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Christ and Baha'u'llah
by George Townshend
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chapter 8 | start page | single page | chapter 10 |  |
Chapter 9
THE RISE OF MODERN EUROPE
IT is
customary to call the civilization of modern Europe par excellence Christian and to think of it as the special trustee
of Christian truth among the less enlightened peoples of the East. Yet in the
twentieth century when the time of spiritual harvesting had come we find
'Abdu'l-Bahá saying that the West as well as the East had "imagined themselves as having attained a
glorious pinnacle of achievement and prosperity, when in reality they have
touched the innermost depths of heedlessness and deprived themselves wholly of
God's bounteous gifts." Nor can they have imagined the awfulness of
the crisis which western civilization would be called upon to face, nor the
challenge and the strain to which it would be subjected.
The true Christian civilization is in fact not that of
modern Europe but that of the age of Constantine, which far more perfectly
mirrored the teachings of Christ and was inspired by the religious spirit of
the early Church. Brief as that civilization was it is described by
'Abdu'l-Bahá as having been the best and most enlightened in the world at that
time. Among its good deeds and pious acts it established infirmaries, hospitals
and charitable institutions. Most of the believers reached a degree of moral
perfection, had no fear of death, longed for wisdom and justice; were ready to
forsake their personal profit, seeking instead to please God and spending their
lives in
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educating and instructing the people. The Emperor Constantine himself was the
first in the Roman Empire to found a public hospital for the treatment of poor
people who had no one to care for them. He was the first Roman Emperor to throw
himself heart and soul into the Cause of Christ. He resolutely promulgated the
principles of the Gospel and brought justice and moderation into the methods of
the Roman government which previously had been noted for injustice and
oppression.
But in, and after, the Dark Ages, Christianity showed more
interest in rites and doctrines than in moral conduct. Indeed it is said that since
the time of St. Francis of Assisi no Christian reform movement has been
concerned with reform of Christian conduct but rather with doctrines and rites.
Even the Reformation itself, great, deep and enduing as its effects have been,
was less concerned with the correction of morals than with the remedying of
ritual abuses.
The whole process of building a new civilization in the
West, found itself vigorously opposed by the Christian Church, which for
centuries past had adopted a policy of immobility and objected to both the idea
and practice of progress. As European culture advanced continuously this
stagnant immobility became definite reaction and the whole spirit of the Church
became hostile to all forward movement. Before the time of Muḥammad the
Church had objected to the scientific spirit as well as to investigation and
logic. Muḥammad had taught and encouraged science, learning and reason,
and as the Church would not weaken its opposition it found itself more and more
estranged from human progress.
The civilization of the West, resulting from the impact of
Islám on Christendom proved to be one of enormous
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and ever-extending material power. Its dominion spread to an unexampled degree over the rest of the world in economic, political and military matters. But it proved quite unequal to spreading its spiritual influence. Even when, during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it spent large sums of money and sent out hundreds and even thousands of missionaries, its failure to Christianize the world was as conspicuous as its success in establishing its economic suzerainty. Viewing the whole period from the twelfth to the twentieth century one sees the reason for this contrast. The initiative in producing this wonderful culture was not taken by the Church nor by religious enthusiasm as in the case of the first and real Christian civilization in the time of Constantine. It was a secular movement sprinting from the sudden and thorough emancipation of the human spirit, and originated with the laity. The Church at the beginning of this period was still the Church of the Dark Ages. Worldly-xcminded men had got control of it and were determined to hold that control. Uninfluenced by the changing spirit of the age they found themselves in opposition to the whole progressive movement that was forging a new, eager, active Europe. They would not tolerate the spirit of enquiry or the free use of reason. These they represented as being definitely heretical. Though Peter wrote (I Peter) . . . "be ready always to give an answer to every man that asketh you a reason of the hope that is in you . . . ;" though Paul likewise wrote "Prove all things: hold fast that which is good" (I Thessalonians v 2I) and acted accordingly himself when "he reasoned in the synagogue every sabbath, and persuaded the Jews and the Greeks" (Acts xviii 4) and again when he "three sabbath days
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reasoned with them out of the scriptures" (Acts xvii 2); and though Jesus Christ Himself definitely taught men
to use their reason to support their faith saying “Wherefore, if God so clothe the grass of the field, which to-day is,
and to-morrow is cast into the oven, shall he not much more clothe you, O ye of
little faith ?" (Matt. vi
30) yet the religious authorities of those days (and many too of these days)
regarded logic and investigation as wrong. They laid it down that the deposit
of faith was static. It was once and for all delivered to the saints, and was
not to be changed or challenged.
Under the reign of such views no Divine science, which
might have balanced physical science and been to it a counterpart and
equipoise, was ever able to arise. Verbalisms, sterile dogmas, riddles that
might evoke controversy but could not illuminate the mind, took the place of a
real search for spiritual truth, a real scrutiny of the deep mysteries of human
and Divine nature. So inveterate was the hostility of the religious authorities
of Christendom to the spirit of Truth and to the pursuit of knowledge that a
careful historian wrote of it:
"Until the seventeenth century, every mental
disposition which philosophy pronounces to be essential to a legitimate
research was almost uniformly branded as a sin, and a large proportion of the
most deadly intellectual vices were deliberately inculcated as virtues. . . .
In a word, there is . . . .
scarcely a rule which reason teaches as essential for its attainment, that
theologians did not for centuries stigmatize as offensive to the
Almighty."[1]
1. Lecky, History of the Rise and Influence of Rationalism in Europe, chap. 4, part ii, pp. 87, 88. Longmans, London 1872.
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The authorities supported their views by the use of
persecution, the justification for which was based on the theory of the moral
guilt of error.
'Abdu'l-Bahá once said that Reason was the throne of
faith; in another place he likened Reason to a great mirror looking into the
heavens but reflecting no image because it was in darkness. Faith, he said, was
like sunlight which enabled the mirror to see and to reflect all the heavenly
truths that lie before it. These symbols express exactly the Christian and the
Bahá'í view of Reason and Faith, but not the view of traditional orthodoxy
which is a purely human concept.
The whole position as regards heresy, dogma, enquiry,
reason and the like was supported by the authority of a great institution, but
Jesus had revealed no specific institution and all institutions, great and
small, old or new, have been deduced by men's reason from this or that phrase
or text of Gospel. No church to-day, or in any other day, can point to any
statement in the Gospel which indicates its pattern, its rule of succession by
which it can silence its critics. The whole system rests on sheer speculation.
Not one of the institutions of Christendom can say it is designed and built in
direct conformity with an express command of Christ in the Gospel. All are
man-made.
Orthodoxy rather than detachment or moral righteousness
has been the shibboleth of religious authorities. Their enthusiasm has been
confined largely to insistence on teachings, doctrines, speculations which,
like their own structure were
devised by themselves, and around which controversies were raised which none
could finally settle. About the main ethical injunctions of Christ and actual
obedience to them there was no such insistence.
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No church, for example, has ever adopted the challenging test for membership
used by Jesus Himself for His disciples: "By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love
for one to another." (John
xiii 35).
Europe in consequence has never been tranquil, full of
good will, united, but rather full of oppression, misery, strife and
turbulence. The cause of Religion has been supported by the most flagrant
breaches of Gospel ethics.
So far did the traditional religion of Europe, in its
character and effects, differ from that of the Gospel, that it became the chief
cause of unchristian feeling and behavior. It promoted hatred and schism,
discontent, strife, cruelty and injustice, suppression of truth and reason. It
has conducted persecutions, burnings at the stake, extermination of heretics,
suppression of truth by force. 'Abdu'l-Bahá comments on this subject in a talk
given at Green Acre, Maine on August 17th, 1912: “Nine hundred thousand martyrs to the protestant cause was the record of
conflict and difference between that sect of Christians and the catholics.
Consult history and confirm this."[1]
But now another divergence between the attitude of the
Church and that of all progressives took shape and grew steadily more wide. The
Church objected to that nation-building which had been the main contribution of
Muḥammad to human history and which was to be as important to the
building of Western civilization as it had been to Islám.
The interests of Church and State never were harmoniously
combined in Christian history as they had been by Muḥammad. Four types
of relationship have been essayed. First, that of Rome in which the Church
1. Promulgation of Universal Peace, Bahá'í Temple Unity, Chicago, 1922 (p. 259).
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is above the State; second, that of Prussia in which the State is above the
Church; third, that of England in which Church and State exist side by side as
different aspects of one community; and lastly, that adopted in the United
States of America where Church is regarded simply as a voluntary association of
individuals and has no official relation to the nation at all.
Not one of these has been satisfactory. It has remained
for the Bahá'í Faith alone to develop a structure of national life in which the
two can be perfectly united and harmonized.
The development of the nation state has been in Europe a
great modern feat, and its achievement has brought immense advantages to the
advancement of science, the promotion of industry, the outlook of the ordinary
man, and has given to the national life a freedom and a power not equalled by any earlier form of social
structure. But these advantages have been won in spite of the Church and in our
time the final result of the struggle is the humiliation of the Church and very
often the secularization of the national life.
Not only has the prestige and influence of the Church been
thus abased but the prestige and influence of religion with it; and at the same
time materialism has been strengthened and exalted. The whole progress of our
Western civilization has been, therefore, not the intensifying of Christianity
but the opposite.
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