They do not use that great gift of God, the
power of the understanding, by which they might see with the eyes of the
spirit, hear with spiritual ears and also comprehend with a Divinely
enlightened heart.
(Abdu'l-Baha,
Paris Talks: 89)
Having presented some thoughts on the
spiritual dimension, let us now, in order to gain a better understanding of
what I am calling the religious faculty, present some considerations on the
state of mind or consciousness that connects with that dimension. Rudolph Otto in his classic, The Idea of the Holy, calls the mental
state of this faculty the “numinous state of mind’ and describes it thus: “This
mental state is perfectly sui generis
and irreducible to any other; and therefore, like every absolutely primary and
elementary datum, while it admits of being discussed, it cannot be strictly
defined.” (Rudolph Otto, The Idea of the
Holy: 144)
How is the
potential of this faculty brought forth?
It is through the teaching of spiritual principle. How
does one get into this mental state? In
a sense, every soul is already within it, or, better, it is already within
every soul, but it must be aroused and brought forth.
First,
we must make a distinction between the spirit and the form of religion. Rudolph Otto wrote: “What is incapable of
being handed down is this numinous basis and background to religion, which can
only be induced, excited, and aroused.” (Rudolph Otto, The Idea of the Holy:
60) The numinous background to
religion, as Otto calls it, which is the same as what we can call the spirit as
opposed to the form of religion, cannot be taught because: “The numinous is
thus felt as objective and outside the self.” (Otto, The Idea of
the Holy: 11) Only what is
felt to be inside or immanent to the self, i.e. a faculty that can be aroused
and give response, can be taught and its potentials brought forth. This objectivity of the numinous, i.e. the
sacred, the divine, is why we must make a distinction between the numinous
spirit of religion and the rational form of religion. The first cannot be taught, the second can,
because of the rational faculty. But
teaching the second can arouse the first, because proper form attracts
spirit.
Otto writes: “There is one way to help
another to an understanding of it. He
must be guided and led on by consideration and discussion of that matter
through the ways of his own mind, until he reach the point at which ‘the
numinous’ in him perforce begins to stir, to start into life and into
consciousness. We can co-operate in this
process by bringing before his notice all that can be found in other regions of
the mind, already known and familiar, to resemble, or again to afford some
special contrast to, the particular experience we wish to elucidate. Then we must add: ‘This X of ours is not precisely this
experience, but akin to this one and the opposite of that other. Cannot you realize for yourself what it
is?’ In other words our X cannot, strictly speaking, be taught,
it can only be evoked, awakened in the mind; as everything that comes ‘of the
spirit’ must be awakened.” (The Idea of
the Holy: 7) But lest we think this
requires some mighty effort to arouse, Otto tells us: “But the mere word, even
when it comes as a living voice, is powerless without the ‘spirit in the heart’
of the hearer to move him to apprehension.
And this spirit, this inborn capacity to receive and understand, is the
essential thing. If that is there, very
often only a very small incitement, a very remote stimulus, is needed to arouse
the numinous consciousness.” (Otto, The
Idea of the Holy: 61
As Otto’s discussion points out, the numinous
is “there” to be experienced in some sense, but there is also “the numinous in
him.” We don’t get into a numinous state
in any absolute sense. It is not
something manufactured from nothing.
Rather, the aspects and attributes of an objective Divinity awaken the
divine that is already within us, giving us the feeling of a numinous
presence. It is the awakening that
occurs when the heart and mind achieve coherence. The intellect’s relationship here is not with
anything physically or intellectually external “out there” as in space or in
some other part of the mind. Rather,
“out there” is really “up there” both as a dimension beyond the human and as a
state of being latent within the human reality.
But “up there” is actually “in there” as the deepest part of humanity,
i.e. the sacred heart. In a telling
insight, Otto observes that “the numinous informs the rational from above”: (The Idea of the Holy: 46) where “above”
refers to that dimension of the divine that the Bahá’í statement called the spiritual
dimension “the source of qualities that transcend narrow self-interest.” In essence, then, the rational faculty
perceives the sacred Spirit and humbly opens itself to be informed. Perhaps it is from the same perspective that
the philosopher, Heidegger, wrote: “A
person is neither a thing nor a process, but an opening or clearing through
which the Absolute can manifest.”
Religion cannot be taught, but the principles
of religion can, and this awakens that faculty if done properly. Baha’u’llah admonishes: “Schools must first
train the children in the principles of religion, so that the Promise and the
Threat recorded in the Books of God may prevent them from the things forbidden
and adorn them with the mantle of the commandments; but this in such a measure
that it may not injure the children by resulting in ignorant fanaticism and
bigotry.” (Baha'u'llah, Tablets of
Baha'u'llah: 68)
Religion as a system of knowledge that can be
taught is the result of an enduring objective relationship with what is sacred,
supernatural, divine, and mystical. It
is not an invention of the imagination or some wish-fulfillment for weak minds
or socially marginalized groups. Neither
is it an opiate of the lazy and spiritually indolent. While it is true that religion as a form of
belief and an objective way of knowing is something that can be outgrown or
discarded, that is true of any body of knowledge. To discard the spirit of religion and with it
the transcendent and sacred, however, is not something that can be done without
losing something inherent within us, without denying some inner power and
faculty necessary to fully engage the universe, without shattering the
wholeness of the cosmos and of the human personality. We are humans, finally, because we can
recognize supernatural realities, not because we can invent them. We have
religion not because we are imaginative beings, but because we are spiritual
ones.
This spiritual potential is present not only at the dawn of each consciousness, but
also at the dawn of human consciousness. The religious faculty may be the first of the faculties
of true consciousness within the rational faculty to awaken. Ernst Cassirer wrote: “The earliest human
consciousness to which we can go back must be conceived as a divine
consciousness, a consciousness of God: in its true and specific meaning the
human consciousness is a consciousness that does not have God outside it but
which—though not with knowledge but with will, not by a free act of the fancy
but rather by its very nature—contains within it a relation to God.” (Ernst
Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic
Forms, v. 2: 7 Rudolph Otto concurs, writing: “religion, nothing else, is
at work in those early stages of mythic and daemonic experience.” (Otto, The Idea of the Holy: 132) In this regard, Baha’u’llah states: “From the
beginning of time the light of unity hath shed its divine radiance upon the
world...” (Tablets of Baha'u'llah: 127)
But
this faculty, so present in children (See Tobin Hart, The Secret Spiritual World of Children), gets drained of its power by
an overly materialistic, rationalistic slant to education, leading to
‘Abdu’l-Baha’s lament that opened this discussion. Lacking belief in the real existence of the
faculty morphs into the belief that there is no such faculty. The degeneration of the faculty of
recognizing God can lead to the notion that there is no God, or to the failure
to recognize God in His new Message and new Manifestation.
As
the first consciousness, composing a knowledge that embraces all human
consciousness, the message of religion has, perhaps, a special connection with
the faculty of justice, which enables its possessor to discern truth from error—the
basis of any moral code—and to recognize God.
We’ll turn to that faculty next.
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