sacrifice and endure pain to achieve their goals. Development requires people, knowledge, resources—and the sustaining, motivating, purifying power of religious faith. Allow me to thank Anne Breneman, Gregory Dahl, and Kurt Hein for documenting this unique concept so clearly.

I would also like to point out that the unpublished manuscript provided by the Office of Social and Economic Development at the Bahá’í World Center from which Gregory Dahl quotes in his article is no longer unpublished. I wrote it, and parts of it were published in Bahá’í News in January and July of 1987.

HOLLY HANSEN VICK

Arlington, Massachusetts

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Faith, Reason, and Society in Bahá’í Perspective

BY NADER SAIEDI

THE QUESTION of the relationship, the relative validity, and the authority of faith versus reason is a serious theological issue that has far-reaching social, political, economic, and cultural implications. The Bahá’í teachings concerning faith and reason offer a tolerant and dialectical perspective that transcends the regressive tendencies of both total rationalism and religious fundamentalism. In the Bahá’í view, reason is historical. Consequently, Bahá’ís accept both the validity and the limitations of reason and rational understanding. The Bahá’í sacred writings themselves indicate the dynamic, open, and substantive Bahá’í approach to the historicity of both faith and reason. Moreover, one may argue that a universal and historical Bahá’í theology offers the potential for (1) the development of a democratic social and political order, (2) an inclusive religious identity, (3) a culture of critical and rational discourse, and (4) a responsible utopianism. These four dimensions of the Bahá’í perspective may be analyzed, and their sociological implications compared to the alternate perspectives of fundamentalist religion and the “myth of total reason.”

The Historical Nature of Reason

A FUNDAMENTAL thesis of Bahá’í epistemology, made explicit in the Bahá’í sacred writings, is the idea that reason is both a valid, authoritative source of knowledge and, at the same time, a partial and limited source. Belief in the significance and validity of reason is so essential to the Bahá’í perspective that ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, the son of Bahá’u’lláh, the Prophet-Founder of the Bahá’í Faith, and the authorized interpreter of His father’s writings, has declared it to be one of the fundamental elements of Bahá’í theology:

Religion must be in conformity to science and reason. If a religion does not agree with the postulates of science nor accord with the regulations of reason it is a bundle of superstitions; a phantasm of the brain. Science and religion are realities, and if that religion to which we adhere be a reality it must needs conform to the fundamental reality of all things.

‘Abdu’l-Bahá also states that,

If religious belief and doctrine is at variance with reason, it proceeds from the limited mind of man and not from God; therefore, it is unworthy of belief and not deserving of attention; the heart finds no rest in it, and real faith is impossible. How can man believe that which he knows to be opposed to reason? . . . Reason is the [Page 10]first faculty of man, and the religion of God

is in harmony with it.

At the same time, the Bahá’í teachings emphasize the limitations of rationality and rational knowledge. According to Bahá’í philosophy, there are alternative means of approaching truth, each of which captures some specific aspects of concrete reality. Reason, therefore, is valid but not exhaustive. The Bahá’í approach demands that there be multiple perspectives on reality, that the nonrational dimensions of human understanding —the esthetic, the spiritual, the intuitive, the mystical—be developed. The Bahá’í thesis of rationality, consequently, avoids an obsessive rejection of all revelational forms of knowledge as found in positivism, mechanistic materialism, and scientism. ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, referring to the vacillation in ancient times between heliocentric and geocentric theories, writes:

Thus all the mathematicians disagreed, although they relied upon arguments of reason. In the same way, by logical arguments, they would prove a problem at a certain time, then afterward by arguments of the same nature they would deny it. So one of the philosophers would firmly uphold a theory for a time with strong arguments and proofs to support it, which afterward he would retract and contradict by arguments of reason. Therefore, it is evident that the method of reason is not perfect, for the differences of the ancient philosophers, the want of stability and the variations of their opinions, prove this. For if it were perfect, all ought to be united in their ideas and agreed in their opinions.

Moreover, a closer look at Bahá’í teachings makes it clear that the thesis of the simultaneous validity and limitation of reason is based on the notion of the historical nature of reason. Any apparent contradiction between a belief in reason and a simultaneous conviction that reason is limited is overcome by an understanding of the historical character of reason in Bahá’í thought.

The thesis of the historicity of reason is built on the idea that both the objective reality of the divine Word and the subjective reality of the human mind are constantly changing and developing. Knowledge—as a relationship between a changing subject and a changing object—therefore, must necessarily be dynamic and historical. The subject of knowledge (reason) is not a transcendental entity outside of life, history, and society. On the contrary, the Bahá’í view finds that all religious or rational understanding must accord with a specific stage of social and historical development, the structure of concrete possibilities available in a particular environment of time and space. This limiting definition implies that the social position of the human subject must shape the perspective and the theoretical structure of reason. Reason, therefore, is not an autonomous, neutral, transcendental, or static medium. Rather, reason emerges out of life; it is limited and formed by the experiences—historical, social, economic, cultural, generational, sexual, racial, ethnic, political, among many others— as well as the location, and the environment of any specific human being.

The dynamic and historical conception of reason in Bahá’í epistemology, as I understand it, has far-reaching theoretical consequences. The first and immediate implication is the necessity for continuous and progressive revelation. If all things are changing, and if the human subject is historical, it follows that no specific revelation can exhaust the totality of reality. In other words, the dynamic character of reality implies that both the ontological and the normative statements of a [Page 11]particular religion can only be valid for a specific social and historical situation. Both truth and value are relative and historically specific phenomena.

It is an established fact that the rules and norms of society are (at least partially) human-made phenomena the validity of which is conditioned upon the logic of the social totality. Further, these regularities among various social phenomena that can be studied sociologically are themselves only applicable to specific forms of society, to specific modes of production, to specific cultural and symbolic environments, and to a specific societal context. No statement or value that is valid for a specific historical context is necessarily valid in a foreign historical framework.

The only way a revelation could be made valid for all societies, all periods of history, and all contexts would be if the revelation restricted itself to purely abstract and general statements devoid of specific content or meaning. Such a transhistorical revelation would be equivalent to an assembly of words without content. Ultimately, such a revelation could only be expressed in a negative language —the language of silence.

The belief in the historical character and the relativity of revelation implies that it is not only human reason, but also the divine intellect, that is historical. Actually, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá has made apparently contradictory statements concerning the Bahá’í principle of the agreement of religion and reason. In some of His writings He has emphasized that it is the divine and universal intellect (aql-i kull-i ’ilahi) that must correspond with religion. In other places, however, He clearly states that it is ordinary human reason with which religion must come to terms.

Bearing in mind the historical nature of reason (both divine and human) we can see that there exists no contradiction in ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s statements. Rather, the historicity of reason implies that both propositions are necessary preconditions of any meaningful theology. The divine mind is the historical unfoldment of the unity of subject and object in the generative, creative, and progressive word of God. Consequently, if religion is to accord with the divine mind, it has to be reconstructed and transformed anew in each age in accordance with the dynamic and changing nature of that divine mind (which, in turn, corresponds to a changing social and historical reality). The Bahá’í teachings remain true to this theoretical construct. Bahá’ís maintain silence concerning the transcendent essence of God, which is thought to be unknowable. The divine mind or will is represented by the Manifestation of God, Who is renewed and transformed in each age in accordance with a new social and historical reality. Revelation is explicitly regarded as relative and changing.

The second implication of the doctrine of the historicity of reason is the necessity, the significance, and the validity of rational understanding, dynamic individual interpretation, and collective analysis. Revelation, and its symbolic and linguistic representations, can apply only to a specific period of time. This limitation means that the content of a divine revelation must be flexible enough to accommodate all the diverse and concrete potentialities of a particular age. Consequently, the sacred text cannot have only one valid and real meaning. In fact, the holy text must hold within itself all the diverse and dynamic potentialities of the age that will be defined and constrained by the structural requirements of that historical period. The sacred text, therefore, represents a potential source of alternative and dynamic meanings.

Since reason is historical, any understanding or interpretation of the divine word represents the fusion of a specific and limited [Page 12]perspective with the rich and multifaceted horizon of the sacred Text. Accordingly, no specific understanding of the word of God can exhaust the totality of the meanings of the revelation. The dynamic theology of the Bahá’í Faith emphasizes the agreement of faith and reason. While insisting on the historicity of reason, it demands the constant application of rational thinking, the utilization of diverse perspectives, and the appreciation of approaches from different cultural backgrounds to realize and actualize the potential of the Bahá’í revelation for the creation of a world civilization. Any claim that one form of understanding the revelation exhausts the historical complexity of the Faith is contrary to the Bahá’í spirit and threatens to transform a dynamic Bahá’í theology into a reified, ahistorical, static, and lifeless body of linguistic symbol.

One might note that the rejection of the notions of the historicity of reason and the progressive nature of revelation have caused serious and unresolvable intellectual contradictions in traditional theological discourse. Perhaps one of the most sophisticated debates over the relationship between faith and reason is to be found in the historical controversy between two Islamic schools of thought—the Asharite and the Mutazilite— in the early Muslim centuries. These two schools took contradictory positions on five essential theological questions. First, the Mutazilites believed in the validity of reason and rational understanding. For them, the use of rational discourse to discover the hidden meanings of the verses of the Qur’án was necessary and valid. The Asharites, on the contrary, rejected the validity of reason and called for a blind and literal understanding of scripture —that is, the Qur’án and the Islamic traditions. Second, the rationalistic premises of the Mutazilites led them to maintain that God is a transcendental reality devoid of attributes or determinations. Asharites believed in an anthropomorphic God, with attributes taken to be real and literal, and not metaphorical. Third, the Mutazilites believed that the word of God—the Qur’án—is not eternal and coexistent with God, but created and temporal. Hence for them, the verses of the Qur’án should be understood to be specific and applicable only to a relevant context. For the Asharites, however, the Qur’án was eternal and uncreated and, therefore, valid for any time, for any situation, and in any context. Fourth, Mutazilites accepted the notion of the law of causality and the laws of nature, while in Asharite theology causality was merely an illusion; every event in the world is directly created by the will of God, and nothing can be explained in naturalistic terms. Finally, Mutazilite theology admitted some freedom of will for individual human beings. Asharites advocated a deterministic philosophy. Unfortunately for the cause of reason, the religious and political battle between the rationalist Mutazilites and the literalist Asharites was concluded in the eleventh century by a decisive victory for the Asharites.

Admittedly, Islamic rationalism was trapped in an impossible paradox. On the one hand, the rationalists attempted to define the word of God as historical. On the other, they continued to regard the Islamic revelation as the final one, valid for any historical situation. To protect the rationality and relevance of Islam, Muslim rationalists eventually had no choice but to reduce their religion to empty theological symbols the content of which was to be provided by often contradictory theoretical, political, cultural, economic, and ideological concepts borrowed from non-Muslim civilizations. This tendency was particularly pronounced in the liberal Islamic movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The contradictions between the historical reality of the modern age and traditional Islamic tenets forced the liberals to choose reason over Islam, and at its expense. The result was a secular, Western ideology disguised in occasional [Page 13]Islamic symbols.

In contrast, traditionalist Muslim theologians chose fundamentalism as a solution to the contradictions they saw between the developments of the modern age and age-old Islamic precepts. Islamic fundamentalism rejects secular rationality and deplores much of the dynamic development of recent history. It calls for a return to an idealized and imaginary past. It is obsessed only with the most visible elements of traditional Muslim religiosity —the segregation of the sexes, the position of religious minorities, the dietary laws, the prohibition of alcohol, and the like; and it finds the world filled with sin and vice. Fundamentalism chooses blind, intolerant repression as a solution to the gap between a living and dynamic human reality and an outmoded and reified body of traditions.

The contrast between the rationalists and the traditionalists is made particularly clear when one examines their approaches to the issue of metaphors and allegories in the sacred texts. As the late Dr. ‘Alímurád Dávúdí of Iran has noted, the rationalists were able to point to explicit statements in the Qur’án to support their view that much of the scripture is couched in metaphorical statements the real meanings of which lie hidden beyond the literal, textual statements—for example, in the Qur’ánic verses that state:

He it is Who has sent down to thee the Book; in it there are verses that are fundamental—they are the basis of the Book—and there are others which are allegoric. Wherefore, those in whose hearts is perversity pursue such thereof as are allegoric seeking to create confusion and to pervert their meaning, and none knows the meaning thereof except Allah and those who are firmly grounded in knowledge.

Although they themselves used the words of the holy texts, the rationalists argued that the application of reason to discover the real, the intended, and the hidden meanings of the sacred scriptures was both valid and necessary; although they argued that to confine the meanings to only literal ones is to fabricate a religious understanding contrary to the will and purpose of the revelation itself, their arguments were rejected.

The traditionalists contended that the holy texts acknowledge the existence of metaphorical meanings, but they insisted that human reason cannot unravel those meanings. The hidden meanings, in other words, are known only to the revelation itself. Therefore, the only source for an understanding of the scripture is the text itself, and not human rational endeavor. One can easily note the circular, contradictory, and paradoxical nature of the argument and of the consciousness it generates.

Bahá’í philosophy resolves the paradox by offering the theory of progressive revelation, a concept that applies both between and within dispensations. For example, the Universal House of Justice, the international governing and legislative body of the Bahá’í Faith, is an institution founded on the premise of the historicity of reason. That institution offers dynamic guidance and inspiration through a dialogical, consultative, administrative structure—guidance that can be abrogated whenever conditions make it necessary to do so.

A third significant implication of the historical theory of reason is the Bahá’í insistence on “unity of station” (vaḥdat-i-maqám) for all human beings, and a vehement rejection of elitism and paternalistic rationalism. By the latter term is intended the thesis that confines rational understanding to a limited segment of the society whose decisions must be blindly followed by the irrational mass of the people. Bahá’í philosophy not only emphasizes the validity of reason but also insists on the rational capacity, responsibility, and independent judgment of each and every human being.

A position amounting to paternalistic rationalism [Page 14]is shared by such diverse ideological orientations as technocratic theory, economistic Marxism, and religious fundamentalism. The revival of rationalism in the Islamic modernist movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, for example, was oriented toward paternalistic rationalism and never toward a democratic theological or political vision.

Likewise, the recent rise of Shí‘ah fundamentalism in Iran finds its foundations in this paternalistic approach. The Usúlí school of Shí‘ah theology from the nineteenth century to the present fundamentalist resurgence has emphasized the exclusivist approach to rational thought. This tradition accepts the idea that religious jurists must use their own rational capacity to derive new and relevant injunctions from the basic Islamic texts and precepts (ijtihád). However, the tradition also insists that the ordinary Muslim is incapable of such independent rational judgment and, therefore, must imitate and obey a qualified doctor of the law (mujtahid). These Usúlí premises of Shí‘ah fundamentalism, then, present a paternalistic rationalism that functions to concentrate power in clerical hands and eliminates the possibility of democratic, critical, humanistic, or popular participation.

Bahá’í theology, however, vehemently rejects such paternalistic rationalism. The thesis of the historicity of reason implies that every human mind can capture some aspects of a manifold concrete reality, while no human mind can claim to encompass the whole. Similarly, every believer can grasp some aspect of divine revelation, and no one person can pretend to have exhausted its truth. Therefore, Bahá’ís reject the claim of any individual to a privileged monopoly of interpretation and understanding of the religion. On the contrary, all human interpretations may have some validity as long as they are tolerant of diversity and make no claim to universal or binding authority. The elimination of all clergy within the Bahá’í Faith and the rejection of emulation as a valid path to God are direct consequences of the premise of a unity of station for all human beings, a point made explicit by Bahá’u’lláh Himself in His Lawḥ-i Ittiḥád.

Democratic rationalism and dialogical hermeneutics are fundamental elements of the consultative structure of the Bahá’í administrative system and form the basis of the Bahá’í vision of an egalitarian world order.

The fourth and final implication of the theory of the historicity of reason is the rejection of such intolerant and exclusive rationalism as is created by the myth of total reason. By this term is intended any system or theory claiming any of the following ideas: the belief that reality is purely and exclusively rational (or, in terms of human action, that human behavior is rational); the belief that human reason has discovered the essence of social and historical reality, has created an exact science of society and history, and has discovered laws of change that can predict the future; and the belief that any approach to knowledge other than a rational or scientific one is meaningless, false, imaginary, or irrational —in other words, that faith, revelation, mystic intuition, existential illumination, and the like, have no validity.

An extensive critique of the premises of the myth of total reason would require a separate paper, if not a book. Suffice it to say that, as modern physics has demonstrated, reality is much more complex than a mechanistic rationalism would lead one to expect. Furthermore, as the sociological critique of the classical assumptions of positivist economic theory has shown, human action is not only rational and scientific but also normative and nonrational.

Both the voluntaristic theories of action and the critical theory of the Frankfurt school reject the reduction of normative human action to a logic of instrumental and technocratic rationality. The sociology of knowledge, as [Page 15]well as the theory of ideology, have demonstrated that reason is rooted in the interests and dynamics of life. Consequently, any notion of a disinterested, objective, unbiased approach to reality represents a false consciousness on the part of reason itself. Finally, as Max Weber and Georg Simmel, two of the greatest social theorists of this century, have argued, our knowledge of a vastly complex reality is not adequate to provide us with an exact science of history that would allow us to make categorical holistic propositions about the totality of being. The myth of total reason, then, overlooks the limits of sociological knowledge and advocates a kind of irrationalism in the name of reason.

The dialectics of the German philosopher, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831), and his phenomenology of reason, along with the Marxist theories of ideology and historical materialism, agree with the Bahá’í position that reason is historical, truth is relative, and reason is conditioned by social and historical reality. Hegel and Marx, however, differ drastically from the Bahá’í perspective when they refuse to apply the idea of the historicity of reason to their own theories, claim a myth of total reason, pretend an objectivity that transcends history, and declare an end of the dialectic.

For Bahá’í philosophy, dialectics can have no end. Reason is always conditioned, limited, progressive, and historical. The Bahá’í Faith openly declares its own revelation to be relative and explicitly anticipates the need for future revelations, progressive new horizons, and more advanced perspectives. Bahá’í philosophy refuses to be contaminated by any intolerant, static, or conservative philosophy that might exalt the status quo.

The Bahá’í belief in the historicity of reason is a powerful critique of the myth of total reason. The Bahá’í writings insist that reason is not a transcendental phenomenon but a product of history—an integral and organic manifestation of life in general and social life in particular. But if reason is merely a specific manifestation and presentation of life, and if its horizon is limited by its own historicity and form, it follows that the dynamic flow and concrete structure of reality can represent itself in diverse forms. These forms are parallel to each other, incommensurable, different but not contradictory, valid but not exhaustive of reality. They fulfill alternate purposes, needs, and potentialities of life and human reality. For example, art, religion, drama, science, ethics, and the like represent different presentations of life and reality through different logics, languages, conditions, and meanings. Bahá’í epistemology, accordingly, accepts the validity and the limitations of such diverse approaches to truth, accepts the complex character of the existential human mystery, and calls for a tolerant and multifaceted development of human potential.

Reason and Faith in Comparative Perspective

SERIOUS STUDENTS of comparative religions may encounter immediate difficulties in studying the Bahá’í Faith in relation to Islam, Christianity, Judaism, and other world religions. One problem of comparison arises from the unique formal structure found in Bahá’í scriptures. If one looks at traditional [Page 16]scriptures, one notes that their dominant elements are metaphorical statements, mythology, rituals, and commandments. In other words, such scriptures are primarily characterized by a symbolic, metaphorical, and poetic mode of discourse—and by extended, concrete, and detailed legal ordinances. It is not surprising, then, to find that the primary relationship between reason and faith in traditional theology has been one of opposition, hostility, contradiction, and intolerance.

Even those philosophers and rationalists who have tried to defend a rationalist theology have, for the most part, characterized the religious approach to truth as an inferior, limited—even a distorted—form of knowledge. According to such rationalist theologians of past traditions, religion should be accepted as a symbolic, metaphorical, and vulgar expression of philosophical truth and the meaning of life. The arguments they use are based on the assumption that religion is a social institution that must appeal to the minds and hearts of the common people and influence the behavior of the mass of society. Since the rational capacity of the masses is limited, and their understanding of pure, abstract, and complex ideas is necessarily inadequate, so the truth of pure revelation must be translated into a symbolic and mythological language in order to become an effective social instrument. Pure religion must be diluted to become a useful social institution.

For such rationalist theology, therefore, the essence of religious truth is nothing but pure philosophy. The prophet or founder of a religion is seen, ultimately, as an exceptional philosopher who has access to a special consciousness of truth—called revelation. The prophet is the embodiment of reason and intellect —the Word. However, social and political necessities and the need for the institutionalization of his teachings force the prophet to speak in the language of his community. He is a philosopher who cannot communicate his revelation directly but must choose the symbolic medium of metaphors, rituals, and concrete laws to convey his meaning to common human beings.

Such an approach to traditional theology can be summarized in three basic propositions: first, that the essence of prophecy and religion is philosophy and philosophical truth; second, that the language and the institutions of religion represent the vulgarization of philosophical truth for the sake of popularization (in other words, religion is the mediocre philosophy of the common people who cannot understand the complexity of higher truth); and third, that religion and the language of religion are limited and distorted media of knowledge inferior, and sometimes contradictory, to the culture of rationality and the rational knowledge or reality.

Such rationalistic assumptions can be found in a number of philosophical and sociological theories of religion. It was Abu Nasr Farabi, among the Islamic philosophers, who first systematically formulated a theory of prophecy as acquired intellect (aql-i mustafad). According to Farabi, the essence of religious truth is available to philosophers alone, while the masses receive only a metaphorical presentation of the pure truth of revelation. Following Farabi, Avicenna (Ibn Sina), a twelfth-century Muslim philosopher, developed and expanded the same theoretical approach.

Hegel’s philosophy of mind reaches the same conclusions. Hegel argued that the dynamic complexity of the totality of reality presents itself in three distinct forms. Although each of these forms captures only limited aspects of reality, the symbolic and the ceremonial presentations of truth are inferior to the comprehensive capacity of direct and speculative philosophy. Therefore, art and religion are seen as two prerational forms of understanding reality the ultimate potential of which is realized in a higher form of understanding [Page 17]that is rational and philosophical.

Within sociological literature, it is usually the theory of the routinization and institutionalization of charisma (or revelation) that most directly expresses the rationalistic critique of traditional religion. According to versions of this theory, the pragmatic requisites for the institutionalization of religion cause theoretical and practical contradictions between the pragmatic methods and the revelational ideals of religion—between practical means and pure ends. Such contradictions, in turn, lead to the distortion of religious truth and meaning, resulting in a superficial, legalistic, obsessive, literalist, and fundamentalist interpretation of religion that must oppose and contradict both rational discourse and scientific development. Although such institutionalization theories admit that at times a strict religious belief and mentality have encouraged the development of economic rationality, capitalism, and scientific discoveries (as with early Protestantism), these are seen as unintended consequences, latent functions, of religious belief that have resulted in the extension of rationality, not as conscious and theoretical functions of these religions.

A fundamental difference between the formal structures of the Bahá’í Faith and those of older religions lies in the fact that, as opposed to traditional scriptures, the Bahá’í sacred writings include a diversity of forms, languages, and approaches to a concrete and dynamic reality. Since the rationalist attack on religious theology is based on the assumption that the primary form of scripture is necessarily metaphorical, mythological, legalistic, ritualistic, and ceremonial, the student of comparative religion often accepts a paradigm that contrasts religious forms and language with philosophical and rational (or mystical) forms and languages, defining them as polar opposites.

Confronted with Bahá’í scriptures and the nature of the Bahá’í revelation, the religious expert will find such limited categories and formal definitions of religious expression inadequate. The Bahá’í writings address rational, mystical, and legal issues directly, explicitly, and extensively. They also present a number of diverse forms, languages, and categories. For example, the Prophet-Herald of the Bahá’í Faith, the Báb, has cited His extensive philosophical writings as evidence of the truth of His revelation—underscoring their importance in His mind. Bahá’u’lláh, Founder of the Bahá’í Faith, has produced diverse kinds of writings including mystical treatises (for example, The Ode of the Dove, The Seven Valleys, The Four Valleys); rational philosophical essays (such as the Tablet of Wisdom, the Book of Certitude, the Tablet to Maqṣúd); legal ordinances (such as the Most Holy Book, Kitáb-i-Aqdas); and others. Similarly, the writings of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá include many explicit discussions of philosophy, epistemology, polity, sociology, the nature of civilization, hermeneutics, and so forth. Finally, Shoghi Effendi, the grandson and appointed successor of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, has written on historical, administrative, and sociopolitical issues and developments.

Some epistemological implications of the unusual characteristics of the Bahá’í sacred writings might be noted here. The modes of expression and various languages in the Bahá’í texts reflect the Bahá’í belief that concrete reality is infinitely complex and that various forms of approach to this complex reality capture only limited aspects of the concrete whole; none of them exhausts the totality of dynamic truth. The fact that the Bahá’í revelation has assumed various forms of expression testifies both to the validity and to the limitation of various forms of human understanding.

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Accordingly, for Bahá’ís, reason, revelation, and mysticism are all significant and valid modes for the realization of the dynamic unfoldment of reality. Bahá’í epistemology, therefore, must reject any exclusive claim to validity or authority by any one criterion of knowledge; it strongly refutes the belief that any one form of understanding can possess a privileged or total encompassing of truth. Not surprisingly, therefore, neither obsessive, positivistic fascination with empirical science (with its arrogant rejection of the validity of any other form of knowledge) nor the intolerance of religious fanaticism, irrationalism, or fundamentalism (with its equally arrogant dismissal of historical influences on scripture and its appalling denial of the significance of human reason) is an acceptable epistemological position for Bahá’í philosophy.

In the history of traditional world religions there have been explicit philosophical and mystical formulations and approaches to religious beliefs and scriptural interpretation. However, such philosophy and mysticism were never plainly elaborated within the sacred scriptures of these religions. Instead, it was often a small minority of the believers within these faiths who articulated rationalist and mystic formulations to defend their religions. And this situation was usually the logical result of the confrontation of such religions with hostile and skeptical intellectual surroundings. The fact, however, that the language of scripture was nonrational provided a strong basis of attack on rationalists and mystics by priests and religious jurists. The latter also found in the scriptures a justification for a literal, legalistic, and ritualized reading of the holy words. Rational or mystical approaches to faith were usually rejected and their followers persecuted.

In the history of Islam, for example, the rationalist, mystical, and legalistic approaches to the Qur’án—and to the religion in general —can be clearly differentiated in the philosophers, the Ṣúfís, and the ‘ulamá, respectively. The period between the eighth and twelfth centuries A.D. witnessed the differentiation and articulation of all three approaches to the Islamic revelation. The subsequent dark ages of Islamic civilization were, however, characterized by the dominance of the ‘ulamá, and their legalistic school, over the rationalist approach. This development was accompanied by the defeat and degeneration of Islamic mysticism into a cult of personality and superstitious veneration of past saints. The hostility of religious institutions to the rationalist approach led to the frequent necessity for Muslim philosophers to practice dissimulation in their philosophical writings.

The Bahá’í theory of progressive revelation, with its sociological implications, provides some perceptive suggestions concerning the reasons for the differences between the formal structure of Bahá’í scriptures and those of previous religions. The idea of progressive revelation involves the notion that religious and spiritual progress is intimately related to the progress of other social and political institutions. Therefore, both the form and the content of divine revelation are historically specific phenomena whose dynamic nature and transformation must accord with the logic of the structural imperatives of society in its various economic, social, political, and cultural dimensions.

We might speculate, then, why reason could not have been a significant factor in the language and discourse, the content and practice, of traditional religions. Perhaps the social structures of past societies could not develop or sustain a popular, egalitarian, and public culture of rationalism and critical discourse. There are various reasons to believe this hypothesis.

Precapitalist societies were characterized by the maintenance of rigid distinctions between human beings in terms of status, caste, race, religion, and sex. These distinctions were accompanied by inequality before the law, differential political rights, and authority derived from status, class, and privilege of the individual speaker and were manifested in his or her language. In such a situation it is natural that all statements tend to be validated by authority rather than by rationality. In [Page 19] other words, the binding character of any statement becomes a function of the social class and status of the speaker, not of the rationality of his arguments.

The advent of capitalist economies signaled a qualitative break with past social orders. Rationality was emphasized through the differentiation of economics from the political realm and the increased reasonableness of all economic enterprises and organizations. The latter was achieved by emphasis on the division of labor, functional differentiation, individualism, the systematic application of scientific methods to production, and the rise of bureaucratic organization. These changes were motivated, of course, by a competitive urge for the maximization of profits.

But it was not only the Industrial (eco- nomic and social) Revolution and the French (political and social) Revolution but also the Communications (cultural and social) Revolution that was directly responsible for the triumph of the norm of rationality and rational discourse. In fact, this last revolution had the most direct influence on the structure of human perception and worldview, transforming ideas into products that could be made available to all human beings and creating the possibility of universal education. The Communications Revolution created relatively autonomous centers of information that could offer alternative accounts to those obtained from the traditional sources of information, the dominant institutions—whether the state, business, or religion.

Diversity of centers of information and analysis gave rise to writing as the dominant mode of communication. In contrast to local, situational, face-to-face interaction, the written word implies an audience of strangers— an audience that has no access to any nonlinguistic signification for the writer. Consequently, the author can take no assumption for granted. He or she must explicate ideas is an impersonal manner, with a critical orientation. This limitation results in an emphasis on reason, the development of a written culture of rationality, and the dominance of rationality in discourse.

Capitalism, in other words, may have been responsible for the entry of the public into the realms of political, cultural, and critical discourse. The language of the Bahá’í scriptures reflects this historical change, validating the new significance of rationality in human affairs. The theology of the Bahá’í Faith, in turn, offers alternatives transcending the institutional limitations on rationality that are imposed by the unequal distribution of social and economic resources in capitalist societies and the irrationalities of nationalistic political and economic frameworks.

Some Social Consequences of the Bahá’í Approach

THE BAHÁ’Í perspective on the relationship between faith and reason has important social, political, and cultural consequences. The social impact of Bahá’í epistemology might be compared with that of the opposing theories of religious fundamentalism and the myth of total reason. Fundamentalism rejects the validity and significance of reason and regards a dogmatic interpretation of scripture and tradition as the only source of authority. Total rationalism rejects faith and advocates an exclusivist myth of reason. A Bahá’í approach, however, balances the validity and significance, as well as the relativity and limitation, of both faith and reason.

Although extreme rationalism and fundamentalist religion seem to offer utterly contradictory views of reality, their sociological consequences and implications are rather similar. Both perspectives share an underlying reification, a compulsive fixation, which suppresses a perception of concrete, organic, and dynamic life. Their perspectives are mediated through extremist, intolerant, and static categories. One may contend that such perspectives lead to a repressive social and political order, an exclusivist identity, a culture of closed and distorted discourse, and an ideal of despotic utopianism.

One may also argue that Bahá’í epistemology will tend to lead to a democratic sociopolitical order, an inclusive identity, a culture of rational and critical discourse, and a [Page 20] responsible utopianism. The Bahá’í theory of knowledge and truth directly encourages a democratic mentality and a tolerant culture. The idea that truth is multifaceted, that no single approach or form can exhaust the totality of reality, suggests an open dialogue among people with diverse points of view. It tends to give democratic validity to the voice of each individual human being. Both religious fundamentalism and the myth of total reason demand the rejection of alternative points of view and, consequently, the repression of democratic norms.

Fundamentalism claims an absolute, ahistorical, exclusive, and unquestionable validity for the Word of God as contained in a body of scripture and tradition. Rejecting any alternative ideas, the fundamentalists define every person and every issue clearly as either godly or satanic and usually feel a divine mission to suppress, silence, or eliminate whatever is found to be satanic. They insist that their religion has provided complete answers for any individual or any social problem. Consequently, they reject any independent human rational judgment, human legislation, or human decision-making.

For religious fundamentalism, the concept of God has a repressive, rather than a democratic, interpretation. A democratic understanding of the divine suggests that each person is created by the same God and that, therefore, everyone carries within himself or herself a divine light, the image of God. All human beings must be regarded by one holding such a view as ends in themselves; and all are equal. A democratic notion of God provides the basis for the repudiation of human discrimination, repression, or violation of human rights.

Bahá’u’lláh, in His writings, has specifically validated a democratic interpretation of the notion of God. He states:

O CHILDREN OF MEN!

Know ye not why We have created you all from the same dust? That no one should exalt himself over the other. Ponder at all times in your hearts how ye were created. Since We have created you all from one same substance it is incumbent on you to be even as one soul, to walk with the same feet, eat with the same mouth and dwell in the same land, that from your inmost being, by your deeds and actions, the signs of oneness and the essence of detachment may be made manifest. Such is My counsel to you, O concourse of light! Heed ye this counsel that ye may obtain the fruit of holiness from the tree of wondrous glory.

Religious fundamentalism, by contrast, offers a repressive interpretation of God. From that point of view, since God is absolute truth, and since that truth is embodied in the Word of God—the scriptures and the traditions— human beings must be divided into two distinct groups: the believers and the unbelievers. The believers are the champions of what is good and true, while the unbelievers are absolutely evil. Consequently, the nonbelievers must be suppressed or purged, their freedom of speech denied, their civil and political rights revoked.

It is curious that the position of extremist rationalism, as represented by the myth of total reason, leads to the same repressive and antihumanist political consequences as are encouraged by the irrationalism of fundamentalist religion. The myth of total reason is, in fact, inherently antidemocratic. In the first place, its advocates claim to possess an absolute, “scientific” knowledge of social and historical reality. Such knowledge places them in a position to make dogmatic and categorical decisions for everyone. In fact, any theory that claims to possess an exact science of social reality sows the germ of intolerance and despotism. For example, one might point to Hitler’s “scientific racism” or Stalin’s “scientific” discovery of the Iron Laws of History. An extremist rationalism leaves no space for diversity, for disagreement, for criticism.

Although the myth of total reason insists [Page 21] that it has come to a rational understanding of the totality of historical reality, the fact is that our human knowledge of the whole is extremely limited and tentative. Consequently, extreme rationalists must resort to emotional generalizations and unfounded structural propositions in the guise of reason. The results are empty propositions, simplistic generalizations, and ideological fantasies dressed in the mantle of rationality. The myth of total reason, in other words, destroys reason and replaces it with substitute gratifications and irrationalism. Since concrete reality is always infinitely more complex than the human mind can grasp, dogmatic simplifications fall short. Advocates of total rationalism must, therefore, engage in censorship, suppression, and repression to hide the widening gap between their theory and the real world.

True to its democratic implications, Bahá’í epistemology leads to an inclusive human identity—a larger identity that is not defined in terms of any particular category, group, or ideology but is inclusive of all human beings. This identity is that of “world citizens,” “lovers of mankind,” “members of the human race.” Acknowledging the validity of diverse manifestations of life and truth, the Bahá’í Faith calls for a universal perspective. It rejects a division of the world into two clearly defined camps of champions of truth and spreaders of falsehood. On the contrary, an important part of Bahá’í identity is defined in terms of continuity, harmony, and unity with other human beings.

Both fundamentalism and extremist rationalism encourage a closed and exclusive identity. Since their perception of truth is absolute and static, they divide the world into black and white. The adherent is urged to dissolve his or her identity into a limited and intolerant group consciousness, to forego independent and critical judgment, and to justify aggression, even violence, against “others” as heroic. Between the extremes of individualism, absolute freedom, and the paralyzing consciousness of paradox, as versus the regressive safety and security of a fanatical dissolution of one’s identity in a closed, particularistic, and exclusive group, the Bahá’í Faith chooses the adventurous path of maturity, autonomy, and independent judgment.

As follows from this inclusive identity, Bahá’í epistemology tends to encourage a culture of rationality and critical discourse. This tendency is particularly the case because Bahá’ís acknowledge the significance and validity of other points of view. Therefore, there is need for constant dialogue, both within and outside the Bahá’í community. The open and inclusive structure of Bahá’í identity makes this dialogue a possibility. Such a dialogue prevents a closed and stereotyped mentality and culture.

In a closed community where discourse is limited only to insiders, common beliefs and assumptions tend to create a culture of closed, authoritarian, irrational, and restricted discourse. Persons within such a community take shared meanings for granted and avoid critical judgment. Gradually, a set of stereotyped ideas develops that is confirmed emotionally by the loud discourse of people who think similarly. The result is intolerance, fundamentalism, ossification, withdrawal from dynamic reality, and an impoverished culture of arrogant oversimplifications. Both the fundamentalist and the extreme rationalist perspectives encourage such a closed and restricted discourse.

The Bahá’í Faith offers its followers the possibility of an open culture of critical and elaborated discourse. While the Bahá’í community has not yet realized its potential for such a glorious culture, there is gradual movement in that direction. To realize the true Bahá’í vision, however, will require a break with the intolerant aspects of the heritages of our past cultures and a more effective participation in the social, economic, cultural, and political developments of our turbulent times.

Such realized Bahá’í perspectives will lead [Page 22] to a responsible utopianism. By this term is intended a theoretical and practical orientation that is critical of the status quo and provides a new vision of a future social order, while yet emphasizing the relative historical, partial, and limited nature of its utopian ideals. Such a responsible utopianism combines realism and idealism. It is not content with the present order but also refuses a simplistic reduction of all human problems and difficulties to a single cause. It does not claim that its utopia is transcendent or transhistorical. On the contrary, it aims only at the realization of certain concrete potentialities of the present age, while respecting the dynamic flow of history and emphasizing the partial and relative validity of its own utopian vision.

It is clear that the Bahá’í utopia is a responsible utopia. It calls for social activism and spiritual awareness; it demands struggle in the varied dimensions of human life; it recognizes the complexity of human problems; it accepts the need for future revelations and for the rise of new utopias that will correspond to changing social and historical conditions.

By contrast, the utopian visions of both religious fundamentalism and reified rationalism (as in simplistic Marxism) demand an end to history. They share the notion that all of human suffering can be traced to a definite cause or a few definite causes that, once eliminated, will bring about a harmonious paradise on earth. Such a static vision of wish fulfillment constrains critical practice and produces intolerant normative judgments. Again, when such views hold sway, the gap between dynamic history and the simplistic utopia creates the need for repressive action, distortion of communication, and the restriction of human freedom. Utopia, in other words, is turned to the service of nightmarish repression.

Conclusion

A BAHÁ’Í view of the relationship of faith and reason is based on the fundamental assumption of the historicity of both divine and human reason. Consequently, the Bahá’í ideology advocates a rationalism that is democratic rather than paternalistic, tolerant and inclusive rather than extremist and exclusive, and critical rather than closed or dogmatic. The significant social import of Bahá’í epistemology can be seen in its tendency to encourage democratic norms, an inclusive identity, a culture of critical discourse, and a responsible utopianism. In all these respects Bahá’í theology transcends the dogmatism of both religious fundamentalism and the myth of total reason. Such ideals hold the potential of creating a rich, complex, and open culture —a potential that should be protected from intolerant distortions derived from past cultural heritages.

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Sand

On hectic days

I become ocean-sprayed sand

shrouded in foam

that sparkles

in the dazzling sunlight,

and I forget for the moment

that in time,

in time,

my tiny finely shaped crystals

will be exposed again

in the quiet dampness

of the tide’s retreat.

—Bob Mullin

Copyright © 1989 by Bob Mullin

Starting

No journey

is started alone:

the look in the eyes

of the dog, the light

of a late-winter moon,

the sycamores

shedding their bark

in the thaw;

from each an offering,

if only mute parables

for this melting life,

this shedding of skins

and light, and of whatever

meek fragrance that is us

that meets us

when we step

through the gate.

—Terry Ofner

Copyright © 1989 by Terry Ofner

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[Page 25]

The City of Tomorrow

BY ALEXANDER GARVIN

THE post-World War II American city experienced cataclysmic change. Broad superhighways were thrust into its heart; its neighborhoods were bulldozed to be replaced by broad pedestrian plazas and shiny glass boxes. For a quarter of a century it seemed that the process of urban renewal would continue indefinitely. Then, in the early 1970s, it came to an abrupt end.

The impetus for these twenty-five years of urban renewal came from the notion that existing cities were terminally ill and that replacing them, section by section, with modern functional superblocks would result in an urban renaissance. The symptoms of the illness seemed obvious: decreasing population, employment, retail sales, and office occupancy; increasing physical deterioration and vacant buildings; and a declining tax base. The reasons seemed equally obvious: a functionally obsolete physical plant. The prescription: remove the congested, decaying portions of our cities and replace them with efficient, modern facilities.

Where did such ideas originate? How were they adapted to fit the political and financial realities of postwar America? How were they steadily transformed in the face of mounting opposition? Where and why did urban renewal prove effective? Why was it eventually jettisoned as a way of curing sick cities? Should it be resurrected? A review of the evolution of urban renewal in America should dispel some of the skepticism about the effectiveness of redevelopment as a technique for revitalizing our cities, help avoid repeating the past mistakes, and encourage its use where it will terminate functional obsolescence, eliminate physical structures or environmental hazards that are having a negative frictional impact on their surroundings, or recapture a market that has been lost to suburban competition.

The City of Tomorrow

THE MAN who provided both the rationale and the physical paradigm for urban renewal was the French architect, Charles-Edouard- Jeanneret Le Corbusier. In 1924 Le Corbusier wrote that “the city of today is a dying thing.” He called for “a frontal attack on the most diseased quarters” and their replacement by new districts “vertical to the sky, open to light and air, clear and radiant and sparkling.” It was a radical rejection of the “pack donkey’s way,” accidental urbanization along the path of least resistance. Instead, he proposed efficient cities with rational, functional, modern plans. In its idealized form the City of Tomorrow that he proposed separated land uses into three principal diStricts: a business center of office towers, a residential area of elevator apartment houses, and a manufacturing- warehousing district. The residential and office areas were essentially a continuous park divided by elevated highways into superblocks [Page 26]

Fig. 1. Le Corbusier’s idealized City of Tomorrow, 1922

1,200 feet square (Fig. 1). Citizens were to speed along the highways in their automobiles until they reached the appropriate branch road leading to an “auto-port” where they garaged their car and walked into a world of grass and trees, free of vehicular traffic and containing all the amenities of modern life.

While Le Corbusier was unclear about what public entity would implement the plan, he was clear, if very naive, on how to pay for it. The money would somehow come from “a fourfold or tenfold increase in buying power” derived from the more efficient, high-density use of land. “The profit achieved by the initiator of this change—the State—would serve to cover the expense” He was silent on how the government would raise the gargantuan amounts of cash to cover either initial condemnation costs or the even more massive costs of reconstruction. Nor did he give any consideration to the problem of relocating millions of residents and thousands of businesses.

The Precursors

THE City of Tomorrow was a logical step in governmental efforts to accommodate the growth of cities. The first modern redevelopment projects began in the sixteenth century when the Popes, primarily Sixtus V, condemned land in Rome to create an appropriate setting for the center of Christendom. They used the land they acquired to create [Page 27]

Fig. 2. Le Corbusier’s Plan Voisin for the reconstruction of Paris, 1925

public streets and squares that connected the city gates with major churches. The concern was with axial thoroughfares, and no real attention was given to what would be built in the rest of Rome.

Another step was taken in the nineteenth century when Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann and his employer Napoleon III transformed Paris from a medieval city of eight hundred thousand into a modern metropolis of two million in thirty years. They did it by building a vast array of public works: ninety-one miles of new and improved streets, dozens of squares, a water system, a sewer system, produce markets, railroad stations, riverfront quays, and thousands of acres of public parkland. Haussmann understood that, in addition to rebuilding the city’s infrastructure (streets, sewers, water mains, etc.) and public facilities, he had to rebuild its residential and commercial buildings. Only then could Paris accommodate its exploding population and burgeoning economy. So he used public works as a strategic government investment with which to spur private developers to build along the new boulevards and opposite the parks. These public works were financed with government bonds to be retired from the taxes on the new private construction they engendered. Today we would call this enterprise financing. Usually he condemned more property than was required and resold it to developers, thus determining where they would build. By providing fresh, cool, potable water at a natural pressure of 230 feet, sufficient to rise to the seventh floor of any spot in Paris, Haussman ensured that the new buildings would be built to the maximum height tolerated in a world without abundant elevators.

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In Papal Rome condemnation had been used to provide monumental public thoroughfares. In Haussmann’s Paris it was used to provide the infrastructure of public works that would spur private reconstruction in appropriate parts of the city. Le Corbusier proposed the next step: condemnation of whole districts to allow the efficient reconstruction of an entire city (Fig. 2). In physical terms this evolution to full-scale area redevelopment may have been relatively obvious. In economic and political terms it was a revolutionary rejection of capitalist market economics and a startling transformation of government (presumably national government) into an urban developer. At first, few cities even considered Le Corbusier’s ideas worth discussing. It was not until after World War II that his urban redevelopment concepts would be implemented. Ironically, they would be tried on a large scale in America, where government did not play the role of developer.

Adapting to Postwar America

THE City of Tomorrow was easy for Americans to accept. They had tamed a continent by rejecting what they, like Le Corbusier, saw as medieval topographic determinism and by adopting instead a simple grid—easy to survey and easy to subdivide into sellable lots. The practical functionalism of his designs for

A new world: a high speed world

A new life: a machine age

A new ideal: use of the machine to liberate the individual

was tailor-made for America. However, the City of Tomorrow had to be adapted to postwar America. This meant reinterpreting the constitutional prohibition against unjustifiable governmental acquisition of private property; reducing the size of these takings to fit financial and political reality; giving the private sector the major role in implementation; demonstrating that Le Corbusier’s vision of a new world would work when actually built; providing a rationale for a national urban redevelopment program; and creating financial inducements for local government, financial institutions, and private developers to build it.

Clearing the most diseased quarters of America’s older cities required interfering with private ownership of land, violating America’s faith in market economics, and combating both the suspicion of and the constitutional prohibition against any government condemnation except to meet the minimum needs of public health, safety, and general welfare. Before the Depression, local governments had only condemned private property for public works. The New Deal extended local condemnation to include land for government-owned public housing. Could this be extended to condemnation for area redevelopment?

In practical terms there is no way to redevelop blighted city districts without public condemnation of privately owned real estate. As soon as owners get wind of any city interest in their land, they will naturally refuse to sell, holding out for the highest possible price—often threatening the feasibility of a project. The hold-outs will in this way preclude both private assemblage of land and negotiated sale to government.

The Fifth Amendment to the Constitution permitted government acquisition of any citizen’s property for a public use such as a school or a firehouse provided that the taking was pursuant to “due process of law” and provided that the owner received fair compensation. However, the Fifth Amendment specified that the taking had to be for “public use.” To get around this taking issue, courts in almost every state had to find that the [Page 29]“elimination of slums and blight” was justified by the need to provide for the health, safety, and general welfare of the population and, thus, was constitutional.

Blighted though American cities were, the areas that could be agreed upon as slums were not the vast territories Le Corbusier had depicted in his City of Tomorrow. Moreover, even the wealthiest cities with the most powerful administrations could not afford the huge appropriations needed. Nor could they manage the political capital to defeat the opposition of the many residents and businesses to be relocated. Unlike Europe, where the national government had historically played the central role in urban planning and development, America had constitutionally relegated this role to local government. For the City of Tomorrow to take root in America, it had to shrink to fit financial and political realities.

The New Deal introduced social welfare programs that permanently altered our ideas about the role of government, but it did not alter most Americans’ profound faith in capitalism. Given the extraordinary postwar economic boom, there could be no question of making real estate development a state enterprise. Nevertheless, Le Corbusier’s notion of government as the prime agent of redevelopment was essential. Only huge corporations like General Motors, Du Pont, and AT & T could risk huge amounts of capital for massive urban redevelopment throughout the country. Such corporations knew little about real estate, for they were not in that business. The construction industry, dominated by small builders with little capital, was too fragmented. Thus a governmental role was necessary. The problem was combining that role with the know-how and energy of the real estate industry. The solution was to have the government pay for planning and initial site development and then to induce private developers to build according to approved redevelopment plans.

Before the City of Tomorrow could be adopted as a cure-all, though, it had to be tested to be sure it worked and would be accepted. Americans, more than the Cartesian French, mistrust anything that only makes theoretical sense. Fortunately New York and Pittsburgh tried Le Corbusier’s approach just as World War II was ending.

After World War I New York City had experimented successfully with legislation to induce developers to build new housing. The approach of the legislation was to provide real estate tax exemptions. The mayoral administration of Fiorello La Guardia, particularly its Parks Commissioner, Robert Moses, was eager to extend this proven approach to redevelopment. In 1943, after inducing the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company to express an interest in clearing the notorious “gas-house” district on the East Side of Manhattan, the city obtained legislation allowing it to condemn blighted areas for resale and reconstruction by private developers. Tax assessments in effect before redevelopment would continue for twenty-five years, but the return was limited to 6 percent on total capital investment.

The first project built under this legislation, the Redevelopment Companies Law of 1943, was Stuyvesant Town. To build it the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company had to clear eighteen blocks with sixteen thousand [Page 30]

Fig. 3. Stuyvesant Town, New York City: Le Corbusier’s Plan Voisin realized in a housing project

residents. Then it had to fit the City of Tomorrow into the seventy-five-acre “gas-house” district site. Metropolitan’s formula was an enclave isolated as much as possible from any negative surrounding influences and large enough to be “quite independent of any development that might come around it.” As in the City of Tomorrow, the traditional street grid was replaced by a housing project surrounded by trees, flowers, grass, playgrounds, curvilinear paths, stores, and parking (Fig. 3). While the 8,800-unit project was about twice the size of a Corbusian superblock, it lacked the schools, libraries, and other community facilities of a genuine superblock. Neither was it part of a continuous aggregation of green superblocks through which pedestrians were free to roam. However, it was so much better than anything around it that tenants clamored to live there. Even today Stuyvesant Town has hundreds of families on waiting lists to get in.

Stuyvesant Town demonstrated that there was ample support for local governments to condemn slums so private developers could create decent, safe, and sanitary new residential projects. It showed that relocation (even when it involved thousands of households) was not an insurmountable political problem and that city dwellers were amenable to living in modern superblocks. However, Stuyvesant Town could not test the proposition that replacement of the most diseased quarters by the City of Tomorrow would result in the rejuvenation of our cities because it included only housing, parking, and stores. Pittsburgh’s Golden Triangle proved that the City of Tomorrow could rejuvenate a whole city.

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By World War II Pittsburgh’s Triangle, at the point where the Allegheny and Monongahela Rivers join to form the Ohio, had become a jumble of rail yards and lofts that could no longer efliciently or economically serve a downtown that had shifted to automotive transportation. Without easy highway access and parking facilities, the Triangle was becoming intolerably congested. Moreover, surrounding rivers periodically flooded. On St. Patrick’s Day 1936, they rose twenty-four feet; damage was estimated at $200 million. Even worse than the flooding were smoke, smog, and grime. Street lights often remained on continuously because day differed little from night. Eager to maintain employment in steel mills and coal fields, the city had always refused to implement smoke- control regulations.

After Richard King Mellon organized the Allegheny Conference on Community Development (ACCD) in 1943, a comprehensive improvement program took shape. The ACCD proposed a ten-bill “Pittsburgh Package” of state legislation. Eight of the proposed ten bills were passed, including county smoke control, a public parking authority that was to build 5,200 municipal garage spaces, a county traffic and transit commission, county waste disposal facilities, and a new downtown highway. It also proposed creation of a redevelopment authority to manage land development. The new mayor, David Lawrence, appointed himself chairman and, until 1959 when he became governor, coordinated every aspect of the transformation of Pittsburgh. Mellon and Lawrence had created a private- public partnership. It was exactly what was needed to bring Le Corbusier’s rational, functional, modern City of Tomorrow to Pittsburgh.

By the end of 1946 all the elements needed to redevelop the Triangle were ready. The following year the City Planning Commission approved a redevelopment plan that included restoration of Fort Pitt (the 1759 fort from which modern Pittsburgh had grown), a new thirty-six-acre Point Park, and a twenty-three- acre office complex, financed by the Equitable Life Assurance Society. Soon new offices, hotels, and stores sprang up around the redeveloped Golden Triangle and throughout the downtown. By the mid-1960s one-quarter of downtown Pittsburgh had been rebuilt (Fig. 4).

The redevelopment of the Golden Triangle worked essentially for the same reason that Stuyvesant Town worked: it supplied a product people wanted at a price they could afford. Whereas Stuyvesant Town only required new legal mechanisms that allowed the private sector to build the City of Tomorrow, Pittsburgh required a comprehensive program. New highways, bridges, garages, and towers in a park setting terminated the conditions that had made downtown Pittsburgh so unpleasant. By eliminating the derelict rail yards, air pollution, and flooding, a new Pittsburgh was created, as Le Corbusier envisaged, “vertical to the sky, open to light and air, clear and radiant and sparkling.”

New York and Pittsburgh demonstrated that the City of Tomorrow, adapted to American needs, worked. If it were to be used on a national scale, though, there had to be nationwide interest and a convincing public- policy rationale. In postwar America that proved to be very easy. Cities across the nation had begun to exhibit all the symptoms of serious illness: increasing physical deterioration, vacant buildings, declining population, decreasing employment, declining retail sales, decreasing office occupancy, and a declining tax base. The flight to the suburbs had begun. There was even speculation that cities might be a passing phenomenon to be replaced by a continuous suburban landscape. Soon all sorts of people were clamoring for action: businessmen who worked downtown; property owners who saw values plummeting; the poor who could not afford to move [Page 32]to the suburbs; blacks and other minorities who were kept from moving; artists, like song writer Malvina Reynolds, who were offended by sprawling suburbs spreading “little boxes made of ticky-tacky” across the once handsome countryside; and politicians who depended on all these people for votes.

The City of Tomorrow appeared to be the prescription everyone was looking for. They grabbed it without understanding that Le Corbusier meant it to be used where there were exploding populations and rapid economic growth. In fact, the symptoms—declining populations, decreasing sales and office occupancy, declining employment, and a decreasing tax base—were the symptoms of shrinkage, not of death.

The problems inherent in transforming a prescription for growth into an effective cure for shrinkage, however, were not generally understood then. Civic leaders had to act quickly; the City of Tomorrow was a ready nostrum; hence they grabbed it. Prescribing it was easy; the problem was how to pay for it. Congress solved that by enacting a national program of urban renewal.

What we know today as “urban renewal” was the product of the Housing Act of 1949 (and various later amendments). Congress, reflecting the national concern over decaying cities, wanted to encourage localities to “clear blighted areas” and develop “well planned” communities. Therefore, it established a subsidy program to pay two-thirds of the cost.

In addition to funding planning, acquisition, and site preparation costs and subsidizing land resale prices, the Housing Act also guaranteed the low-cost, long-term financing that developers needed if they were to build marketable new housing where there had once been slums. Normally banks did not lend to projects in blighted areas. To compensate for the added risk of building in urban renewal areas, Congress instructed the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) to insure bank mortgages covering between 80 and 95 percent of the cost of new housing in such areas. Thus banks were not as worried about lending there, and developers could reduce their cash equity investment far below what was normally required.

Once Congress enacted the Housing Act, all the pieces were in place for a national effort to eliminate the most diseased quarters and replace them with Le Corbusier’s prescription for a modern, functional city.

Clearing the Most Diseased Quarters

CITIES grabbed the urban renewal cure-all as a way of clearing their worst deteriorated areas. For example, the Southwest Urban Renewal Area of Washington, D.C., an area with 23,500 people and 5,600 run-down housing units (43 percent with outside toilets, 44 percent without baths, 21 percent without electricity, 70 percent without central heat) was cleared (Fig. 5). If statistics were not as dramatic in other renewal areas, conditions were serious enough for them to be labeled detrimental to the safety, health, morals, and welfare of the community. They had to be in order to satisfy legal requirements for condemnation. Boston had been trying to replace the Scollay Square section of downtown with a government center since 1917. The area was a sailors’ and derelicts’ hangout, a district of tattoo parlors, burlesque theaters, bars, flop houses, hot dog stands, and penny arcades.

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Fig. 4. Pittsburgh’s Golden Triangle, 1983, forty years after redevelopment

Fig. 5. Southwest Urban Renewal Area of Washington, D.C., 1974: A modest American version of Le Corbusier’s plan

[Page 34] In applying for federal urban renewal funding, the city’s consultants found 91 percent of the structures to be dilapidated, 60 percent vermin-infested, 45 percent with walls visibly out of plumb, 40 percent without hot water.

Nevertheless, there was opposition from the start. When Hartford, Connecticut, in 1951, decided to condemn 245 “slum” apartments with 187 families and 108 “marginal” busi- nesses employing 1,037, in order to create Constitution Plaza, a complex of glass office buildings, retail stores, and hotel on a pedestrian platform covering parking for 1,900 cars, opponents went to court. They claimed that the area was not blighted and that the project would eliminate jobs and rob the city of a “very valuable enclave of ethnic heritage.” They lost.

Even in New York the redoubtable Robert Moses had faced opposition. For decades Moses had been the man who got things done for New York. The bridges, tunnels, parks, parkways, beaches, and playgrounds he had created changed the face of the entire New York metropolitan region. In 1948, when Mayor William O’Dwyer appointed him chairman of the Committee on Slum Clearance, Moses ordered a survey of New York City that identified nine thousand slum acres requiring redevelopment. Hence, when the Housing Act passed, he was ready, announcing five projects that were to clear ninety acres and 8,100 families. Opposition forced him to drop three of these first five. In 1950, when he proposed a project in Morningside Heights, residents objected to characterizing the area as a slum. They organized a “Committee to Save our Homes,” which managed to stall approval for two years. In 1957, to obtain approval for his twelfth project, Lincoln Center, Moses had to drop four of the eighteen blocks he had proposed for clearance two years earlier. Eventually, the ever-practical Moses began proposing sites in fringe areas where relocation would not be as serious.

Opposition to the clearance strategy boiled down to three arguments. One posited that one does not eliminate a slum by tearing it down and removing the people; one moves the problem elsewhere. The second argument asserted that the cost, in terms of disrupted lives, severed interpersonal relationships, and destroyed group identity, was not justified, especially given the vulnerability of slum residents. The third argument claimed that areas chosen for renewal may have been characterized by badly maintained structures, vacant stores, and poor residents but that they were frequently also vibrant neighborhoods providing a cohesive sense of community for the residents.

Perhaps the most persuasive advocate of the third view was Herbert Gans, a sociologist whose book, The Urban Villagers, a study of Boston’s West End, revolutionized our perception of areas chosen for renewal. The West End was a predominantly Italian- American neighborhood on the edge of downtown Boston that was proposed for renewal in 1950 and had been labeled detrimental to the safety, health, morals, and welfare of the inhabitants by Boston’s renewal officials. Gans did more than listen to complaints from the “Committee to Save the West End.” He carefully surveyed area residents and concluded that apartments “were usually in much better condition than the outside or the hallways,” that the residents “could live together side by side without much difficulty,” and that “when emergencies occurred, neighbors helped each other readily.” He saw the West End as “a run-down area of people struggling with the problems of low income, poor education, and related difficulties. Even so, it was by and large a good place to live.” Gans’ study came too late. The area was cleared and is today a pallid version of a Corbusian superblock containing 2,300 apartments, two office buildings, three shopping complexes, two pools, a tennis club, and garages for twelve hundred cars. Except for one [Page 35]

Fig. 6. Boston’s West End, 1980, after not-too-successful redevelopment

building containing subsidized apartments for the elderly, it is an enclave of the upper middle class (Fig. 6).

Reacting to the mounting criticism, Congress, in the Housing Act of 1954, expanded the urban renewal program to include rehabilitation. It did not care that permitting “old-world” leftovers seriously compromised Le Corbusier’s vision of a new city. It was responding to legitimate complaints from constituents.

Cities quickly began to designate spots within renewal areas as suitable for rehabilitation. Three cities even conceived of rehabilitation as a major component of their renewal strategy: Philadelphia in Society Hill, New York in the West Side Urban Renewal Area, and New Haven in Wooster Square.

Wooster Square was a 235-acre neighborhood centered around a charming landscaped public square created in 1825. Originally it had been a fashionable resort attracting families from the South who traveled by boat from New Orleans and Charleston. As New Haven grew, factories sprang up, and the resort began to change into a working-class community, first Irish and later Italian-American. The area’s single-family homes were converted to two- and three-family dwellings. Conditions had deteriorated sufficiently by the 1950s that the city’s dynamic Mayor, Richard C. Lee, and his renewal director, Edward Logue, decided to declare Wooster Square an urban renewal area. In 1957, after more than two years of careful consideration, they proposed 755 structures for clearance and 558 for rehabilitation. In addition, the renewal plan envisioned a new school; a new firehouse; numerous small parks and landscaped [Page 36] residential parking lots, including 345 street trees; and building of scattered small-scale housing clusters. Today Wooster Square is one of New Haven’s most attractive neighborhoods (Fig. 7). The Italian-American community is still there, but their homes have been rehabilitated, largely with FHA mortgages made possible by the 1954 changes in the renewal program. Wooster Square proved that urban renewal could take place without displacing a community if the planners were willing to jettison the City of Tomorrow.

The reason critics were successful in opposing clearance was that it was often proposed for the wrong areas. Where rundown buildings were having a blighting effect on an area, clearance resulted in removing the obstacles to private development and mortgage lending. A good illustration of this is Philadelphia’s Penn Center.

A large part of postwar Philadelphia was “a dying thing” because of the impact of the grimy brick Chinese Wall supporting the elevated Pennsylvania Railroad tracks. As long as the “Chinese Wall” remained, dripping sooty water while deafening trains sped past, no developer would invest nearby. Edmund Bacon, executive director of the City Planning Commission, succeeded in replacing the twenty-three-acre Chinese Wall with Penn Center, a multilevel project with a new underground suburban railroad station connected to the subway by a fourteen hundred foot underground concourse lined with shops and covered at grade by a pedestrian plaza with a bus station, hotel, new stores, and office towers above. When Penn Center replaced the Chinese Wall, it sparked the renaissance of downtown Philadelphia. Clearance worked because the impediments to private investment around Penn Center were removed, just as selective clearance had worked in Wooster Square.

However, when the clearance strategy was applied to poverty areas it failed. Clearance might eliminate the worst blight, but it could not create the climate needed to attract new private investment. After years of deferred maintenance the remaining buildings required major rehabilitation. Money to pay for that work was not available from banks because there was no way to recoup it from area residents in increased rents. Poor residents even had trouble paying existing rents. Thus the continuing inadequacy of the property owners’ income guaranteed increasing neglect and abandonment, not renewal. New housing, with federal subsidies, might have replaced the worst blighting influences but could not cure the economic problems of the neighborhood’s remaining buildings.

Applying the Cure-All

DISTRICTS like Washington’s Southwest Urban Renewal Area or Boston’s West End were meant as alternatives to the flight to the suburbs. They decreased densities, increased open space, and provided all the amenities of a true superblock. Successful though they might have been in attracting largely white, middle- class residents, projects like these could never have succeeded in reversing the flight to the suburbs. It had been under way since the start of the nineteenth century. To some degree suburbanization had always been spurred by the flight from slums such as these projects replaced. However, to a much greater degree it was fired by the desire for home ownership, access to the outdoors, a simpler family environment . . . Virtually universal automobile ownership, favorable tax regulations, FHA mortgage insurance, and, after 1956, a national highway network made the price of a home with a yard financially accessible to the overwhelming majority of Americans. The City of Tomorrow simply was not competitive. The “new life” in Le Corbusier’s “high speed world” filled with efficient skyscrapers not only was more expensive than a $400 down payment on a house in Levittown but [Page 37]

Fig. 7. New Haven’s Wooster Square, 1979: Where is the City of Tomorrow?

was not a place where many middle-class Americans wanted to raise their children.

In 1950, one year after the introduction of urban renewal, 27 percent of the population already lived in suburbs. By 1970 more Americans lived in suburbs than in cities or rural areas. Today almost two-thirds of our population own their own homes, two-thirds of which are single-family structures with yards.

The City of Tomorrow could not reverse the shift in population; neither could it reverse the accompanying decline in retail sales. From the beginning, planners misjudged the attraction of a new downtown shopping environment. They saw Le Corbusier’s vision of superhighways connected to downtown garages as a way of ending traffic congestion and attracting the shoppers who had fled the city.

In New Haven, for example, the Church Street Redevelopment Project, initiated in 1955, was conceived as the terminus of a downtown highway connector (Fig. 8). Customers were to park in the 1,280-car garage and shop in an air-conditioned mall including two department stores. The project’s market survey concluded that, while New Haven’s population would remain at its 1950 level, 164,000, for the next forty years, the surrounding suburban market area would grow from 156,000 to 746,000. It was wrong about New Haven, whose population shrank to 126,000 by 1980. But it was right about the region, which grew to 761,000. The planners who expected the Church Street Project to attract a large share of this growing suburban market could not have been more wrong. New Haven’s share of metropolitan sales fell from 79 percent in 1948 to 22 percent in 1982. Between 1960 and 1973, seven [Page 38]

Fig. 8. New Haven’s Church Street Redevelopment Project, 1976: The wrong prescription

major shopping complexes containing 3,342,000 square feet of floor area opened in surrounding suburbs. They attracted the market New Haven lost.

The City of Tomorrow, however, could be successful in reversing the decline of office districts. In most cities, office buildings were obsolete. Increasing mechanization meant that the floor area required for each worker had significantly increased. Moreover, the postwar worker expected a modern air-conditioned working environment easily accessible by car. Urban renewal provided the means for rapidly satisfying these requirements.

In deciding to proceed with Charles Center in 1958, for example, the city of Baltimore determined that 75 percent of its office space had been built before 1920, that nothing had been built since the Depression, and that 20 percent was in poor condition. Planners felt there was a market for three million square feet of new office space and decided to build two million in a renewal project right in the middle of the business district. When completed, more than a decade later, Charles Center included the new offices, 430,000 square feet of retailing, 700 hotel rooms, a movie house, an 1,800-seat theater, 700 apartments, and parking for 4,000 cars (Fig. 9). Within months of completion, Charles Center had generated new private construction on surrounding blocks.

Across the country, modern office complexes within renewal projects provided the impetus for additional private development. As Le Corbusier had predicted, efficient, modern business districts had succeeded in [Page 39]reversing the decline in office occupancy.

Redevelopment also proved to be quite profitable for city governments. The part of Hartford proposed for clearance in 1951 to create Constitution Plaza had been assessed at $2.3 million and paid $103,000 in annual real estate taxes. Upon completion, in 1964, the renewal area was reassessed at $23.4 mil- lion and paid $1,053,000 in taxes. Since the project required only $800,000 to cover the local share of net project cost, Hartford easily recouped its initial investment within less than one year of completion.

Not only were most renewal projects successful in fiscal terms, they usually spurred the restoration of the tax base. Perhaps that is why so many municipalities sought federal renewal funding. Eventually, 2,532 projects in 992 cities received over $12.6 billion in federal renewal funds.

Transfiguration and Death

IN ABOUT a quarter of a century, Le Corbusier’s City of Tomorrow altered the face of America. Most cities had at least one urban renewal area, and many had several. Even so, no American city ever came close to realizing Le Corbusier’s dream. Redevelopment of entire cities was never tried. From the very beginning the City of Tomorrow had been transformed to fit America’s pocketbook, turned over to private enterprise, and aimed at an environment of urban shrinkage and suburban growth. The earliest projects generated enough opposition from parochial interest groups and ideological foes to force further changes.

The opposition of residents and businesses relocated by urban renewal projects may have been characterized by supporters of renewal as a selfish attempt to put parochial interests ahead of that of the public. But it was opposition that had to be dealt with. As it became increasingly vocal, renewal plans were altered to minimize dislocation. The Housing Act of 1954 permitted FHA rehabilitation loans, not just clearance. The Housing Act of 1959 required neighborhood analysis and a relocation plan. Congress continually increased relocation benefits until the Uniform Relocation Act of 1969 finally pushed costs to a level that precluded massive redevelopment projects.

Civic organizations and community groups opposed urban renewal from the start. They usually argued for indigenous solutions and questioned the effectiveness of replicating the City of Tomorrow. In 1959 Congress reinforced this stance when it amended the Housing Act to guarantee the participation of site tenants in the planning process by requiring each project to have a citizen Project Advisory Committee.

Fig. 9. Baltimore’s Charles Center, 1972: Successful redevelopment

[Page 40] The increasing role of the citizenry in reshaping the City of Tomorrow is particularly evident in the evolution of renewal efforts in New York City. Stuyvesant Town only required the approval of the City Planning Commission and the Board of Estimate. Later projects were routinely modified to meet citizen objections and sometimes were even designed with the participation of the local Project Advisory Committee. After passage of the Demonstration Cities and Metropolitan Development Act of 1966, known popularly as Model Cities, projects began to be devised by neighborhood residents who sought to retain the scale and character of the existing city that Le Corbusier thought obsolete. When compared to the pristine Cartesian clarity of the City of Tomorrow, the disorganized jumble of decaying older neighborhoods may have seemed a slum to many planners. To the Model Cities participants it provided the corner bar, the candy store, the newsstand they knew were essential to maintain the safety and vitality of their daily life. The more local residents had to say about renewal projects, the less the projects had to do with the City of Tomorrow. Bit by bit Le Corbusier's paradigm had been eroded.

Ideological opposition to the City of Tomorrow was divided into two camps, aesthetic and sociocultural. Aesthetic criticism was directed at the undistinguished design of the hermetically sealed glass boxes and brick barracks placed in sterile pedestrian plazas cut off from the rest of the city. It was also directed at the destruction of historical landmarks integral to the understanding of local history.

Social critics argued that physical reconstruction by itself was as futile as any of the other attempts to provide salvation by bricks. They called, instead, for social, economic, and political action integrated with physical redevelopment. Model Cities was conceived to demonstrate this. Instead, it demonstrated the extraordinary costliness of a totally integrated approach to urban renewal. The needed funds were just not there. Slowly urban renewal was being priced beyond the country’s willingness to pay.

On 5 January 1973 President Richard Nixon unilaterally declared a moratorium on all new housing, renewal, and Model Cities projects. He was able to do this because the projects had become too costly and the opponents too powerful. It would be convenient to hold Richard Nixon accountable for the death of urban renewal. However, when he declared his moratorium, the City of Tomorrow itself had become a “dying thing.” By the late 1960s and early 1970s many projects did not even resemble their French progenitor. New Haven's Wooster Square had neither superblocks nor towers. Boston’s Government Center had no green space (Fig. 10). New York's Lincoln Center became a neo-Beaux Arts cultural center.

While redevelopment may have become increasingly difficult to justify, every city had to compete for its share of national urban renewal funds. So the projects kept coming. One way to alter the situation was to end the competition for categorical urban renewal grants and guarantee each locality its fair share of federal funds. Then competing priorities would have to be considered locally. Congress adopted such an approach when it passed the Housing and Community Development Act of 1974 a week after Nixon left office. The new Act created block grants that could be used to pay for 100 percent of the costs of rehabilitation, public improvements, open space, historic preservation, and economic development, not just redevelopment.

Everyone assumed that new and less expensive redevelopment projects would be forthcoming. They were not. America had lost faith in urban renewal. Moreover, developers [Page 41]

Fig. 10. Boston’s Government Center

across the country were building glass towers without renewal assistance. Accordingly, local governments chose to spend their block grants on all possible other purposes. The frontal attack on the most diseased quarters was over and along with it Le Corbusier’s modernistic vision. It was now thought that physical restoration of aging buildings, transformation of once-fashionable streets into pedestrian zones, and gentrification of older neighborhoods would bring back the people who had fled to the suburbs and thereby restore the most diseased quarters.

An Evaluation

DESPITE countless successes, few people believe urban renewal works. As evidence, they point to continuing physical deterioration, declining retail sales, and a decreasing tax base. What they fail to understand is that these are symptoms of continuing urban shrinkage that could well have been worse had there been no redevelopment. Moreover, they usually refer to those parts of town where redevelopment either has not taken place or was inappropriate from the moment it was conceived.

Urban renewal was brought to a halt after and because Le Corbusier’s program for the replacement of the most diseased quarters had revived countless urban areas. Projects like Pittsburgh’s Golden Triangle, Philadelphia’s Penn Center, and Baltimore’s Charles Center successfully brought new life to their surroundings. They demonstrated that by removing portions of a city that were impediments to a prosperous economy or a healthy environment, an entire city could be revived. They also demonstrated that Le Corbusier’s program of replacing whole cities section by section was not only politically and financially impossible; it was also unnecessary. The city was not a disappearing phenomenon. Even without redevelopment projects, the American city would survive.

Some critics admit that some urban renewal [Page 42] projects were financially successful, but they decry banal design. They may be referring to the glass towers, or the vast open spaces between them, or to the prevalent greenery, the land-use patterns, or even the highways. Are they right in condemning Le Corbusier’s vision of the City of Tomorrow?

There is nothing inherently wrong with glass skyscrapers. Designed by Le Corbusier or Mies van der Rohe, they can rival the greatest of architectural monuments. In the hands of the men who designed the high-rise boxes of our renewal projects, they are usually as uninspired as the “ticky-tacky little boxes” of their suburban competitors.

The undifferentiated space of renewal projects may have provided light and air and dramatic vistas, but it failed to provide the active street life required by a healthy urban area. Occasionally, in the hands of a great architect, large open plazas can be successful. Mies van der Rohe demonstrated this with New York’s Seagram Building and Chicago’s Federal Center. Unlike the City of Tomorrow, though, the plazas of these projects are designed to fit into an existing street grid and to accommodate existing pedestrian activity. Even the much less architecturally distinguished plazas of Charles Center attract activity because they are fitted to existing streets and thus profit from existing pedestrian activity. At Constitution Plaza, where vast arid stretches of pavement are too far from the rest of downtown Hartford, there is little activity except when people come to work or return home. Hence what stores there are have trouble attracting sufficient customers.

The trees and grass of the City of Tomorrow may have provided color, scale, and the pleasure of foliage, but as undefined green space they dissolve the city in an ocean of green without providing for the social needs of urban living. Where designers took the next step and provided a program for this parklike environment, the results are quite different. At Stuyvesant Town, where there are few broad stretches of grass, it is the paved playgrounds for younger children, paved ball courts for teenagers, benches for watching mothers, and tree-lined walkways for strolling adults that provide the setting for social interaction. In countless housing projects that mimic the City of Tomorrow without understanding what Le Corbusier had in mind, the vast stretches of dusty grass only provide a setting for conflict between maintenance workers and “trespassing” tenants.

The cultural and consumer activities needed by a successful city require a critical mass. They cannot be divided and allocated among superblocks. Where the unthinking followers of Le Corbusier did so, the results were uniformly unacceptable. Constitution Plaza is such a superblock, cut off by traffic arteries from downtown Hartford. Thus it can only support activities needed by the users of its office towers. Charles Center, on the contrary, was never conceived as a superblock. It was meant to be an integral part of downtown Baltimore. Together with the surrounding busy blocks, Charles Center attracts a sufficient concentration of people to support the widest array of land uses.

Le Corbusier was wrong to segregate land uses. As Jane Jacobs so eloquently argued in The Death and Life of Great American Cities, mixed land use ensures twenty-four-hour vitality and safety. When renewal projects provide the wide array of activities and land uses she recommended, they are successful. Charles Center, for example, includes a convention center, a theater, eight hundred hotel rooms, a TV center, a department store, tens of thousands of feet of retailing, and 367 apartments. In contrast, Constitution Plaza is basically office towers, a small hotel, and some stores. Not surprisingly, Charles Center is a twenty-four-hour success while Constitution Plaza is almost lifeless during the day and quite dead at night.

The greatest achievement of the City of Tomorrow was in making it clear that we must make our cities easily accessible to the car, the bus, and the truck. In Pittsburgh, where the bridges, highways, and parking garages are intelligently handled, they have brought new life to the Golden Triangle. Unfortunately, in many other cases they have become [Page 43] agents of city destruction, poisoning everything along their edges.

The failures of the City of Tomorrow are not the failures of Le Corbusier’s paradigm. They are predominantly the failures of the designers who copied the paradigm without fully understanding what Le Corbusier had in mind. At the Golden Triangle, in Charles Center, and in other renewal projects where his paradigm was sensitively adapted to local conditions, the results demonstrate the appropriateness of his vision.

Let Us Continue

RICHARD NIXON, while President, declared the “urban crisis” terminated. There never was an “urban crisis,” only a brief but sustained cry for action. Politicians had been forced to act by a crescendo of demands from urban areas. When the demands subsided, Nixon and countless others assumed that the “crisis” was over.

The demands subsided because people were disillusioned. Despite decades of urban renewal, Model Cities, and Great Society programs, urban problems continued. Eventually skepticism about the effectiveness of these programs overcame the desire for action. Urban renewal had proved to be an effective cure for some situations in some cities. But cities were not willing to take the time to determine from which ailments they were suffering or to develop the appropriate prescriptions. Because redevelopment, at first, had appeared to be an effective cure, they mindlessly prescribed it for every illness. When it failed to work in all situations, when opposition grew too strong, when federal funds dwindled, they equally mindlessly discarded it.

In 1973, when Nixon terminated urban renewal, there were still areas in every city where it was needed. The same is true today. For example, on New York City’s Lower East Side, just south of Stuyvesant Town, there are blocks of abandoned tenements and vacant lots that could be redeveloped. The neighborhood continues to deteriorate because New York City, which owns these abandoned slums, is not willing to propose an urban renewal project. Nevertheless, a few adjoining buildings are being renovated with market-rate financing by private developers. In one of these recently rehabilitated buildings, condominium apartments ranging in size from 400 to 3,600 square feet have been selling at prices from $116,000 to $1.2 million. If New York City made this land available, developers would flock to the area. This part of the Lower East Side is precisely the sort of area in which urban renewal works. Similar situations can be found in cities across the country.

It has been more than a decade since anyone seriously proposed a major renewal project. It is time somebody did. Cities decay and wither when we do not alter those sections that have become functionally obsolete, that are having a negative frictional impact on their surroundings, or that have lost a market that can be recaptured. However, we must distinguish among those situations in which redevelopment is the appropriate action and those that require something less radical.

The Golden Triangle successfully replaced obsolete factories, lofts, and warehouses. However, not all functionally obsolete areas need to be cleared. Some can be adapted to new uses. In San Francisco the factories and warehouses of Fisherman’s Wharf have become profitable retailing establishments. In New York City’s SoHo and Tribeca, functionally obsolete areas were first transformed into artists’ studios and galleries and then into fashionable apartment houses with even more fashionable boutiques. The important thing is to recognize functional obsolescence and eliminate it. Too often misguided protectionism and nostalgia keep us from seeing reality. Hence, like King Canute, we end up running along the beach in a vain attempt to roll back the waves. Instead, we should be actively working to eliminate functional obsolescence by rezoning, where existing structures can be adapted to new uses, and by clearance and redevelopment, where they cannot.

Penn Center eliminated the Chinese Wall that kept developers from creating the downtown offices that Philadelphia desperately needed. Once Penn Center was in place, developers [Page 44] flocked to rebuild the blocks around it. Stuyvesant Town eliminated the dilapidated “gas-house” district on Manhattan's East Side with no such effect. This giant, self- contained superblock was too deliberately isolated from its surroundings. Even if Stuyvesant Town had been designed to be an integral part of its surrounding neighborhoods, it could not have spurred renewal. Neighborhood residents were too poor to afford new housing, and New Yorkers who could pay for new housing preferred living elsewhere. Developers naturally chose to build in those areas. As a superblock, Stuyvesant Town is successful. The hundreds of families waiting to get in prove that. Its failure as an investment in neighborhood revitalization, though, demonstrates that the City of Tomorrow, as a replacement for an area that is having a negative frictional impact on its surroundings, only works when there will be sufficient demand for surrounding sites after redevelopment.

Renewal projects have also been successful when they provide attractions not available elsewhere. Lincoln Center, for example, attracted sufficient customers to spin off countless new restaurants, boutiques, gift shops, and other activities that would never have come otherwise. The same is true of the convention center, theater, hotels, and retail facilities of Baltimore’s Charles Center. We should eschew those projects that, like New Haven’s Church Street, only replace run-down areas with new buildings, and ensure that renewal projects also include facilities with the capacity to attract a new market.

Le Corbusier may have been wrong in wanting to rebuild our cities, section by section, with modern functional superblocks. However, after spending $12.6 billion on more than two thousand five hundred urban renewal projects we know when, where, and how to use his City of Tomorrow to revive our cities, successfully. Political support for urban renewal may have waned. Yet neither the need nor the opportunities has. Let us continue!

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Images of Peace in World Literature

BY BRET BRENEMAN

JUST AS individuals of various faiths and philosophies have striven to imagine a glorious life after death, writers throughout the ages have dreamed of a time when humanity as a whole would experience the tranquil and dynamic felicities of heaven on earth. Unlikely as the realization of such dreams may appear to those who do not recognize a transcendent power capable of overcoming the present international chaos, the world seems to be on the verge of the fulfillment of these eschatological dreams. The statement of the Universal House of Justice (the international governing body of the Bahá’í Faith) entitled The Promise of World Peace, addressed to the peoples of the world, opens with the following riveting words:

The Great Peace towards which people of goodwill throughout the centuries have inclined their hearts, of which seers and poets for countless generations have expressed their vision, and for which from age to age the sacred scriptures of mankind have constantly held the promise, is now at long last within the reach of the nations.

In what terms have such poets and seers expressed their vision? What images have they used to convey their dreams of peace?

Not surprisingly, the images used to describe visions of a peaceful future are images found in sacred scripture. The figurative language heralding a “Great Peace” in the work of poets from both East and West is familiar to those who are acquainted with the scriptural literature of the various religious traditions. The Torah of Judaism, the Bhagavad Gita of Hinduism, the Gathas of Zoroastrianism, the New Testament of Christianity, the Qur’án of Islam have all served, it seems, as “mother” books. Bahá’í scripture reexpresses much of the predominant imagery of individual and collective peace.

The images of prophecy are often drawn from objects and experiences that promise completion and consummation: images of path and journey, images of maidens, images of light, images of flowering gardens and shady trees, and images of courts and thrones.

[Page 48] BEGINNING with a look at images of path, one must note that such imagery is more likely to be associated with conflict and trouble than with peace. Its inclusion in this treatment is to underscore the fact that peace as it is depicted in sacred and creative literature is an attainment, the ultimate victory in the “war” of life. It requires search and conscious effort.

The quest motif is common in both Western and Eastern literature—in myths, legends, novels, poems, and epics alike. Christian, in Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, for example, traverses a moral landscape toward the Celestial City. His movement, though described as physical and geographical, is understood to be spiritual—that of the soul facing the tests and tribulations of a mortal world. Dante in his Divine Comedy journeys out of a “dark wood” into infernal and supernal realms. In Malory’s Morte d’Arthur, Galahad, after many knightly adventures along a dangerous way, finds the Holy Grail and sees in it a beatific vision. All three of these classic Western works describe the maturation of the human soul in terms of journey. Turning to an equally great Eastern writer, one finds in Hafiz, a fourteenth-century Persian poet, a similar use of the imagery of travel. Having been touched by a flame of the love of God, the poet yearns for a complete union with his soul’s Beloved: “At every breath the caravan bells cry: ride on.”

Only in an esoteric way is there a promise of world peace in The Pilgrim’s Progress, The Divine Comedy, Morte d’Arthur, and Hafiz (although The Divine Comedy contains some passages that refer to a historic consummation). In fact, countless other examples of peace imagery are also images of inner peace that have no overt sociopolitical or historical overtones. For it seems in the deepest poetry, and perhaps in matters of the soul as well, the individual experience has collective implications. Outward peace depends upon an inward attainment. Or, as The Promise of World Peace observes: “in essence, peace stems from an inner state supported by a spiritual or moral attitude, and it is chiefly in evoking this attitude that the possibility of enduring solutions can be found.”

In such a microcosmic and spiritual context, then, one may find in the poetry of the least apocalyptic of poets, the seventeenth-century Japanese miniaturist Basho, a vision of peace that is relevant to this study. The work of this poet abounds in images of path and journey. The following haiku, for example, appears in one of his travel sketches:

Picking my way

Through a mountain road, I was greeted

By a smiling violet.

Although such a poem resists allegorical interpretation, one feels in it that the lone traveler’s journey is being confirmed, that the very forces of life support [Page 49] and encourage his risk-taking. One senses a freedom and euphoria born out of arduous discipline—the spirit of Zen.

Such, then, are some uses of travel imagery in literature from various parts of the planet. When one digs beneath the merely narrative interest of these works—the picaresque aspect—one finds different versions of “the Path” referred to in sacred scripture: “the Eightfold Path” of Buddhism, the strait and narrow path of Christianity, the “straight path” of Islam, “the Way” referred to by both Christ and Krishna.

Besides such explicit comparisons of the spiritual life to a path, there are other less overt ones in scripture. The Bhagavad Gita, for example, implies a quest: “That yogin, so devoted, so controlled, comes to the peace beyond— My peace, the peace of high Nirvana!” The Gathas include an appeal: “teach me well what he should do who with a pure mind seeks earnestly to find the Peace of Brahm.” Isaiah’s famous prophecy makes the promise of such arrival relevant to collective humanity: “And many people shall go and say, Come ye, and let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, to the house of the God of Jacob; and he will teach us of his ways, and we will walk in his paths. . . .” The Qur’án also wishes to redirect the human journey: “Whither are you going?” it asks. “Verily, this is no other than a warning to all creatures; To him among you who willeth to walk in a straight path. . .”

In modern times, Bábí and Bahá’í scripture are replete with references to path and journey. The Báb, Prophet-Founder of the Bábí religion and forerunner of the Bahá’í Faith, writes, “Verily God hath revealed unto Me that the Path of the Remembrance which is set forth by Me is, in very truth, the straight Path of God. . .” And Bahá’u’lláh, Prophet-Founder of the Bahá’í Faith, says, “This is the day wherein the Ṣiráṭ calleth aloud: ‘I am the straight Path’ . . .” In a work referred to as the Tablet of the True Seeker, He also gives advice to anyone who “determines to take the step of search in the path leading to the knowledge of the Ancient of Days.” [Page 50]

AS AN invitation to set foot on that path and as an embodiment of all that is lovable and worth suffering for, the female figure is a predominant image in spiritual poetry. Dante’s Beatrice in The Divine Comedy is probably the best known example. The young woman, having ravished the poet’s soul while on earth, has passed on, seeming to connect him to eternity; in a poetic vision she introduces him to the splendors of paradise. In his first encounter with her he finds his beloved transfigured:

So now for me amid a cloud of flowers

That from the angels’ hands upfloated light

And fell, withinside and without, in showers,

A lady, olive-crowned o’er veil of white,

Clothed in the color of a living flame,

Under a mantle green, stole on my sight.

Beatrice, as her name implies, embodies the state of beatitude, the blissful condition of having attained the blessings of Heaven.

The nineteenth-century American poet Walt Whitman also sees peace in terms of feminine imagery; he exalts the poetic muse to the station of a global mother figure who heralds and nurtures, not only individual satisfaction, but world peace itself. Surveying industrial America, in “Song of the Exposition” Whitman proclaims that spiritual and aesthetic inspiration are needed in a democratic society “To fill the gross and torpid bulk with vital religious fire. . . .” “Come Muse migrate from Greece and Ionia,” he calls, and,

Responsive to our summons,

Or rather her long-nurs’d inclination,

Join’d with an irresistible, natural gravitation,

She comes! I hear the rustling of her gown,

I scent the odor of her breath’s delicious fragrance. . . .

Whitman is adopting the ancient Greek image of poetic inspiration as feminine, but in doing so, in naturalizing her as American, he allies her with themes of peace and makes her the very goddess of peace itself. He declares that she will animate “all that forwards perfect human life,” all arts and sciences, but

To sound of different, prouder songs, with stronger themes,

Practical, peaceful life, the people’s life, the People themselves

Lifted, illumined, bathed in peace—elate, secure in peace.

Away with themes of war! away with war itself!

The products and inventions of peaceful, post-Civil War society Whitman attributes to that “feminine” spirit of civilization: “While we rehearse our measureless wealth, it is for thee, dear Mother, / We own it all. . . .”

Turning to the modern Hindu epic of the Indian poet, mystic, and philosopher, Sri Aurobindo (1872-1950), one finds a Beatrice-like figure in the young woman who gives her name to the title of the work, Savitri. Satyavan, the prototype of the true seeker, enters a spiritual dimension through his love for her: [Page 51]

O golden princess, perfect Savitri,

More I would tell than failing words would speak

Of all that thou hast meant to me, unknown,

All that the lightning flash of love reveals.

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

For now I know that all I lived and was

Moved towards this moment of my heart’s rebirth

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

And his gold sun has shone on me from thy face.

For now another realm draws near with thee

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

My mind transfigures to a rapturous seer

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

All with thy coming fills. Air, soil, and stream

Wear bridal raiment to be fit for thee.

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

Enter my life, thy chamber and thy shrine.

This beauteous maiden, a form of the “divine Mother” of Hinduism, seems to represent for Aurobindo the immanence of the Godhead and the possibility of spiritual peace and fulfillment on earth.

The female figure also graces the promises of peace expressed in sacred literature and seems to be the prototype for similar images in poetry. In the book of 1 Samuel, for example, Abigail saves David from slaughtering one who has wronged him. David says to her:

Blessed be the Lord God of Israel, which sent thee this day to meet me: And blessed be thy advice, and blessed be thou, which has kept me this day from coming to shed blood, and from avenging myself with mine own hand.

Abigail eventually becomes his bride. In the New Testament, woman as bride becomes a symbol of the second coming: “the marriage of the Lamb is come, and his wife hath made herself ready.” “And I John saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.”

The female figure in the Qur’án, though often misunderstood in the West, is central to promises of paradise. As in the Book of Revelation, one finds bridal imagery in the Qur’án but in graphic detail: “But for the God-fearing is a blissful abode, . . . And damsels with swelling breasts. . .” “and to the damsels with large dark eyes will we wed them.”

‘Abdu’l-Bahá, the son of Bahá’u’lláh and Center of His Covenant, states that our age will witness increasingly the activation of the “feminine” virtues of mercy and compassion and that peace will not come about until the voices of [Page 52] women are heard in the world. In light of these statements, one begins to see that the female figure in scripture often represents an ideal toward which the human race as a whole is evolving, an ideal of gentleness, mercy, and beauty. Indeed, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá explains that “in some passages in the Holy Books where women are mentioned, they represent the soul of man.” Elsewhere He explains that “the Law of God” is compared to “an adorned bride.”

Both the Bábí and the Bahá’í writings contain imagery that links spiritual truth with feminine beauty. The Báb, indeed, goes so far as to identify himself with the feminine: “I am the Maid of Heaven begotten by the Spirit of Bahá, abiding within the Mansion hewn out of a mass of ruby, tender and vibrant. . . .” In imagery consonant with that of the Báb, Bahá’u’lláh announces, “Thereupon the Maid of Heaven hastened forth unveiled and resplendent from Her mystic mansion. . .” And in a passage similar but revealingly different, He also writes, “Let the future disclose the hour when the Brides of inner meaning, will, as decreed by the Will of God, hasten forth, unveiled, out of their mystic mansions. . .” And again: “Unveil Thy face, and manifest the beauty of the black-eyed Damsel. . . .” All of these statements of Bahá’u’lláh convey a sense of fulfillment that seems to be a major component of spiritual and social peace.

SURELY THE most ubiquitous and evocative of spiritual symbols is light—light from all sources, but especially light from the sun, the source of sources. In darkness light beckons, illumines the path of search, and then engulfs with peace the soul who perseveres on that path. A light of apotheosis has long beckoned from what is often thought of as “the end of time,” as well, drawing forward the entire human race.

Dante, having left the dark wood and the murk of the inferno, beholds light “shaped like a river.” He comes to witness that

There is light yonder which makes visible

Creator to creation, that alone

In seeing Him can in its own peace dwell.

It is the nature of that peace-inducing light to bring contentment to human nature. This seems true both individually and collectively, and the poet’s experience seems to prefigure the great corporate attainment. John Milton brings that light closer to earth in a parousian paean called “At a Solemn Musick,” which concludes with this stanza: [Page 53]

O may we soon again renew that Song

And keep in tune with Heaven til God ere long

To His celestial consort us unite,

To live with Him, and sing in endless morn of Light.

Basho’s stark images speak for themselves, suggesting higher things. The following haiku, translated into four lines rather than the usual three, is a good example:

How many columns of clouds

Had risen and crumbled, I wonder,

Before the silent moon rose

Over Mount Gassan.

By contrast with the clouds, the moon is steady and enduring; although slow in coming, it is a body to count on and to revere. Now, by its light, one can discern the majesty of Mount Gassan, previously obscured. And thus nature seems to give a message. It hints at a source of beauty and truth that presides over the contingencies of life.

In another haiku, also translated into four lines, Basho gives an image in miniature of a kind of promised land:

The great Milky Way

Spans in a single arch

The billow-crested sea,

Falling on Sado beyond.

The reader is presented with a suggestive tableau. The Milky Way, utterly distant and unapproachable, nevertheless serves as a kind of bridge to Sado (a small island off the west coast of the main Japanese island, Honshu), rendering it almost a destination in another dimension—in fairyland, in myth, or in poetic dreams of the future.

Alfred Lord Tennyson, living in the dawn of the modern age of terror and promise, makes of the spiritual image of light a social one as well:

When wealth no more shall rest in mounded heaps,

But smit with freer light shall slowly melt

In many streams to fatten lower lands,

And light shall spread, and man be liker man

Thro’ all the seasons of the golden year.

. . . Ah! when shall all men’s good

Be each man’s rule, and universal Peace

Lie like a shaft of light across the land,

And like a lane of beams athwart the sea,

Thro’ all the circle of the golden year?

In the twentieth century, when to many sensitive people the past’s promises have borne only banal fruit and the future seems either too trivial or too horrible [Page 54] to contemplate, T. S. Eliot affirms the intersection of the eternal into grinding time, a divine intervention that has always existed but that is only now recognized. In Four Quartets he posits that the beauty of a neglected rose garden is still accessible, that the eternal is always present. In that garden there is a pool,

And the pool was filled with water out of sunlight,

And the lotus rose, quietly, quietly,

The surface glittered out of heart of light. . . .

A lotus, Hindu symbol of divine transcendence, grows among the mystic roses. Eliot goes on in the poem to portray humankind as tormented by the fire of its own heedlessness. But in the closing image that fire, redeemed, becomes an illumined rose not unlike Dante’s beatific rose:

And all shall be well and

All manner of things shall be well

When the tongues of flames are in-folded

Into the crowned knot of fire

And the fire and the rose are one.

Turning once again to sacred scripture, light imagery is everywhere. In the Bhagavad Gita the yogi’s mind is compared to a lamp: “Steadfast a lamp burns sheltered from the wind. . . . ” In the Gathas of Zoroastrianism, “Light and Darkness” are locked in “mutual wrestle play” until the mind conquers “egoism” and “the better mind of love” gains “the reign of One.” Buddha is reported to have advised in His last sermon: “Therefore, O Ananda, be ye lamps unto yourselves. . . . Hold fast to the Truth as to a lamp.” In Genesis 1:3 light is the substance of creation. In Malachi 4:2 God gives a light-filled promise to “the sons of Jacob” and to all humanity: “But unto you that fear my name shall the Sun of righteousness arise with healing in his wings. . . .” The coming of divine justice is described in the Gospels in terms of light: “For as the lightning cometh out of the east, and shineth even unto the west; so shall also the coming of the Son of man be.” “Then shall the righteous shine forth as the sun in the kingdom of their Father.” Similarly, as part of the eschatology of the Book of Revelation one finds the following: “And the city had no need of the sun, neither of the moon, to shine in it: for the glory of God did lighten it, and the Lamb is the light thereof. And the nations of them which are saved shall walk in the light of it: and the kings of the earth do bring their glory and honour unto it.”

Inasmuch as “Bahá’í” means “follower of light, or splendor,” it is not surprising that the writings of Bahá’u’lláh and of the Báb, His Forerunner, are full of images of light. Only a sampling can be included here. For example, Bahá’u’lláh comfortingly proclaims: “I am the guiding Light that illuminateth the way.” In a statement that may shed “light” on the lightning image quoted [Page 55] from the Gospels above, He writes, “This light hath risen in the orient, and travelled towards the occident. . .” Indicating that there can be no true peace in the world without justice, He says, “There can be no doubt whatever that if the day star of justice . . . were to shed its light upon men, the face of the earth would be completely transformed.” And in a startling image that seems at first more one of war than peace, He writes, “and lo, they that have recognized the radiance of the Sinaic splendor expired, as they caught a lightning glimpse of this Crimson Light enveloping the Sinai of Our Revelation.” It seems a peace of rapture that is being conveyed here, of all being caught up in God.

The original peace, from which humanity ostensibly strayed, is also described in terms of a garden. Moreover, garden and flower imagery is predominant in both scripture and poetry as a means of conveying the peace that comes from obedience to God’s will. Beatrice asks of Dante, for example (in a passage that also includes images of path, maiden, and light),

“Why does my face enamour so, that thou

On the fair garden hast no glance bestowed

Which flowers beneath Christ’s rays? Behold it now!

Here is the Rose, wherein the Word of God

Made itself flesh; and there the lilies are

Whose fragrance lured to follow the good road.”

The rose of Dante’s great poetic vision seems to symbolize, besides God's Word, the ultimate of mystical apprehension. In the following passage Dante indicates that the very climate natural to that sublime rose is peace:

In form, then of a radiant white rose

That sacred soldiery before mine eyes

Appeared. . . .

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

Like bees. . . .

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

Into the flower descending from the height

Through rank on rank they breathed the peace. . . .

Returning to the verdant and fragrant Persian tradition, one finds these mystic- cum-romantic lines in Rúmí:

The colors of the grove and the voices of the birds will bestow immortality

At the time when we come into the garden, thou and I.

It is a tryst, a moment of union in a place of beauty and order. Western readers might at first think that they have encountered an oriental version of the European tendency to exalt romance to the station of religion and might read “immortality” as mere hyperbole. Even a slight familiarity with mystical Islamic verse makes it clear, however, that the wine-bibing and womanizing in such poetry refer to divine intoxication, to a state transcending the narrow, [Page 56] mundane ego. This garden, too, like Eden in the beginning, is a place of harmony with God’s will.

Back in England, in the morning-hued nineteenth-century, Shelley attempts to reconcile pagan, secular, and Christian truths in one vision and comes close in a passage toward the end of Prometheus Unbound:

Man, one harmonious soul of many a soul,

Whose nature is its own divine control,

Where all things flow to all, as rivers to the sea;

Familiar acts are beautiful through love;

Labor and pain, and grief, in life’s green grove

Sport like tame beasts, none knew how gentle they could be!

Invoking Isaiah’s vision of lion and lamb and Christ’s doctrine of the sovereignty of love, the inspired poet foresees an innate, peace-bringing oneness coming into its own.

A little later in that same century and that same country, the Victorian religious poet Gerard Manley Hopkins in several fresh, ecstatic poems seems to see a light from eternity shining on natural scenes. In “Spring,” for example, he writes:

The glassy peartree leaves and blooms, they brush

The descending blue; that blue is all in a rush

With richness; the racing lambs too have fair their fling.

What is all this juice and all this joy?

A strain of the earth’s sweet being in the beginning

In Eden garden. . . .

But man is not in tune with this harmony. As Hopkins writes in “The Sea and the Skylark,” “We, life’s pride and cared-for crown / Have lost that cheer and charm of earth’s past prime. . .” Having been expelled from the garden through disobedience, man is still not qualified to re-enter it. He is disinherited from the stable felicities of peace: “When will you ever, Peace, wild wooddove, shy wings shut, / Your round me roaming end, and under be my boughs?”

T. S. Eliot in Four Quartets seems to say that humanity in a sense never inhabited Eden, since the felicity of that heavenly garden depends upon conscious knowledge of it, a realization of the timeless presence of divine love. At the outset of the long poem, he observes that

Footfalls echo in the memory

Down the passage which we did not take

Towards the door we never opened

Into the rose-garden. . . .

At the end of the work, he writes,

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

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And know the place for the first time.

Through the unknown, remembered gate

When the last of earth left to discover

Is that which was the beginning. . . .

It is an earned innocence, an achieved peace, he champions: “A condition of complete simplicity / (Costing not less than everything.).”

Related to images of gardens are those of trees. In Milton’s Paradise Regained one finds that Christ’s millennial sovereignty “shall be like a tree / Spreading and overshadowing the Earth.” In the poem “Brotherhood” by the nineteenth- century American poet John Greenleaf Whittier one finds a similar image:

Then shall all shackles fall; the stormy clangor

Of wild war music o’er the earth shall cease;

Love shall tread out the baleful fire of anger,

And in its ashes plant the tree of peace!

Turning once again to scripture, one notes first the exquisite garden of a Buddhist vision of the future, the domain of one they call Maitrya-Amitabha, the Promised One:

The western quarter is made of lapis lazuli, forming a level plain, forming a checkboard of eight compartments with gold threads, set off with jewel trees.

In Genesis one finds the prototype of all gardens: “And the Lord God planted a garden eastward in Eden; and there he put the man he had formed. And out of the ground made the Lord God to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight, and good for food; the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. And a river went out of Eden to water the garden; . . .”

At the end of the Bible, in the Revelation of St. John the Divine, the reader seems to have returned to a transfigured Eden:

And he shewed me a pure river of water of life, clear as crystal, proceeding out of the throne of God and of the Lamb. In the midst of the street of it, and on either side of the river, was there the tree of life, which bare twelve manner of fruits, and yielded her fruit every month: and the leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations.

Bahá’í scripture also contains many passages full of garden, flower, and tree imagery, imagery that is evocative of renewal and consummation: “Proclaim unto the children of assurance,” Bahá’u’lláh writes, “that within the realms of holiness, nigh unto the celestial paradise, a new garden hath appeared. . .” “In the Rose Garden of changeless splendor a flower hath begun to bloom, compared to which every other flower is but a thorn, and before the brightness [Page 58] of Whose glory the very essence of beauty must pale and wither.” “The Flower, thus far hidden from the sight of men, is unveiled to your eyes.”

Both the Tree of Knowledge and the Tree of Life are found in the Bahá’í writings:

Oh, how blessed the day when, aided by the grace and might of the one true God, man will have freed himself from the bondage and corruption of the world and all that is therein, and will have attained unto true and abiding rest beneath the shadow of the Tree of Knowledge!

O My Friends! Have ye forgotten that true and radiant morn, when in those hallowed and blessed surroundings ye were all gathered in My presence beneath the shade of the tree of life, which is planted in the all-glorious paradise?

A supernal, preexistent Eden seems to be invoked by these words.

A FINAL complex of images of peace and consummation has to do with royalty, throne images being particularly common. Turning first to William Shakespeare, in whose work royalty is so predominant, one finds in The Merchant of Venice, Portia saying of mercy that

. . . it becomes

The throned monarch better than his crown;

His sceptre shows the force of temporal power,

The attribute to awe and majesty,

Wherein doth sit the dread and fear of kings;

But mercy is above this sceptered sway,

It is enthroned in the hearts of kings,

It is an attribute to God himself,

And earthly power doth then show likest God’s

When mercy seasons justice.

Like most Elizabethans, Shakespeare seemed to hope that cosmic order would be reflected in monarchical society. The true king or queen, that monarch whose justice was seasoned with mercy, was seen as the viceregent of God. Implied in the above passage is the notion, spelled out in King James’ primer for princes, The Basilicon Doron, that peace and order stem from the illumined heart of a just and God-fearing king. King James opens his guide to governance with a sonnet of his own:

God gives not Kings the stile of Gods in vaine,

For on his throne his Sceptre doe they swey:

And as their subjects ought them to obey,

So Kings should feare and serve their God againe,

If then ye would enjoy a happie raigne

[Page 59]

Observe the Statutes of your heavenly King,

And from his Lawe, make all your Lawes to spring,

Since his lieutenant heere ye should remaine

Reward the just, be stedfast, true, and plaine

Represse the proude, maintayning aye the right,

Walk alwaies so, as ever in his sight,

Who guardeth the godlie, plaguing the prophane

And so ye shall in Princelie vertues shine

Resembling right your mightie King Divine.

Christ, in John Milton’s Paradise Regained, proclaims that when His time comes to sit on “David’s Throne” it will be like

. . . a stone that shall to pieces dash

All monarchies besides throughout the world,

And of my Kingdom there shall be no end:

Means there shall be to this, but what the means,

Is not for thee to know, nor me to tell.

The Prince of Peace will reign, and the mysterious ways of divine providence will finally have their full “sceptered sway” in the world.

Shelley, like Shakespeare, places a throne in a heart from which resolution proceeds. At the end of Prometheus Unbound, he writes,

Love, from its awful throne of patient power

In the wise heart, from the last giddy hour

Of dread endurance, from the slippery, steep

And narrow verge of crag-like agony, springs

And folds over the world its healing wings.

Gentleness, Virtue, Wisdom, and Endurance,

These are the seals of that most firm assurance

Which bars the pit over Destruction’s strength. . . .

Employing a gorgeous, Eastern kind of eschatology, Sri Aurobindo has an esoteric sovereignty bring in the age of peace. First the prophecy:

The Immanent shall be the witness God

Watching on his many-petalled lotus-throne,

His actionless being and his silent might

Ruling earth-nature by eternity’s law,

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

All then shall change, a magical order come

Overtopping this mechanical universe.

Then the fulfillment:

The prophet moment covered limitless space

And cast into the heart of hurrying Time

A diamond light of the Eternal’s peace,

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A crimson seed of God’s felicity;

A glance from the gaze fell of undying Love.

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

A power leaned down, a happiness found its home.

Over wide earth brooded the infinite bliss.

Turning for a final time to the “mother” books, it is not surprising that images of royalty should be predominant in sacred scripture. All questions of authenticity aside for now, the scriptures of the major religions are different versions of the Word of God, and the function of God’s Word is to exert God’s rule over the souls of humanity in order to ennoble them and to make them more faithful “images of God.” As God’s conscient creatures, human beings are His subjects; God is our “King,” and a world in which His laws and ways prevail is His “Kingdom.” And such a world would be a world at peace.

The Bhagavad Gita of Hinduism and the Gathas of Zoroastrianism both speak of spiritual victory in terms of temporal sovereignty—of an other-worldly peace in worldly terms. Krishna encourages Arjuna, representative of the human soul and protagonist in what seems a very real military engagement, to “fight for the kingdom waiting thee,” and promises that he will be “victor upon this plain.” The Gathas contain the prayer that the soul will overcome “egoism” and the “Lower Mind” and “gain the reign of One—as is desired.”

The New Testament contains stirring monarchical images presaging the great day of peace and historical fulfillment:

When the Son of man shall come in his glory, and all the holy angels with him, then shall he sit upon the throne of his glory: And before him shall be gathered all nations. . . .

And then there is the apocalypse of Revelation where all humankind learns that Christ will return with a new name; it is, however, imagery of war rather than of peace, of the spiritual battle that will bring the millennium:

And I saw heaven opened, and behold a white horse; and he that sat upon him was called Faithful and True, and in righteousness he doth judge and make war. His eyes were as a flame of fire, and on his head were many crowns; and he had a name written, that no man knew, but he himself. And he was clothed with a vesture dipped in blood: and his name is called The Word of God. And the armies which were in heaven followed him upon white horses, clothed in fine linen, white and clean. And out of his mouth goeth a sharp sword, that with it he should smite the nations: and he shall rule them with a rod of iron: and he treadeth the winepress of the fierceness and wrath of Almighty God. And he hath on his vesture and on his thigh a name written, King of Kings, and Lord of Lords.

[Page 61] It is clear that, in addition to the “feminine” virtues mentioned above of mercy and gentleness, the Promised One must come with power—power to change and unite a low-aimed and divided world. He must exert His sovereignty. The prayer in the Gathas called for “the power to control this . . . egoism / And put an end to all Duality.” Arjuna needed military might to become the “victor.” King James I knew that kings must “represse the proude” and “plague” “the prophane.” Milton saw the returned Christ as having power that could “to pieces dash / All monarchies.” Shelley saw love in “its awful throne of patient power.” In Aurobindo’s Savitri, “A power leaned down” bringing “the Eternal’s peace.” And in John of Patmos’ vision, divine justice is foreseen smiting the nations and ruling with a rod of iron.

One comes, with an examination of royalty images in Bahá’í scripture, to a point of arrival. This sense of culmination is given both in verses addressed to the individual and in those addressed to humanity as a whole. As an example of the former, one finds this comforting appeal: “To the court of holiness I summon thee; abide therein that thou mayest live in peace for everrnore.” As an example of the latter, one reads this resounding proclamation: “Ye are but vassals, O kings of the earth! He Who is the King of Kings hath appeared, arrayed in His most wondrous glory.” Garden and throne merge into one: “Guide, then, the people unto the garden of delight which God hath made the Throne of His Paradise.” Of Bahá’u’lláh, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá writes, employing garden and royalty images, among others:

Eternal grace is never interrupted, and a fruit of that everlasting grace is universal peace. Rest thou assured that in this era of the spirit, the Kingdom of Peace will raise up its tabernacle on the summits of the world, and the commandments of the Prince of Peace will so dominate the arteries and nerves of every people as to draw into His sheltering shade all the nations on earth.

A cursory examination of some predominant imagery common to sacred scripture and creative literature, primarily poetry, attempts to explain the opening reference in The Promise of World Peace to the vision of the “Great Peace” of “seers and poets” throughout the ages. But the predominance of similar images was not the only rationale for their choice in this study: path, maiden, light, garden, and throne form a kind of narrative context, with “throne” representing a point of arrival. The selection and ordering of the categories found worldwide in sacred and profane literature inevitably produces a sense of culmination and helps explain the confidence of the Universal House of justice that the Great Peace “is now at long last within the reach of the nations.”

[Page 62]

Coming Home: Tanglefoot Lane

The farm on Tanglefoot is abandoned.

It no longer adds up to what it is.

The lower branches are missing from the windbreak.

A dish towel rots on the line.

What sunlight there is

fingers through the outbuildings,

but the shadows

never quite reach the ground.

The farmer could come back to this place,

walk into the house,

look through the rafters,

up past what is left of the roof,

and hunger for the feel of something heavy

in his hand like a hammer,

but there is too much light inside.

He cannot come back.

Not if his shadow doesn’t work anymore,

not if the roof caves in

and weed grow up through the dry heart

of the furnace. Not if the dark and heavy things

of his life, like rain,

look for low places

in the ground.

—Terry Ofner

Copyright © 1989 by Terry Ofner

[Page 63]

[Page 64]

Authors & Artists

BRET BRENEMAN, who is currently a middle school language arts teacher in South Carolina, holds a B.A. degree in American literature from Stanford University, an M.A. degree in English literature from the University of Sussex, and an M.A.T. degree from New Mexico State University in collaboration with the Teachers’ Corps. He has taught in Hawaii, Singapore, Japan, and Micronesia and is now enrolled in a doctoral program at the University of South Carolina.

ALEXANDER GARVIN, who holds a B.A. degree from Yale and a Master of Urban Studies and a Master of Architecture, also from Yale, is a city planning consultant, a New York City real estate developer, and a lecturer in city planning at Yale University. From 1974 through 1978 he was Deputy Commissioner for Housing for New York City and from 1978 through 1980 Director of Comprehensive Planning. Mr. Garvin is a partner in Oktagon, which owns, develops, and manages residential real estate.

BOB MULLIN, a former journalist, teaches high school in Oregon. His poem was inspired by the Oregon coast.

TERRY OFNER, who holds degrees in English and horticulture, has been working toward an M.A.T. degree at the University of Iowa.

NADER SAIEDI, who holds a Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Wisconsin at Madison, is an assistant professor of sociology at Carleton College. His interests include social theory, political philosophy, social stratification, Marxist theory, and the sociology of knowledge.

ART CREDITS: Cover design by John Solarz; photograph by Mark Sadan; p. 1, photograph by Lyndal Walker; p. 3, photograph by George O. Miller; p. 7, photograph by Dayid L. Trautmann; p. 8, photograph by Steve Garrigues; p. 24, photograph by Steve Garrigues; p. 26, photograph, courtesy Le Corbusier Foundation; p. 27, photograph, courtesy Museum of Modern Art; pp. 30, 33, 35, 37, 38, 39, 41, photographs by Alexander Garvin; p. 45, photograph by Steve Garrigues; p. 46, photograph by Steve Garrigues; p. 63, photograph by David Trautmann.