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The following musings consider how very difficult it is to believe, for any thoughtful, awake individual, that a fellow human could ever be a voice of the divine, more, in Baha'i parlance, a Manifestation of God, in a transcendent, numinous degree. With the accumulated dissappointments that human folly and human wisdom both have furnished us throughout our history, never more so than in the 20th century, with the betrayals of so many hopes by so many leaders, teachers, philosophers, gurus, caudillos, revolutionaries, both the nefarious and the well-meaning, to believe that from our familiar, imperfect human fabric could come a divinely perfect, absolutely flawless pattern, would seem to be to ask too much. And yet, as Baha'is, we recognise in a Persian nobleman of the 19th century, Mirza Husayn Ali, a perfection compelling enough to place capitals before His name, and see in His humanity, the Manifestation of God, Baha'u'llah, and in His teachings the remedy that a travailing world, mostly unawares, is seeking. What, subjectively, does such a leap against common sense, entail?
Many and high are the claims associated with the Founding Figure of a world religion. Their startling and frequently iconic elements come to dominate the image that we form of Him to the extent of overwhelming our earthly, but in truth no less startling, point of encounter with that same prophetic figure. In the case of Baha'u'llah, Prophet-Founder of the Baha'i Faith, this is so to a pronounced degree, the claims advanced being superlative to the point of astonishment.
"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."
(Gleanings from the Writings of Baha'u'llah, section VII)
Our first instinct, upon being brought to an encounter with such remote, such far suspended words, is to reach out, to attempt immediately to fasten somehow upon their contents in full flight, without pausing to take in the unmeasured feat of their having reached our ears in the first place. It is to remain unapprehending of a compelling tale implicit - unsyllabled and untold - in the trajectory traversed by those actual words, not in claimed heavens beyond our reach and ken, but in the prosaic earth that bears alike, and bears in common, our feet of clay, and prophets' own.
It is in fact, counter-intuitively, our shared human condition with that putative prophetic figure that makes it possible for our sobered sight (for life takes care more soon than late to rein in our flights of fancy) to dare to see beyond the human: to yield perhaps uneasily to a sense of Divinity transcendent in the soul of an otherwise merely remarkable human being.
'Errare humanum est', the old wrinkled pirate in the adventures of Asterix was fond of repeating with each new sinking of his ship - to the perennial irritation of his captain. Any dimly honest introspection will touch without much seeking (more were too much) the tender spots where we find our own too personal confirmation of that melancholy, else compassionate and consoling maxim.
And if to be human is to err, we must know better than to seek redemption in however heavenly a human's voice. We should know, surely by now, that heaven is too large to fit into the upright frame of the unplumed, smooth-skinned biped that is man. We should know better, all the more with so much red and bloodied history behind us, than, as Marx might put it (Groucho, not Karl), join a club that would have one like us, a fellow human, for its prophet.
And yet, historically, something stops us again and again from resting in such good old common sense. Something pricks us in our complacent wisdom. Something inconveniently insists in our wistfulness and just won't let it lie. It is the indefatigable consciousness that, if to be human is to err, yet to err is to have dreamt, or sought or tried or dared to yearn or yet aspire unto something other than our error, something which in erring was intuited but mistook, misplaced, misdone, was misadventured. It is to affirm that before, and after, and above our error, was and is the faint, yet lingering trace of a pure, or at any rate purer intention, or conception, or reality, than its crude and at times devastatingly destructive trail of unintended consequence.
And here lies an asymetry that gives birth to human thirst and human tragedy, and to nobility, and genuine heroism, to compassion, and defiant joy of the impossible experienced, the redemptive surprise of grace. I refer to the uncomfortable realization that, notwithstanding our limited capacity, we come to the world equipped with an infinite thirst, and are fated to live in the paradox of our apprehension of immensity, and our experience of constraint, our indwelling yearning for transcendence, and the very limitations on which our experience of transcendence is, by definition, grounded. And this, said the Persian to the Theban at the banquet table, is the bitterest sorrow: 'to abound in knowledge and yet have no power over action' (Herodotus 9:16).
For it is not capriciousness impels us to more, to all, in our loves and our desires, whether as children or grown adults (for though we learn in adulthood, as learn we must, to tame and domesticate our will to possess all that our irrepressibly unsated hunger desires, our insatisfaction still wags its tail with every morsel in anticipation of more, even in the foreknowledge that less is forthcoming).
It is rather that deep within, for some consciously, for others, just beyond the limen of awareness, stirs the intuition of totality, not as a thing external to ourselves which indifferently contains us as one more constituent atom, but rather as constituent of ourselves, totality as contained within us: not as an item is contained in a box, but as is a feeling in a melody, contained not so much inside, as through us, as if totality in some sense was us, yea, and more than us.
It is as if at the back of our minds we carried the feeling that it was so nearly within our gift - on the tip of our tongue - to join the letters kaf and nun, the cosmic B and E, and that, just beyond recall, but only just, awaited in readiness the words we at some indeterminate occasion ('when was it?') were the first in existence to ever pronounce: Fiat Lux!
And there was light.
What a contradiction! We go about in earnest or by default collecting evidence of our frailty, piling up conclusive proof of our fragility, disavowing whatever magic we may have invested in our innocence, and then knowingly embark on dreams and enterprises and loves and gambles beyond our capacity to realize. Sartre's vacillating Hugo in that relentless play, Les mains sales, on the verge of a terrible deed and a terrible error he's struggling to commit, gives a fellow youth, in passing, non-sequitur, the advice that life itself, and history, would give those who ponder on the lessons afforded by the pageant of youthful dreams with their stillborn issue:
‘Te charge pas de ce que tu ne peut pas faire. Apres ca, ca pese trop lourd... Je ne sais pas si vous avez remarquee: c'est pas commode d'etre jeune.’
'Take on nothing that you cannot do. After that, it weighs too heavily... I don't know if you have noticed: it's not comfortable being young.'
And so, reckless youth gives way to cautionary maturity. Santa takes visa. The grand Houdini drowns in the chains he himself selects to exhibit his ingenuity. They were too heavy.
We arrive at the 21st century with our innocence broken, no longer prey to the tragic, collective aspirations that inflamed our imaginations and convulsed our history in Hobsbawm.'s Age of Extremes. We now know better: it can't be done, and after that it is too heavy. So much hope betrayed, so many dreams discarded, cheapened or trademarked, mass produced and commercialized. Socialism, Democracy, Revolution, Empire, the American Dream, Woodstock, Esperanto, the United Nations, internationalism, multiculturalism, political correctness, political activism, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the European Union, country, planet and religion: gone are the dreams, only pragmatism remains.
We remain active, but compartmentalized. We work for the possible, not for the best. We'll work with many for a moment, only with a few for a long time. We'll join no communities, we'll follow no man, we'll think thrice before marrying, we'll embrace no flag. We'll not be labeled, will not be defined. And if we are called by a Dreamer, to dream the Dream of Humankind, we'll remember the betrayals of last century, and, leaving Virgil to Dante, taking Candide as our guide, we'll not hesitate to reply:
'C'est bien cela, mais allons cultiver notre jardin.'
'All that is very well, but let us cultivate our garden.'
Pero sa muove, as Galileo was said to have written in his prison, in the midst of his capitulation. And yet it moves. There are still, even now, after everything, after so much, many, me too, incorrigibly, who grant all this and simply dream again, and again, and then again, without reneging or detracting one jot or tittle from the peripateia, the dramatic fall from great heights, that has accompanied, in the long run, each and every one of our elaborate and millennial dreams, time after time, after time, after time.
And still and all, these many recalcitrant children of our century do affirm, do steadfastly maintain with Emerson, that, in the matter of human aspiration, 'the appeal to experience, is forever invalid and vain. We give the past to the objector, and yet we hope... We grant that human life is mean; but how did we find out that it was mean? What is the ground of this uneasiness of ours; of this old discontent? What is the universal sense of want and ignorance, but the innuendo by which the soul makes its enormous claim? ...The philosophy of six thousand years has not searched the chambers and magazines of the soul. In its experiments there has always remained, in the last analysis, a residuum it could not resolve. Man is a stream whose source is hidden. Our being is descended into us from we know not whence. The most exact calculator has no prescience that somewhat incalculable may not balk the very next moment.' ( The Oversoul)
And it is this capacity to be surprised by abundance that keeps us receptive, sometimes against our protestations and better judgment, to the irruption of unexpected magic into our lives, to taking on that which we cannot do, and perchance doing it beautifully: to falling in love; to baring our irredeemably solitary sorrow to a listening ear, and finding in it the capacity to hear; to finding in the glance of our child the confidence to believe in the embrace of life; to be capable of discerning, in a fellow human being, dazzling suns of interminable light.
And at such momentary instants of dramatic epochee, when we involuntarily, joyfully and astonishedly suspend our disbelief long enough to take in life emerging naked and enravishing like Venus from the deep, we find our voice once more in Sartre's desperate, if not despairing Hugo:
'Et ca aussi c'est de la comedie. Tout ca! Tout ce que je vous dis la. Vous croyez peut etre que je suis desespere? Pas du tout: je joue la comedie du desespoir. Est ce qu'on peut en sortir?'
'And that too is a play. All that! Everything I was saying to you. You believe perhaps that I am desperate? Not at all: I act the play of despair. Can one exit from it?'
This is, indeed, a pressing question, recurrent in the life of the individual who would approach with sincerity the hard business of living, and more urgent perhaps than ever for a global society whose will to act, whose will to consciously build a functional world order, seems paralyzed by a despairing poverty of aspiration.
'I act the play of despair. Can one exit from it?'
We know that, on a personal level, even at our most desperate, despondent periods of defeat, moments come intermittently that interrupt us with a smile. From a good comedy on television, to a newborn's random gurgle, from a sudden thing of beauty to a dish that was just right, from a book that reshapes our insights, to a chat that changes our life.
The answer, then, to our question, is that one can, in fact, authentically, and legitimately, transcend the narratives, the tedious or self-defeating enactments of past experience, by a moment that fills its gaps.
An instant, it will be objected, is an instant, and a life is a life. But - in this too Emerson had something to say - 'There is a difference between one and another hour of life in their authority and subsequent effect. Our faith comes in moments; our vice is habitual. Yet there is a depth in those brief moments which constrains us to ascribe more reality to them than to all experiences.' (The Oversoul)
So what does all this have to do with the figure of Baha'u'llah? It is that, before faith, our starting point is no more, but no less, than the fragile dignity of our common humanity. That everything in our experience should predispose us to reduce the Prophetic Figure that confronts us to the fallible clay out of which we ourselves are kneaded. And it is that same predisposition that equips us to distinguish in so familiar a play, a new Character. It is, if it be there, the capacity of this new Character to tap into and fulfill that part of our human paradox that aspires beyond our incapacity, that subjective sense of the totality within us, that is capable of engendering an Emersonian 'moment of faith', weighing more than all the years of life without it. It is a test, simultaneous and reciprocal, of the authenticity of the Prophet's claim to the Real, and of our openness to receive the Real into our ever approximate actuality, the duration and degree to which that moment of faith is capable of suspending our well grounded disbelief in the transcendent possibilities of our own nature, not in the abstract, but in the irreducibly personal, which alone can motivate the motion of our inner life.
There is more. Going about our business generations and societies distant from the person of Baha'u'llah, the degree to which His entry into history may be regarded as remarkable, may be judged by the chain of impacts and transmissions necessary for so improbable a scenario as is your reading, even now, these words about that Person, first written by a lonesome Mexican in a far-flung island on the outer edge of Africa, continuing to extend a multiplied 'moment of faith' carried from mouth to mouth, passed on from heart to heart, journeyed with, traveller by traveller, from shore to shore, country to country, city to city, hamlet to hamlet, home to scattered home, handed down and lived vicariously from year to year, and decade to decade, past a century and onto a second century, and still counting, memorialized and appropriated, identity by identity, race by race, nation by nation, tribe by tribe, from tens, to hundreds, to one thousand and more than one thousand fractious ethnicities with all their divergent prejudices and dreams, and arriving to me, for one, in the utterly inauspicious, suburban English neighbourhood of Beeston, Nottingham, no less than miraculously, from its genesis in that pestiferous and now inextant dungeon where the Qajar Emperor Nasiri'd- Din did gaol a cast-out, ragged and humiliated scion of the Persian nobility, before exiling Him to the far reaches of a moribund Ottoman empire.
How did notice of Baha'u'llah arrive to you from that black pit, by what tortuous trajectory, by what chain of events, as you might be able now to trace it with approximate exactitude? Attempt the exercise, and marvel at the result.
It is likewise as a human, indeed, with a personal history, a history dramatic but familiar also, that Baha'u'llah would have been encountered by His contemporaries, and it would have had to have been something exceptional in His very humanity that would alone have led those that came to believe to entertain the possibility of a higher reality in Him.
Some would have met, and others heard of the precocious Child of the talented and ill-starred minister, Mirza Abbas Buzurg, in the dangerous gossip of court circles, where reputations were made and unmade, and insinuation could be enough to lose a man his position, his freedom, and his head.
They might have sighed condescendingly, genuinely commiserated, or pompously moralised about the terrible misfortune that befell Baha'u'llah's father, beginning with a great flood that rose from the mountains of Mazindaran and swept up his splendorous house, as an omen and figure of the more terrible flood of calamity that would bring down his household, a flood long in rising, and unchained by one fugitive word critical of the prime minister's petty murder of his best friend, in a confidence betrayed by a disloyal correspondent, that made the young, uncannily perceptive Child, be witness to the decimation of His father's fortunes and his independence; the humiliating, excruciatingly public and vindictive dissolution of a truly catastrophic royal marriage; the painful, and for a child no doubt agonic spectacle of his father's bastinado by the prime minister's agents and collaborators; the fragmentation and dispersion of his household, and his father’s premature death in isolation and despair.
Or they might have nodded sagely at the undiminished brightness of that Youth's prospects,even in the wake of His father's reverses, noting admiringly the early signs of skill at the perilous game of navigating despotic favour and steering a path across the shallows of paranoid and ephemeral cabals of patronage, emerging unscathed, repeatedly, from frontal contests with the same prime minister who was the architect of His father's fall.
They might have marvelled at and celebrated the geniality of His intercourse, the vigour of His intellect, the liberality of His hospitality and the abundance of His charity. They might also have expressed astonishment or concern at His disregard for personal advancement, his aloofness from political intrigue, and his religious preoccupations. They would undoubtedly have been perplexed and troubled by His eventual advocacy of the religious conflagration which a young Shirazi Mercer had enkindled with His claim to be the Instrument for the advent of the promised Day of God. Many would have felt themselves compelled to join Him at all costs, or impede Him by any means, in His fearless and ensorcelling summons to the Cause of Siyyid Ali Muhammad, the Bab.
But nothing, nothing could have prepared them, or perhaps us, to see in Him the Manifestation of the Godhead, the Inaugurator of a five thousand century prophetic cycle, or, in purely worldly terms, the force capable of fulfilling, and recasting, the Message announced by the Bab, and imparting it to every single country of an as yet well nigh interminable world - against the combined efforts of two emperors and the categorical, mortal fatwas of the highest and most powerful guardians and regulators of Islamic doctrine, from the mujtahids of Persia to the Ulama of al-Azhar.
Once more, we, like they, are challenged to discern, in the familiarity of Mirza Husayn Ali's humanity, the unfamiliar element that produces in our hearts the subjective certitude in His reality as the Glory of God, as Baha'u'llah, a realization that, if it be true, must rank as the supreme fulfilment of our soul's inherent, inborn search for Truth.
To do so, to glimpse the subtle element, the elusive inner logic, to locate the unfolding, of divine manifestation in an otherwise recognizably human personality, we must venture into the objective facts of what must remain an inaccessible, and in the final analysis, if we have the intellectual humility to recognize it, an incomprehensible subjective experience of divine revelation.
This frank acknowledgement of limitation is an absolutely critical point of departure. For in seeking to understand the subjective experience of a fellow human being, in understanding their self-descriptions of inner states and transitions, we inevitably proceed by analogy. No man can know, nor is a man ever likely to do so, what it feels like to give birth to a child. One may, I speak here as a man, seek in women's descriptions handholds for one's own experience, analogies to one's own sensations, and perhaps one will find enough to evoke memories of pain, of wonder, of anxiety, of concentration, of exhaustion. One might even find that he is better able than less capable speakers, by dint of eloquence, to describe, transmit and integrate the descriptions received from various women, to convey in words the nature of the experience. But a man will still be none the wiser, not a hair's breadth closer to comprehending what it is like to have a new life beating within one's body and to perform the arduous miracle of ushering it into extra-uterine life.
Similarly, who can lay claim to be able to grasp, let alone interpret or explain the intensely private, incommunicable experience that gives birth in a single heart to a future world religion? Who would be so arrogant as to pronounce him or herself on the meaning of a Prophet's subjective experience of God, beyond possibly presenting, ever tentatively, His own statements on the subject? Even these statements must be understood not as explanations or straightforward descriptions of subjective experience, but as oblique analogies to a reality and experience deemed to be ineffable, and beyond language's capacity to apprehend or yet approximate. They must be understood, not as transparent, unambiguous expressions of spontaneous self-exposure, but as didactic compromises with our capacity of comprehension, designed, not to evoke in the reader familiarity with an experience that less than ten men in recorded history may be said with any plausibility to have experienced (engendering, each one, a whole civilization), but rather to affect our own sense of identity and our relationship and response to that Prophetic Figure.
To analyze human psychology and social organization with a theoretical and conceptual framework derived from the study and description of the most complex and sophisticated apes, would be to do violence to the infinitely richer complexities of human interaction, notwithstanding concrete points of close and even startling similarity that push back the boundaries of our distinctive natures. It is hard to see how one would describe in simian terms Milo's Venus, Beethoven's 9th Symphony, Rumi's Mathnavi, Notre Dame Cathedral, the Dome of the Sistine Chapel. One would be hard put to place, even in the most exquisitely tender mating rituals of the gorilla or the chimpanzee, the odes of Pablo Neruda.
It would seem no less fatuous to attempt to reduce to conceptual models derived from the normal fabric of human consciousness the self-awareness of Souls Whose thoughts and ways tower so far above the commonality of mankind as to bring within their aggregated compass the vast majority of mankind, including its most distinguished and influential individuals. To say of such Souls that they felt this, or they thought that, beyond the apparently unambiguous self-descriptions in their writings, is to presume too much, as would any such statement with regards to human thoughts and feelings that started from the conceptual framework of zoology. At most we can say, such a Soul said this, or acted thus, which may raise the following questions, and evoke the following responses in the reader, or the beholder. When we understand that no statement from such a Educator is gratuitous, and that access to their inner experience is a foregone matter, we may more profitably ask ourselves, what response could this disclosure be sought to trigger in the reader, what notion, what aesthetic, what relationship to implant in the reader, rather than what does it tell us about what was going on in the depths of His mysterious heart.
With this in mind, we can venture, if curiosity, else devotion, spurs us, with stumbling feet into Baha'u'llah's descriptions of His encounter with the Divine from the perspective of the human in Him, and in His words find a bridge to our own deeply personal, truly human, ever approximate and potentially life-changing encounter with Him.
Monday, 5 January 2009
Counter-Intuition: A Manifestation of God in a human body? Surely we know better...
Tuesday, 23 December 2008
How to read the Word of God? Reflections on the Book of Certitude
“In the name of God, the Exalted, the Most High. No man shall attain the shores of the ocean of true understanding except he be detached from all that is in heaven and on earth.”
With these words opens Baha’u’llah’s Book of Certitude. Without warning, without pause, perhaps even unawares we are transported to the edge of dilemma: do we identify ourselves with the type of reader which the book assumes is glancing at its pages - a reader devotedly seeking shores of oceanic understanding? Or do we resist the identification, proceeding as an audience other than the one presumed (intended) by Baha’u’llah? And if we do recognise in the quest for true understanding our own aspiration, do we accept the challenge of detachment as formulated in the text? More to the point, do we accept the book’s authority to prescribe at all? Or do we here part company with Baha’u’llah, choosing to measure the book by standards other than those laid out in its pages?
On our conscious or unconscious answer to these questions rests our subsequent experience of the text. These choices and decisions, not explicit in the text, lie implicit in the prescriptive authority assumed by Baha’u’llah throughout the work. The extent to which we either acquiesce to Baha’u’llah’s authorial voice, or distance ourselves therefrom, dictates a diversity of possible relationships between text and reader which in turn give rise to various ways of experiencing its meanings. It is this link between interpretation and experience, as conceived by Baha’u’llah, which we wish to explore in greater depth.
Let us return, then, to the beginning. “No man shall attain the shores of the ocean of true understanding except he be detached from all that is in heaven and on earth.” Implicit in this passage is, as we have said, an audience desirous to attain the wondrous vista, the “shores of the ocean of true understanding”.[1] The generic tone of the address, as of the work as a whole, further indicates that the book’s intended audience is not only one particular person seeking to attain unto these shores,[2] but rather a type or even archetype of reader, seeker-aspirant of this glorious destination.[3] Implicit in this aspiration, furthermore, is the fact of separation, of distance from one’s goal (true understanding), for one cannot aspire to attain a goal one has already reached. An unspoken recognition of the reader’s remoteness from true understanding thus provides or rather signals the point of departure. It evokes receptivity - a willingness to listen openly and sincerely to an authorial voice that speaks as if from deep within or far above in the preamble of the book.
But such desire to attain, such awareness of the distance, are deemed insufficient: “except” we be “detached from all that is in heaven and on earth”, we shall in no wise “attain the shores of the ocean of true understanding”. The use of the conditional (“except he be detached...”) implies that detachment is not inherent in the journeying. It is possible to travel towards true understanding without detachment, but though one may indeed thus travel, one will never thus attain.
Expatiating on the meaning of these initial words the next paragraph states:
“The essence of these words is this: they that tread the path of faith, they that thirst for the wine of certitude, must cleanse themselves of all that is earthly - their ears from idle talk, their minds from vain imaginings, their hearts from worldly affections, their eyes from that which perisheth.”
In what could almost be considered a paraphrase of the earlier passage, the book’s ideal reader is defined still more clearly. Not only must he desire to attain to the shores of the ocean of true understanding; he must also “tread the path of faith” and “thirst for the wine of certitude.” Unlike detachment, which quality the conditional clause implies could be absent during the journey, the other three requisites are treated as a given, a sine qua non of the journey itself. An intention - to attain to the shores of the ocean of true understanding; a designated and ongoing action - treading the path of faith; and an inner state - thirst for certitude’s mystic wine. Bereft of these three, not just the goal, the book advises, but the very journey, are beyond reach.
The Author thus seems to be emphatically inculcating certain attitudes in the audience. An ideal reader is being not merely hoped for or awaited – but rather actively cultivated. It becomes clear that there are preconditions imposed by the book upon its reader without which one may not fully participate in its paradigm. Unless these conditions apply to us as readers, while reading of the book will still be possible, our attempts at understanding it ‘from within’ will be in fact precluded. For unless we are in actual fact upon a quest for true understanding, treading the path of faith, and thirsting for the wine of certitude, we will fall outside the scope of the book’s intended, or at least implicit, audience.
This of course does not mean that only those who fulfil or desire to fulfil these requisites will be able to derive meaning from the Book of Certitude. The literary, philosophical, even aesthetic contents of the Book of Certitude may be equally accessible to readers who recognise and readers who reject the Author’s claim to prescriptive authority. Both audiences may well arrive at similar or identical conclusions as to the meaning of a text. But the psychological effect of arriving at those shared conclusions is likely to differ in relation to one’s attitudes to the Author’s claims to authority, implicit in his interpretive demands. Readings which do not accept the Book of Certitude’s underlying premises; readings which do not, for instance, involve the intense spiritual seeking so emphatically inculcated in its opening pages, will result in an experience of the text other than that expected by its Author.
One of the most significant then, if least obvious themes of the Book of Certitude, is what may be termed the psychological, or more precisely the mystical, dimension of hermeneutics. In linking true understanding – the quintessencial subject of hermeneutics – to spiritual states, Baha’u’llah aligns the hermeneutical process to what is best described as mystical experience. The exploration of a sacred text, when undertaken under the pale of Baha’u’llah’s exhortations, becomes a journey of the soul into the realm of the spirit: the mystical City of
From this perspective, Baha’u’llah’s Book of Certitude appears intended primarily, not to impart certain information or expound a given set of opinions (which any intelligent reader is likely to be able to grasp), but to have a specific existential/mystical effect which only a spiritually engaged reading can induce. The hermeneutical process is thus harnessed to the goal of spiritual education. Rather than focusing on dispelling the obscurities of a specific set of escathological traditions as voiced by Haji Mirza Siyyid Muhammad, for which a more traditional tafsir approach would have been perhaps more appropriate, Baha’u’llah uses the Haji’s questions as a means of directing him, and by extension the full compass of the intended audience, to the qualities of mind and heart that according to the Book of Certitude can alone enable a reader to truly understand, that is to say, truly experience, the allusions at hand and others akin to them.
The underlying method involves linking the text’s message to a series of interpretive obstacles which act as spiritual stimuli. These obstacles take the form of premises and attitudes which must be developed or overcome in order to attain the goal of “true understanding”. They function simultaneously as gates mediating entry into a privileged experience of the text, and as barriers defending or concealing the full meaning of the book from audiences regarded as unworthy to receive it or unready to accept it. Hence, the Book of Certitude may perhaps be said to have a less obvious intended audience than might at first be imagined: a reader who, though not yet fulfilling its criteria for true understanding, is yet desirous of fulfilling them, and willing to spend the necessary effort.
In reality, our approach to Scripture, to the practice of “sacred reading” more generally, and to our investigation of life itself, proceeds, if we are to follow Bahá’u’lláh’s injunctions and the vistas they unfold, in the reverse direction to that followed in this essay. It begins, in fact, in the striving for a spiritual condition which is the fundamental prerequisite of true understanding, and which the Book of Certitude explicitly, and the whole Bahá’í canon implicitly, seek to stimulate. It is out of this inner yearning, and sincere labour, that wells out the true intellectual humility and compassion that make possible an open-minded and loving eye. The receptivity, self-awareness, and independence of thought that such a spiritual condition and hermeneutical attitude engenders, empowers us to engage with the ambiguities, perplexities, contradictions and paradoxes of real life, in all its overwhelming immensity and plenitude, without yielding to either despair or dogmatism, and impels us, and makes us ever more capable, to achieve reconciliation in an increasingly fissiparous world.
[1] the word here translated as "true understanding" is irfan, a word rich in mystic resonances. The word is present in the short Baha'i obligatory prayer, as well as in the opening paragraph of Baha'u'llah's Most Holy Book, and in both texts it is held up as the purpose of existence. Irfan is further translated by Shoghi Effendi as "knowledge" and as "recognition" of God and His Manifestation. Islamicists usually translate the term as "gnosis". Its prominence in Islamic mysticism may be inferred from the fact that the word irfan, according to Siyyid Hussein Nasr, was used in post-Safavid Iran, especially in the nineteenth century, as a euphemistic way of referring to sufism when the latter was repressed and socially unacceptable. Irfan is sometimes described as "relational knowledge" as opposed to purely rational or analytical knowledge, and is said to involve spiritual communion, mystic insight and love.
[2] Such as Haji Mirza Siyyid Muhammad, the maternal uncle of the Bab in answer to whose questions the Book of Certitude was written.
Friday, 6 July 2007
Fanaticism or Relativism: Can a Bahá'í be Certain?
At the heart of most religious conflict, but also at the heart of most religious altruism, lies the conviction, nay, the certitude, that one is right about one's most fundamental beliefs. When a Bahá'í states his or her belief that Baha'u'lláh's message is divinely suited to the needs of the age, is he or she right? Can he know that this is the case beyond the shadow of a doubt, even unto death itself, a degree of conviction the Iranian Bahá'í martyrs have consistently manifested? Is not such degree of conviction the very basis of religious fanaticism? On the other hand, if one cannot be sure about the reality of any truth claims, how does religious truth differ from personal opinion, and what opinion can inspire the degree of conviction required to engender the level of commitment and personal transformation called for by contemporary challenges to social cohesion and environmental sustainability which threaten our very survival on this planet? The following comment seeks to explore, if not fully answer, these questions.
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I have been following the discussions on exclusivism and on scripture
as unchallengeable truth.
One of the questions being asked is, I gather, how do we KNOW? how
does my conviction about something compare with someone else's?
If I believe that Baha'u'llah is the Manifestation of God for this
Day, and someone else doesn't, who's right? Can I say you are wrong
but I am right? Is there a difference between saying 'you are wrong
and I am right' and saying 'I am convinced that you are wrong and I am
right on this one'?
When seeking knowledge of reality, we are faced with a sea of
uncertainty. There are four criteria, 'Abdu'l-Baha stated in Some Answered
Questions as well as in Promulgation of Universal Peace, by which we
understand. Sensory experience, reason, inspiration, and tradition.
The last applies specially to scripture, but I assume we could
stretch it to anything we believe on the authority of another. But,
'Abdu'l-Baha goes on to explain, our senses easily deceive us,
telling us for instance (and for centuries convincing us) that the
Sun revolves around the earth. Our logic is similarily unreliable,
leading us to believe one thing at one time and another at another
time (‘Abdu’l-Bahá gives Plato as an example). Inspiration he describes as
the promptings of the heart, promptings which now lead us to God, now
to Satan, our own insistent self. Finally, tradition, even where
recognised as infallible as in the case of Holy Scriptures, is
dependent upon our reason for its understanding, and so is subject to
its limitations. We are left, then, where we started, in a sea of
uncertainty. With all criteria flawed there would seem to be no
grounds for real conviction, only for an acknowledgement of
inescapable relativism; only for humility, above all, sheer
powerlessness.
And yet, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá leaves us one rock to grasp for refuge, and that is the
Holy Spirit. Through Its guidance, we can arrive at truth, unerring
and infallible. Thus He explains in Paris Talks that when man allows
the Spirit, through his soul, to enlighten his understanding, then he
contains all creation. This may be similarily linked to the
passage in the Iqan where Baha'u'llah states that the understanding
of the scriptures is dependent, not on human learning, but "solely"
upon "purity of heart, chastity of soul, and freedom of spirit",
attitudes which presumably allow the Spirit to enlighten our
understanding. Again, this may be linked to the statement of
'Abdu'l-Bahá in Selections from the Writings of 'Abdu'l-Bahá that
when the quest for knowledge is joined to the love of God it
becomes fruitful, whereas without the love of God it is devoid of
fruit, "nay it leadeth unto madness". Understanding being thus
linked to the Holy Spirit, scholarship becomes, in essence, a mystic
quest, in which context alone it fulfils itself.
But I'm digressing. Just as we might sigh with relief at having
found a source of certainty, we ask ourselves the question, "Am I
inspired of the Holy Spirit?", and we're thrown back to the four
criteria of knowledge, back to the sea of uncertainty. For where
everything is relative, the very notion of doubt and certainty
becomes irrelevant.
It seems to me that the primary result of a recognition, conscious
or more often unconscious, of the relativity of understanding is a sense
of powerlessness, a sense of meaninglesness which might in some ways describe
the character of human experience in the 20th century. If all opinions are equally
valuable, then all opinions are equally meaningless. If Hitler's
views were as valid as Ghandhi's then one's views don't mean that
much in the first place.
This breakdown of paradigms as a result of the recognition of relativism
is what I understand to have been the insight of Nietzche's madman.
He saw in the 19th century revolutions not only a sense of liberation but primarily
a sense of breakdown. When God dies, the whole of Western morality dies as
well, and with it Western civilization as a whole. While this
collapse was conceived by Nietzsche to be liberating to himself and
kindred spirits, he also foresaw that it was apocalyptic in its
implications for civilization as a whole.
Like a man whose ship of certainty shipwrecks on a sea of relativity, we are
confronted with two choices: either we cling ever more firmly to
whatever remnants remain afloat, clinging for very life and refusing
to let go or entertain alternatives; or we abandon the shipwreck and
try to swim in the direction of land. In the former case we focus on
answers, in the latter, on questions. In the former we find our
security, our certitude, in location, in the latter, on process.
Thus we find, for instance, among religions,that on the one
hand, we have ecumenism; on the other, fundamentalism. Politically,
countries where this fragmentation of certainty is particularily
evident, like the former U.S.S.R., evince both strong pulls towards
openness, internationalsim, etc., and also towards nationalism and
racialism.At an individual level, similarily, the recognition of relativism and
the human need for meaning may give rise both to humility and to
intransigence. The former is born of a sense of transcendence; the
latter, from insecurity and fear, indeed, paradoxically, for lack of
certitude in the absence of certainty.
And yet we cannot live our lives with such a model. I trust that
there is a computer, so I type this message, which I'm convinced will
be read by you. I trust I exist, no, it's not even a question in my
mind. If you didn't believe me I would not bother with trying to
prove it to you, so certain am I about my existence. Indeed, if you
really did not believe I existed when knowing me personally, I should
think there was something wrong with you. But my certitude is no
grounds for certainty; a distinction to which I will return later.
Indeed, in believing I exist I'm merely using the four criteria
mentioned above, all of which I recognise as flawed. So my
certitude, in the last analysis, is in essence an intelligent act of
faith.
Those of you who are into Wittgenstein will recognise echoes of his
thought. I strongly recommend the posthumously published volume of
his notes on the nature of certainty, appropriately titled On
Certainty. In this book, as I understand it, he asserts the impossibility of
absolute knowledge, taken to mean a sense of knowing something which warrants
that knowledge as fact, that is, a sense of knowing something which
absolutely precludes the statement "I thought I knew." He thus makes
the distinction between knowledge and certainty, asserting:
"One does not infer how things are from one's own certainty.
Certainty is as it were a tone of voice in which one declares how
things are, but one does not infer from one's tone of voice that one
is justified."
One may perhaps re-label the distinction between knowledge and
certainty as one between certainty and certitude. Certitude denoting
a conviction which does not warrant its subject as fact, and
certainty denoting conviction which warrants its subject as fact.
This might be the difference between the conviction of a
Manifestation, whose conviction that something is true warrants it to
be a fact at some level (not necessarily a literal or historical
one), and that of human beings, none of whose convictions imply such
warrantee (except, I suppose, in the case of conferred infallibility).
Be that as it may, for human beings, as far as the above categories
go, certitude would appear to be the highest form of conviction one
can reach, certainty being an impossibility by virtue of the
epistemological limitations inherent in our nature.
Now, given these limitations, all conviction becomes an act of faith,
more or less rational, as the case may be. Certitude, in this
perspective, becomes the most intense form of faith, almost to the
point, perhaps to the point, of precluding doubt. It is not that
doubt becomes impossible, it is rather that it becomes unthinkable.
Thus I have certitude that I possess a hand, it is not something I
would question, it is a given. I undertake a great many actions
which assume its existence. On the other hand there are beliefs
which I hold which are far more tenuous. Is there life in other
planets? If so, what is its nature? What do the readers of these lines look like?
"It might be imagined," writes Wittgenstein, "that some
propositions, of the form of empirical propositions, were hardened
and functioned as channels for such empirical propositions as were
not hardened but fluid; and that this relation altered with time, in
that fluid propositions hardened, and hard ones became fluid."
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One man's certitude then, might be another's doubt. So, to return to
our question, who is right? How do we Know? How do we decide? For
decide we must, at least to a degree. If I see someone mugging an
old lady or beating up a child, I'm not going to argue with myself
whether or not he is right to do so - I'll try to stop him. In the
same way, when I call myself a Baha'i, I have actually made a
decision. I recognise in its teachings the best answer to the
dilemmas of humanity as I perceive them. More, I recognise its
teachings as Divine, hence normative, not just for me, but for all
society. It would seem illogical to recognise it as normative for me
and not for others, as if Baha'u'llah had really meant to speak to
Ismael alone, and not to humanity. Others, however, do not see in
the Baha'i teachings a divine revelation, but at most a partial
inspiration which is normative only insofar as it agrees with other
propositions which are, so to speak, hardened in one's mind. Which is true?
This may be answered at three levels.
1) Apodictically (as it is in itself): Is apodictic knowledge
possible? According to 'Abdu'l-Baha it is not humanly possible to
know the essence of a thing. Hence knowledge is relative and varies
according to our point of view. From this perspective all knowledge
is both relative and fallible, and thus one can never truly Know
whether a given proposition is true, false or merely different,
though one may have fairly strong convictions on the matter. In this
perspective Wittgenstein and 'Abdu'l-Baha appear to be in agreement.
However, 'Abdu'l Baha postulates yet one more dimension: the Divine.
From this perspective one may indeed KNOW. Whatever the Holy Spirit
unveils is right and true, is certain. Should the Holy Spirit
enlighten our understanding of any matter we would, to that extent
and to that extent only, know with certainty. However, as mentioned
before, we can never know what aspects of our convictions have been
illumined by the Holy Spirit. Apodictic knowledge is possible, then, but not with
certainty. The possibility of apodicticity is there, but not
the possibility of certainty. We can trust that some of our
knowledge is true apodictically, but we can never absolutely know to what
extent. In other words, reality is not a relative concept, though it
is relatively experienced. Similarily apodictic knowledge of reality
is possible, but not apodictic conviction. Only God knows what,
in all our convictions, is actually true. This allows us to go
beyond the position that there is no such thing as truth, whilst
avoiding the position that we KNOW that we are, as Baha'is, the main custodians
of it, or at least of some aspect of it.
We might believe so, we might give our lives to testify to our certitude in the truth of God's Self-revelation in Baha'u'llah and to vindicate our belief in His teachings, but we are also aware that our conviction, by itself, does not warrant our certitude as fact.
In this perspective, the abrogation of Jihad and the substitution of the sword for wisdom and utterance acquires significance. We renounce the notion of apodictic conviction, though not of apodictic knowledge. By recognising the basis of our conviction as relative, whilst having absolute certitude in its truth, we exchange the quest for conformity for the quest of intersubjectivity, which is the next level at which
we may approach the question.
2) Intersubjectively: If we cannot apodictically know then we cannot
apodictically prove something to be right. Instead of trying to
prove, we attempt to persuade, to arrive at a consensus as to what is
right or true. In this light, a given conviction proves its validity
by its capacity to generate agreement around its subject. The
proposition that the earth circles the sun has validated, though not
proved, itself by the degree of agreement it has generated throughout
the centuries. Similarily Newton's theories, so long accepted so
widely, have to a large extent been superseded by Einstein's work,
which "proved" itself to be right by becoming more intersubjectively
accepted. When the disciples of Jesus accepted him, they had nothing
but their own certitude and their grounds for such a certitude to go
by. The capacity of their beliefs to generate agreement around their
subject matter has given them intersubjective validation.
Similarily, Baha'is cannot "prove" their beliefs, but they can
increasingly help others to make sense of them, in the faith, nay the
certitude, that others will similarily recognise them as the true
answer to the needs of the world. Recognise them, that is, not
apodictically, but intersubjectively.
Which brings us to the third level:
3) Subjective: At this level, one's own convictions become the
criteria by which we decide the truth of a given proposition. The
highest degree of conviction we can reach is certitude. Certainty is
beyond us. In accepting this we can accept diversity without
compromise; that is, we can agree to disagree. We follow our own
convictions in the hope that time will show the correctness or
otherwise of our positions. Above all, in recognising our
powerlessness, we renounce any ideas of imposing our beliefs, though
not necessarily of winning others to our way of thinking. In other
words, we aim at intersubjectivity, and not beyond.