(Prepared by the Baha’i World Centre and
commissioned by The Universal House of Justice)
At
Ridván 2002, we addressed an open letter to the world’s religious leaders. Our
action arose out of awareness that the disease of sectarian hatreds, if not
decisively checked, threatens harrowing consequences that will leave few areas
of the world unaffected. The letter acknowledged with appreciation the
achievements of the interfaith movement, to which Bahá’ís have sought to
contribute since an early point in the movement’s emergence. Nevertheless, we
felt we must be forthright in saying that, if the religious crisis is to be
addressed as seriously as is occurring with respect to other prejudices
afflicting humankind, organized religion must find within itself a comparable
courage to rise above fixed conceptions inherited from a distant past.
Above all, we expressed our conviction
that the time has come when religious leadership must face honestly and without further evasion the implications of the truth
that God is one and that, beyond all diversity of cultural expression and human
interpretation, religion is likewise one. It was intimations of this truth that
originally inspired the interfaith movement and that have sustained it through
the vicissitudes of the past one hundred years. Far from challenging the
validity of any of the great revealed faiths, the principle has the capacity to
ensure their continuing relevance. In order to exert its influence, however,
recognition of this reality must operate at the heart of religious discourse,
and it was with this in mind that we felt that our letter should be explicit in
articulating it.
Response has been encouraging. Bahá’í
institutions throughout the world ensured that thousands of copies of the
document were delivered to influential figures in the major faith communities.
While it was perhaps not surprising that the message it contained was dismissed
out of hand in a few circles, Bahá’ís report that, in general, they were warmly
welcomed. Particularly affecting has been the obvious sincerity of many
recipients’ distress over the failure of religious institutions to assist
humanity in dealing with challenges whose essential nature is spiritual and
moral. Discussions have turned readily to the need for fundamental change in
the way the believing masses of humankind relate to one another, and in a
significant number of instances, those receiving the letter have been moved to
reproduce and distribute it to other clerics in their respective traditions. We
feel hopeful that our initiative may serve as a catalyst opening the way to new
understanding of religion’s purpose.
However rapidly or slowly this change
occurs, the concern of Bahá’ís must be with their own responsibility in the
matter. The task of ensuring that His message is engaged by people everywhere
is one that Bahá’u’lláh has laid primarily on the shoulders of those who have
recognized Him. This, of course, has been the work that the Bahá’í community
has been pursuing throughout the history of the Faith, but the accelerating
breakdown in social order calls out desperately for the religious spirit to be
freed from the shackles that have so far prevented it from bringing to bear the
healing influence of which it is capable.
If they are to respond to the need,
Bahá’ís must draw on a deep understanding of the process by which humanity’s
spiritual life evolves. Bahá’u’lláh’s writings provide insights that can help
to elevate discussion of religious issues above sectarian and transient
considerations. The responsibility to avail oneself of this spiritual resource
is inseparable from the gift of faith itself. “Religious fanaticism and
hatred”, Bahá’u’lláh warns, “are a world-devouring fire, whose violence none
can quench. The Hand of Divine power can, alone, deliver mankind from this
desolating affliction….” Far from feeling unsupported in their efforts to
respond, Bahá’ís will come increasingly to appreciate that the Cause they serve
represents the arrowhead of an awakening taking place among people everywhere,
regardless of religious background and indeed among many with no religious
leaning.
Reflection on the challenge has prompted
us to commission the commentary that follows. One Common Faith, prepared under our supervision, reviews relevant passages
from both the writings of Bahá’u’lláh and the scriptures of other faiths
against the background of the contemporary crisis. We commend it to the
thoughtful study of the friends.
The Universal
House of Justice
Naw-Rúz, 2005
ONE
COMMON FAITH
1. There is every reason for
confidence that the period of history now opening will be far more receptive to
efforts to spread Bahá’u’lláh’s message than was the case in the century just
ended. All the signs indicate that a sea change in human consciousness is under
way.
2. Early in the twentieth
century, a materialistic interpretation of reality had consolidated itself so
completely as to become the dominant world faith insofar as the direction of
society was concerned. In the process, the civilizing of human nature had been
violently wrenched out of the orbit it had followed for millennia. For many in
the West, the Divine authority that had functioned as the focal centre of
guidance—however diverse the interpretations of its nature—seemed simply to
have dissolved and vanished. In large measure, the individual was left free to maintain whatever relationship he believed connected his
life to a world transcending material existence, but society as a whole
proceeded with growing confidence to sever dependence on a conception of the
universe that was judged to be at best a fiction and at worst an opiate, in
either case inhibiting progress. Humanity had taken its destiny into its own
hands. It had solved through rational experimentation and discourse—so people
were given to believe—all of the fundamental issues related to human governance
and development.
3. This posture was
reinforced by the assumption that the values, ideals and disciplines cultivated
over the centuries were now reliably fixed and enduring features of human
nature. They needed merely to be refined by education and reinforced by
legislative action. The moral legacy of the past was just that: humanity’s
indefeasible inheritance, requiring no further religious interventions.
Admittedly, undisciplined individuals, groups or even nations would continue to
threaten the stability of the social order and call for correction. The
universal civilization towards the realization of which all the forces of
history had been bearing the human race, however, was irresistibly emerging,
inspired by secular conceptions of reality. People’s happiness would be the
natural result of better health, better food, better education, better living
conditions—and the attainment of these unquestionably desirable goals now
seemed to be within the reach of a society single-mindedly focused on their
pursuit.
4. Throughout that part of
the world where the vast majority of the earth’s population live, facile
announcements that “God is Dead” had passed largely
unnoticed. The experience of the peoples of Africa, Asia,
5. As the twentieth century
approached its close, therefore, nothing seemed less likely than a sudden
resurgence of religion as a subject of consuming global importance. Yet that is
precisely what has now occurred in the form of a
groundswell of anxiety and discontent, much of it still only dimly conscious of
the sense of spiritual emptiness that is producing it. Ancient sectarian
conflicts, apparently unresponsive to the patient arts of diplomacy, have
re-emerged with a virulence as great as anything known before. Scriptural
themes, miraculous phenomena and theological dogmas that, until recently, had
been dismissed as relics of an age of ignorance find themselves solemnly, if
indiscriminately, explored in influential media. In many lands, religious
credentials take on new and compelling significance in the candidature of aspirants
to political office. A world, which had assumed that with the collapse of the
Berlin Wall an age of international peace had dawned, is warned that it is in
the grip of a war of civilizations whose defining character is irreconcilable
religious antipathies. Bookstores, magazine stands, Web sites and libraries
struggle to satisfy an apparently inexhaustible public appetite for information
on religious and spiritual subjects. Perhaps the most insistent factor in
producing the change is reluctant recognition that there is no credible
replacement for religious belief as a force capable of generating
self-discipline and restoring commitment to moral behaviour.
6. Beyond the attention that
religion, as formally conceived, has begun to command is a widespread revival
of spiritual search. Expressed most commonly as an urge to discover a personal
identity that transcends the merely physical, the development encourages a
multitude of pursuits, both positive and negative in character. On the one
hand, the search for justice and the promotion of the
cause of international peace tend to have the effect of also arousing new
perceptions of the individual’s role in society. Similarly, although focused on
the mobilization of support for changes in social decision-making, movements
like environmentalism and feminism induce a re-examination of people’s sense of
themselves and of their purpose in life. A reorientation occurring in all the
major religious communities is the accelerating migration of believers from
traditional branches of the parent faiths to sects that attach primary
importance to the spiritual search and personal experiences of their members.
At the opposite pole, extraterrestrial sightings, “self-discovery” regimens,
wilderness retreats, charismatic exaltation, various New Age enthusiasms, and
the consciousness-raising efficacy attributed to narcotics and hallucinogens
attract followings far larger and more diverse than anything enjoyed by
spiritualism or theosophy at a similar historical turning point a century ago.
For a Bahá’í, the proliferation even of cults and practices that may arouse
aversion in the minds of many serves primarily as a reminder of the insight
embodied in the ancient tale of Majnún, who sifted the dust in his search for
the beloved Laylí, although aware that she was pure spirit: “I seek her
everywhere; haply somewhere I shall find her.” [1]
7. The reawakened
interest in religion is clearly far from having reached its peak, in either its
explicitly religious or its less definable spiritual manifestations. On the
contrary. The phenomenon is the product of historical
forces that steadily gather momentum. Their common effect is to erode the
certainty, bequeathed to the world by the twentieth century, that material
existence represents ultimate reality.
8. The most
obvious cause of these re-evaluations has been the bankruptcy of the
materialist enterprise itself. For well over a hundred years, the idea of
progress was identified with economic development and with its capacity to
motivate and shape social improvement. Those differences of opinion that
existed did not challenge this world view, but only conceptions as to how its
goals might best be attained. Its most extreme form, the iron dogma of
“scientific materialism”, sought to reinterpret every aspect of history and
human behaviour in its own narrow terms. Whatever humanitarian ideals may have
inspired some of its early proponents, the universal consequence was to produce
regimes of totalitarian control prepared to use any means of coercion in
regulating the lives of hapless populations subjected to them. The goal held up
as justification of such abuses was the creation of a new kind of society that
would ensure not only freedom from want but fulfilment for the human spirit. At
the end, after eight decades of mounting folly and brutality, the movement
collapsed as a credible guide to the world’s future.
9. Other systems
of social experimentation, while repudiating recourse to inhumane methods,
nevertheless derived their moral and intellectual thrust from the same limited
conception of reality. The view took root that, since
people were essentially self-interested actors in matters pertaining to their
economic well-being, the building of just and prosperous societies could be
ensured by one or another scheme of what was described as modernization. The
closing decades of the twentieth century, however, sagged under a mounting
burden of evidence to the contrary: the breakdown of family life, soaring
crime, dysfunctional educational systems, and a catalogue of other social
pathologies that bring to mind the sombre words of Bahá’u’lláh’s warning about
the impending condition of human society: “Such shall be its plight, that to disclose
it now would not be meet and seemly.”[2]
10. The fate of
what the world has learned to call social and economic development has left no
doubt that not even the most idealistic motives can correct materialism’s
fundamental flaws. Born in the wake of the chaos of the Second World War,
“development” became by far the largest and most ambitious collective
undertaking on which the human race has ever embarked. Its humanitarian
motivation matched its enormous material and technological investment. Fifty
years later, while acknowledging the impressive benefits development has
brought, the enterprise must be adjudged, by its own standards, a disheartening
failure. Far from narrowing the gap between the well-being of the small segment
of the human family who enjoy the benefits of modernity and the condition of
the vast populations mired in hopeless want, the collective effort that began
with such high hopes has seen the gap widen into an abyss.
11. Consumer
culture, today’s inheritor by default of materialism’s gospel of human
betterment, is unembarrassed by the ephemeral nature of the goals that inspire
it. For the small minority of people who can afford them, the benefits it
offers are immediate, and the rationale unapologetic. Emboldened by the
breakdown of traditional morality, the advance of the new creed is essentially
no more than the triumph of animal impulse, as instinctive and blind as
appetite, released at long last from the restraints of supernatural sanctions.
Its most obvious casualty has been language. Tendencies once universally
castigated as moral failings mutate into necessities of social progress.
Selfishness becomes a prized commercial resource; falsehood reinvents itself as
public information; perversions of various kinds unabashedly claim the status
of civil rights. Under appropriate euphemisms, greed, lust, indolence,
pride—even violence—acquire not merely broad acceptance but social and economic
value. Ironically, as words have been drained of meaning, so have the very
material comforts and acquisitions for which truth has been casually
sacrificed.
12. Clearly,
materialism’s error has lain not in the laudable effort to improve the
conditions of life, but in the narrowness of mind and unjustified
self-confidence that have defined its mission. The importance both of material
prosperity and of the scientific and technological advances necessary to its
achievement is a theme that runs through the writings of the Bahá’í Faith. As
was inevitable from the outset, however, arbitrary efforts to disengage such
physical and material well-being from humanity’s spiritual
and moral development have ended by forfeiting the allegiance of the very
populations whose interests a materialistic culture purports to serve. “Witness
how the world is being afflicted with a fresh calamity every day”, Bahá’u’lláh
warns. “Its sickness is approaching the stage of utter hopelessness, inasmuch
as the true Physician is debarred from administering the remedy, whilst
unskilled practitioners are regarded with favour, and are accorded full freedom
to act.”[3]
13. In addition to
disillusionment with the promises of materialism, a force of change undermining
the misconceptions about reality that humanity brought into the twenty-first
century is global integration. At the simplest level, it takes the form of
advances in communication technologies that open broad avenues of interaction
among the planet’s diverse populations. Along with facilitating interpersonal
and intersocial exchanges, general access to information has the effect of
transmuting the cumulative learning of the ages, until recently the preserve of
privileged elites, into the patrimony of the entire human family, without
distinction of nation, race or culture. With all the gross inequities that
global integration perpetuates—indeed intensifies—no informed observer can fail
to acknowledge the stimulus to reflection about reality that such changes have
produced. With reflection has come a questioning of all established authority,
no longer merely that of religion and morality, but also of
government, academia, commerce, the media and, increasingly, scientific
opinion.
14. Apart from
technological factors, unification of the planet is exerting other, even more
direct effects on thought. It would be impossible to exaggerate, for example,
the transformative impact on global consciousness that has resulted from mass
travel on an international scale. Greater still have been the consequences of
the enormous migrations that the world has witnessed during the century and a
half since the Báb declared His mission. Millions of refugees fleeing from
persecution have swept like tidal waves back and forth across the European,
African and Asiatic continents, particularly. Amid the suffering such turmoil
has caused, one perceives the progressive integration of the world’s races and
cultures as the citizenry of a single global homeland. As a result, people of
every background have been exposed to the cultures and norms of others about
whom their forefathers knew little or nothing, exciting a search for meaning
that cannot be evaded.
15. It is
impossible to imagine how different the history of the past century and a half
would have been had any of the leading arbiters of world affairs addressed by
Bahá’u’lláh spared time for reflection on a conception of reality supported by
the moral credentials of its Author, moral credentials of the kind they
professed to hold in the highest regard. What is unmistakable to a Bahá’í is
that, despite such failure, the transformations announced in Bahá’u’lláh’s
message are resistlessly accomplishing themselves. Through shared discoveries
and shared travails, peoples of diverse cultures are
brought face to face with the common humanity lying just beneath the surface of
imagined differences of identity. Whether stubbornly opposed in some societies
or welcomed elsewhere as a release from meaningless and suffocating
limitations, the sense that the earth’s inhabitants are indeed “the leaves of
one tree”[4] is slowly
becoming the standard by which humanity’s collective efforts are now judged.
16. Loss of faith
in the certainties of materialism and the progressive globalizing of human
experience reinforce one another in the longing they inspire for understanding
about the purpose of existence. Basic values are challenged; parochial
attachments are surrendered; once unthinkable demands are accepted. It is this
universal upheaval, Bahá’u’lláh explains, for which the scriptures of past
religions employed the imagery of “the Day of Resurrection”: “The shout hath
been raised, and the people have come forth from their graves, and arising, are
gazing around them.”[5] Beneath all
of the dislocation and suffering, the process is essentially a spiritual one:
“The breeze of the All-Merciful hath wafted, and the souls have been quickened
in the tombs of their bodies.”[6]
17. Throughout
history, the primary agents of spiritual development have been the great
religions. For the majority of the earth’s people, the scriptures of each of
these systems of belief have served, in Bahá’u’lláh’s words, as “the City of
18. Why, then,
does this immensely rich heritage not serve as the central stage for today’s
reawakening of spiritual quest? On the periphery, earnest attempts are being
made to reformulate the teachings that gave rise to the respective faiths, in
the hope of imbuing them with new appeal, but the greater part of the search
for meaning is diffused, individualistic and incoherent in character. The
scriptures have not changed; the moral principles they contain have lost none
of their validity. No one who sincerely poses questions to Heaven, if he
persists, will fail to detect an answering voice in the Psalms or in the
Upanishads. Anyone with some intimation of the Reality that
transcends this material one will be touched to the heart by the words in which
Jesus or Buddha speaks so intimately of it. The Qur’án’s apocalyptic visions
continue to provide compelling assurance to its readers that the realization of
justice is central to the Divine purpose. Nor, in their essential features, do
the lives of heroes and saints seem any less meaningful than they did when
those lives were lived centuries ago. For many religious people, therefore, the
most painful aspect of the current crisis of civilization is that the search
for truth has not turned with confidence into religion’s familiar avenues.
19. The problem
is, of course, twofold. The rational soul does not merely occupy a private
sphere, but is an active participant in a social order. Although the received
truths of the great faiths remain valid, the daily experience of an individual
in the twenty-first century is unimaginably removed from the one that he or she
would have known in any of those ages when this guidance was revealed.
Democratic decision-making has fundamentally altered the relationship of the
individual to authority. With growing confidence and growing success, women
justly insist on their right to full equality with men. Revolutions in science
and technology change not only the functioning but the conception of society,
indeed of existence itself. Universal education and an explosion of new fields
of creativity open the way to insights that stimulate social mobility and
integration, and create opportunities of which the rule of law encourages the
citizen to take full advantage. Stem cell research, nuclear energy, sexual
identity, ecological stress and the use of wealth raise, at the very least, social questions that have no precedent. These,
and the countless other changes affecting every aspect of human life, have
brought into being a new world of daily choices for both society and its
members. What has not changed is the inescapable requirement of making such
choices, whether for better or worse. It is here that the spiritual nature of
the contemporary crisis comes into sharpest focus because most of the decisions
called for are not merely practical but moral. In large part, therefore, loss
of faith in traditional religion has been an inevitable consequence of failure
to discover in it the guidance required to live with modernity, successfully
and with assurance.
20. A second
barrier to a re-emergence of inherited systems of belief as the answer to
humanity’s spiritual yearnings is the effects already mentioned of global
integration. Throughout the planet, people raised in a given religious frame of
reference find themselves abruptly thrown into close association with others
whose beliefs and practices appear at first glance irreconcilably different
from their own. The differences can and often do give rise to defensiveness,
simmering resentments and open conflict. In many cases, however, the effect is
rather to prompt a reconsideration of received doctrine and to encourage
efforts at discovering values held in common. The support enjoyed by various
interfaith activities doubtless owes a great deal to response of this kind
among the general public. Inevitably, with such approaches comes a questioning
of religious doctrines that inhibit association and understanding. If people
whose beliefs appear to be fundamentally different from
one’s own nevertheless live moral lives that deserve admiration, what is it
that makes one’s own faith superior to theirs? Alternatively, if all of the
great religions share certain basic values in common, do not sectarian
attachments run the risk of merely reinforcing unwanted barriers between an
individual and his neighbours?
21. Few today
among those who have some degree of objective familiarity with the subject are
likely, therefore, to entertain an illusion that any one of the established
religious systems of the past can assume the role of ultimate guide for
humankind in the issues of contemporary life, even in the improbable event that
its disparate sects should come together for that purpose. Each one of what the
world regards as independent religions is set in the mould created by its
authoritative scripture and its history. As it cannot refashion its system of
belief in a manner to derive legitimacy from the authoritative words of its
Founder, it likewise cannot adequately answer the multitude of questions posed
by social and intellectual evolution. Distressing as this may appear to many,
it is no more than an inherent feature of the evolutionary process. Attempts to
force a reversal of some kind can lead only to still greater disenchantment
with religion itself and exacerbate sectarian conflict.
22. The dilemma is
both artificial and self-inflicted. The world order, if it can be so described,
within which Bahá’ís today pursue the work of sharing
Bahá’u’lláh’s message is one whose misconceptions about both human nature and
social evolution are so fundamental as to severely inhibit the most intelligent
and well-intentioned endeavours at human betterment. Particularly is this true
with respect to the confusion that surrounds virtually every aspect of the
subject of religion. In order to respond adequately to the spiritual needs of
their neighbours, Bahá’ís will have to gain an in-depth understanding of the
issues involved. The effort of imagination this challenge requires can be
appreciated from the advice that is perhaps the most frequently and urgently
reiterated admonition in the writings of their Faith: to “meditate”, to
“ponder”, to “reflect”.
23. A commonplace
of popular discourse is that by “religion” is intended the multitude of sects
currently in existence. Not surprisingly, such a suggestion at once arouses
protest in other quarters that by religion is intended rather one or another of
the great, independent belief systems of history that have shaped and inspired
whole civilizations. This point of view, in turn, however, runs up against the
inevitable query as to where one will find these historic faiths in the
contemporary world. Where, precisely, are “Judaism”, “Buddhism”,
“Christianity”, “Islám” and the others, since they obviously cannot be
identified with the irreconcilably opposed organizations that purport to speak
authoritatively in their names? Nor does the problem end there. Yet another
response to the enquiry will almost certainly be that by religion is intended
simply an attitude to life, a sense of relationship with a Reality that
transcends material existence. Religion, so conceived, is
an attribute of the individual person, an impulse not susceptible of
organization, an experience universally available. Again, however, such an
orientation will be seen by a majority of religiously minded persons as lacking
the very authority of self-discipline and the unifying effect that give
religion meaning. Some objectors would even argue that, on the contrary,
religion signifies the lifestyle of persons who, like themselves, have adopted
severe regimens of daily ritual and self-denial that set them entirely apart
from the rest of society. What all such differing conceptions have in common is
the extent to which a phenomenon that is acknowledged to completely transcend
human reach has nevertheless gradually been imprisoned within conceptual
limits—whether organizational, theological, experiential or ritualistic—of
human invention.
24. The teachings
of Bahá’u’lláh cut through this tangle of inconsistent views and, in doing so,
reformulate many truths which, whether explicitly or implicitly, have lain at
the heart of all Divine revelation. Although in no way a comprehensive reading
of His intent, Bahá’u’lláh makes it clear that attempts to capture or suggest
the Reality of God in catechisms and creeds are exercises in self-deception:
“To every discerning and illumined heart it is evident that God, the unknowable
Essence, the divine Being, is immensely exalted beyond every human attribute,
such as corporeal existence, ascent and descent, egress and regress. Far be it
from His glory that human tongue should adequately recount His praise, or that
human heart comprehend His fathomless mystery.”[9] The instrumentality through which the Creator of all things
interacts with the ever-evolving creation He has brought into being is the
appearance of prophetic Figures who manifest the attributes of an inaccessible
Divinity: “The door of the knowledge of the Ancient of Days being thus closed
in the face of all beings, the Source of infinite grace … hath caused those
luminous Gems of Holiness to appear out of the realm of the spirit, in the
noble form of the human temple, and be made manifest unto all men, that they
may impart unto the world the mysteries of the unchangeable Being, and tell of
the subtleties of His imperishable Essence.”[10]
25. To presume to
judge among the Messengers of God, exalting one above the other, would be to
give in to the delusion that the Eternal and All-Embracing is subject to the
vagaries of human preference. “It is clear and evident to thee”, are
Bahá’u’lláh’s precise words, “that all the Prophets are the
26. Religion, thus
conceived, awakens the soul to potentialities that are otherwise unimaginable.
To the extent that an individual learns to benefit from the influence of the
revelation of God for his age, his nature becomes progressively imbued with the
attributes of the Divine world: “Through the Teachings of this Day Star of
Truth”, Bahá’u’lláh explains, “every man will advance and develop until he …
can manifest all the potential forces with which his inmost true self hath been
endowed.”[13] As humanity’s
purpose includes the carrying forward of “an ever-advancing civilization”,[14] not the least
of the extraordinary powers that religion possesses has been its ability to
free those who believe from the limitations of time itself, eliciting from them
sacrifices on behalf of generations centuries into the future. Indeed, because
the soul is immortal, its awakening to its true nature empowers it, not only in
this world but even more directly in those worlds that lie beyond, to serve the
evolutionary process: “The light which these souls radiate”, Bahá’u’lláh
asserts, “is responsible for the progress of the world and the advancement of
its peoples…. All things must needs have a cause, a motive power, an animating
principle. These souls and symbols of detachment have provided, and will
continue to provide, the supreme moving impulse in the world of being.”[15]
27. Belief is thus
a necessary and inextinguishable urge of the species that has been described by
an influential modern thinker as “evolution become conscious of itself”.[16] If, as the
events of the twentieth century provide sad and compelling evidence, the
natural expression of faith is artificially blocked, it will invent objects of
worship however unworthy—or even debased—that may in some measure appease the
yearning for certitude. It is an impulse that will not be denied.
28. In short,
through the ongoing process of revelation, the One Who is the Source of the
system of knowledge we call religion demonstrates that system’s integrity and
its freedom from the contradictions imposed by sectarian ambitions. The work of
each Manifestation of God has an autonomy and an authority that transcend
appraisal; it is also a stage in the limitless unfolding of a single Reality.
Because the purpose of the successive revelations of God is the awakening of
humankind to its capacities and responsibilities as the trustee of creation,
the process is not simply repetitive, but progressive, and is fully appreciated
only when perceived in this context.
29. In no sense
can Bahá’ís profess to have grasped at this early hour more than a minute
portion of the truths inherent in the revelation on which their Faith is based.
With reference, for example, to the evolution of the Cause, the Guardian said,
“All we can reasonably venture to attempt is to strive to obtain a glimpse of
the first streaks of the promised Dawn that must, in the fullness of time,
chase away the gloom that has encircled humanity.”[17] Apart from
encouraging humility, this fact should serve also as a
constant reminder that Bahá’u’lláh has not brought into existence a new
religion to stand beside the present multiplicity of sectarian organizations.
Rather has He recast the whole conception of religion as the principal force
impelling the development of consciousness. As the human race in all its
diversity is a single species, so the intervention by which God cultivates the
qualities of mind and heart latent in that species is a single process. Its
heroes and saints are the heroes and saints of all stages in the struggle; its
successes, the successes of all stages. This is the standard demonstrated in
the life and work of the Master and exemplified today in a Bahá’í community
that has become the inheritor of humanity’s entire spiritual legacy, a legacy
equally available to all the earth’s peoples.
30. The recurring
proof of the existence of God, therefore, is that from time immemorial He has
repeatedly manifested Himself. In the larger sense, as Bahá’u’lláh explains,
the vast epic of humanity’s religious history represents the fulfilment of the
“Covenant”, the enduring promise by which the Creator of all things assures the
race of the unfailing guidance essential to its spiritual and moral
development, and calls on it to internalize and give expression to these values.
One is free to dispute through historicist interpretations of the evidence the
unique role of this or that Messenger of God, if that is one’s purpose, but
such speculation is of no help in accounting for developments that have
transformed thought and produced changes in human relationships critical to
social evolution. At intervals so rare that the known instances can be counted
on one’s fingers, the Manifestations of God have
appeared, have each been explicit as to the authority of His teachings and have
each exerted an influence on the advance of civilization incomparably beyond
that of any other phenomenon in history. “Consider the hour at which the
supreme Manifestation of God revealeth Himself unto men”, Bahá’u’lláh points
out: “Ere that hour cometh, the Ancient Being, Who is still unknown of men and
hath not as yet given utterance to the Word of God, is Himself the All-Knower
in a world devoid of any man that hath known Him. He is indeed the Creator
without a creation.”[18]
31. The objection
most commonly raised against the foregoing conception of religion is the
assertion that the differences among the revealed faiths are so fundamental
that to present them as stages or aspects of one unified system of truth does
violence to the facts. Given the confusion surrounding the nature of religion,
the reaction is understandable. Chiefly, however, such an objection offers
Bahá’ís an invitation to set the principles reviewed here more explicitly in
the evolutionary context provided in Bahá’u’lláh’s writings.
32. The
differences referred to fall into the categories of either practice or
doctrine, both of them presented as the intent of the relevant scriptures. In
the case of religious customs governing personal life, it is helpful to view
the subject against the background of comparable features of material life. It
is most unlikely that diversity in hygiene, dress,
medicine, diet, transportation, warfare, construction or economic activity, however
striking, would any longer be seriously advanced in support of a theory that
humanity does not in fact constitute one people, single and unique. Until the
opening of the twentieth century, such simplistic arguments were commonplace,
but historical and anthropological research now provides a seamless panorama of
the process of cultural evolution by which these and countless other
expressions of human creativity came into existence, were transmitted through
successive generations, underwent gradual metamorphoses and often spread to
enrich the lives of peoples in far distant lands. That present-day societies
represent a wide spectrum of such phenomena, therefore, does not in any way
define a fixed and immutable identity of the peoples concerned, but merely
distinguishes the stage through which given groups are—or at least until
recently have been—passing. Even so, all such cultural expressions are now in a
state of fluidity in consequence of the pressures of planetary integration.
33. A similar
evolutionary process, Bahá’u’lláh indicates, has characterized the religious
life of humankind. The defining difference lies in the fact that, rather than
representing simply the accidents of history’s ongoing method of trial and
error, such norms were explicitly prescribed in each case, as integral features
of one or another revelation of the Divine, embodied in scripture, their
integrity scrupulously maintained over a period of centuries. While certain
features of each code of conduct would eventually fulfil their purpose and in
time be overshadowed by concerns of a different nature
brought on by the process of social evolution, the code itself would lose none
of its authority during the long stage of human progress in which it played a
vital role in training behaviour and attitudes. “These principles and laws,
these firmly-established and mighty systems”, Bahá’u’lláh asserts, “have
proceeded from one Source, and are the rays of one Light. That they differ one
from another is to be attributed to the varying requirements of the ages in
which they were promulgated.”[19]
34. To argue,
therefore, that differences of regulations, observances and other practices
constitute any significant objection to the idea of revealed religion’s
essential oneness is to miss the purpose that these prescriptions served. More
seriously, it misses the fundamental distinction between the eternal and the
transitory features of religion’s function. The essential message of religion
is immutable. It is, in Bahá’u’lláh’s words, “the changeless Faith of God,
eternal in the past, eternal in the future”.[20] Its role in
opening the way for the soul to enter into an evermore mature relationship with
its Creator—and in endowing it with an ever-greater measure of moral autonomy
in disciplining the animal impulses of human nature—is not at all
irreconcilable with its providing auxiliary guidance that enhances the process
of civilization building.
35. The concept of
progressive revelation places the ultimate emphasis on recognition of the
revelation of God at its appearance. The failure of the generality of humankind
in this respect has, time and again, condemned entire populations to a
ritualistic repetition of ordinances and practices long
after these latter have fulfilled their purpose and now merely stultify moral
advance. Sadly, in the present day, a related consequence of such failure has
been to trivialize religion. At precisely the point in its collective
development where humanity began to struggle with the challenges of modernity,
the spiritual resource on which it had principally depended for moral courage
and enlightenment was fast becoming a subject of mockery, first at those levels
where decisions were being made about the direction society should take, and
eventually in ever-widening circles of the general population. There is little
cause for surprise, then, that this most devastating of the many betrayals of
trust from which human confidence has suffered should, in the course of time,
undermine the foundations of belief itself. So it is that Bahá’u’lláh
repeatedly urges His readers to think deeply about the lesson taught by such
repeated failures: “Ponder for a moment, and reflect upon that which has been
the cause of such denial….”[21] “What could
have been the reason for such denial and avoidance…?”[22] “What could
have caused such contention…?”[23] “Reflect,
what could have been the motive…?”[24]
36. More
detrimental still to religious understanding has been theological presumption.
A persistent feature of religion’s sectarian past has been the dominant role
played by clergy. In the absence of scriptural texts that established
unarguable institutional authority, clerical elites succeeded in arrogating to
themselves exclusive control over interpretation of the Divine intent. However
diverse the motives, the tragic effects have been to impede the current of inspiration, discourage independent intellectual
activity, focus attention on the minutiae of rituals and too often engender
hatred and prejudice towards those following a different sectarian path from
that of self-appointed spiritual leaders. While nothing could prevent the
creative power of Divine intervention from continuing its work of progressively
raising consciousness, the scope of what could be achieved, in any age, became
increasingly limited by such artificially contrived obstacles.
37. Over time,
theology succeeded in constructing in the heart of each one of the great faiths
an authority parallel with, and even inimical in spirit to, the revealed
teachings on which the tradition was based. Jesus’ familiar parable of the
landowner who sowed seed in his field addresses both the issue and its
implications for the present time: “But while men slept, his enemy came and
sowed tares among the wheat, and went his way.”[25] When his
servants proposed to uproot them, the landowner replied, “Nay; lest while ye
gather up the tares, ye root up also the wheat with them. Let both grow
together until the harvest: and in the time of harvest I will say to the
reapers, Gather ye together first the tares, and bind them in bundles to burn
them: but gather the wheat into my barn.”[26] Throughout
its pages, the Qur’án reserves its severest condemnation for the spiritual harm
caused by this competing hegemony: “Say: The things that my Lord hath indeed
forbidden are: shameful deeds, whether open or secret; sins and trespasses
against truth or reason; assigning of partners to God, for which he hath given
no authority; and saying things about God of which ye have no knowledge.”[27] To the modern mind it is the greatest of ironies that generations
of theologians, whose impositions on religion embody precisely the betrayal so
strongly denounced in these texts, should seek to use the warning itself as a
weapon in suppressing protest against their usurpation of Divine authority.
38. In effect,
each new stage in the progressively unfolding revelation of spiritual truth was
frozen in time and in an array of literalistic images and interpretations, many
of them borrowed from cultures which were themselves morally exhausted.
Whatever their value at earlier stages in the evolution of consciousness,
conceptions of physical resurrection, a paradise of carnal delights,
reincarnation, pantheistic prodigies, and the like, today raise walls of
separation and conflict in an age when the earth has literally become one
homeland and human beings must learn to see themselves as its citizens. In this
context one can appreciate the reasons for the vehemence of Bahá’u’lláh’s
warnings about the barriers that dogmatic theology creates in the path of those
seeking to understand the will of God: “O leaders of religion! Weigh not the
Book of God with such standards and sciences as are current amongst you, for
the Book itself is the unerring Balance established amongst men.”[28] In His Tablet
to Pope Pius IX, He advises the pontiff that God has in this day “stored away …
in the vessels of justice” whatever is enduring in religion and “cast into fire
that which befitteth it”.[29]
39. Freed from the
thickets with which theology has hedged religious understanding about, the mind
is able to explore familiar scriptural passages through the eyes of
Bahá’u’lláh. “Peerless is this Day,” He asserts, “for it is as the eye to past
ages and centuries, and as a light unto the darkness of the times.”[30] The most
striking observation that results from taking advantage of this perspective is
the unity of purpose and principle running throughout the Hebrew scriptures,
the Gospel and the Qur’án, particularly, although echoes can readily be
discerned in the scriptures of others among the world’s religions. Repeatedly,
the same organizing themes emerge from the matrix of precept, exhortation,
narrative, symbolism and interpretation in which they are set. Of these
foundational truths, by far the most distinctive is the progressive
articulation and emphatic assertion of the oneness of God, Creator of all
existence whether of the phenomenal world or of those realms that transcend it.
“I am the Lord,” the Bible declares, “and there is none else, there is no God
beside me”,[31] and the same
conception underpins the later teachings of Christ and Muhammad.
40. Humanity—focal
point, inheritor and trustee of the world—exists to know its Creator and to
serve His purpose. In its highest expression, the innate human impulse to
respond takes the form of worship, a condition entailing wholehearted
submission to a power that is recognized as deserving of such homage. “Now unto
the King eternal, immortal, invisible, the only wise God, be honour and glory
for ever and ever.”[32] Inseparable
from the spirit of reverence itself is its expression in service to the Divine purpose for humankind. “Say: All bounties are in the hand of
God: He granteth them to whom He pleaseth: and God careth for all, and He
knoweth all things.”[33] Illumined by
this understanding, the responsibilities of humanity are clear: “It is not
righteousness that ye turn your faces towards East or West”, the Qur’án states,
“but it is righteousness—to believe in God … to spend of your substance, out of
love for Him, for your kin, for orphans, for the needy, for the wayfarer, for
those who ask….”[34] “Ye are the
salt of the earth”,[35] Christ
impresses on those who respond to His call. “Ye are the light of the world.”[36] Summarizing a
theme that recurs time and again throughout the Hebrew scriptures and will
subsequently reappear in the Gospel and the Qur’án, the prophet Micah asks,
“…what doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and
to walk humbly with thy God?”[37]
41. There is equal
agreement in these texts that the soul’s ability to attain to an understanding
of its Creator’s purpose is the product not merely of its own effort, but of
interventions of the Divine that open the way. The point was made with
memorable clarity by Jesus: “I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man
cometh unto the Father, but by me.”[38] If one is not
to see in this assertion merely a dogmatic challenge to other stages of the one
ongoing process of Divine guidance, it is obviously the expression of the central
truth of revealed religion: that access to the unknowable Reality that creates
and sustains existence is possible only through awakening to the illumination
shed from that Realm. One of the most cherished of the Qur’án’s surihs takes up
the metaphor: “God is the Light of the heavens and the
earth…. Light upon Light! God doth guide whom He will to His Light.”[39] In the case
of the Hebrew prophets, the Divine intermediary that was later to appear in
Christianity in the person of the Son of Man and in Islám as the Book of God
assumed the form of a binding Covenant established by the Creator with Abraham,
Patriarch and Prophet: “And I will establish my covenant between me and thee
and thy seed after thee in their generations for an everlasting covenant, to be
a God unto thee, and to thy seed after thee.”[40]
42. The succession
of revelations of the Divine also appears as an implicit—and usually
explicit—feature of all the major faiths. One of its earliest and clearest
expressions occurs in the Bhagavad-Gita: “I come, and go, and come. When
Righteousness declines, O Bharata! When Wickedness is strong, I rise, from age
to age, and take visible shape, and move a man with men, succouring the good,
thrusting the evil back, and setting Virtue on her seat again.”[41] This ongoing
drama constitutes the basic structure of the Bible, whose sequence of books
recounts the missions not only of Abraham and of Moses—“whom the Lord knew face
to face”[42]—but of the
line of lesser prophets who developed and consolidated the work that these
primary Authors of the process had set in motion. Similarly, no amount of
contentious and fantastical speculation about the precise nature of Jesus could
succeed in separating His mission from the transformative influence exerted on
the course of civilization by the work of Abraham and Moses. He Himself warns
that it is not He Who will condemn those who reject the message He bears, but Moses “in whom ye trust. For had ye believed
Moses, ye would have believed me: for he wrote of me. But if ye believe not his
writings, how shall ye believe my words?”[43] With the
revelation of the Qur’án, the theme of the succession of the Messengers of God
becomes central: “We believe in God, and the revelation given to us, and to
Abraham, Ismá‘íl, Isaac, Jacob … and that given to Moses and Jesus, and that
given to (all) Prophets from their Lord….”[44]
43. For a
sympathetic and objective reader of such passages what emerges is a recognition
of the essential oneness of religion. So it is that the term “Islám” (literally
“submission” to God) designates not merely the particular dispensation of
44. It is,
therefore, an inadequate recognition of the unique station of Moses, Buddha,
Zoroaster, Jesus, Muhammad—or of the succession of
Avatars who inspired the Hindu scriptures—to depict their work as the founding
of distinct religions. Rather are they appreciated when acknowledged as the
spiritual Educators of history, as the animating forces in the rise of the
civilizations through which consciousness has flowered: “He was in the world,”
the Gospel declares, “and the world was made by him….”[46] That their
persons have been held in a reverence infinitely above those of any other
historical figures reflects the attempt to articulate otherwise inexpressible
feelings aroused in the hearts of unnumbered millions of people by the
blessings their work has conferred. In loving them humanity has progressively
learned what it means to love God. There is, realistically, no other way to do
so. They are not honoured by fumbling efforts to capture the essential mystery
of their nature in dogmas invented by human imagination; what honours them is
the soul’s unconditioned surrender of its will to the transformative influence
they mediate.
45. Confusion
about the role of religion in cultivating moral consciousness is equally
apparent in popular understanding of its contribution to the shaping of
society. Perhaps the most obvious example is the inferior social status most
sacred texts assign to women. While the resulting benefits enjoyed by men were
no doubt a major factor in consolidating such a conception, moral justification
was unquestionably supplied by people’s understanding of the intent of the scriptures themselves. With few exceptions, these
texts address themselves to men, assigning to women a supportive and
subordinate role in the life of both religion and society. Sadly, such
understanding made it deplorably easy to attach primary blame to women for
failure in the disciplining of the sexual impulse, a vital feature of moral
advancement. In a modern frame of reference, attitudes of this kind are readily
recognized as prejudiced and unjust. At the stages of social development at
which all of the major faiths came into existence, scriptural guidance sought
primarily to civilize, to the extent possible, relationships resulting from
intractable historical circumstances. It needs little insight to appreciate
that clinging to primitive norms in the present day would defeat the very
purpose of religion’s patient cultivation of moral sense.
46. Comparable
considerations have pertained in relations between societies. The long and
arduous preparation of the Hebrew people for the mission required of them is an
illustration of the complexity and stubborn character of the moral challenges
involved. In order that the spiritual capacities appealed to by the prophets
might awaken and flourish, the inducements offered by neighbouring idolatrous
cultures had, at all costs, to be resisted. Scriptural accounts of the condign
punishments that befell both rulers and subjects who violated the principle
illustrated the importance attached to it by the Divine purpose. A somewhat
comparable issue arose in the struggle of the newborn community founded by
Muhammad to survive attempts by pagan Arab tribes to extinguish it—and in the
barbaric cruelty and relentless spirit of vendetta
animating the attackers. No one familiar with the historical details will have
difficulty in understanding the severity of the Qur’án’s injunctions on the
subject. While the monotheistic beliefs of Jews and Christians were to be
accorded respect, no compromise with idolatry was permitted. In a relatively
brief space of time, this draconian rule had succeeded in unifying the tribes
of the Arabian Peninsula and launching the newly forged community on well over
five centuries of moral, intellectual, cultural and economic achievement,
unmatched before or since in the speed and scope of its expansion. History
tends to be a stern judge. Ultimately, in its uncompromising perspective, the
consequences to those who would have blindly strangled such enterprises in the
cradle will always be set off against the benefits accruing to the world as a
whole from the triumph of the Bible’s vision of human possibilities and the
advances made possible by the genius of Islamic civilization.
47. Among the most
contentious of such issues in understanding society’s evolution towards
spiritual maturity has been that of crime and punishment. While different in
detail and degree, the penalties prescribed by most sacred texts for acts of
violence against either the commonweal or the rights of other individuals
tended to be harsh. Moreover, they frequently extended to permitting
retaliation against the offenders by the injured parties or by members of their
families. In the perspective of history, however, one may reasonably ask what
practical alternatives existed. In the absence not merely of present-day programmes
of behavioural modification, but even of recourse to such
coercive options as prisons and policing agencies, religion’s concern was to
impress indelibly on general consciousness the moral unacceptability—and
practical costs—of conduct whose effect would otherwise have been to demoralize
efforts at social progress. The whole of civilization has since been the
beneficiary, and it would be less than honest not to acknowledge the fact.
48. So it has been
throughout all of the religious dispensations whose origins have survived in
written records. Mendicancy, slavery, autocracy, conquest, ethnic prejudices
and other undesirable features of social interaction have gone unchallenged—or
been explicitly indulged—as religion sought to achieve reformations of behaviour
that were considered more immediately essential at given stages in the advance
of civilization. To condemn religion because any one of its successive
dispensations failed to address the whole range of social wrongs would be to
ignore everything that has been learned about the nature of human development.
Inevitably, anachronistic thinking of this kind must also create severe
psychological handicaps in appreciating and facing the requirements of one’s
own time.
49. The issue is
not the past, but the implications for the present. Problems arise where
followers of one of the world’s faiths prove unable to distinguish between its
eternal and transitory features, and attempt to impose on society rules of
behaviour that have long since accomplished their purpose. The principle is
fundamental to an understanding of religion’s social role: “The remedy the
world needeth in its present-day afflictions can never be the
same as that which a subsequent age may require”, Bahá’u’lláh points out. “Be
anxiously concerned with the needs of the age ye live in, and centre your
deliberations on its exigencies and requirements.”[47]
50. The exigencies
of the new age of human experience to which Bahá’u’lláh summoned the political
and religious rulers of the nineteenth century world have now been largely
adopted, at least as ideals, by their successors and by progressive minds
everywhere. By the time the twentieth century had drawn to a close, principles
that had, only short decades earlier, been patronized as visionary and
hopelessly unrealistic had become central to global discourse. Buttressed by
the findings of scientific research and the conclusions of influential
commissions—often lavishly funded—they direct the work of powerful agencies at
international, national and local levels. A vast body of scholarly literature
in many languages is devoted to exploring practical means for their
implementation, and those programmes can count on media attention on five continents.
51. Most of these
principles are, alas, also widely flouted, not only among recognized enemies of
social peace, but in circles professedly committed to them. What is lacking is
not convincing testimony as to their relevance, but the power of moral conviction
that can implement them, a power whose only demonstrably reliable source
throughout history has been religious faith. As late as the inception of
Bahá’u’lláh’s own mission, religious authority still exercised
a significant degree of social influence. When the Christian world was moved to
break with millennia of unquestioning conviction and address at last the evil
of slavery, it was to Biblical ideals that the early British reformers sought
to appeal. Subsequently, in the defining address he gave regarding the central
role played by the issue in the great conflict in America, the president of the
United States warned that if “every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be
paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so
still it must be said ’the judgements of the Lord are true and righteous
altogether’.”[48] That era,
however, was swiftly drawing to a close. In the upheavals that followed the
Second World War, even so influential a figure as Mohandas Gandhi proved unable
to mobilize the spiritual power of Hinduism in support of his efforts to
extinguish sectarian violence on the Indian subcontinent. Nor were leaders of
the Islamic community any more effective in this respect. As prefigured in the
Qur’án’s metaphorical vision of “The Day that We roll up the heavens like a
scroll”,[49] the once
unchallengeable authority of the traditional religions had ceased to direct
humanity’s social relations.
52. It is in this
context that one begins to appreciate Bahá’u’lláh’s choice of imagery about the
will of God for a new age: “Think not that We have revealed unto you a mere
code of laws. Nay, rather, We have unsealed the choice Wine with the fingers of
might and power.”[50] Through His
revelation, the principles required for the collective coming of age of the
human race have been invested with the one power capable of penetrating to the roots of human motivation and of altering behaviour. For
those who have recognized Him, equality of men and women is not a sociological
postulate, but revealed truth about human nature, with implications for every
aspect of human relations. The same is true of His teaching of the principle of
racial oneness. Universal education, freedom of thought, the protection of
human rights, recognition of the earth’s vast resources as a trust for the
whole of humankind, society’s responsibility for the well-being of its
citizenry, the promotion of scientific research, even so practical a principle
as an international auxiliary language that will advance integration of the
earth’s peoples—for all who respond to Bahá’u’lláh’s revelation, these and
similar precepts carry the same compelling authority as do the injunctions of
scripture against idolatry, theft and false witness. While intimations of some
can be perceived in earlier sacred writings, their definition and prescription
had necessarily to wait until the planet’s heterogeneous populations could set
out together on the discovery of their nature as a single human race. Through
spiritual empowerment brought by Bahá’u’lláh’s revelation the Divine standards
can be appreciated, not as isolated principles and laws, but as facets of a
single, all-embracing vision of humanity’s future, revolutionary in purpose,
intoxicating in the possibilities it opens.
53. Integral to
these teachings are principles that address the administration of humanity’s
collective affairs. A widely quoted passage in Bahá’u’lláh’s Tablet to Queen
Victoria expresses emphatic praise of the principle of democratic and
constitutional government, but is also an admonition
about the context of global responsibility in which that principle must operate
if it is to realize its purpose in this age: “O ye the elected representatives
of the people in every land! Take ye counsel together, and let your concern be
only for that which profiteth mankind and bettereth the condition thereof, if
ye be of them that scan heedfully. Regard the world as the human body which,
though at its creation whole and perfect, hath been afflicted, through various
causes, with grave disorders and maladies. Not for one day did it gain ease,
nay its sickness waxed more severe, as it fell under the treatment of ignorant
physicians, who gave full rein to their personal desires and have erred
grievously. And if, at one time, through the care of an able physician, a
member of that body was healed, the rest remained afflicted as before.”[51] In other
passages, Bahá’u’lláh spells out some of the practical implications. The
governments of the world are called upon to convene an international consultative
body as the foundation, in the words of the Guardian, of “a world federal
system”[52] empowered to
safeguard the autonomy and territory of its state members, resolve national and
regional disputes and coordinate programmes of global development for the good
of the entire human race. Significantly, Bahá’u’lláh attributes to this system,
once established, the right to suppress by force acts of aggression by one
state against another. Addressing the rulers of His day, He asserts the clear
moral authority of such action: “Should any one among you take up arms against
another, rise ye all against him, for this is naught but manifest justice.”[53]
54. The power
through which these goals will be progressively realized is that of unity.
Although to Bahá’ís the most obvious of truths, its implications for the
current crisis of civilization appear to escape most contemporary discourse.
Few will disagree that the universal disease sapping the health of the body of
humankind is that of disunity. Its manifestations everywhere cripple political
will, debilitate the collective urge to change, and poison national and
religious relationships. How strange, then, that unity is regarded as a goal to
be attained, if at all, in a distant future, after a host of disorders in
social, political, economic and moral life have been addressed and somehow or
other resolved. Yet the latter are essentially symptoms and side effects of the
problem, not its root cause. Why has so fundamental an inversion of reality
come to be widely accepted? The answer is presumably because the achievement of
genuine unity of mind and heart among peoples whose experiences are deeply at
variance is thought to be entirely beyond the capacity of society’s existing
institutions. While this tacit admission is a welcome advance over the
understanding of processes of social evolution that prevailed a few decades
ago, it is of limited practical assistance in responding to the challenge.
55. Unity is a
condition of the human spirit. Education can support and enhance it, as can
legislation, but they can do so only once it emerges and has established itself
as a compelling force in social life. A global intelligentsia, its
prescriptions largely shaped by materialistic misconceptions
of reality, clings tenaciously to the hope that imaginative social engineering,
supported by political compromise, may indefinitely postpone the potential
disasters that few deny loom over humanity’s future. “We can well perceive how
the whole human race is encompassed with great, with incalculable afflictions”,
Bahá’u’lláh states. “They that are intoxicated by self-conceit have interposed
themselves between it and the Divine and infallible Physician. Witness how they
have entangled all men, themselves included, in the mesh of their devices. They
can neither discover the cause of the disease, nor have they any knowledge of
the remedy.”[54] As unity is
the remedy for the world’s ills, its one certain source lies in the restoration
of religion’s influence in human affairs. The laws and principles revealed by
God, in this day, Bahá’u’lláh declares, “are the most potent instruments and
the surest of all means for the dawning of the light of unity amongst men.”[55] “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.”[56]
56. Central to
Bahá’u’lláh’s mission, therefore, has been the creation of a global community
that would reflect the oneness of humankind. The ultimate testimony that the
Bahá’í community can summon in vindication of His mission is the example of
unity that His teachings have produced. As it enters the twenty-first century,
the Bahá’í Cause is a phenomenon unlike anything else the world has seen. After
decades of effort, in which surges of growth alternated with long stretches of
consolidation, often shadowed by setbacks, the Bahá’í
community today comprises several million people representative of virtually
every ethnic, cultural, social and religious background on earth, administering
their collective affairs without the intervention of a clergy, through
democratically elected institutions. The many thousands of localities in which
it has put down its roots are to be found in every country, territory and
significant island group, from the Arctic to Tierra del Fuego, from
57. The
achievement calls out for understanding. Conventional explanations—access to
wealth, the patronage of powerful political interests, invocations of the
occult or aggressive programmes of proselytism that instil fear of Divine
wrath—none have played any role in the events involved. Adherents of the Faith
have achieved a sense of identity as members of a single human race, an identity
that shapes the purpose of their lives and that, clearly, is not the expression
of any intrinsic moral superiority on their own part: “O people of Bahá! That
there is none to rival you is a sign of mercy.”[57] A fair-minded
observer is compelled to entertain at least the possibility that the phenomenon
may represent the operation of influences entirely different in nature from the
familiar ones—influences that can properly be described only as
spiritual—capable of eliciting extraordinary feats of sacrifice and
understanding from ordinary people of every background.
58. Particularly
striking has been the fact that the Bahá’í Cause has been able to maintain the
unity thus achieved, unbroken and unimpaired, through the most vulnerable early
stages of its existence. One will search in vain for another association of
human beings in history—political, religious, or social—that has successfully
survived the perennial blight of schism and faction. The Bahá’í community, in
all its diversity, is a single body of people, one in its understanding of the
intent of the revelation of God that gave it birth, one in its devotion to the
Administrative Order that its Author created for the governance of its
collective affairs, one in its commitment to the task of disseminating His
message throughout the planet. Over the decades of its rise, several
individuals, some of them highly placed and all of them driven by the spur of
ambition, did their utmost to create separate followings loyal to themselves or
to the personal interpretations they had imposed on Bahá’u’lláh’s writings. At
earlier stages in the evolution of religion, similar attempts had proved
successful in splitting the newborn faiths into competing sects. In the case of
the Bahá’í Cause, however, such intrigues have failed, without exception, to
produce more than transient outbursts of controversy whose net effect has been
to deepen the community’s understanding of its Founder’s purpose and its
commitment to it. “So powerful is the light of unity”, Bahá’u’lláh assures those
who recognize Him, “that it can illuminate the whole earth.”[58] Human nature
being what it is, one can readily appreciate the Guardian’s anticipation that
this purifying process will long continue—paradoxically but necessarily— to be an integral feature of the maturation of the Bahá’í
community.
59. A corollary of
the abandonment of faith in God has been a paralysis of ability to address
effectively the problem of evil or, in many cases, even to acknowledge it.
While Bahá’ís do not attribute to the phenomenon the objective existence it was
assumed at earlier stages of religious history to possess, the negation of the
good that evil represents, as with darkness, ignorance or disease, is severely
crippling in its effect. Few publishing seasons pass that do not offer the
educated reader a range of new and imaginative analyses of the character of
some of the monstrous figures who, during the twentieth century, systematically
tortured, degraded and exterminated millions of their fellow human beings. One
is invited by scholarly authority to ponder the weight that should be given,
variously, to paternal abuse, social rejection, professional disappointments,
poverty, injustice, war experiences, possible genetic impairment, nihilistic
literature—or various combinations of the foregoing—in seeking to understand
the obsessions fuelling an apparently bottomless hatred of humankind.
Conspicuously missing from such contemporary speculation is what experienced
commentators, even as recently as a century ago, would have recognized as
spiritual disease, whatever its accompanying features.
60. If unity is
indeed the litmus test of human progress, neither history nor Heaven will
readily forgive those who choose deliberately to raise
their hands against it. In trusting, people lower their defences and open
themselves to others. Without doing so, there is no way in which they can
commit themselves wholeheartedly to shared goals. Nothing is so devastating as
suddenly to discover that, for the other party, commitments made in good faith
have represented no more than an advantage gained, a means of achieving
concealed objectives different from, or even inimical to, what had ostensibly
been undertaken together. Such betrayal is a persistent thread in human history
that found one of its earliest recorded expressions in the ancient tale of
Cain’s jealousy of the brother whose faith God had chosen to confirm. If the
appalling suffering endured by the earth’s peoples during the twentieth century
has left a lesson, it lies in the fact that the systemic disunity, inherited
from a dark past and poisoning relations in every sphere of life, could throw
open the door in this age to demonic behaviour more bestial than anything the
mind had dreamed possible.
61. If evil has a
name, it is surely the deliberate violation of the hard-won covenants of peace
and reconciliation by which people of goodwill seek to escape the past and to
build together a new future. By its very nature, unity requires self-sacrifice.
“…self-love”, the Master states, “is kneaded into the very clay of man.”[59] The ego,
termed by Him the “insistent self”,[60] resists
instinctively constraints imposed on what it conceives to be its freedom. To
willingly forgo the satisfactions that licence affords, the individual must
come to believe that fulfilment lies elsewhere. Ultimately, it lies, as it has
always done, in the soul’s submission to God.
62. Failure to
meet the challenge of such submission has manifested itself with especially
devastating consequences throughout the centuries in betrayal of the Messengers
of God and of the ideals they taught. This discussion is not the place for a
review of the nature and provisions of the specific Covenant by means of which
Bahá’u’lláh has successfully preserved the unity of those who recognize Him and
serve His purpose. It is sufficient to note the strength of the language He
reserves for its deliberate violation by those who simultaneously pretend
allegiance to it: “They that have turned away therefrom are reckoned among the
inmates of the nethermost fire in the sight of thy Lord, the Almighty, the
Unconstrained.”[61] The reason
for the severity of this condemnation is obvious. Few people have difficulty in
recognizing the danger to social well-being of such familiar crimes as murder,
rape or fraud, nor the need for society to take effective measures of
self-protection. But how are Bahá’ís to think about a perversity which, if
unchecked, would destroy the very means essential to the creation of
unity—would, in the uncompromising words of the Master, “become even as an axe
striking at the very root of the Blessed Tree”?[62] The issue is
not one of intellectual dissent, nor even of moral weakness. Many people are
resistant to accepting authority of one kind or another, and eventually
distance themselves from circumstances that require it. Persons who have been
attracted to the Bahá’í Faith but who decide, for whatever reason, to leave it
are entirely free to do so.
63. Covenant-breaking
is a phenomenon fundamentally different in nature. The impulse it arouses in
those under its influence is not simply to pursue freely
whatever path they believe leads to personal fulfilment or contribution to
society. Rather, are such persons driven by an apparently ungovernable
determination to impose their personal will on the community by any means
available to them, without regard for the damage done and without respect for
the solemn undertakings they entered into on being accepted as members of that
community. Ultimately, the self becomes the overriding authority, not only in
the individual’s own life, but in whatever other lives can be successfully
influenced. As long and tragic experience has demonstrated all too certainly,
endowments such as distinguished lineage, intellect, education, piety or social
leadership can be harnessed, equally, to the service of humanity or to that of
personal ambition. In ages past, when spiritual priorities of a different
nature were the focus of the Divine purpose, the consequences of such rebellion
did not vitiate the central message of any of the successive revelations of
God. Today, with the immense opportunities and horrific dangers that physical
unification of the planet has brought with it, commitment to the requirements
of unity becomes the touchstone of all professions of devotion to the will of
God or, for that matter, to the well-being of humankind.
64. Everything in
its history has equipped the Bahá’í Cause to address the challenge facing it.
Even at this relatively early stage of its development—and relatively limited as its resources presently are—the Bahá’í enterprise is
fully deserving of the respect it is winning. An onlooker need not accept its
claims to Divine origin in order to appreciate what is being accomplished.
Taken simply as this-worldly phenomena, the nature and achievements of the
Bahá’í community are their own justification for attention on the part of
anyone seriously concerned with the crisis of civilization, because they are
evidence that the world’s peoples, in all their diversity, can learn to live
and work and find fulfilment as a single race, in a single global homeland.
65. This fact
underlines, if further emphasis were needed, the urgency of the successive
Plans devised by the Universal House of Justice for the expansion and
consolidation of the Faith. The rest of humanity has every right to expect that
a body of people genuinely committed to the vision of unity embodied in the writings
of Bahá’u’lláh will be an increasingly vigorous contributor to programmes of
social betterment that depend for their success precisely on the force of
unity. Responding to the expectation will require the Bahá’í community to grow
at an ever-accelerating pace, greatly multiplying the human and material
resources invested in its work and diversifying still further the range of
talents that equip it to be a useful partner with like-minded organizations.
Along with the social objectives of the effort must go an appreciation of the
longing of millions of equally sincere people, as yet unaware of Bahá’u’lláh’s
mission but inspired by many of its ideals, for an opportunity to find lives of
service that will have enduring meaning.
66. The culture of
systematic growth taking root in the Bahá’í community would seem, therefore, by
far the most effective response the friends can make to the challenge discussed
in these pages. The experience of an intense and ongoing immersion in the
Creative Word progressively frees one from the grip of the materialistic
assumptions—what Bahá’u’lláh terms “the allusions of the embodiments of satanic
fancy”[63]—that pervade
society and paralyze impulses for change. It develops in one a capacity to
assist the yearning for unity on the part of friends and acquaintances to find
mature and intelligent expression. The nature of the core activities of the
current Plan—children’s classes, devotional meetings and study circles—permits
growing numbers of persons who do not yet regard themselves as Bahá’ís to feel
free to participate in the process. The result has been to bring into existence
what has been aptly termed a “community of interest”. As others benefit from
participation and come to identify with the goals the Cause is pursuing, experience
shows that they, too, are inclined to commit themselves fully to Bahá’u’lláh as
active agents of His purpose. Apart from its associated objectives, therefore,
wholehearted prosecution of the Plan has the potentiality of amplifying
enormously the Bahá’í community’s contribution to public discourse on what has
become the most demanding issue facing humankind.
67. If Bahá’ís are
to fulfil Bahá’u’lláh’s mandate, however, it is obviously vital that they come
to appreciate that the parallel efforts of promoting the betterment of society
and of teaching the Bahá’í Faith are not activities competing for
attention. Rather, are they reciprocal features of one coherent global
programme. Differences of approach are determined chiefly by the differing
needs and differing stages of inquiry that the friends encounter. Because free
will is an inherent endowment of the soul, each person who is drawn to explore
Bahá’u’lláh’s teachings will need to find his own place in the never-ending
continuum of spiritual search. He will need to determine, in the privacy of his
own conscience and without pressure, the spiritual responsibility this
discovery entails. In order to exercise this autonomy intelligently, however,
he must gain both a perspective on the processes of change in which he, like
the rest of the earth’s population, is caught up and a clear understanding of
the implications for his own life. The obligation of the Bahá’í community is to
do everything in its power to assist all stages of humanity’s universal
movement towards reunion with God. The Divine Plan bequeathed it by the Master
is the means by which this work is carried out.
68. However
central the ideal of the oneness of religion unquestionably is, therefore, the
task of sharing Bahá’u’lláh’s message is obviously not an interfaith project.
While the mind seeks intellectual certainty, what the soul longs for is the
attainment of certitude. Such inner conviction is the ultimate goal of
all spiritual seeking, regardless of how rapid or gradual the process may be. For
the soul, the experience of conversion is not an extraneous or incidental
feature of the exploration of religious truth, but the pivotal issue that must
eventually be addressed. There is no ambiguity about Bahá’u’lláh’s words on the
subject and there can be none in the minds of those who
seek to serve Him: “Verily I say, this is the Day in which mankind can behold
the Face, and hear the Voice, of the Promised One. The Call of God hath been
raised, and the light of His countenance hath been lifted up upon men. It
behoveth every man to blot out the trace of every idle word from the tablet of
his heart, and to gaze, with an open and unbiased mind, on the signs of His
Revelation, the proofs of His Mission, and the tokens of His glory.”[64]
69. One of the
distinguishing features of modernity has been the universal awakening of
historical consciousness. An outcome of this revolutionary change in
perspective that greatly enhances the teaching of Bahá’u’lláh’s message is the
ability of people, given the chance, to recognize that the whole body of
humanity’s sacred texts places the drama of salvation itself squarely in the
context of history. Beneath the surface language of symbol and metaphor,
religion, as the scriptures reveal it, operates not through the arbitrary
dictates of magic but as a process of fulfilment unfolding in a physical world
created by God for that purpose.
70. In this
respect, the texts speak with one voice: religion’s goal is humanity’s
attainment of the age of “in-gathering”,[65] of “one fold,
and one shepherd”;[66] the great age
to come when “the Earth will shine with the glory of its Lord”[67] and the will
of God is carried out “in earth, as it is in heaven”;[68] “the promised
Day”[69] when the
“holy city”[70] will descend
“out of heaven, from … God”,[71] when “the mountain of the Lord’s house shall be established in
the top of the mountains, and shall be exalted above the hills; and all nations
shall flow unto it”,[72] when God will
demand to know “what mean ye that ye beat my people to pieces, and grind the
faces of the poor”;[73] the Day when
scriptures that have been “sealed till the time of the end”[74] would be
opened and union with God will find expression in “a new name, which the mouth
of the Lord shall name”;[75] an age
utterly beyond anything humanity will have experienced, the mind conceived or
language as yet encompassed: “even as We produced the first Creation, so shall
We produce a new one: a promise We have undertaken: truly shall We fulfil it.”[76]
71. The declared
purpose of history’s series of prophetic revelations, therefore, has been not
only to guide the individual seeker on the path of personal salvation, but to
prepare the whole of the human family for the great eschatological Event lying
ahead, through which the life of the world will itself be entirely transformed.
The revelation of Bahá’u’lláh is neither preparatory nor prophetic. It is
that Event. Through its influence, the stupendous enterprise of laying the
foundations of the
72. Service to the
goal calls for an understanding of the fundamental difference distinguishing
the mission of Bahá’u’lláh from political and ideological projects of human
design. The moral vacuum that produced the horrors of the twentieth century
exposed the outermost limits of the mind’s unaided capacity to devise and
construct an ideal society, however great the material resources harnessed to
the effort. The suffering entailed has engraved the lesson indelibly on the
consciousness of the earth’s peoples. Religion’s perspective on humanity’s
future, therefore, has nothing in common with systems of the past—and only
relatively little relationship with those of today. Its appeal is to a reality
in the genetic code, if it can be so described, of the rational soul. The
73. The process
bears within itself the assurance of its fulfilment. For those with eyes to
see, the new creation is today everywhere emerging, in the same way that a
seedling becomes in time a fruit-bearing tree or a child reaches adulthood.
Successive dispensations of a loving and purposeful Creator have brought the
earth’s inhabitants to the threshold of their collective coming-of-age as a single
people. Bahá’u’lláh is now summoning humanity to enter on its inheritance:
“That which the Lord hath ordained as the sovereign remedy and mightiest
instrument for the healing of all the world is the union of all its peoples in
one universal Cause, one common Faith.”[83]
[1] Bahá’u’lláh refers to
the ancient Persian and Arabian story of Majnún and Laylí, The Seven Valleys
and The Four Valleys (Wilmette: Bahá’í Publishing Trust, 1991), page 6.
[2] Gleanings from the
Writings of Bahá’u’lláh (Wilmette: Bahá’í Publishing Trust, 1983), section
LXI.
[3]ibid., section XVI.
[4]Tablets of Bahá’u’lláh
revealed after the Kitáb-i-Aqdas (Wilmette: Bahá’í Publishing Trust, 1988), page 27.
[5]Gleanings, section XVII.
[6]Bahá’u’lláh, Epistle
to the Son of the Wolf (Wilmette: Bahá’í Publishing Trust, 1988), page 133.
[7]Bahá’u’lláh, The
Kitáb-i-Íqán (Wilmette: Bahá’í Publishing Trust, 1993), paragraph 216.
[8]ibid.
[9]ibid., paragraph 104.
[10]ibid., paragraph 106.
[11]Gleanings, section XXII.
[12]Prayers and Meditations
by Bahá’u’lláh (Wilmette: Bahá’í Publishing Trust, 1987), page 311.
[13]Gleanings, section XXVII.
[14]ibid., section CIX.
[15]ibid., section LXXXI.
[16]Julian Huxley, cited by
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man (London: William
Collins Sons & Co. Ltd., 1959), page 243. See also Julian Huxley, Knowledge,
Morality, and Destiny (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1957), page 13.
[17]Shoghi Effendi, The
World Order of Bahá’u’lláh: Selected Letters (Wilmette: Bahá’í Publishing
Trust, 1991), page 35.
[18]Gleanings, section LXXVIII.
[19]ibid., section CXXXII.
[20]Bahá’u’lláh, The
Kitáb-i-Aqdas: The Most Holy Book (Wilmette: Bahá’í Publishing Trust,
1993), paragraph 182.
[21]Bahá’u’lláh, The
Kitáb-i-Íqán, paragraph 4.
[22]ibid., paragraph 8.
[23]ibid., paragraph 13.
[24]ibid., paragraph 14.
[25]St. Matthew 13.25,
Authorized King James Version.
[26]ibid., 13.29–30.
[27]Qur’án, surih 7, verse
33, Abdullah Yusuf Ali translation, third edition, (n.p.: 1938).
[28]Bahá’u’lláh, The
Kitáb-i-Aqdas, paragraph 99.
[29]The Summons of the Lord
of Hosts: Tablets of Bahá’u’lláh (
[30]Bahá’u’lláh, quoted in
Shoghi Effendi, The Advent of Divine Justice (Wilmette: Bahá’í
Publishing Trust, 1990), page 79.
[31]Isaiah 45.5.
[32]Timothy 1.17.
[33]Qur’án, surih 3, verse
73.
[34]ibid., surih 2, verse 177.
[35]St. Matthew 5.13.
[36]ibid., 5.14.
[37]Micah 6.8.
[38]
[39]Qur’án, surih 24, verse
35.
[40]Genesis 17.7.
[41]Bhagavad-Gita, chapter
IV, Sir Edwin Arnold translation.
[42]Deuteronomy 34.10.
[43]
[44]Qur’án, surih 2, verse
136.
[45]The Promulgation of
Universal Peace: Talks Delivered by ‘Abdu’l-Bahá during His Visit to the
[46]
[47]Gleanings, section CVI.
[48]Abraham Lincoln, quoted
in Inaugural Addresses of the Presidents of the United States
(Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1989).
[49]Qur’án, surih 21, verse
104.
[50]Bahá’u’lláh, The
Kitáb-i-Aqdas, paragraph 5.
[51]The Summons of the Lord
of Hosts, paragraph 174.
[52]Shoghi Effendi, The
World Order of Bahá’u’lláh, page 204.
[53]Bahá’u’lláh, quoted in
Shoghi Effendi, The World Order of Bahá’u’lláh, page 192.
[54]Gleanings, section CVI.
[55]Tablets of Bahá’u’lláh, page 129.
[56]Bahá’u’lláh, quoted in
Shoghi Effendi, The World Order of Bahá’u’lláh, pages 202–203.
[57]Bahá’u’lláh, quoted in
Shoghi Effendi, The Advent of Divine Justice, page 84.
[58]Gleanings, section CXXXII.
[59]‘Abdu’l-Bahá, The
Secret of Divine Civilization (Wilmette: Bahá’í Publishing Trust, 1990),
page 96.
[60]Selections from the
Writings of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá (Haifa: Bahá’í World Centre, 1997), page 256.
[61]Bahá’u’lláh, from a
previously untranslated Tablet.
[62]Will and Testament of
‘Abdu’l-Bahá (Wilmette: Bahá’í Publishing Trust, 1944), page 25.
[63]Bahá’u’lláh, The
Kitáb-i-Íqán, paragraph 213.
[64]Gleanings, section VII.
[65]The Summons of the Lord
of Hosts, paragraph 126.
[66]
[67]Qur’án, surih 39, verse
69.
[68]St. Matthew 6.10.
[69]Qur’án, surih 85, verse
2.
[70]Revelation 21.2.
[71]ibid., 3.12.
[72]Isaiah 2.2.
[73]ibid., 3.15.
[74]Daniel 12.9.
[75]Isaiah 62.2.
[76]Qur’án, surih 21, verse
104.
[77]Gleanings, section IV.
[78]St. Luke 17.21.
[79]St. Matthew 21.33.
[80]ibid., 13.23.
[81]ibid., 7.17.
[82]Gleanings, section XCVI.
[83]ibid., section CXX.