People think religion is confined in an
edifice, to be worshipped at an altar. In reality it is an attitude toward
divinity which is reflected through life.
(Abdu'l-Baha,
Divine Philosophy: 14)
The Religion of God as the Word of God is
first, in time, in creation, in divine knowledge, and in human
understanding. It is the essential
reality. In regards to time and creation,
that is, the cosmological re-ligia of binding the primordial chaos into ordinal
cosmos, the Book of Genesis informs us: “In the beginning God created the
heaven and the earth.’ (King James Bible,
Genesis 1:1) The New Testament Book
of John tells us how the cosmological creation of Genesis was effected: “In the
beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God.” (King
James Bible, John 1: 1-2) The Word
is the creative power of God. The unity
which is the oneness of humankind in this context is the understanding that all
people are children of the same God.
In regards to the interplay of divine
knowledge and human understanding, recall that Baha’u’llah tells us that the “first
bestowal of God is the Word, and its discoverer and recipient is the power of
understanding.” The first bestowal of
God is the Religion of God, when this is discovered by the power of
understanding religion among human beings begins. Speaking of the Religion of God, Baha’u’llah says in another place: “Religion bestoweth upon man the most precious of all gifts, offereth the cup of
prosperity, imparteth eternal life, and showereth imperishable benefits upon
mankind.” (Tablets of Baha'u'llah: 129) That “most precious of all gifts” is the gift
of understanding. The bestowal is received
when It is discovered, and upon its reception the gifts pour forth from the human reality. That drive in the soul of human beings that inclines them toward
transcendence is what receives and discovers the Word, the Religion of God.
The human soul is the heart of creation,
because the human spirit is the collective reality out from which flow all
other realities in creation. It is their
pivot, their center, motive force and essential reality: “The world, indeed
each existing being, proclaims to us one of the names of God, but the reality
of man is the collective reality, the general reality, and is the center where
the glory of all the perfections of God shine forth—that is to say, for each
name, each attribute, each perfection which we affirm of God there exists a
sign in man.” (Abdu'l-Baha, Some Answered
Questions: 195)
But, the soul is also, through the power of
the rational faculty, which is the collective reality of all other human
faculties, the first in creation to recognize God: “Know, verily, that the soul
is a sign of God, a heavenly gem whose reality the most learned of men hath
failed to grasp, and whose mystery no mind, however acute, can ever hope to
unravel. It is the first among all created things to declare the excellence of
its Creator, the first to recognize His glory, to cleave to His truth, and to
bow down in adoration before Him.” (Gleanings
from the Writings of Baha'u'llah: 158)
The human spirit knows and recognizes God
through a religious faculty located in the heart. “Therefore, hath it been said: ‘Knowledge is
a light which God casteth into the heart of whomsoever He willeth."
(Baha'u'llah, The Kitab-i-Iqan: 46) —an
experience that often stirs up among the unwary an inchoate confusion of awe,
dread, rapturous love, ecstatic emotion, mystical intuition and sometimes
pathology. But as we said, in spiritual
terms the pivot is, at one and the same time, the focal center, the heart, the
source and motive power, the essence, of something. The heart is both a focal
center of spiritual energies and a radiant center of human energies.
In regards to religion and the foundations of
social knowledge, ‘Abdu’l-Baha explains that the role of the great Spiritual
Luminaries is this: “Briefly, the supreme
Manifestations of God are aware of the reality of the mysteries of beings.
Therefore, They establish laws which are suitable and adapted to the state of
the world of man, for religion is the essential connection which proceeds from
the realities of things.” (Some Answered
Questions: 157) “Religion,” He goes
on, “is the necessary connection which emanates from the reality of things; and
as the supreme Manifestations of God are aware of the mysteries of beings,
therefore, They understand this essential connection, and by this knowledge
establish the Law of God.” (Some Answered
Questions:158) Thus the power of
understanding discovers the expanding principles of God’s unfolding Knowledge,
the great re-ligia binding all things together in ever greater complexity, and
an expanding human knowledge is built upon these discoveries. Hence, when a new unfoldment of divine
knowledge occurs, a new religion (i.e. re-ligia) appears, the gift of
understanding is bestowed, so human knowledge also becomes new.
It is, perhaps, for this reason that the
House of Justice writes in the following terms of the cardinal importance in
human life of this essential reality called religion and its relation to peace:
“No serious attempt to set human affairs aright, to achieve world peace, can
ignore religion. Man's perception and practice of it are largely the stuff of
history. An eminent historian described religion as a "faculty of human
nature". That the perversion of this faculty has contributed to much of
the confusion in society and the conflicts in and between individuals can
hardly be denied. But neither can any fair-minded observer discount the
preponderating influence exerted by religion on the vital expressions of
civilization. Furthermore, its indispensability to social order has repeatedly
been demonstrated by its direct effect on laws and morality.” (The Universal
House of Justice, The Promise of World
Peace: 1)
That eminent historian is, I believe, Arnold
Toynbee, who wrote: “The quest for ultimate spiritual reality is inborn in
human nature.” (Arnold Toynbee, Habit and Change: 8)
This idea of an innate religious faculty, or
what some call an instinct, is, in one or more of its aspects, acknowledged by
numerous thinkers from many fields. Carl
Jung said about religion: “Religion, as the careful observation and taking
account of certain invisible and uncontrollable factors, is an instinctive
attitude peculiar to man, and its manifestations can be followed all through
human history.” (Carl Jung, The
Undiscovered Self: 26) Biologist Dean Hamer echoes Jung: “Spirituality is
one of our basic human inheritances. It
is, in fact, an instinct.” (Dean Hamer, The
God Gene: How Faith is Hardwired into our Genes: 6)
Regarding religion’s connection with human
intelligence, sociologist Daniel Bell wrote: “Religion…is a constitutive part
of man’s consciousness: the cognitive search for the pattern of the ‘general
order’ of existence; the affective need to establish rituals and to make such
conceptions sacred; the primordial need for relatedness to some others, or to a
set of meanings which will establish a transcendent response to the self; and
the existential need to confront the finalities of suffering and death.” (Bell,
The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism:
169) Anthropologist Gregory Bateson
says “religion is a rich, internally structured model that stands in
metaphorical relationship to the whole of life, and therefore can be used to
think with.” (Gregory Bateson and Catherine Bateson, Angels Fear: 195)
Psychologist Dr. Alfred Meier writes: “...the religious belongs to the
wholeness of the human personality….The subjective experience connected with a
religious phenomenon and with healing is actually one of transcendence and this
transcendence is a new element which was not in the system from the beginning.”
(Alfred Maier, Jung’s Analytic Psychology
and Religion: 73) The Bahá’í
Writings also speak of “…religion as the principal force impelling the development
of human consciousness.” (The Universal House of Justice, One Common Faith: 23)
Religion, these writings assert, is “a source of knowledge that totally embraces
consciousness.” (One Common Faith:
13-14) These last thoughts echo this
statement from the Master: “(T)he religion of
God is the promoter of truth, the founder of science and knowledge, it is full
of goodwill for learned men; it is the civilizer of mankind, the discoverer of
the secrets of nature, and the enlightener of the horizons of the world.” (Some Answered Questions: 136)
More to come on the religious faculty.
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