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World order

SUMMER 1974

ORIENTAL SCHOLARSHIP AND THE BAHÁ’Í FAITH

Denis MacEoin

BAHÁ’Í THEATER?

Emo Marconi

OF TIME, SPACE, AND MAN:

REFLECTIONS ON PROGRESSIVE REVELATION

Nosratollah Rassekh

THE LURE OF NECROPHILIA

Firuz Kazemzadeh

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World Order

A BAHÁ’Í MAGAZINE • VOLUME 8 NUMBER 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 FISHER

HOWARD GAREY

ROBERT HAYDEN

GLENFORD E. MITCHELL

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

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

Subscription: USA and Canada, 1 year, $4.50; 2 years, $8.00; single copies, $1.25. All other countries, 1 year, $5.00; 2 years, $9.00; single copes $1.35.

Copyright © 1974, National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of the United States, World Rights Reserved. Printed in the U.S.A.

ISSN 0043-8804

IN THIS ISSUE

1 The Global Spectre of Hunger

Editorial

4 Interchange: Letters from and to the Editor

9 Oriental Scholarship and the Bahá’í Faith

by Denis MacEoin

22 Bahá’í Theater?

by Emo Marconi

32 Poems

poem by Michael S. Harper

37 Of Time, Space, and Man: Reflections on

Progressive Revelation

by Nosratollah Rassekh

51 The Lure of Necrophilia

book review by Firuz Kazemzadeh

Inside back cover: Authors and Artists in This Issue

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The Global Spectre of Hunger

ALMOST EVERYWHERE one turns these days, there is starvation. In Africa, in a band four thousand miles long and one thousand miles wide, man and beast brutally starve. Weather patterns have shifted, drought has come to fertile and semifertile areas, and millions are caught, with scarcely anyplace to go and less reason to stay. The band stretches to take in parts of India, China, and Central America. The repercussions are endless.

Starvation in less dramatic forms has also become part of the lives of millions of us throughout the world, so much a part that often we do not know we are starving. Yet we hunger too: for clean air, for safe streets and parks, for art with meaning, for days without violence, for government with integrity, and for intangibles—for a sense of personal worth and dignity, for friendship, for a sense of community, for education which develops all of man’s potential, physical, mental, spiritual. It is not shifting weather patterns which threaten us, but rather “A tempest, unprecedented in its violence, unpredictable in its course, catastrophic in its immediate effects,” which is “sweeping the face of the earth” in such a way that none escapes.

One is tempted to step into the quicksand of short-range solutions. At least one staves off the hunger pangs and has the sense of doing something. Never mind the sinking feeling. Never mind that the plans are doomed, victims of changing interests and priorities, of impatience, of personal differences. One can always, while hunger grows (like an ulcer masked with alcohol), think that if he tries harder, if he cuts more red tape, if he gets the parties to agree that they agree, if he hires more police and plants more street lights, if he arranges more centers to dispense fellowship, if he concocts a new philosophical base . . . So go the endless, fruitless attempts and disappointments.

Where, then, does one turn? Shoghi Effendi, explaining the oneness of mankind, the pivotal principle of Bahá’u’lláh’s Revelation, wrote:

Its appeal is not to be merely identified with a reawakening of the spirit of brotherhood and good-will among men, nor does it aim solely at the fostering of harmonious cooperation among individual peoples and nations.

Such short-range goals, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá has told us, will never bring the desired results; the parts must be added to the whole. Thus Shoghi Effendi continued, explaining that the implications of the principle of the oneness of mankind

are deeper . . . Its message is applicable not only to the individual, but concerns itself primarily with the nature of those essential relationships that must bind all the states and nations as members of one human family. It implies an organic change in the structure of present-day society, a change such as the world has not yet experienced. . . . It calls for no less than the reconstruction and the demilitarization of the whole civilized world—a world organically unified in all the essential aspects of its life, its political [Page 2] machinery, its spiritual aspiration, its trade and finance, its script and language, and yet infinite in the diversity of the national characteristics of its federated units.

These fundamental changes in human society—touching as they will the family, the city, the nation, and the world—are the answers to the starvation which threatens to engulf us. Therein lies the equitable distribution of food and resources, the balance for reestablishing decency, integrity, friendship, community, dignity—in short, for appeasing the hunger which increasingly erodes the substance of our lives. It rests with us, to bring ourselves “down to poverty” or to pluck “the choicest fruits” from “the tree of effulgent glory.”

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Interchange LETTERS FROM AND TO THE EDITOR

SUMMER is traditionally a time for departing from routines and schedules, for improvisation, for any possible relaxation from the demands of fall and winter commitments. This summer, though, offers different fare. For Bahá’í’s it is a time of anticipation and preparation for the nationwide launching of the Five Year Plan in the United States at the First National Bahá’í Conference to be held in St. Louis, August 28-September 1—a Conference which promises to be the largest gathering of Bahá’ís ever held.

For those who live in the Washington, D.C. area, this summer offers the opportunity to participate in an extraordinary cultural event. A “Tribute to Mark Tobey,” an exhibition of seventy paintings, has been mounted at the Smithsonian’s National Collection of Fine Arts, June 7-September 8. Not intended to be a retrospective in the usual sense, the exhibition consists of paintings ranging in date from 1936 to 1972. Almost a third —many of them Tobey’s finest—date from the last ten years and have never been shown in the United States.

The exhibit has evoked warm and sensitive critical response—reviews in the Washington Post (June 7), Washington Star-News (June 7), the New York Times (June 8), and Newsweek (July 29)—and a straightforward essay in the June Smithsonian. The program designed for the exhibition is itself a work of art. In it Joshua C. Taylor, the Director of the National Collection of Fine Arts, writes a moving tribute to Mark Tobey, passing over the biographical details of the man’s life to offer an opening into the world, or realm, which Tobey records:

A painting by Tobey has always provided a view into a private world of vision and spirit rather than an invitation to a critical world of schools and trends. With extraordinary persistence he has kept his sights on a beatific goal, seeing painting as a means for breaking down the false limits of materiality that bind the spirit to a profitless world. Yet he has been very much a part of the urban culture of our time, finding creative excitement in the entangling activity and threatening visual chaos of the modern city as well as in the more tranquil countryside. Nature for Tobey is to be found in man, and man finds his true being in spirit. Without sermonizing or lapsing into abstruse symbols, Tobey’s painting, with its demanding intricacies and its ecstatic intensity, provides a way to the spirit, to that point at which aesthetic refinement becomes identical with spiritual release. His luminous world belongs to all men.

Benjamin Forgery, writing for the Washington Star-News, also comments on the spiritual aspects of Tobey’s work:

A distinguishing feature of Tobey’s career is that religion arrived before the art, that is before he had developed a formal means to express his innermost convictions. Tobey became a Bahá’í in 1918, a conversion that in a sense [Page 5] created an artistic problem rather than solving it in that Bahá’í, an international religion originating in Persia in the 19th century, has no iconographic tradition.

For Tobey this absence of confining dogma doubtless was beneficial. Bahá’í in a sense is an intellectually hierarchical religion, but one of its chief precepts is the unity of all mankind and, in a broader sense. the unity of all things—humankind, nature and spirit. This sense of cosmic unity, deepened by his researches into oriental art, religions and philosophy, is a crucial aspect of Tobey’s art.

The “Tribute to Mark Tobey,” after its tenure at the National Collection of Fine Arts, will move on to the Seattle Art Museum. There will be, in addition, a small exhibition of Mark Tobey paintings mounted at Washington University’s Steinberg Gallery in St. Louis, in connection with the National Bahá’í Conference. Thus not only those in the Washington, D.C. area but those in mid-America and in the Northwest have in store a rare bounty. The Editors of WORLD ORDER congratulate the National Collection of Fine Arts for honoring Mark Tobey in its “Tribute.” Mark Tobey we congratulate for his contributions to the artistic and spiritual aspirations which unite mankind.

To the Editor

WOMEN’S LIBERATION

I read and reread with great interest James C. Haden’s “Notes on Women’s Liberation” (Winter 1973-74). My first impression was a feeling of encouragement that the women’s movement is arousing less ridicule and more serious criticism. I also liked Haden’s civility, which is indispensable to serious criticism. I noted with pleasure the absence of epithets which are common even in such writings. But on rereading I became aware that Haden’s civility can in no way be equated with sympathy. There is a fine line between his cool criticism and the hostility to which one is more accustomed.

There are many points in the essay with which a feminist may take issue. Just one example: Haden claims that data concerning countries where women are heads of government “are not allowed to bear . . . at all” on the a priori claim by some feminists that political control by women would bring peace and prosperity. Of course, these data are not allowed in the argument, but why? Because a reasonable person putting forward this claim realizes that any woman who could make it to the top in male-dominated political circles would have to think and act “like a man"; she would probably be even more tough than male politicians to compensate for the disability of being a woman in a man’s world. Furthermore the data are hardly significant. How many examples do we have?

My disagreement with Haden centers on his dismissal of a priori claims. As a Bahá’í I accept as self-evident Bahá’u’lláh’s principle of the equality of men and women. I also accept ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s statement that “The education of woman will be a mighty step toward [war’s] abolition and ending for she will use her whole influence against war. . . . She will refuse to give her sons for sacrifice upon the field of battle. In truth she will be the greatest factor in establishing Universal Peace and international arbitration.” The few women heads of state may have symbolic value in the emancipation of women, but they will assuredly not bring peace and prosperity. The force for [Page 6] change will come with societal transformation as women are educated and win their right to equal participation in all fields of activity.

If one were to take the data of human history as a guide, woman would seem fated to live her days in the home and the fields. But men do not live by the old patterns either. Our world is shaped—indeed buffeted—by new realities. We will not survive this age of transition without a priori convictions, leaps of faith, Utopian ideals—call them what you will. These abound in the women’s movement. Even in the emotional cant, offense to the aesthetic sense, “ideological thunder and lightning”—the very characteristics Haden points out—one finds exploration of new possibilities. The “voice of patience and sensitivity” to which Haden calls us may take us furthest, but impatience and insensitivity too are part of the movement toward change; it is naive to think they need not be. As in any exploration, some people get bogged down, some turn back, some go away, and a few succeed in expanding our horizons. Mr. Haden not only does not acknowledge this, but he has no kind words for any feminist, leaving one with the impression that the movement really has nothing of value to offer.

Thus Haden is in some ways more unpleasant than forthright critics. Norman Mailer’s The Prisoner of Sex may not be “effective,” in Haden’s terms, but one knows where he stands. Mailer’s earthy harangue at least has some point. But what is behind Haden’s “notes,” what makes them more than superficial fault-finding —a commitment to “patience and sensitivity,” art as a “true liberating force,” aesthetic sensibility, “real change”? With no better context for his criticism Haden is open to the charges he levels against the feminists: “an excess of intellectualism and a lack of spontaneity.” Or is the tone of cool civility really masking deep antagonism? I wish I knew.

GAYLE MORRISON

São José dos Campos, Brazil

Why an article like James C. Haden’s “Notes on Women’s Liberation” was included in a magazine of the caliber of WORLD ORDER is incomprehensible. For ‘Abdu’l-Bahá said, “In this Revelation of Bahá’u’lláh, the women go neck and neck with the men. In no movement will they be left behind. Their rights with men are equal in degree,” yet a magazine dedicated to presenting the Bahá’í view on the world offers an article that is both patronizing and belittling, blind to the position of women in American society and heedless of the Master’s example.

Haden’s prejudice is easily pinpointed. He mentions two sides to Women’s Liberation rhetoric, the “directly practical,” and the “mystical and almost metaphysical.” He includes two quotes illustrating both views. The practical quote is accurate, for it implies that women want equal rights to equal work. But for the metaphysical quote he uses a statement that could be taken from Brave New World, and then obliquely states that this vision, not the other, is the basis of the Women’s Rights Movement. “But the question is whether there may not be some real connection between these minimal and maximal pleas for feminism.” Although he never answers this question, he uses Firestone’s argument, which he describes as “admittedly the radical case” as the basis for the rest of his theories.

He then criticizes the Women’s Liberation movement because of its use of language. “A question which is seldom or never asked is why the women’s movement has been so barren of vigorous linguistic innovation.” If the question is unasked it’s because the question is irrelevant to the basic problem. When Haden says, “The trouble seems to be an excess of intellectualism and a lack of spontaneity,” he suggests that this is an ill inherent in women’s nature, thus implying that the women’s movement is basically flawed, rather than recognizing that the women’s movement is basically a movement of the middle class and a worship of the intellect and suppression of spontaneity is an ill of the middle class.

He then states that the women’s movement views language as the instrument of oppression, rather than a mirror which reflects it, and that women desire to suppress all reference to gender because of a Puritanical fear of sex. Perhaps Ms. does sound harsher than Mistress, but today mistress almost exclusively connotates the clandestine hobby of a married man. Certainly women wish some words changed, but that’s only a portion of their demands. I remember when I first learned the grammatical rule that says that when referring to a person of an unknown gender, the pronoun he or him is automatically used. I was hurt. To this day, I prefer to say them or their and make a grammatical error than to use that rule. If the [Page 7] literary critic for the New York Times blacked out the word “boy” from his daughter’s tool kit it was not from a sense of Victorian prudery that prohibits any reference to gender, but from the desire to protect his child from feeling that in order to play with tools she has to be a boy. After all, it is (with the word remaining) a “busy boy’s tool kit” (emphasis mine). And what the father’s job has to do with Haden’s argument is beyond me.

Certainly the Women’s Liberation movement is not without faults. But Haden totally ignores the practical aspect of the movement, the demands for a basic humanity and a right to shape one’s own destiny as one sees fit, and concentrates on an aspect which is totally tangential. He settles the question of women’s complaints against “s—work” by saying that men have to do it too, thus completely writing off the fact that it is much easier for men to find work that is not dull and uncreative, and that our society teaches that s—work is a women’s natural talent. He implies that the Women’s Liberation movement is hot air, devoid of aesthetics, that the problems they seek to solve do not even exist, and thus reinforces the idea that women are inferior to men in degree, not equal. . . .

BARBARA A. FRICK

Providence, Rhode Island

MARTYRDOM OF THE BÁB

The Fall 1973 issue of WORLD ORDER reached me . . . and was a most welcome reading! For two or three hours I’ve avidly read the accounts on the martyrdom of . . . the Báb, which made the search for similar accounts in the works of Nicolas and Huart. This brief study brought a fresh understanding of the episode in question and new light on a number of subjects and details which might seem unimportant at first sight, but when pondered upon impart the right dimension to the drama. Thus your magazine fulfilled its aim at least with this reader.

One minor detail, though. Contrary to your statement in the introduction, Gobineau very clearly defines the family relationship of Mullá Muḥammad-‘Alí, the Báb's disciple (he writes “beau-fils,” i.e., stepson) of Áqá-Siyyid-‘Alí Zunúzí—see pp. 233 and 242 of latest edition of “Religions . . .”/Gallimard).

Incidentally, did you know about Nicolas’ allegations that Gobineau (whom he calls “an ignorant and second-hand scholar”/faquin . . ./) used materials translated by his Jewish professor, Lalezar, for his “Religions . . .” (according to Nicolas: a brilliant albeit faulty translation). These materials, according to Nicolas, were based on Sipihr’s Násikhu’t taváríkh, as stated in your introduction. Nicolas, by the position he assumed in Tabríz and in Ṭihrán with the French Foreign Service, must have known about the circumstances in which Gobineau wrote his book (see, for example, footnote of pp. 199-200 of Nicolas’ Seyyed Ali Muhammad dit Le Bab). . . . I mention Nicolas because he has unique merits, even though he wrote much later than Gobineau and some of his accounts contain important inaccuracies. Was he not an avowed supporter of the Báb, and did he not as the first orientalist at least in France apprehend his station? His great merit lies in the fact that he clearly defined the cultural and religious background against which the Báb appeared. . . .

DANIEL SCHAUBACHER

Utzigen, Switzerland

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Oriental Scholarship and the Bahá’í Faith

BY DENIS MACEOIN

EVERYONE who studies the history, culture, or beliefs of the Middle East, must, sooner or later, come across references to the Bahá’í religion in the books he reads or from the people he meets. Orientalists are more likely to encounter the Bahá’í Faith than other academics, with the exception, perhaps, of the growing body of scholars of comparative religion. For this reason it is extremely important that orientalists have access to fair, up-to-date, and reliable information on the subject. Unfortunately, material used by scholars often does not meet these standards. The result is the perpetuation of blunders. Indeed, it is difficult to think of one book in which the Bahá’í Faith is referred to that is free of errors. In some cases the degree of inaccuracy is, to say the least, staggering. Thus, in only four pages of History of the Islamic Peoples Carl Brockelmann makes no fewer than twenty-two errors of historical fact, not including a large number of inferences which are decidedly suspect and, for the most part, misleading. In other cases one is led to ask how it was possible for the writer to have made certain mistakes at all, as, for example, Sarah Searight’s remark in her book The British in the Middle East that Laurence Oliphant “was responsible for introducing him [Bahá’u’lláh] to a party of American tourists in search of new spiritual truths, who were later instrumental in setting up a branch of the Babi sect in America.”

In a review in the Middle East Journal, Peter Chelkowski, Assistant Professor of Near Eastern Languages and Literatures at New York University, writes, “It is high time for a monograph on the Bahá’í Faith and a comparative study with other religions. The works on the subject by E. G. Browne and Le Comte de Gobineau should be treated as preliminary accounts since they lack the historical perspective of finished products.”

This neglect of the Bahá’í Faith is also alluded to by Mr. L. P. Elwell-Sutton, Head of the Department of Persian at the University of Edinburgh, in a review for the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, where he refers to it as “a world faith that for all the speed of its diffusion throughout the world is still too little known.”

It is much to be regretted that since the death of E. G. Browne in 1926 no leading European scholar has written a significant study of the Bahá’í religion. This was not true in the preceding decades, for in the last century and at the beginning of this a number of scholars of repute, among them Gobineau, Nicolas, Rosen, and, above all, Browne himself, produced numerous volumes, both translations and original studies, mostly on the early period of the Bahá’í Faith (at that time usually referred to as Bábísm). But since the 1920s, outside of some slight works, mostly articles for journals such as Muslim World, of a tendentious and polemical nature, as well as a considerable body of popularizations by such writers as Marcus Bach, and apart from an increasingly large [Page 10] output of translations, histories, commentaries, and other works from the pens of Bahá’í authors, most notable among these being the excellent translations into English made by Shoghi Effendi, no serious study, comparable in erudition to those earlier works, has as yet appeared.

Such a situation is the more to be regretted inasmuch as the Bahá’í Faith, far from having faded into insignificance or ceased to make any notable developments, has undergone numerous and important changes in the last fifty years, and at present occupies a position which makes it appear to be of much more universal interest than was the case at the end of the nineteenth century when so much was written about it. Indeed, the following statement of E. G. Browne, however exaggerated it may have seemed at the time it was written, today appears both perceptive and foreseeing: “here [the student of religious thought] . . . may witness . . . the birth of a faith which may not impossibly win a place amidst the great religions of the world.”

There was, in fact, much less justification for the expression of such high hopes at the beginning of this century. The Bahá’í Faith then seemed, to all outward appearances, to be an obscure Oriental cult, a sect of Islám, a neo-Theosophical brotherhood, a pantheistic school of thought, a syncretistic, universalistic, pacifist movement, largely confined to the Middle East, with a few scattered followers —mainly cranks, eccentrics, and wealthy widows in the West—almost extirpated through violent persecution in the land of its birth, and more than likely to fall before long into inevitable confusion and ultimate extinction. Most of these impressions either came from the misrepresentations of enemies of the Bahá’í Faith or were caused by the paucity and inadequacy of Bahá’í literature of that period and by the inaccuracy of many translations then in circulation, as well as from the unavoidable difficulties of adjustment involved in the introduction to the Western world of a religion which had been founded but fifty years previously in the East and the coloring by many early Western Bahá’ís of the Bahá’í teachings with ideas drawn from their varied backgrounds, such as Theosophy, New Thought, and Swedenborgianism. Yet many writers to this day persist in basing their assertions as to the character and status of the Bahá’í religion on this same picture, outdated and distorted as it is.

The present position of the Bahá’í Faith is considerably different from that of fifty years ago. Whereas in 1921 (which marks a turning point in Bahá’í history) it was represented in only fifteen countries, there are at present Bahá’ís in over three hundred countries, islands, and territories. From tens of thousands in 1921 the world membership of the Bahá’í Faith has reached millions and is expanding rapidly. According to recent statistics its greatest successes have been in Southeast Asia, the Indian subcontinent, Africa, Latin America, particularly in Bolivia, the southern United States, and northern Canada. Bahá’ís reside in some 69,500 localities. The variety of backgrounds, religious, economic, ethnic, or national, represented in the Bahá’í community is as great as might be expected from such a wide diffusion of the Faith.

Parallel with this significant rise in membership and prestige is the gradual but steady growth and consolidation of Bahá’í administration. From a handful of local administrative bodies, rather insecurely established by 1921, the number of Local Spiritual Assemblies elected each year throughout the world now exceeds 17,000. Equally significant is the increase of National Spiritual Assemblies from none in 1921 to well over one hundred in 1974 and the establishment, in 1963, of the Universal House of Justice, the international governing body of the Bahá’í world. Finally, it may be noted that Bahá’í literature has been translated into some 571 languages.

IN VIEW of such statistics—without taking [Page 11] into consideration the more important underlying factors which endow the Bahá’í Faith with a character radically different from that of the multitude of ephemeral religious movements proliferating in the modern world—it is strange that the work of earlier researchers has not been carried up to the present day and that a general silence regarding the Bahá’í Faith continues to prevail in those circles where one might have expected such a phenomenon to have excited more than passing or cursory interest.

There seem to be a number of interrelated factors which explain this lack of sustained interest in the growth and maturing of a contemporary world religion. One factor is that when it became apparent that the Bahá’í Faith was gravitating away from the Middle East in its orientation and activities and was increasingly exhibiting traits of universalism, losing in the process—as the natural result of its spread to the West—many of the more oriental aspects which had superficially characterized it during the early days of its life in the land of its birth orientalists, who had, for the most part, viewed it as an expression of Islamic modernism, of Persian religious ideas, or as an unusual feature of nineteenth-century Persian history, interesting insofar as it was related to these topics but of little significance in its own right, lost all interest in its future development. Such neglect on the part of scholars was deepened by continued political and religious restrictions on Bahá’í activities in Muslim countries which have resulted in a slowing down of the development of the Bahá’í Faith in that part of the world. Moreover, the repeated assertions by Bahá’ís themselves and the emphatic declaration of the supreme religious court of Egypt that they are not Muslims but members of an independent faith, and the confirmation of this assertion in the fact that the vast majority of Bahá’ís in the modern world are not of Muslim extraction, has resulted in disinterestedness among those for whom the Bahá’í Faith seemed important only as a reform movement in Islám. In addition, the slowness of the Bahá’í Faith (which still is in the process of expanding and consolidating its achievements) to develop a distinct and unique character that can be easily taken apart and studied at leisure has tended to cause some impatience among those who had hoped for more immediate results.

Another factor in the lack of sustained interest in the Bahá’í Faith is the tendency, attested to by the bibliographies of even very recent books, of writers to rely for information upon out-of-date material which naturally makes no reference to subsequent developments and is often highly inaccurate in the information presented. There can, however, be no explanation for the strange lack of curiosity about the present condition of the Bahá’í religion among those who have recourse to such material.

It is also true that many of the early writers who devoted some of their time to the study of the Bahá’í Faith—writers such as Robert P. Richardson, Samuel Graham Wilson, Bishop J. R. Richards, William McE. Miller, and Earl E. Elder—were Christian ministers or missionaries and that their works bear heavy traces of the strong bias they felt against the religion they were studying. Their motive was to denigrate and condemn the Bahá’í Faith; and, in consequence, their writings lack the openness and detachment which is essential to scholarship.

It is only fair to add another factor which has caused many scholars to shy away from the Bahá’í Faith, namely the emphasis which, particularly since 1937, has been placed on teaching and spreading the Bahá’í Faith. Most recent Bahá’í literature has been didactic, and some of it of a not very high quality (although this is by no means true of all); and some Bahá’ís, in their zeal to spread the Faith, have given an impression that their sole aim is conversion, leading to a natural desire on the part of scholars, wishing to preserve an attitude of independent research, to avoid close contact with Bahá’ís.

More generally, however, it is apparent that the majority of scholars still look upon [Page 12] the Bahá’í Faith as one of the many fringe religions with which we are all so familiar and thus do not see any reason for looking more deeply into the matter. It can either be approved of in a rather patronizing fashion as “a universalistic movement preaching the brotherhood of man” or dismissed in any one of several disparaging and scornful ways. But it is never recognized as a potential force for social and religious change or as a significant event in the history of religion, for to do so would be to risk one’s professional reputation by seeming to become over-enthusiastic about what is still, in the eyes of most scholars, an obscure and eccentric cult. Nor is the risk small, for that is precisely what happened to E. G. Browne himself. Sir Denison Ross wrote of him that “It is a matter for regret that he should have devoted so many years to the minutest enquiries into this subject; for he might have been turning his vast knowledge to more useful account.” One reviewer dismissed Browne’s translation of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s Traveller’s Narrative as “a waste of the powers and opportunities of a Persian scholar.”

A final factor may be mentioned here, namely that the Bahá’í Faith, as compared with the established world religions such as Christianity or Islám, is still very much a religion in the early stages of development, with its achievements largely to be seen in terms of future potential rather than past events. Although there have been significant developments in its history thus far and although its present achievements are notable and widespread, it is to the future that we must look in order to appreciate the full import of its claims. This necessarily involves us in the study of what must appear to be visionary, hypothetical, or utopian and not, therefore, subject to the critical analysis and historical scrutiny with which we treat the claims and achievements of the older faiths of the world.

Having, we hope, shown something of the continued importance of this subject, let us now deal with the actual development of scholarship on the Bábí and Bahá’í religions.

AS FAR as can be established at present, the earliest reference to the Bábí religion to appear in the West was in a paragraph entitled “Mahometan Schism” which was printed in the London Literary Gazette and Journal of Belles Lettres, Arts, Sciences, Etc. on Saturday, November 15, 1845, p. 757, col. 1. This notice reappeared in the London Times four days later (p. 3. col. 6) and was subsequently reprinted in the American Eclectic Magazine of Foreign Literature, Sciences and Art (p, 142) for January to April 1846. The paragraph was a remarkably accurate account of the earliest persecution of Bábís (among the three men involved in this incident was Quddús—Mírzá Muḥammad-‘Alíy-i-Bárfurúshí —the leading disciple of the Báb) in Shíráz in June 1845, and the subsequent arrest of the Báb outside Búshihr during the same month.

In subsequent years a great many references were made to the Bábís in travelers’ journals and in diplomatic dispatches, but none of these dealt at any length with the subject. The first European work to be devoted almost wholly to a study of the Faith of the Báb was the seminal work by Joseph Arthur Comte de Gobineau, Les religions et les philosophies dans L’Asie Centrale, first published in 1865 (Paris: Didier). In his preface to the third edition German Professor L. Schemann wrote: “. . . .Gobineau a été le [Page 13] premier qui ait parlé de ces matières-là, comme, par exemple, des bâbys et du bâbysme.” Gobineau, a French diplomat and writer, and, ironically, one of the founders of the Aryan racial theory, spent the years 1855 to 1858 and 1861 to 1863 in Persia and, while there, made a systematic and detailed study of the Bábí religion. Of the sixteen chapters in this book, eleven are devoted to an account of the history and teachings of the Bábí Faith. In addition, an appendix of almost eighty pages contains a translation of a work of the Báb. The book fast became a classic. In 1923 Lord Curzon said, “the best works which have been written on Asia, have been composed by a Frenchman, the comte de Gobineau.” Tolstoy, Matthew Arnold, and Ernest Renan were but a few of the thousands who read and were deeply stirred by this remarkable history. Through the influence of this book alone, the moving story of the life of the Báb and the heroic sufferings of His persecuted followers was to capture the imagination of a whole generation of European writers and thinkers. Jules Bois, the French publicist, wrote, “‘All Europe was stirred to pity and indignation . . . Among the littérateurs of my generation, in the Paris of 1890, the martyrdom of the Báb was still as fresh a topic as had been the first news of His death. We wrote poems about Him. Sarah Bernhardt entreated Catulle Mendès for a play on the theme of this historic tragedy.’” Matthew Arnold, referring directly to Gobineau’s work, observed, “Count Gobineau, formerly Minister of France at Teheran and at Athens, published, a few years ago, an interesting book on the present state of religion and philosophy in Central Asia. . . . The chief purpose of his book is to give a history of the career of Mirza Ali Muhammad . . . the founder of Bâbism, of which most people in England have at least heard the name.”

Signally greater than all this, however, was the effect Gobineau’s book had on a young English student, later to become the greatest British scholar in the field of Persian studies—E. G. Browne. It was a perusal of Les religions et les philosophies dans L’Asie Centrale which first attracted Browne’s attention to the events which some forty years previously had shaken the Persian nation from end to end. He writes of Gobineau’s work:

To anyone who has already read this masterpiece of historical composition, this most perfect presentation of accurate and critical research in the form of a narrative of thrilling and sustained interest, such as one may, indeed, hope to find in the drama or the romance, but can scarcely expect from the historian, it is needless to describe the effect which it produced on me. . . .

. . . I had long ardently desired to visit Persia and above all Shíráz, and this desire was now greatly intensified. But whereas I had previously wished to see Shíráz because it was the home of Ḥáfiẓ and of Sa’dí, I now wished to see it because it was the birthplace of Mírzá ‘Alí Muḥammad the Báb.”

IN 1887, Browne, a young man of twenty-five, traveled to Persia, where he sojourned for a year, this being the only visit he was ever to make to that country. During his stay he met and conversed with Bábís (most of whom were by then known as Bahá’ís) in Iṣfahán, Shíráz, and elsewhere. These meetings he recorded in the pages of his great classic, written in 1893, A Year Amongst the Persians. That Browne was deeply impressed [Page 14] by what he encountered is evident from his own statement about those meetings: “The memory of those assemblies can never fade from my mind; the recollection of those faces and those tones no time can efface. I have gazed with awe on the workings of a mighty Spirit, and I marvel whereunto it tends.” However, Browne was also confused by what he found. Expecting to encounter the hounded survivors of a proscribed minority, he found instead a closely knit and active community; seeking Bábís, he discovered Bahá’ís; eager to learn all he might of the memory of the Báb, he found added to that memory the conviction of the coming of Bahá’u’lláh. The split between Azalís and Bahá’ís served further to weaken his enthusiasm and to confuse his preconceived ideas. As one Bahá’í writer rather colorfully puts it: “It was as though a mourner who had emotionally accepted the loss of a relative had arrived at the funeral to find the loved one the centre of a large and brilliant social reception.”

Shortly after his return from Persia, Browne was elected to the Royal Asiatic Society and in 1889 read two papers about the Bábís, based on his researches on Bábí and Bahá’í manuscripts which he had been able to acquire. In later years Browne translated or wrote a large number of books and articles relating to the Bábí and Bahá’í religions, some of them of immense value to the study of the subject, others less so. These include his translation, with copious notes, of A Traveller’s Narrative written to illustrate the Episode of the Báb, a history written by ‘Abdu’l-Bahá. This work appeared (along with a facsimile reprint of the original manuscript) in 1891, after Browne’s return to England from a visit to Bahá’u’lláh in April 1890. Browne was granted four successive interviews with Bahá’u’lláh in His residence at Bahjí, outside the prison-city of ‘Akká in Palestine (to which Bahá’u’lláh had been exiled in 1868).

Although he was by no means the only European to come into the presence of Bahá’u’lláh, Browne is the only one to have left us a detailed description of his meeting with One Who claimed to be the Manifestation of God on earth. This description, often quoted by Bahá’ís, appears in his introduction [Page 15] to A Traveller’s Narrative (pp. xxix-xi): “The face of him on whom I gazed I can never forget, though I cannot describe it. Those piercing eyes seemed to read one’s very soul; power and authority sat on that ample brow; while the deep lines on the forehead and face implied an age which the jet-black hair and beard flowing down in indistinguishable luxuriance almost to the waist seemed to belie. No need to ask in whose presence I stood, as I bowed myself before one who is the object of a devotion and love which kings might envy and emperors sigh for in vain!”

Other works of Browne’s include his translation of the Táríkh-i-Jadíd or New History of Mírzá Ḥusayn-i-Hamadání, which was published in 1893; his edition of the Kitáb-i-Nuqṭatu’l-Káf purportedly written by Ḥájí Mírzá Jání of Káshán, published in 1910 as the fifteenth volume of the E. J. W. Gibb Memorial Series; Materials for the Study of the Bábí Religion; and a number of articles for the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society and for other journals and encyclopedias.

The achievement of Browne in this field is assessed by Hasan Balyuzi in his excellent study E. G. Browne and the Bahá’í Faith:

No Western scholar has ever equalled the effort of Edward Granville Browne in seeking and preserving for generations to come the story of the birth and rise of a Faith which was destined, as he foresaw at the onset of his distinguished career, to have a significance comparable to that of the other great religions of the world. The Comte de Gobineau’s classical work was gathering dust when Edward Browne took up his pen to write of a dawning Faith with zest and admiration. Many, there must have been, particularly in academic circles, on both sides of the Atlantic, who made their first acquaintance with that thrilling story in the writings of Edward Browne.

Bahá’ís undoubtedly owe to Edward Granville Browne a deep debt of gratitude. He gave to posterity the only pen-portrait of Bahá’u’lláh, majestic and awe-inspiring. He wrote an obituary note on the passing of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, which was just and noble and true. Despite some mistaken views, his well-merited fame is enduring.

R. A. Nicholson writes of Browne’s work in this field: “To me, at any rate, his enthusiasm for the Bábís has never seemed difficult to understand, nor its consequences to be a matter for regret. That he should eagerly grasp the opportunity given him to study on the spot, and in close touch with [Page 16] members of the sect, a typically Persian religion, which, though no longer in its infancy, was still young enough to feel growing pains; that he should realise its interest and historical importance to students of Comparative Religion; and that he should therefore exert himself to collect, examine, edit, and translate its earliest documents and records—all this is only what any one who knew Browne must have expected of him. His work on Babism may be supplemented in the future; it can never be superseded. I am not sure whether, taking a long view, we ought not to regard it as the most original and valuable of all his contributions to our knowledge of Persia.”

Nevertheless, it is important to realize that Browne’s achievement was two-sided. His own knowledge of the subject was necessarily limited, and he was often misled by certain individuals and incidents into drawing false conclusions. There is no doubt, for example, that he largely misunderstood the relationship between the Bábí and Bahá’í religions, feeling that, in the latter, the Báb had been relegated to a position resembling that of John the Baptist (a misconception which the frequent and not always careful use of this analogy by Bahá’ís only perpetuated). He was also never able fully to come to terms with or understand the division between the Azalís and the Bahá’ís or to grasp the real implications of the conflict between ‘Abdu’l-Bahá and His half-brother Mírzá Muḥammad-‘Alí.

In later years Browne’s own commitment to the cause of the Persian constitutional movement and his disappointment at the noninvolvement of the Bahá’ís in that movement led him to alter his previous view that in the Bábí-Bahá’í movement there lay the possibility for lasting reform in Persia. Other factors increased Browne’s disillusionment with the Bahá’í Faith; and, although he still wrote of it in his later years, his work of this period is of little scholarly value. His Materials for the Study of the Bábí Religion (1918)—most of which is in fact concerned with information relating to the Bahá’í and not the Bábí Faith—is an unbalanced and even misleading compilation, being described as a book which “neither adds appreciably to one’s knowledge of the Bahá’í Faith, nor does it enhance in any sense the stature of its author.” An interesting index of Browne’s attitude at this period is given by a reference in his article entitled “Bábíism” in the eleventh edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica (1910-1911), where he states that “An interesting article on the subject, by Stoyan Krstoff Vatralsky of Boston, Mass., entitled ‘Mohammedan Gnosticism in America’ appeared in the American Journal of Theology for January 1902, pp. 57-58” [actually pages 57 to 78 of that journal]. It is surprising and somewhat saddening that Browne, the leading authority on the subject and one of the greatest Orientalists Europe has ever produced, should refer the reader to an unscholarly and scurrilous article which makes statements such as the following: “of all the strange cults, oriental vagaries, theosophic maunderings, and morbid hallucinations that have of late years invaded this country, perhaps the most curious, and certainly the most pernicious, is that of the Babists, a secret Mohammedan sect which I discovered some time ago in Wisconsin, and since then in Chicago, under the name of ‘Truth-Knowers’” —language which Browne himself would never have used.

APART FROM Gobineau and Browne, a number of other scholars devoted some portion of their time to the study of the Bábí and the Bahá’í Faiths. These included Baron Victor Rosen, who, in addition to a number of articles on Bábí manuscripts in the Collections Scientifiques de l’Institut des Langues Orientales de St. Petersbourg produced in [Page 17] 1908 a collection of Bahá’í Tablets; A. G. Tumanskii, who wrote a number of articles for the Russian Oriental Society and prepared a scholarly edition, with notes and a Russian translation, of the Kitábu’l-Aqdas, Bahá’u’lláh’s Book of Laws, which appeared in 1899 in the Mémoires de l’Académie Impériale des Sciences de St. Petersbourg; Hermann Roemer, whose inaugural Dissertation for the Doctorate in Higher Philosophy in Tübingen was published in Potsdam in 1911 as Die Babi-Beha’i: eine Studie zur Religionsgeschichte des Islams and is one of the most comprehensive accounts of the subject; Clement Huart, whose La Religion du Bab appeared in Paris in 1889 and who wrote the articles relating to the subject in the first edition of the Encyclopaedia of Islam; and, perhaps most important of all, A. L. M. Nicolas, the first dragoman at the French Legation at Ṭihrán and a professed Bábi, whose work in French may alone claim an importance equal to that of Browne in English: he translated three major works of the Báb, Le Béyân Persan (4 vols., 1911-14), Le Béyân Arabe (1905), and Le livre des sept preuves (1902) and wrote a number of other original studies, including Siyyid Ali-Muhummad dit Le Bâb, and four essays on the Shaykhís.

Valuable as these works are for the study of Bábí and Bahá’í history, they suffer greatly from a variety of limitations: (1) An often uncritical acceptance by their authors of manuscripts, despite the loss, corruption, and incompleteness of such material—indeed the work of authenticating, collating, and editing Bábí and Bahá’í manuscripts is likely to continue for a considerable length of time; (2) A dependence of their authors upon early histories, and a too great reliance upon unverified information; (3) Their inability and sometimes reluctance to apprehend fully the reasons for apparent schisms in the Bábí and Bahá’í communities or to perceive the motives underlying the actions of the Azalís or the adherents of Mírzá Muḥammad-‘Alí, often exposing the scholars to deliberate attempts on the part of such disaffected elements to supply them with what is all too obviously misleading or even fabricated information; (4) Viewing the subject with too much clinical detachment, resulting at times in a somewhat myopic vision of events and personalities; (5) The obvious difficulty facing any historian in dealing with contemporary or extremely recent events—that of lack of perspective, a problem still present in dealing with the history of a religion only one hundred and thirty years old, and present not only for independent scholars but for Bahá’í writers as well; (6) The lack of [Page 18] accurate histories and commentaries by Bahá’ís—early Bahá’í material, particularly in the West, is often wildly inaccurate and at times contains gross misconceptions. while Bahá’í translations, mostly done in the early years of this century by young Persians who went to America to act as interpreters for a number of Bahá’í teachers sent there from Palestine and Persia, are of an almost uniformly low standard.

It is clear that we must use the works of early researchers with considerable caution and reserve. Where, then, ought the scholar to turn for accurate information on the subject? In addition to the works of Browne, Gobineau, and the rest recourse must be had to studies and translations by Bahá’í scholars. In any case, far too little attention has been paid to the substantial body of literature which analyzes and expounds the teachings, history, and organization of the Bahá’í Faith from an expressly Bahá’í point of view. As an example of this neglect one may cite the bibliography to William McE. Miller’s introduction to E. E. Elder’s translation of Al-Kitáb Al-Aqdas, published by the Royal Asiatic Society in 1961. The most recent work referred to in that bibliography is an article by himself dated 1940; the only books published by Bahá’ís listed there are two long out-of-date and unused translations; the other twelve works given are by Browne, Gobineau, and such self-admitted opponents of the Bahá’í Faith as Samuel Wilson, J. R. Richards, and Miller himself, as well as two works on Shí’ih Islám by Persian authors. There can be no valid justification in what purports to be a scholarly work for the deliberate omission of histories or studies from sympathetic pens, of which there is no scarcity. It is, incidentally, worth remarking that the quality of this translation (itself made by an avowed enemy of the Bahá’í religion), and of the notes to it reflects no credit either on the translator or on such a universally respected body as the Royal Asiatic Society.

It may be objected that books written by Bahá’ís are bound to be heavily slanted and therefore unreliable; but it is clear that, even if this may be true in the case of some of the more popularized accounts of the Bahá’í Faith, it is not true in every instance. Bahá’í publications are valuable for a number of reasons. First, the scholar, in using them, can have no doubt that, whatever the views expressed in an authorized Bahá’í publication, they are those which Bahá’ís hold: there can be no better guide to the tenets of a faith than the writings of those who believe in it. Second, Bahá’í writers have themselves investigated the Bahá’í religion, its history, and its teachings and have based their belief on the findings of such a study, a study every bit as rigorous and independent as that which may be made by their non-Bahá’í colleagues, the concept of an unfettered search after truth being one of the fundamental principles enunciated by Bahá’u’lláh. Third, someone’s commitment to a particular belief does not mean the necessary atrophy of his mental faculties. This is more particularly so within the Bahá’í religion where the continued exercise of reason alongside faith is constantly stressed. Fourth, and, perhaps, most important, many of the works of Bahá’í scholars are of an exceptionally high quality by any standards. The histories and other writings, in Persian, of the erudite Mírzá Abú’l-Faḍl, of Ishráq-i-Khávarí, of Fáḍil-i-Mázindarání, and of certain others are outstanding; and no thorough research into Bahá’í history or Bahá’í Scriptures can be made without reference to them. In English the works of George Townshend (former Canon of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin, and Archdeacon of Clonfert and an Irish scholar of high repute), of Horace Holley, and of Hasan Balyuzi, whose biography of the Báb has just been published, and in French the translations and other writings of Hippolyte Dreyfus-Barney, [Page 19] are all of great merit. Yet they are overshadowed by the incomparable writings of Shoghi Effendi, a great-grandson of Bahá’u’lláh, and Guardian of the Bahá’í Cause between 1921 and 1957. These works are, without dispute, exceptional. No one conversant with the masterpieces of English prose could fail to be impressed deeply by the mastery with which Shoghi Effendi handles that language, by the skill with which he transposes the ornate richness of Persian and Arabic into poetic yet idiomatic English, or by the firm command of rhetoric displayed in his original compositions. For the Orientalist, the most important of his works, apart from his translations of Bahá’í Scripture, which are models worthy of study, is his history of the first Bahá’í century, God Passes By, and his carefully edited translation of The Dawn-Breakers, a chronicle of the early days of the Bahá’í revelation by Nabíl-i-Zarandí. In breadth of vision, scope of understanding, accumulation of information, and consistency of argument God Passes By is a work both original and fertile; no future historian writing of the events touched upon so illuminatingly in this volume will ever be able to do so without constant reference to its pages. In the sources it draws upon, in the significance with which it invests both events and personages, in the unity of purpose and harmony of operation which it imposes upon those same events and persons, in the originality of the direction which its underlying thesis attributes to the course of human history, and in the coherence of the pattern, part of a design woven through past, present, and future, which its dominating vision lays upon the developing history of an entire religious Dispensation, God Passes By may be conceived of as a formulative and seminal work which will undoubtedly give birth to unnumbered progeny.

The Dawn-Breakers is in many ways one of the finest orientalist publications of this century. Apart from the intrinsic value of the text itself as an important contribution to our knowledge of the early period of the Bábí and Bahá’í Faiths, the translation itself is superb; and the introduction, notes, and appendices, as well as the illustrations, are erudite, carefully chosen, and entirely neutral. Writing to Shoghi Effendi about this work, Professor Bayard Dodge of the American University of Beirut, said:

The quality of the English and the delightful ease of reading the translation are extraordinary, as usually a translation is difficult to read. You have been splendid in making the book so neutral and in adding the footnotes, which make the work more a matter of scientific history than anything like propaganda. The force of the book is very great, because the translation is so scientific and the original authorship so spontaneous, that the whole work must seem genuine, even to the most cynical critic.

From the point of view of history, the work is of the greatest possible value: It is also tremendously useful, as it explains the psychology which lies back of our great movements of religious revelation. Of course the chief value is the light that is thrown upon the early history of the Bahá’í Movement.

Sir Denison Ross, Director of the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, likewise praised the book and said that it would “be of the utmost service to me in the lectures I deliver here every Session on the Bab and the Baha.” Tendentious though it undeniably is, and containing minor inaccuracies, Nabíl‘s Narrative must still remain the most derailed and honest of early sources for Bahá’í history.

[Page 20] AT THIS POINT, it may be useful to enumerate the sources for Bahá’í history. One Bahá’í writer classifies them as follows:

1. The Writings of the Báb, Bahá’u’lláh, and ‘Abdu’l-Bahá and commentaries by Shoghi Effendi and the Universal House of Justice, the supreme governing body of the Bahá’í world community.

2. The research work of neutral scholars.

3. The commentaries of Bábis or Bahá’ís.

4. The commentaries and reports of official opponents (Muslim and Christian clergy; the nineteenth-century Persian government; etc.).

5. The material produced by individuals who have been expelled from the Bahá’í Faith, known to Bahá’ís as Covenant-breakers.

Obviously, the relative merit of these groups will be judged differently according to the standpoint of the readers. For example, the mere statement of Bahá’u’lláh or ‘Abdu’l-Bahá as to the facts of a particular historical event would be, in itself, sufficient evidence for a Bahá’í, whereas a non-Bahá’í scholar might require further proof that the event had in fact taken place in the manner described. Nevertheless, for the non-Bahá’í researcher, the first two groups will also have the greatest value—the first because they form the basis of Bahá’í belief and practice and are accepted in their entirety by all Bahá’ís and because the writers of such accounts were at the very center of the events which they describe, and their statements, therefore, are often the only first-hand account of those incidents; the second because of their essentially neutral approach—although the value of this group will only be fully apparent when historically accurate works, taking into account all the available information, are produced by contemporary scholars. The third group may be legitimately open to the charge of tendentiousness. While most popular works produced in the West are, in any case, dependent on the first group and are in no way original historical works, it would, nevertheless, be wrong to neglect the studies of trained Bahá’í scholars. Nor should valuable memoirs and diaries by early Bahá’ís, such as Biḥjatu’s-Ṣudúr by Ḥájí Mírzá Ḥaydar-‘Alí, the Kitáb-i-Badáyiu’l-Áthár of Mírzá Maḥmúd-i-Zarqání, Kháṭirát-i-Nuhṣálih by Yúnis Khán-i-Afrúkhtih, Kháṭirát-i-Ḥabíb by Dr. Ḥabíb-i-Mu’ayyad, or Tárikh-i-Shuhaday-i-Yazd by Ḥájí Muḥammad Táhir-i-Málmiri, be ignored as important contemporary sources. Early works by Bahá’í writers are often subject to many of the same limitations which characterize the works of Browne and others, such as paucity of accurate source material, poor translations, a lack of historical perspective, traces of ideas and theories belonging to groups and movements out of which many of the early Western Bahá’ís came, and theories and opinions current in that era. Since 1921, however, such limitations have been increasingly absent and may be definitely said to be uncharacteristic of present-day Bahá’í writing. The work of the fourth group, that of professed enemies of the Bahá’í Faith, needs little comment. Whereas Bahá’í writers may be partisan yet entirely accurate and honest at the same time, such is seldom the case with those whose avowed purpose is to discredit and undermine the beliefs about which they write. Their use of half-truths, hidden jibes, appeals to known prejudices, even fabrication, and their reluctance to acknowledge sources rob these works of all but curiosity value. What reliance can be placed on the work of a writer who can state blatantly that, “As the purpose of this discussion [Page 21] is the refutation of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s interpretation, only those verses are quoted which are necessary to the fulfillment of that purpose”?

The fifth group, that of works by so-called Covenant-breakers, is often, understandably, a cause of confusion to scholars. Browne and others have time and again taken at face-value statements made by such individuals and made little or no effort to investigate thoroughly and, if possible, to verify the claims made by them. It is outside the scope of this paper to demonstrate in any detail the nature of the misunderstandings thus caused or the hypocritical and often venal character of the pretensions of certain malcontents whose only motivation seems to have been a desire for leadership. Reference need only be made to the written confession of Mírzá Badí’u’lláh which relates the intrigues and machinations contrived by himself and his disaffected brothers Mírzá Muḥammad-‘Alí and Mírzá Ḍíyá’u’lláh and his nephew Mírzá Shu’áu’lláh against the person of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, their purloining and interpolation of the text of certain of Bahá’u’lláh’s Writings, and their falsification of Bahá’í history to suit their purpose; to the open declaration by ‘Abdu’l-Ḥusayn Ávárih of the insincerity and venality of his later writings, writings whose manifest bitterness and ugly abusiveness alone testify to the jealousy, pride, and vindictiveness which animated him; or to the obscurity that rapidly overtook Ruth White, who, without even an elementary knowledge of Persian, sought to call in question the authenticity of the Will and Testament of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá. The value of the writings of self-confessed hypocrites is bound to be extremely slight.

In addition to these sources, we should include the numerous documents in the Public Records Office in London, and in Russia, France, and Persia, which bear on the history of the Bábí and Bahá’í religions and which often provide excellent material for the corroboration or discrediting of other accounts.

I HAVE TRIED to demonstrate the need that exists, first, for a fresh consideration of a religion which is rapidly emerging from obscurity and seems not unlikely to attain full recognition as a leading world religion worthy to be reckoned among the already established world faiths and, second, for a realization on the part of scholars that much of the material on which they have for half a century relied is out-of-date and often inaccurate and, indeed, that it is time they awoke to the fact that reliance on second-hand and third-hand material is both unscholarly and unfair and can only lead to the perpetuation of errors both of fact and judgment.

[Page 22]

Bahá’í Theater?

BY EMO MARCONI

AS STUDENTS and practitioners of drama, the basic question we ask our readers is this: Is Bahá’í theater possible; and if it is, what characteristics must it have to distinguish it from current theatrical productions and to merit the appellation Bahá’í?

To suggest an answer, let us try to discover the historical meaning of the term theater, and, using sociological concepts, determine the principal elements of drama. We shall limit ourselves to a brief listing of such elements, keeping in mind the innumerable hypotheses advanced on the subject and the many experiments which have been made, especially in modern times.

Here, then, are the elements which, in our view, characterize the stage:

A. The theatre derives from ritual. It represents, therefore, at least in the earliest times, a specifically religious form of poetic-communal expression. Thus ritual as the womb of the theater must permit at some level the representation of the image of a god or gods, or, as in China, of ancestors. In the world of the Old Testament (spiritual and therefore historical) as in the world of Islám we do not find a theater developed by the community into a system because religious law has always prohibited any representation of the Divinity. (Should anyone object that a Jewish theater existed in the diaspora, we would reply that Yiddish theater, born in the late nineteenth century in Eastern Europe, emerged from the contamination of the Hebraic spiritual world by the world of Orthodox Christianity which permits images of God and the saints. Yiddish theater is, therefore, one that originated in the perversion of the world of the Bible.)

B. A second element of theater can be stated thus: theater is a mechanism, functioning at various levels, whose purpose is to convey to the public a human, cultural, or socio-critical message. This mechanism always includes space and realizes itself in the physical realm. The theater establishes its reality through the living presence of the body of the actor at the moment of his becoming a dramatic persona.

C. A third element of theater is its need for shelter—that is, the place where the theatrical mechanism functions are separated physically (the proscenium as an insurmountable barrier in contiguous space) and psychologically. It must be closed to outsiders, to those uninitiated in the rite, and the participating community must remain quiet for the rite to be performed. The physical and psychological isolation and the demand for quiet, reverent attention is particularly evident in the theater as procession, for example in religious pageants or street demonstrations.

D. Since the theatrical mechanism is built to carry a message, and since any communication. no matter how poetic, is always structural and determined by language, the theater is a cultural phenomenon. A language consists of symbols, of semantic, grammatical, and syntactic rules, of codes, and therefore belongs to a culture. The poetic function fulfilled in the [Page 23]

[Page 24] theater through the invention of a story dealing with conflict of sentiments or passions always carries with it the capacity for critical examination. Thus a playwright may not surrender to pure imagination (though he may use it extensively) but must, through stage conventions which may be seen as the gears of our theatrical mechanism, through rules imposed by rhythms, tempos, and the physical limitations of the actors, and through the psychological limitations of the spectators, structure his dramatic expression within well-established and fixed limits.

Moreover, critical examination does not stop at the threshold of the “mechanical” exigencies of a work performed. It also includes the thoughts of the author and, subsequently, of the director about the society of which they are members and about the ideals expressed by the human group to which they belong. It includes the forms of cultural-political behavior of a given historical time and place; and, above all, it includes the philosophical vision which the author and the director have of the world and of their own relation to the ruling social and political power.

E. Yet another element inheres in the play dimension of the theater. The life of the stage is, above all, play. It is, first, a play of images incarnated in actors always perceived in motion, for in motion lies the origin of knowledge and participation. (Man perceives only that which in some way is in motion.) It is, second, a play of masques which exemplify characters, temperaments, roles, and emblems. One of the most common pleasures, indeed, is that of appearing to be, or imagining oneself capable of appearing, different from what one believes he is. Perhaps the masque represents the first conscious pleasure of a baby. (Is this not a gift of God, terrible though it may be?) At first glance, however, it would seem correct to affirm that there converge in the masque will, memory, and the desire to create a simulated reality, more acceptable and more attractive than the one which life makes us experience everyday. Nevertheless, the extraordinary fact remains that through the alienation of the masque one finds a deeper and more universal reality. (It is truly possible to affirm that man is an animal simbolicum if it is through symbols, in this case the masque, that one returns to the primeval scheme of existence.)

Furthermore, the idea of a feast or festival approaches the idea of play. The theater then becomes the most suitable place for liberation from psychic tension and mental and behavioral conditioning, assuring in the end a therapeutic function. Take, for example, the anticipation of a spectator in the few moments before the curtain rises, when the lights are dimmed in the hall—an anticipation that is full of joy of reunion. Or take the intrinsic significance the body assumes when it is freed of conditioning as in “happenings,” a phenomenon so lively and so widespread in our time, and certainly not accidentally. There is here the dimension of the communal feast mentioned above. It should be added that in the theater play is an essential component because in the ludus (game or play) lies one of the deeper motivations of communal life.

[Page 25] At the foundation of the five elements listed above lies the essential problem of the theater, the problem basic to the life of the stage—namely, make-believe. Even Artaud, who in his brilliant ravings looked for the primordial essence of the stage, placing it in real life as the expression of primitive and explosive energy inherent in the being of all things and all men, could not in the end renounce the basic structure of make-believe. In fact, he too produced texts to be performed.

Thus arises the question: What is this transformation of forms and values, a transformation so efficacious as to render the life of the stage more real than everyday reality? In the theater the spectator moves from the moment of personalization, when he perceives the limits and purposes of characters, to the moment of initiation permitting him to understand the motives which make the various characters act in accordance with their inner logic and with a finality made explicit through their mutual relationships. He then arrives at identification with the protagonist or the antagonist and in them loses himself completely, as in a conscious dream which requires interpretation.

The problem, however, is even more complex. Having recognized the fact that an animal cannot simulate pain, whereas man can do so very easily (this being one of the very stimulating issues raised by Wittgenstein), where, one must ask, is the root of theatrical make-believe, the root tied to conventions of expression and, simultaneously, so full of diverse values and so capable of psychic and physical transvaluation?

There is at the bottom of it a rather mysterious development of many values and a conquest of possible worlds which are reached in the sphere of imagination through the emergent movement of feeling and passion. Of course, the movement of bodies, the suggestiveness of lights and of colors, the trenchancy and persuasiveness of the voice and of music, have a fundamental and effective function. Moreover, the entire mechanism described above is not confined by nature to the stage alone. The “location” of the theatre could be anywhere. The stage as we know it and use it was willed and created originally by royal courts and then by the bourgeoisie in the sixteenth century. To make clear that theatrical “location” can be anywhere, one might point to street happenings or to the theatrical significance of the “dawn-breakers” [teams of Bahá’í youth who engage in dramatic performances, usually with song and music for the purpose of acquainting the public with the Bahá’í Faith, ed.] who represent a unique Bahá’í theatrical phenomenon of our time.

Make-believe occurs when one can check a “factual” situation, such as the reality of daily life, against another, independent of the former, a different and autonomous configuration of physical and psychological relations between individuals or objects which, like marionettes or puppets, have human reactions. In more scientific terms, theatrical make-believe is the result of a change of rhythm.

[Page 26] Now the way is clear to give a first approximate semiotic model of the theater. Having a certain society, and therefore a certain culture, having identified in it a custom (the latter defined as an act of individual liberty) which is for one reason or another accepted by many, the semiotic model of the theater proposed here identifies such custom, emerging naturally from society, with an invariable which necessarily finds its expression in theatrical fact. (Generally this invariable is identified with the antagonist in the play because he is of the society, which permits the greatest identification, through the psychic and mental inertia of the many.) Against this invariable (which in the theater must always be represented by a physical reality: a person, an object, a phantasm, a light, and so on) there emerges the reactions of the personae.

Could it be said that the theater is entirely in such reactions, that it is, in other words, not action but reaction, a totality of reactions—physical, human, psychic, spiritual? Now, however, our reasoning brings us to a turning point.

If the essence of the semiotic model of the theater is the invention of reactions of personae to an invariable (an invariable which necessarily individuates a custom, as explained above), it is possible to say that custom in a society is structured through the recognition which theater accords. Since custom is always the effect of a group, theater becomes the explicit expression of the life of the group at the moment when it is mature enough to express itself.

This is, indeed, the main feature of the whole discussion, since it is through this turning point, beyond which there emerges the concept of the group and its necessary expression, that we could, perhaps, find, invent, propose, study Bahá’í theater. Such Bahá’í theater has to do with representation of reactions to the invariable (understood as the symbolic representation of the group) in which dramatic conflict must be expressed not through a play of power but through that of non-power.

We understand that, having stated this, we leave behind all occidental theater and a good part of oriental theater. Instead of conflict as the basis of drama, one finds love; instead of a development of themes of passion—the representation of a sincere search for God and peace; instead of violence as the basis of relationships among characters—the representation of unifying will. Of course, to the usual public, the kind that delights in opening nights, such theater would appear boring (though all rites, ancient and modern, [Page 27]

[Page 28] admit a certain type of conflict between good and evil, between man and the devil). In the society of the future, however, founded on the Kingdom of God on earth, and that certainly not in any Utopian sense, usage (expression of various groups) will establish relationships among individuals absolutely outside the patterns known in the past or in the present.

Setting aside abstract terminology, one would say that it is a matter of placing characters with their conflicts and passions no longer in sentimental twilight where, no matter how they strain their eyes they remain short-sighted, but in the “place” illumined by the light of Bahá’u’lláh.

Today human relations are largely based on lies. Thus clashes frequently result not from anything real but from appearances and pretenses: hence the craftiness and the disposition to foul play (gaining power, after all, is worth a few lies!). Someday, however, when man can read his fellow’s mind (biologists and psychologists are currently engaged in serious efforts to achieve this) and in seeing the thoughts of another, who would attempt foul play, who would covet “power,” who could try to obtain it without being discovered? But then all social as well as theatrical conflicts will be outdated and outmoded.

Let us study the theater of the past and the present as an extemporaneous and ethnological fact (as we would look critically at cock fighting so beloved of the ancients and of those among our contemporaries who are “ancients” themselves). (Interesting though the rites of [Page 29] the aborigines may be in their bodily movements and the grace of their dance, they certainly do not allow the populations of the more advanced societies to identify with their sacred symbolism.)

THIS, then, is the framework of our final argument. We shall now try to make some basic points. The first purpose of Bahá’í theater should be to lift up souls— that is, to help actors and spectators become better human beings through the convergence of their minds and their hearts in the light of unity and love; and since Bahá’u’lláh has stated that music can serve such a purpose better than any other art, it follows that Bahá’í theater must be closely linked to music, understood not only as the art of sound but, in a broader sense, as rhythm, an art capable of carrying souls to spiritual and celestial spheres. Furthermore, Bahá’í theater should help spectators arrive at a spiritual moment which they reach together and which is experienced by the group as a close union of purposes and aspirations; it should serve as the substratum of prayer, a way for the group and the individual soul to turn to God.

In the Bahá’í theater characters should represent not physically and psychologically [Page 30] limited human beings but themes. Thus the development of a character might be expressed by one or more characters simultaneously. The theme, of course, could be sacred or profane. The important point is that characters must cease being limited expressions of reality enclosed in form but must become, in spite of human insufficiency, universal symbols of the Faith. The character-themes should subsume the aspirations and inclinations of many people, as has always been the case in the theater.

In studying the origin of Greek drama, one discovers that the character emerged from the chorus, which had been the primum logicum of the theater. He first assumed the form of a god, then that of a hierophant, and finally that of a hero and citizen. In the future the direction must be reversed. The development should proceed not from the chorus to the character, a creature limited by his psyche and his fate, but rather from the character-theme to the chorus and to the community. The character-theme should guide and control the aspirations and expectations of the many. No more characters, making appear on the stage an incandescent primordial life, as in Artaud. No more characters-examples, be they even as plebeian as Brecht’s. The character-theme must emerge that will, through religious and prophetic force, carry others with him toward ideals mentioned above.

Between the stage and the public a conflict of instinctive forces should not explode or a climate of criticism be created. Indeed, there will be no stage, but rather there will occur a devotional act of which the character-theme, expressed by one or more actors, will be an instrument that would enable every spectator to recognize himself as a citizen of the world, free in his own search, serene and detached from that very symbol represented by the character-theme, happy in the acceptance of his destiny. Such a theater will aspire to obtain from the spectators adhesion to the character-theme, who will while apparently making decisions for himself, decide in reality for others, not in the context of a story or a divertissement but in the context of history.

Furthermore, Bahá’í drama must identify itself with a permanent proclamation of the Faith. The essential future tasks of those who work in the Bahá’í theater will be a search for character-themes and a study of the interplay of reactions between them, the symbols they represent, and the public. We have to establish a new theatrical “location.” Since the Faith has no charismatic rituals, the community will have to become its own ritual. The Bahá’í theater must come to the aid of this enterprise. Of course, there is risk in choosing new perspectives: the perennial risk inherent in the invention of art. Yet it is a risk which must be confronted with humility and firm purpose, as have done artists of all epochs. However, those who work in the Bahá’í theater must be more than professionals; they must be seers as well.

Having demythologized the dramatic forms of the past and the present, Bahá’ís will have to bring to the theatrical “location” the reality (energy) which resides in the things of the world and in man. They will have to bring to light, the light of the stage, the internal, that which is beyond appearance: quality and life. Until now on the stage man has represented “actions” (reactions) which enabled him to capture and experiment with psychological, moral, and ideal motivations from which emerged actions as visible and suggestive results.

The movements, the colors, the lights, the sounds—all contribute to helping one traverse the ideal path that carries him [Page 31] from the effects, which he sees on the stage, to the causes. Bahá’í theater will have to help man go from the psychological or environmental causes to the reality of the self, the spiritual reality of man, finally apprehended as the soul—from the individual roaming the earth who is represented on the stages of our time, to the recognition of Bahá’u’lláh’s universal plan. In this development of the stage understood as an artistic act, lies the novelty of its foundation and of its eventual expression. There is, however, a danger. The ascent from the effects to the causes, and from them to the inner spiritual reality, and from it to the plan of God, should not be consolatory or exhortatory. The object is not to represent something of which man already knows the conclusions, as happens in hortatory theater, but rather to open him up to an unknown world in which the discovery of the Plan of Bahá’u’lláh will be presented as something ever new and ever unforeseen, something which one finds it difficult to make manifest because of the magnitude of the task and the difficulty of the process of purification that must be undergone by both the workers of the theater and the spectators.

Let us express the hope that the thoughts presented in these pages might serve as a basis of discussion among those who believe that the theater has had and will still have the function of bringing together in a fixed “place” the spiritual, artistic, and ideal interests of diverse groups, be they believers or unbelievers, to whom the Bahá’í Faith may be proclaimed.

[Page 32]

Poems

BY MICHAEL S. HARPER

Message to Robert Hayden

(for Arna Bontemps, in the continuum)

Do I make connections

only after Arna’s death

electric with thanks

for his warning loud

handclasp on the porch

weight, waiting in Nashville

words of power lines

down, sparks, invisible;

flying, locked in your car,

your wife in the night visit.

And now, thanks,

the only death that makes

this message riddling

praise of musing

over wires, down, always down:

and we bury that spark to light, always to light.

Copyright © 1974 Michael S. Harper

[Page 33]

Abe

(for Abe and Belle Chapman)

Why you came back after your heart

stalled on the Chinese steps,

what street name in Prague,

does not matter;

what matters is your song

of great strain in our 30’s

called hard times,

when great men of art

were workers from breads

their mothers made to sell,

and when they ate

they laughed, and what cheese

they got they paid for twice

in the same day

to the same man;

what roads their fathers

walked for work

we’ll never know.

What we know is the price

one pays for indifference,

the shoed nail bent

into each soul to kick

at the arched movement,

each yamulke poised to crow

on your wife whose name

comes clear as the belled charge

of Coltrane we will listen

to in the room of your daughter,

her son the book

written as your heart

pours liquid fumes

of the life he must know,

and what the bread cost,

what you paid

to keep the stairwell

unchambered, unbypassed,

a red road open

at the crossroad

of scarred hands.

Copyright © 1974 Michael S. Harper

[Page 34]

Blackjack

(for Jackie Robinson)

1963;

we march.

I look out remedial

white windowed essays

from Pasadena

I will read tonight

and there you are visiting

three black sisters

excluded from official parade

‘their skins unlovely’.

Orange and Fair Oaks

to grow on

to the stadium

blocks where you stand

silent; I am silent—

Nodding I say

’47 high noon in the bleachers,

Cards in town,

you jog the outfield grass

lagging loose balls,

how you lofted their cream-

skinned signatures

over the white heads

where we sat pigeontoed

circling their dugout,

how we carried your curled

name to our table

while your team cursed

your singed garters

on pennant flagged tongues.

As they saw nothing

but your teeth and eyes

we saw the jeering train

unwinding its sheets in Georgia

your mail cringing with snake

juice spat in the Bronx;

and when you crossed

our borders we cheered

our black ace

of the marked deck at Westwood,

the bowl we stand in,

the counter where their salted

nuts stack in their vacuum cans.

[Page 35]

We will not speak of broad

jumps over tracks,

yardlines of pigskin

jaunted, stitched white balls

spiked at your skull:

we will remember the found

sleep and meals you lost

running over bases

their pitchers feared covering,

balls you made them eat

now flowering from your son’s

funeral car.

High blood pressure,

diabetes,

your eyes gone blind,

I will not answer.

I steal home

at your back

down the red clay road

of their stadium

recalling Rachel,

my own daughter,

on deck.

‘Did he say Blackie?’

my brother said

of the white boy

in row G:

“Black Jack,

the gamble’s taken,

the debt unpaid,

and the answer,

answered, still to come.”

Copyright © 1974 Michael S. Harper

[Page 36]

[Page 37]

Of Time, Space, and Man: Reflections on Progressive Revelation

BY NOSRATOLLAH RASSEKH

IN 1654 Archbishop Ussher of Armagh, after a careful study of the Old Testament, concluded that creation had taken place in the year 4,004 B.C. The date was printed in an authorized version of the Bible and for a century or more thereafter it was heresy to suggest an earlier origin. Bishop Lightfoot, soon after, not entirely convinced of the precision of that date, made a study of his own and proclaimed that the universe was indeed created in the year 4,004 B.C.—On October 23, at 9 a.m.

For most of his relatively short history man has believed that his universe is scarcely older than himself, that time and space are both finite. If the world was a few thousand years old, it had even less time to look forward to since practically everyone was also convinced of a cataclysmic end.

As for space, could not everyone visually perceive the limit of this universe?

By the nineteenth century, however, a revolution of scientific discoveries drastically changed man’s concept of time and space and essentially altered the traditional concepts of man’s relation to his universe. The “natural philosophy” of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries became simply “science,” and all of its branches—the separate sciences——developed cumulatively. The period from 1830 to 1914, particularly, marked the zenith of scientific progress. The achievements of this period were not only more numerous than those of preceeding ages, but they probed more deeply into the hidden mysteries of things and revealed the nature of the world and of man in a hitherto unsuspected light.

The most important transfer of ideas and theories during the course of the nineteenth century came from biological sciences. Its most outstanding achievement was the development of new explanations of the theory of organic evolution. The theory was as old as Anaximander (611-547 B.C.). It had been revised by the philosopher Holbach, the poet Goethe, and the scientists Buffon and Linnaeus in the eighteenth century. But it was the French biologist Jean Lamarck (1744-1829) who first developed a systematic hypothesis based on the principle of inheritance of acquired characteristics and the great Charles Darwin (1809-1882) who revolutionized biological science by his theory of natural selection. The theory itself is a most remarkable and simple idea—so simple in fact that Huxley wondered why he had not thought of it himself. In Origin of Species, published in 1859, Darwin expounded the hypothesis that the nature, or the environment, selects those variants among the offspring that are to survive and reproduce. Organisms produce more young than the available resources can sustain. Those best suited to survive pass on the expedient properties to their offspring while inferior forms are eliminated. [Page 38] There is the factor of variation, which means that no two of the offspring are exactly alike; the stronger—the one with longer horns, or sharper claws, or coloration of body better blending with the surroundings and eluding the enemy, and so on—would survive. Thus variation and natural selection are the primary factors in the origin of species. In The Descent of Man Darwin attempted to show that man himself originally evolved from some ape-like ancestor, long since extinct, but probably a common forebearer of the existing anthropoid apes and man.

It should be pointed out that, by the time of Darwin’s scientific research, geologists, particularly Sir Charles Lyell, and paleontologists had well established the record of the rise, of the development, and sometimes of the disappearance, over millions of years, of thousands of different forms of plants and animal organisms, or species. During the century since the publication of The Descent of Man other scientists, particularly the German August Weismann (1834-1914), the Dutch botanist Hugo De Vries (1848-1935), and the Austrian monk Gregor Mendel (1822-1884) modified or changed some of the Darwinian assumptions by claiming that the variations of importance in the evolutionary process are probably not so much the numerous, tiny ones Darwin emphasized but rather bigger and much rarer ones known as “mutations.”

Regardless of changes and modifications proposed by other scientists relating to the theory of evolution, a fundamental change in the concept of time was introduced in the scientific world. Instead of a few thousand years, the earth, it was explained, was billions of years old, and man’s creation instead of being simultaneous with that of his universe, was now said to have taken place billions of years after the appearance of his place of habitation. The earth itself, though billions of years old, had a relatively recent history as part of the universe.

The research and discoveries of biologists, geologists, botanists, and zoologists during the course of the last century and a half, complemented within the last few decades by experts working in astronomy, geophysics, and allied fields, and greatly aided by discoveries such as radiocarbon (Carbon 14) which enables them to estimate more exactly the age of many deposits under thirty thousand years old, have given us a timetable. The timetable is not exact, nor is there complete agreement on it. It is an approximation in which specialists with a conventional sense of humor will use phrases like “give or take another million years.”

The birth of the earth occurred around four billion years ago. For a long time—perhaps two billion years—the earth underwent significant geological changes. The outer crust buckled and folded; and eruptions and earthquakes took place, making over the whole surface. Eventually the primary rocks of the earth’s surface were worn down by wind and weather so that dust, rubble, mud, [Page 39] and sand were deposited in the lowlands. Thus an environment was created which could support the simplest forms of life.

About a billion years ago the spark of life appeared in one-celled plants which lived in the sea. Then followed the slow, gradual evolution of the invertebrates and the vertebrates—primitive fishes and amphibian reptiles, including dinosaurs. Probably around seventy million years ago mammals appeared and after a time primates—animals whose fingers and toes ended in nails rather than hooves. The apes emerged as an improved model of the primates.

Notices of man’s entrance upon the scene are fragmentary—fossils, skeletons, or rude tools and ornaments. To interpret this evidence the science of anthropology emerged. The advancements in it and the light anthropologists have shed upon the entrance of our ancestors on the stage of history have been among the most fascinating and significant discoveries of the twentieth century.

IT WAS on Friday, April 3, 1964, that Dr. Louis S. B. Leakey, the British anthropologist, announced, at a news conference at the headquarters of the National Geographic Society, his discovery in East Africa of a new species of primitive man he believed to be the direct ancestor of modern man. He and his wife Mary had discovered in Tanganyika fossil parts of five individuals, which he said, “may rank someday as the most important in our knowledge of human evolution,” and which are destined to alter “the whole of our textbooks.” The new species, he claimed, was almost 2 million years old, adding about 1.5 million years to the ancestry of man. He called the new species Homo habilis, meaning a man able to do things. Homo habilis he described as small—about 3½ to 4½ feet tall at the maximum—with the possible ability of speech because of its jaw structure. Homo habilis lived in the Olduvai Gorge where his remains were found by the Leakeys in 1959 at the same time they found fossil bones of another type called Zinjanthropus.

That Zinjanthropus could be a true ancestral human being was indicated by evidence that he walked erect and used crude tools, tools, to be sure, not a product of manufacturing skills or inventive talents but consisting of objects taken from nature (bones of large animals, limbs from trees, and chunks of stone, perhaps broken or crudely chipped).

On Friday, January 13, 1967, Professor Bryan Patterson of the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology reported the discovery in Kenya of an elbow bone which has been identified as that of a man-like creature earlier than Homo habilis. The creature was alive during the time of volcanic activity that periodically sent sheets of lava across the landscape. The site, like the Olduvai Gorge, lies along the Rift Valley which cleaves the African land mass and which has been a periodic source of lava outpouring. It was one such eruption that had made possible the dating of the new find. A Cambridge firm, Geochron laboratories, analyzed a number of lava specimens and set an age of [Page 40] 2.5 million years to the eruption with a 200,000 year margin of error.

In the last three years two further phenomenal discoveries in Africa have thoroughly challenged the validity of long-cherished theories concerning the origin and evolution of the human race. One was the finding in Kenya’s East Rudolph Basin of a human skull and bones below a layer dated about 2.8 million years, by Richard Leakey, the son of the famed husband-wife team. The second was the discovery that a cave in southern Africa on the border between Swaziland and Natal was inhabited by men of modern type, quite possibly as long as 100,000 years ago. The remains, including the skeleton of an infant, unearthed in Border Cave by two young anthropologists, Adrian Boshier of the Museum of Man and Science and Peter Beaumont, are unmistakably those of our own species, Homo sapiens, who were not supposed to have appeared until about 35,000 B.C. These cave-dwellers had mastered the art of mining and manufactured a variety of sophisticated tools, including agate knives with edges still sharp enough to slice paper. They also had religious convictions and apparently believed in an afterlife for the body of the infant had been carefully and ceremoniously buried.

THUS man has been on the face of this earth for millions of years. But the era before 10,000 B.C. can be hardly treated as “history” in the most technical sense. The time period which involves man’s physical and cultural developments is more the concern of the anthropologist. Historians rely primarily on written documents, and today after only some five thousand years of literacy it is difficult to imagine a world in which the only means of intelligent conversation was the human voice. Yet such was the human condition for hundreds of thousands of years. The ratio of the time man-like creatures have been on earth before history to the time since history began is something like the ratio of six hours to one minute. It is quite possible that much of the physical and cultural base of man’s behavior today—his appetites, his emotions, his subconscious and unconscious life, even his thought processes—was largely formed before the single minute of history and during those several hours of prehistory. This is the lesson that most have learned from the new time scale.

Once man was on the Stage. the action of the drama consisted in the reaction between him and his environment. Environment was more obstinate than man for nature changed little and man had to do the adapting if he were to survive. Many basic human characteristics and skills were determined or acquired in the long ages which preceded the development of written records. It is an obvious mistake to believe that human society can be understood by studying only the events of the last few generations. It may be just as much of a mistake to believe that the experiences of primitive man have left no mark on our behavior.

IT IS an infinitesimal point in space, called the earth, that is the modest stage of human history.

The earth, the physical environment of man, is a minute particle in a vast cosmos which includes all planets and all space. In our solar system the sun is the only luminous body and therefore its only star. The sun is a monster in its [Page 41] own portion of the cosmos, its total mass being 320,000 times that of the earth. And yet the sun is but one of billions of other stars in the cosmos, the total expanse of creation, and so small by comparison with many other luminous bodies that our sun is regarded by astronomers as a “dwarf star.”

The invention of the telescope has provided man with proof of other galaxies beyond his own. Millions of these objects in various stages of evolution have been viewed, and several hundreds have been clearly observed. The development of astronomy in the twentieth century has been influenced by physics and modern astronomical concepts such as that of a finite but expanding universe, of curved space, and, perhaps above all, of the almost inconceivable distances and quantitative light years. Such concepts have made astronomy highly romantic to laymen.

Astronomical discoveries have made everyday terms of measurement such as miles or kilometers obsolete. A new term, a new unit of space measurement has been adopted: the light year, or the distance that light (which travels at about 186,000 miles per second) covers in one year (in round figures about 6 million million miles!). Our galaxy is about 100,000 light years in diameter and 10,000 light years thick. The gulf that separates us from our neighboring star island in Andromeda exceeds 1,500,000 light years while the most remote galaxies yet photographed by the two-hundred-inch telescope at Mount Wilson are no less than 2 billion light years away.

Kenneth W. Gatland in The Inhabited Universe points out that in all about six thousand galaxies lie within the range of a two-hundred-inch telescope. When one remembers that our own galaxy contains some 30,000 million Stars, he can only stand in awe at this incredible assembly.

To give a conceptual image of the limitless universe, Garland stated that if one were to take a sphere 50 feet in diameter to represent the sun, Mercury would be a ball 2½ inches in diameter in orbit 2,000 yards away; Venus with a diameter of 5½ inches would be about three quarters of a mile from our model sun: the Earth, a ball just a fraction larger than Venus, would be circling a mile off. At 1½ miles from the sun would lie Mars, 3 inches in diameter; at 5¼ miles would be the 5 foot Jupiter with its moon rotating within 20 feet of it. At 9½ miles would be Saturn, measuring 4 feet 2 inches; at 41 miles would be Pluto, measuring 3 inches. “One can not help boggling at the thought that the nearest sun at that scale would be 270,000 miles away!”

Change was, relatively, very slow in the evolution of species as well as in the evolution of man’s culture. Hundreds of thousands of years elapsed before man refined his primitive stone tools for his hunting and defense and before his old ston-eage culture—paleolithic—gave way to the new stone age—neolithic. The neolithic age brought a new cultural complex, extending beyond the achievements of the paleolithic age in many more respects than merely the methods of preparing stone implements. Equipped with tools, fire, and language, through thousands of years, man slowly began to dominate his environment instead of having to accept whatever circumstances brought him. By about 50,000 [Page 42] B.C.—the era of Cro-Magnon Man—group life had become more regular and more highly organized. The remarkable workmanship displayed in tools and weapons and the highly developed techniques in the arts represented some division of labor. The Cro-Magnon man had developed some notions of the unseen powers: he bestowed more care upon the bodies of his dead, painted the corpses, folded the arms over the heart, and deposited ornamental necklaces, weapons, and tools in the graves.

The development of community life was indeed one of the most important revolutionary movements in human history for it was at once a social, an economic, and a political revolution and had significant influence over the industrial, artistic, and religious life of man. Equally as dramatic a landmark in the evolution of human society was the agricultural revolution, which probably began about 7,000 B.C. and slowly spread in the river valleys of the Nile, Euphrates, and Indus. In this period food gathering tended to become less important and food producing more so. Men tended to settle down and discover that they were social beings whose lives could become more meaningful in communities. Up to this period primitive man—our ancestor—had been a hunter and food gatherer; while he remained so, he could not form settled communities but must, per force, remain a wanderer. It was most probably around the Mediterranean area—to the east and south of it—that men (or, more likely, their women folk) discovered that by clearing the ground of weeds and planting the seeds of certain edible grasses they could obtain a food crop to supplement what could be provided by hunting. Shortly after the discovery of agriculture an “urban revolution” took place because it became possible for men to settle in considerable numbers within a large but clearly defined area.

Gradually the “urban revolution” made possible the creation of much larger social units which included not only farmers and pastoralists but also a number of specialists: stonemasons, smiths, carpenters, wheelwrights. Finally there emerged at new class of experts: the scribes, the men who learned the new and difficult art of writing, an invention of more potent force for the future than any other before it.

Gordon Childe in What Happened in History claims that “The thousand years or so immediately preceeding 3000 B.C. were perhaps more fertile in fruitful inventions and discoveries than any period in human history prior to the sixteenth century A.D.” During this period man not only invented “writing” but also learned how to make bricks for buildings, created the potter’s wheel, built wheeled vehicles and sailing vessels. An industrial revolution, indeed, was taking place as the result of the discoveries of people whose names must forever be unrecorded. The discovery of the metallurgy of copper and bronze brought that era to an end. Man had at last started on the road “that led to Parnassus—and to Pittsburgh.”

ALVIN TOFFLER has pointed out in Future Shock that if one takes the last 50,000 years of man’s existence and divides it into lifetimes of 62 years each, [Page 43] there would be 800 such lifetimes. Of those 800, 650 were spent in caves. Only in the last 70 lifetimes has it been possible for man to communicate effectively from one lifetime to another—through the invention of writing. Only during the last 6 lifetimes have the masses of men ever seen a printed word. Only during the last 4 lifetimes was it possible to measure time with any precision. Only during the law 2 lifetimes anyone, anywhere, could use an electric motor. The overwhelming majority of all the material things man uses in daily life today has been developed within the present, the 800th lifetime.

Until the present era the pace of change was extremely slow, causing man no traumatic psychological adjustments and creating no crisis of identity. Eric J. Hobsbawm, in The Age of Revolution: 1789-1848, termed the industrial revolution of the eighteenth century an episode without a beginning and an end. “To ask when it was ‘complete,’” he observed, “is senseless, for its essence was that henceforth revolutionary change became the norm.” “By any reckoning this was probably the most important event in world history, at any rate since the invention of agriculture and cities.” “. . . both Britain and the world knew that the Industrial Revolution launched in these islands . . . was transforming the world. Nothing could stand in its way. The gods and kings of the past were powerless before the businessmen and steam-engines of the present.”

THE OLD WORLD came to an end as the result of the industrial revolution and the scientific and technological advances which accompanied it. With the disappearance of the old world’s material order the basic fabric of all human institutions was also radically altered, modified, or destroyed.

As the old world began to roll up, man began to strengthen his faith in himself. The remarkable scientific discoveries initiated by Newton, Descartes, Leibniz, and others, culminating in the past 150 years in the works of Heisenberg, Pasteur, Einstein, and many more, caused man to believe that the unknowns were no longer unknowable, that he could learn and do for himself what formerly he had thought only God could do or reveal. A secular civilization set its faith on science to solve all mysteries and on ideology to establish the cord of harmonious social relations. The utilitarian effects of science and technology seemed to strengthen man’s reliance on them for his salvation. By applying the techniques of science and technology had he not made life easier and longer? Was not living becoming, even for the masses, something more than just a dreary succession of events between birth and death?

The scientific attitude of skepticism toward the supernatural added powerfully to the modern drive toward rationalism, positivism, and materialism. By the mid-nineteenth century the intense scientific materialism allowed no objective, tangible existence for the world of the spirit. “Ideology,” it was anticipated, would “‘purify’” ideas in order to achieve objective truth and [Page 44] “‘correct’” thought. Daniel Bell, commenting on the nineteenth century age of idealism, explains that a social movement can rouse people when it can do three things: “simplify ideas, establish a claim to truth, and, in the union of the two, demand a commitment to action. The nineteenth-century ideologies, by emphasizing inevitability and by infusing passion into their followers, could compete with religion.” Many scientists, in fact, managed to make the pursuit of scientific knowledge itself a kind of religion.

Feuerbach, who called himself Luther II, expressed the sentiment of the age when he wrote that man would be free when he had demythologized religion, when theology had been replaced by anthropology and man substituted for God. Religion was, in his opinion, capable only of creating “‘false consciousness’”; philosophy would reveal “‘true consciousness.’” Thorton Wilder’s novel, The Eighth Day, was a reflection of those in America who, at the turn of the twentieth century identified change and hope with the coming of the year 1900. The new century was the “eighth day”—after Genesis. The men of this century were to be a new breed, free from the past and heirs to the future.

The nineteenth century’s faith in material progress and its assumptions that science, education, and rising living standards would ultimately eradicate man’s inhumanity to man were shattered in our century’s two murderous world wars, a great depression, and a present not free from the immediate threat of both war and depression. Only a generation ago Hitler’s adherents employed chemically efficient gas chambers to embark upon genocide in a country which boasted one of the world’s highest standards of literacy.

The dream of the scientific and mechanical sublime was decisively reversed when cities, which, it had been hoped, would bring culture and wealth, turned into industrial slums, pestholes of poverty, crime, and depravity. Thus progress often turned out to be self-defeating. Reforms and innovations instituted with the highest motives in many cases made things worse rather than better. DDT killed insects which spread disease and destroyed food crops, but its lethal effects on birds, fish, and perhaps indirectly on human beings has caused much alarm. Goods were mass produced to make life fuller and happier—automobiles, detergents, electric power—but they also created waste, disfigured the land, polluted the air and water, and threatened to make large portions of the earth uninhabitable. Improvements in medicine and the challenge felt by the newly independent nations to raise their standard of living have caused a population explosion which neutralizes any economic gain for the masses.

The effect of the nineteenth-century “ideologists” on basic human attitudes remained negligible as war, racism, exploitation, and indifference persisted. Man as Homo faber created a world where reality and ideal continue as parallels which seemingly can never meet. Moreover, the “ideologists” themselves, all convinced of their monopoly on “truth,” added their share to human conflict. “Ideology,” observed Daniel Bell, “makes it unnecessary for people to confront individual issues on their individual merits. One simply turns to the [Page 45] ideological vending machine, and out comes the prepared formulae. And when these beliefs are suffused by apocalyptic fervor, ideas become weapons, and with dreadful results.” The hopes of salvation, truth, or revolution turned to unheroic day-to-day waiting.

Thus the Eighth Day became the Age of Anxiety, the Aspirin Age, the Age of Overkill, the Age of Tranquilizers, the Age of Longing, the Age of Conformity, the Age of Suspicion.

Instead of the millennium, the generation is witnessing the threat of thermonuclear war, the manifold problems of emerging nations, the anarchy of much of modern art, drama, and literature, and an increase (in part apparent, because of improvement in diagnosis and fuller publicity, but in part real) of mental disorder, violence, juvenile delinquency, cynicism, and indecency. Henry Adams, one of the most sensitive and articulate observers of the transition of human society late in the nineteenth century warned that industry was crushing human spirit beneath the weight of its machines and nostalgically contemplated the manner in which the Virgin Mother had given meaning to every aspect of life during the Middle Ages. Only the dynamo, observed Adams, seemed to provide a force comparable to that of the Virgin, and he—Adams —could not bring himself to worship at the shrine of this modern deity. As “ideology” failed to replace “religion,” commitments of all kinds, social, moral, mental, became less and less concrete and more and more tentative. As “absolutes” succumbed to “relativism,” man lost his own sense of identity. A contemporary psychiatrist, Allen Wheelis, observed that “More than ever before one is aware of the identity he appears to have, and more than ever before is dissatisfied with it. It doesn’t fit, it seems alien, as though the unique course of one’s own life had been determined by untoward accident.” His explanation of modern man’s dilemma warrants our attention:

Identity is a coherent sense of self. It depends upon the awareness that one’s endeavors and one’s life make sense, that they are meaningful in the context in which life is lived. It depends also upon stable values, and upon the conviction that one’s actions and values are harmoniously related. It is a sense of wholeness, of integration, of knowing what is right and what is wrong and of being able to choose. . . .

Identity can survive major conflict provided the supporting framework of life is stable, but not when that framework is lost. One cannot exert leverage except from a fixed point. Putting one’s shoulder to the wheel presupposes a patch of solid ground to stand on. Many persons these days find no firm footing; and if everything is open to question, no question could be answered.

How does the Bahá’í Faith respond to these changes of concepts, attitudes, and values which have engulfed humanity during the last century and a half? Can man find a new and creative way of life? Can he attain knowledge of the means to justify his legitimate hope, fulfil his normal emotions, satisfy his [Page 46] intelligence, civilize his activities, and unify his aims with those of his fellowmen?

The Bahá’í analysis of the dilemma of modern man is no different from the one provided by Allen Wheelis. An outstanding Bahá’í social thinker, Horace Holley, commented that modern man is in the same position as the mountain climber bound to other climbers by a rope. He is constantly compelled to choose between freedom and protection, to balance his rights and his loyalties; and he must constantly compromise between his duty to protect others and his duty to develop something unique and important in himself:

As long as the route and the goal are equally vital to all the climbers, the necessary adjustments can be made without undue strain. But modern life binds together in economic, political and other arrangements groups of people who never entered into a pact of mutual agreement, who inwardly desire and need diverse things. The rope that binds them is a tradition, a conviction, an inherited obligation no longer having power to fulfil.

Here, in essence, is the tragic sickness of modern man. What he sows he cannot reap. What he reaps he cannot store until a new harvest ripens. He feeds on another’s desire, he wills to accomplish an alien task. he works to destroy the substance of his dearest hope. Moral standards stop at the frontier of the organized group. Partisan pressures darken the heavens of understanding.

Humanity is undergoing a complete transformation of values. The individual is being transplanted from his customary, sheltered, traditional way of life to the vast and disruptive confusions of a world in torment. The institutions which have afforded him social or psychic well-being are themselves subject to the same universal dislocation. The label no longer identifies the quality or purpose of the organization. One cannot retreat into the isolation of primitive simplicity; one cannot advance without becoming a part of a movement of destiny which no one can control or define.

However, Holley observes. “The central fact to be noted concerning the nature of the Bahá’í Faith is that it contains a power, fulfilled in the realm of conscience, which can reverse the principal momentum of modern civilization . . . and initiate its own momentum moving steadily in the direction of unity and accord.” For the Bahá’í Faith, like all religions of the past, believes in and emphasizes the duality of man: man as an animal, subject to nature; man as spiritual or conscious being capable of transcending the world of material existence. The spiritual powers of man, being nobler and higher, possess virtues which nature intrinsically does not evince and thus can triumph over natural conditions. But the contemporary secular civilization looks upon physical personality and condemns as unscientific the belief that concealed within the person are supernatural powers and immortal being. Holley writes that “What science is to the natural universe religion is to mankind in all that pertains to its spiritual, its supernatural endowment and aim. There is no chaos nor void [Page 47] where truth ceases to exist or laws to operate, but there is in man a realm of ignorance where he attempts to deny a divine law by substituting human desire and human opinion.”

Religion gives meaning to human life; it is a source of wisdom to which man may turn for continuous mental and moral development—“a source of truth revealing a universe in which man’s life has valid purpose and assured realization.” Religion establishes on earth a source of love and truth and law—it is, Bahá’u’lláh writes, “the chief instrument for the establishment of order in the world, and of tranquillity amongst its people.” “Religion,” says Holley, “is God’s Will, but God’s Will so offered to human beings that that Will can penetrate and reinforce their will and raise them up into a new condition; unfold latent powers and attitudes. That is religion.” “The fundamental purpose animating the Faith of God and His Religion,” Bahá’u’lláh informs us, “is to safeguard the interests and promote the unity of the human race, and to foster the spirit of love and fellowship amongst men. . . . This is the straight Path, the fixed end immovable foundation. Whatsoever is raised on this foundation, the changes and chances of the world can never impair its strength, nor will the revolution of countless centuries undermine its structure.”

What religion in its renewal brings is first inner change of spirit which distinguishes religion from philosophy, policy, or partisan programs. The spiritual transformation of individuals can and will transmute world chaos into world order. But faith alone cannot afford a basis on which the organic unity of a religious fellowship can endure. It has to extend from the realm of conscience to the realm of social action. “It confirms the substance of faith not merely as a source of individual development but as a definitely ordered relationship to the community.”

Thus man, from the Bahá’í point of view, has a “destiny to fulfil under a beneficient Providence whose aims for humanity are made known through Prophets who stand between man and the Creator.” The destiny began with man’s creation and from that very beginning, now concealed within the mysteries of millions of years, Prophets appeared to nourish the spiritual qualities of man. “The belief that species were immutable productions,” Darwin wrote in The Origin of Species, “was almost unavoidable as long as the history of the world was thought to be of short duration . . .” The same can be said of the immutability of religions. As long as man believed that the duration of history was only a few thousand years, one could accept the belief [Page 48] in finality of any one religion. But with man’s modern concept of time, one has to reevaluate man’s relationship to his Creator.

The purpose of creation, Bahá’u’lláh explained, was for man to recognize his God and worship Him. The revelation of each Prophet begins a cycle which by the spiritual revivification of man releases the creative elements of a new and higher civilization. The process began, not within the last few thousand years, but most probably as far back as the time of the Homo habilis—or beyond. In addition, the phenomenon occurred not in any isolated geographic space but wherever man existed. In choosing man to be the repository of spiritual experience the Creator was not selective and did not cast off any segment of His creation. Divine Revelation has been periodic, progressive, and universal. Bahá’u’lláh writes:

O SON OF MAN!

I loved thy creation, hence I created thee. Wherefore, do thou love Me, that I may name thy name and fill thy soul with the spirit of life.

O SON OF SPIRIT!

Noble have I created thee, yet thou hast abased thyself. Rise then unto that for which thou wast created.

Religious evolution has accompanied biological and cultural evolution. It has provided guidelines and set the course for the changing world. Until the technological and industrial miracles of the last century or so universalized the earth, man’s outlooks, habits, values, and mores were formed in such isolation that no one had to consider what people might be doing or feeling in other parts of the world. Thus there was a crucial need for a “broadening of outlook, a clarification of vision and a re-education in ideas and habits” if man were to master the problems of a civilization that so suddenly expanded to include the whole world.

[Page 49] Bahá’u’lláh’s Revelation is historically new and unique because it has universalized religion. Viewed from within, the Bahá’í Faith is a religion extended from the individual to embrace humanity. Its teachings for the individual, writes Holley, supply him “with an ethics, a sociology, an ideal of social order, for which humanity in its earlier stages of development was not prepared.” “In the spiritual world” the Bahá’í Faith is “nothing else than the ancient and timeless reality” which the Prophets of the past “disclosed to the race in a stage of added growth and development so that men can take a larger measure of that which always existed.”

In a magnificent chapter on “Religious Education for a Peaceful Society” Holley writes on the universe of Palomar—the largest telescope yet designed, raised on a mountain under the clear California sky.

The universe of Palomar engulfs the small and familiar worlds sustained by the imagination of the poet, the shepherd and the mariner of ancient times. Its infinity of space and time can never be subjugated by hope or fear. It is a motion we cannot stay, a direction we cannot divert, a peace we cannot impair, a power we cannot control. Here existence realizes the fulness of its purpose. The design and the material, the means and the end, the law and the subject, seem wholly one.

At Palomar the mind of man, standing on tiptoe, can behold the cosmic spectacle and grow by the eternal majesty it feeds on, but searching east or west or north or south one finds here no candle lighted to welcome the errant human heart.

“The astronomer has his polished lens of Palomar to reveal the mysteries of the physical universe.” Mankind has Divine Revelation to behold the will and purpose of God.

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[Page 51]

The Lure of Necrophilia

REVIEW OF ERICH FROMM’S The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness (NEW YORK: HOLT, RINEHART AND WINSTON, 1974), XVI, 478 PAGES

BY FIRUZ KAZEMZADEH

DESTRUCTIVENESS is a salient characteristic of man. At times not only individuals but whole societies fall into a frenzy of massacre, devastation, and death without reason and without the slightest advantage to themselves. The two world wars have led to a further increase in violent behavior, inevitably leading one to ask the question: What causes violence, aggression, destructiveness? More particularly, what has caused the steady growth of necrophilia—love for that which is dead, decaying, inanimate, or mechanical?

Recently some scholars have claimed that aggressiveness is an instinct. According to Konrad Lorenz, man is so constructed that his nervous system accumulates energy which must occasionally be released in the form of aggression. Aggression is biologically desirable because an aggressive individual has an advantage in the struggle for existence. Robert Ardrey makes similar claims, while Desmond Morris sees man as the naked ape. The behaviorist A. H. Buss defines aggression as “a response that delivers noxious stimuli to another organism” and rigidly excludes concepts of purpose or intent. Other scholars offer variations on the instinctual, psychoanalytic, or behaviorist themes.

Surveying the field and analyzing the answers, Erich Fromm, a psychoanalyst born and trained in Germany (Heidelberg University, the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute) and a long time resident of the United States, severely criticizes his fellow scholars, pointing out the paucity of data on which they base their conclusions, the falsity of some of their assumptions, the illogic of their thought, their hidden biases, and their subconscious conformity to the ideological dictates of societies in which they live and work. In the Anatomy of Human Destructiveness Fromm sets out to give a definitive critique of their errors and his own presumably correct theory of what constitutes destructiveness and how it works.

Much of Fromm’s criticism is convincing. Lorenz and all those who argue that man is an animal, transfer to human society the findings of zoology, but Fromm quotes N. Tinbergen to the effect that “among the thousands of species that fight, [man is] the only one in which fighting is disruptive. . . . Man is the only species that is a mass murderer, the only misfit in his own society. Why should this be so?”

If instinctivists cannot answer the question, behaviorists refuse even to ask it. Terms such as “disruptive,” “misfit,” and “murderer” imply moral judgment whereas the science of man, as understood by behaviorists, is supposed to be as “value-free” as physics or astronomy. Fromm proceeds to demonstrate the inconsistencies inherent in behaviorist attempts to construct a value-free science of man and concludes that B. F. Skinner “is a naive rationalist who ignores man’s passions.” Moreover, Skinner and the behaviorists are products of their society.

Indeed, the whole principle of neobehaviorism is that self-interest is so powerful that by appealing to it—mainly in the form of the environment’s rewarding the individual for acting in the desired sense—man’s behavior can be completely determined. In the last analysis, neobehaviorism is based on the quintessence of bourgeois experience: the primacy of egotism and self-interest over all other human passions.

Fromm also shows how crude and unreliable [Page 52] the techniques of psychological experimentation of S. Milgram, P. G. Zimbardo, and others are and how the unstated biases and assumptions of “social scientists” determine the results of their research and their experiments.

One might expect that Fromm, a psychoanalyst himself, would offer Freudian psychology as the solution to the problem of aggression and destructiveness. Fromm does pay homage to Freud, especially for his “discovery” of the unconscious and its dynamic:

Freud’s revolution was to make us recognize the unconscious aspect of man’s mind and the energy which man uses to repress the awareness of undesirable desires. He showed that good intentions mean nothing if they cover up the unconscious intentions; he unmasked “honest” dishonesty by demonstrating that it is not enough to have “meant” well consciously.

Though psychoanalysis is an “instinctivistic” theory, the “instinctivist” element does not “refer to the substance of psychoanalysis” which, in Fromm’s revisionist version, “is essentially a theory of unconscious strivings, of resistance, of falsification of reality according to one’s subjective needs and expectations (transference), of character, and of conflicts between passionate strivings embodied in character traits and the demands of self-preservation.” It is this “revised” form of psychoanalysis which provides the conceptual framework for Fromm’s study of human destructiveness.

IN A CHAPTER on neurophysiology Fromm shows that biologically man is no more programmed to be aggressive than he is to be cowardly. Flight may in fact serve the need for self-preservation better than fight; and a whole theory, quite as plausible as that of “aggression,” could be built on the premise of an “uncontrollable flight instinct” in man:

To political and military leaders it may, in fact, not sound so funny, but rather sensible. They know from experience that man’s nature does not seem to incline toward heroism and that many measures have to be taken to motivate man to fight and to prevent him from running away in order to save his life.

Man’s ability to repress the impulse to flight and the apparent dominance of the fight impulse might be due to cultural factors and not to biology at all.

A distinction must be made, Fromm argues, between defensive and predatory aggression in animals and aggressive behavior in man. Cats, hyenas, or wolves show no rage when they attack their prey. Their aggression is highly purposive, directed only at securing food. Fromm claims that predatory aggression has a peculiar neurophysiological base, distinct from the “substrates” of other forms of aggressive behavior. Thus the model of man as predator, and therefore aggressively destructive, is not supported by neurophysioiogical evidence.

In his determination to prove that man is not a predator who has failed to develop instinctive inhibitions against killing his own kind, Fromm argues the contrary. He points out that many men refuse to kill or eat animals they have kept as pets or have otherwise known as individuals. He further argues that language itself reflects human reluctance to eat animals:

We use different words for flesh: if the animal is alive, we speak of its flesh; if the flesh is to be eaten, we call it meat. Quite clearly this differentiation is meant to remove the association between the animal one eats and the living animal. We even give different names to some animals depending on whether they are alive or to be eaten as food. When we speak of the live animal, we speak of cows and bulls; when we eat them, we talk about beef. Pigs to be eaten we call pork. . . .

This is the kind of fanciful speculation in which psychoanalysts often indulge and which infests the pages of psychoanalytic literature. One wonders whether Fromm has given thought to the fact that the live animals he mentioned have Saxon names, [Page 53] while the meats have French names (cow —beef, pig—pork, calf—veal). It has been suggested by historians that after A.D. 1066 Saxons worked while French-speaking Normans ate, a good enough reason for the dual terminology, though it smacks of economic interpretation of history and ruins another lovely psychoanalytic theory.

Paleontology and anthropology are additional sciences Fromm mobilizes in the service of his thesis that man is not by nature a destructive, aggressive predator. He adduces a mass of evidence indicating that primitive man, man the hunter, was not the vicious creature some have imagined. When speculating about the distant past that left virtually no record, it is tempting and easy to guess, then to turn one’s guesses into possibilities, transform those into probabilities, and emerge with certainties. Fromm follows Lewis Mumford in postulating that the appearance of cities changed the entire structure of human society. This is undoubtedly true, but it is doubtful whether the pre-urban man was necessarily gentler or more peaceful. There is simply no evidence to prove such a contention. However, it is demonstrable that Fromm’s assertion that “not before the city-state with its kings and its hierarchy had developed did bloody wars of conquest become a permanent institution,” is wrong. Rome was overwhelmed by Germanic barbarians from the forests, not by city-dwelling Carthagenians or Persians; and what city-state bred and nurtured Genghis Khan?

Moreover, the identification of agriculture with creativity and of the intellect with inventions, techniques, the state, and the law is dubious, to say the least. “No longer the womb,” Fromm writes, “but the mind became the creative power, and with this, not women, but men dominated societies.” Abstractions of this sort, equating the woman with the womb and denying her a mind are too old-fashioned to merit serious comment.

Fromm quotes Mumford to the effect that the emergence of civilization was equivalent to the exertion of power, that city-states were “‘rigorous, efficient, often harsh, even sadistic,’” and that Egyptian and Mesopotamian monarchs “‘boasted on their monuments and tablets of their personal feats in mutilating, torturing, and killing with their own hands their chief captives.’” The abundant evidence to the contrary is never presented. Yet the Achaemenian shahs of ancient Persia, contemporaries and conquerors of Egyptian and Mesopotamian monarchs, proclaimed themselves obedient to the benevolent will of Ahura Mazda—the Wise Lord—and boasted of their concern for the well-being of their subjects, of their love of justice, and of their determination to protect the weak. They were famed for their tolerance and admired even by their enemies.

FROMM’S BELIEF that he has “demonstrated . . . that his [man’s] destructiveness is neither innate, nor part of ‘human nature,’ and that it is not common to all men” is to a considerable extent justified, but not because of the historical evidence he has gathered, for it is selective, dubious, and incomplete.

To understand aggression, benign or malignant, one must form a concept of human nature. Fromm does not avoid the challenge. While most contemporary scholars disclaim the existence of human nature, Fromm boldly proclaims that man is the only animal who possesses reason through which he may know the nature of things. It is the emergence of self-awareness and reason in man that has disrupted the “harmony” of his animal existence.

Their emergence has made man into an anomaly, the freak of the universe. He is part of nature, subject to her physical laws and unable to change them, yet he transcends nature. He is set apart while being a part; he is homeless, yet chained to the home he shares with all creatures. Cast into this world at an accidental place and time he is forced out of it accidentally and against his will. Being aware of himself, he realizes his powerlessness and the limitations of his existence. . . .

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. . . Man is the only animal who does not feel at home in nature, who can feel evicted from paradise, the only animal for whom his own existence is a problem. . . . Man’s existential contradiction results in a state of constant disequilibrium. This disequilibrium distinguishes him from the animal, which lives, as it were, in harmony with nature.

From this state stem man’s psychic needs —not simple animal instincts to feed, run from danger, seek shelter, procreate, but fully human passions of “love, tenderness, striving for justice, independence, truth, hate, sadism, masochism, destructiveness, narcissism.” These are to Fromm “character-rooted passions.” They describe man’s nature, the structure of his character which he defines as “the relatively permanent system of all noninstinctual strivings through which man relates himself to the human and natural world.”

Man’s character, his nature, require that he overcome his alienation from the world in which he finds himself a stranger. Beyond the immediate satisfaction of his material needs all his strivings are directed toward the establishment of harmony between himself and his universe. He may produce an illusion of harmony by dulling his mind with drugs, by dedicating himself to some narrow pursuit that would absorb all his energies, leaving none for reflection that would bring back to him the awareness of being alone. He may try to overcome alienation by reverting to the animal stage. However, sooner or later he must discover that there is no refuge from alienation unless he finds in life an object of “‘ultimate concern’” (Fromm borrows Tillich’s phrase). Such an object of ultimate devotion elevates man “beyond his isolated existence, with all its doubts and insecurity, and gives meaning to life. In being devoted to a goal beyond his isolated ego, he transcends himself and leaves the prison of absolute egocentricity.”

The key to such transcendence of his state is unity:

There is only one approach to unity that can be successful without crippling man. Such an attempt was made in the first millenium B.C. in all parts of the world where man had developed a civilization—in China, in India, in Egypt, in Palestine, in Greece. The great religions springing from the soil of these cultures taught that man can achieve unity not by a tragic effect to undo the fact of the split [between man and nature], but by fully developing human reason and love. Great as are the differences between Taoism, Buddhism, prophetic Judaism, and the Christianity of the Gospels, these religions had one common goal: to arrive at the experience of oneness, not by regressing to animal existence but by becoming fully human—oneness within man, oneness between man and nature, and oneness between man and other men.

In these and similar passages, Fromm comes as close to grasping the essence of man’s earthly dilemma as does any modern thinker. However, he shrinks from the implications of his own insight and quickly retreats to the safer ground of the more conventional “wisdom” of our day. Religion, it turns out, could be anything: even the humanism of the Renaissance or the philosophy of Marx. At this point a baffled reader might very well feel that Fromm has brought him full circle. If we are to expect salvation from Marx, why not from Lorenz or Skinner?

The one means of overcoming alienation, the establishment of a relationship between man and God, whether conceived as a person, a force, or an ineffable essence of the universe—the means offered by the great religions—is seen with unseeing eyes. However, Fromm is not concentrating primarily on overcoming alienation. More than halfway through the book he finally grapples with the problem of cruelty and destructiveness.

Destructiveness takes many forms. One is “algolagnia” or the desire to inflict pain on others (sadism) or have it inflicted upon [Page 55] oneself (masochism). Algolagnia, whether sexually or otherwise motivated, is always destructive. Fromm rejects the argument of the radical modern apologists of Marquis de Sade that since sadism is a human desire and since man must be free to satisfy his desires, sadism should neither be disparaged nor its practice prevented. Moreover, sexual sadism is not the most dangerous form of destructiveness, since it is confined in its effects. Non-sexual sadism is defined by Fromm as “the passion to have absolute and unrestricted control over a living being. . . .” He provides an example in Albert Camus’ Caligula, the mad emperor who humiliates his friends. “He kills some of them, and those that remain still have to smile and joke.” He is insatiable in his quest for power. Only absolute power will satisfy him. “‘I want the moon,’” he says. This variety of sadism is socially the most dangerous, while psychologically “It is the transformation of impotence into the experience of omnipotence; it is the religion of psychical cripples.”

Another form of malignant aggression is necrophilia, which like sadism, can be of sexual or non-sexual nature, though the term has not been commonly applied to “a character-rooted passion.” As defined by Fromm, necrophilia is “the passionate attraction to all that is dead, decayed, putrid, sickly; it is the passion to transform that which is alive into something unalive; to destroy for the sake of destruction; the exclusive interest in all that is purely mechanical. It is the passion ‘to tear apart living structures.’”

Fromm makes a connection between necrophilia and modern dedication to mechanical gadgets. (“All over the industrialized world there are men who feel more tender toward, and are more interested in, their automobiles than their wives.”) Com- pulsive picture taking too can be a minor manifestation of necrophilia, since “Taking a snapshot (the aggressive expression is significant) means essentially to transform the act of seeing into an object—the picture . . .” The connection between destructiveness and worship of technology is strikingly expressed in the “Futurist Manifesto” of the Italian poet, F. T. Marinetti, who proclaims that a speeding car, its hood decorated with great pipes, is more beautiful than the “Victory of Samothrace.” “Except in struggle,” he shouts, “there is no more beauty. No work without an aggressive character can be a masterpiece. Poetry must be conceived as a violent attack on unknown forces . . .” And further: “We glorify war—the world’s only hygiene— militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of freedom-bringers, beautiful ideas worth dying for, and scorn for woman.” Marinetti would destroy museums and libraries. “We will sing,” he orates,

of great crowds excited by work, by pleasure, and by riot; we will sing of the multicolored, polyphonic tides of revolution in the modern capitals; we will sing of the vibrant nightly fervor of arsenals and shipyards blazing with violent electric moons; greedy railway stations that devour smoke—plumed serpents; factories hung on clouds by the crooked lines of their smoke; bridges that stride the rivers like giant gymnasts, flashing in the sun with a glitter of knives . . .

In Marinetti’s worship of the machine, speed, war, in his anti-intellectualism and anti-feminism Fromm discerns all the essential elements of necrophilia. Even the redeeming power of art cannot absolve Marionetti from the charge of spiritual perversity when he proclaims the new religion of velocity. “Holiness of wheels and rails. One must kneel on the tracks to pray to the divine velocity.” Everything must succumb before the needs of the machine: “Forthcoming destruction of houses and cities, to make way for great meeting places for cars and planes.”

[Page 56] Generalizing from mountains of evidence, Fromm suggests that modern industrial society promotes necrophilious tendencies. Modem man

. . . transforms all life into things, including himself . . . The world becomes a sum of lifeless artifacts; from synthetic food to synthetic organs, the whole man becomes part of the total machinery that he controls and is simultaneously controlled by. . . .

. . . Man, in the name of progress, is transforming the world into a stinking and poisonous place (and this is not symbolic). He pollutes the air, the water, the soil, the animals—and himself. . . .

The phenomena about which there is so much indignation—drug addiction, crime, the cultural and spiritual decay, contempt for genuine ethical values—are all related to the growing attraction to death and dirt. How can one expect that the young, the poor, and those without hope would not be attracted to decay when it is promoted by those who direct the course of modern society?

Though sadism and necrophilia are diseases of the individual, they spring from the interaction of man with his environment and, first of all, with other men. The solution to the problem of human destructiveness, Fromm believes, will be possible only if society itself is reconstructed in such a way as to discourage necrophilia, promoting biophilia —love of life—instead. The book ends with an affirmation of optimism. One senses that Fromm would have rather confessed faith, but faith, he says, “because of its theological implications, is not a word for today.” He knows that “Optimism is an alienated form of faith . . .” In his case the alienation is from the object of ultimate concern, from God. So Fromm is prevented by his own immersion in a mauerialistic culture, a culture that places its faith and values on things, from successfully achieving that act of transcendence which alone would justify his optimism, his faith.

It is at this point that the book fails. It has no solutions to offer. After learning something about the nature of destructiveness, one is justified in asking for methods of treatment. Fromm is honest and peddles no nostrums attractively packaged to suit the public’s taste. Instead his book has no ending. It must therefore be judged not as a unified whole, not as a theory that proposes a cure as well as a diagnosis, but rather as a series of sketches, suggestions, and insights—some acute and ultimately valid, others hasty, confused, or derived from psychoanalytic mythology in which truth and error are so closely intertwined that the strands cannot be unravelled. It is a frustrating book and a rewarding one: frustrating because the author did not have the wisdom, or the courage, to take the step which would have opened the door to a higher level of perception and discourse, rewarding because he provoked thought and focused attention on one of the most important human experiences —the passion to destroy.

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Authors & Artists

MICHAEL S. HARPER is a professor of English and director of the writing program at Brown University. He holds a bachelor’s degree from California State University at Los Angeles and masters degrees from that University and the University of Iowa Writer’s Workshop. His many publications include Dear John, Dear Coltrane, History Is Your Own Heartbeat, History as Apple-tree, Song: I Want a Witness, Debridgement, and Nightmare Begins Responsibility. His interests include editing Heartblow: Black Veils, an anthology of black poetry of the seventies and, with Sterling A. Brown and Sterling Stuckey, New Negro Caravan. He was a National Book Award nominee in 1970 and in 1972 won the best book award from the Black Academy of Arts and Letters for History Is Your Own Heartbeat.

FIRUZ KAZEMZADEH is a professor of History at Yale University and editor of World Order.

DENIS MACEOIN, a native of Ireland, holds an M.A. degree in English language and literature from Trinity College, Dublin. He is now, after studying for six months at Pahlavi University in Shíráz, completing work on a second M.A. degree in Persian and Arabic studies at the University of Edinburgh. He has specialized in Qájár Persia and Sufism and Shi‘ism and is writing his doctoral dissertation on Bahá’í history up to 1892.

EMO MARCONI, who lives in Milan, has taught drama at various universities in Italy. Having become a Bahá’í several years ago, Professor Marconi has been working on the problem of defining the Bahá’í theater of the future.

NOSRATOLLAH RASSEKH is a professor of history and chairman of the Department of History at Lewis and Clark College. Dr. Rassekh holds a B.A. degree in political science, an M. A. degree in international relations, and a Ph.D. in history, all from Stanford University. He twice held the Ray Lyman Wilbur Scholarship in American History from Stanford and since 1970 has been a Fellow of Stanford’s Hoover Institute. His publications include “The Non-Hero in History,” which appeared in the Fall 1967 World Order, and A Bibliography of Persian Gulf Sheikdoms. His “White Revolution of Irán” will be published next year by the Hoover Institution.

ART CREDITS: p. 3. pen and ink drawing by David S. Ruhe; p. 8, woodcut, courtesy of The Bettmann Archive; p. 23, photograph of theatrical mask from Pompeii, courtesy of The Bettmann Archive; p. 27, photograph of a water color by John Searle, courtesy of The Bettmann Archive; p. 28, woodcut, courtesy of The Bettmann Archive; p. 22, engraving, courtesy of The Bettmann Archive; p. 31, pen and ink drnwing, courtesy of The Bettmann Archive; p. 36, pen and ink drawing by David S. Ruhe; p. 50, engraving, courtesy of The Bettmann Archive; back-cover, photograph by Glenford E. Mitchell.

GLENFORD E. MITCHELL, who received a master’s degree in journalism from Columbia University, is managing editor of World Order.

DAVID S. RUHE, a physician and former professor of Preventive Medicine and Public Health at the University of Kansas Medical School and Center, studied art in his youth at the Baum Art School in Allentown, Pennsylvania. He lives in Haifa, Israel, where he serves as a member of the Universal House of Justice, the supreme administrative body of the Bahá’í Faith.

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