Justice and Oneness

Justice and the Oneness of God

By John Taylor; 2006 Oct 05

My health is better than I remember it ever being. My single-minded efforts at more exercise and better diet are at last starting to pay off. I have had to punch a few new holes in my belt. But that brightening puts my career or lack of it in a starker light. Writing these essays every day starts to seem more futile and pointless every day. What do I get out of it? What does anybody, other than about three dozen readers, get out of it? So yesterday in foul weather I sat before the keyboard moping, writing nothing. Then after supper my sister-in-law Jitka called from Hamilton and we arranged to go visit in Hamilton. I picked her up and dropped her, Marie and Thomas off at a Burger King with a play place. Meanwhile Silvie and I went on to attend Mrs. Javid's fireside.

Thus Marie and Jitka got their chance for a few hours to jawbone in rapid-fire Czech while Thomas climbed the indoor slides and other play structures nearby. Jitka has been here longer than many naturalized citizens but because of her means of entry she is most often called an illegal worker, or just an illegal. Lately I heard for the first time the politically correct word for these non-persons: an "undocumented worker." Well, if she is an undocumented worker then I am an undocumented writer, in spades. Anyway, after the meeting the fireside speaker, Charles F., introduced me very kindly to the group, announcing that I had set out to write an essay a day. I sat shamefaced, thinking how sorely I have fallen short of that goal lately. I fail even to do what digs the hole of failure even deeper. But I took that as a goad, a good thing; so thank Charles for the existence of the following shovel full.

Let us go back to our ongoing project over the better part of a year, our examination of the Uber-principle, the Oneness of God. In the arbitrary order of the principles that I have adopted as a convention, we just finished ethics and are about to step into universal peace.

I must say that lately I feel like a vaudeville master of ceremonies who, every time he goes over to unveil the principle of universal peace, a hook comes out from offstage, encircles his neck and pulls him back; I constantly return to ethics and oneness of God. Rather than trying to avoid the hook, let me just admit there is an intermediate principle between personal and social, between ethics and peace: justice. Justice is the confluence, the straddling of the line between God within and a God that loves us all as a species, as well as all the rest of His creation. So today let us discuss how justice applies to the principle of One God.

Recently we were diverted, as it turns out fortunately, by an Internet discussion of a tangled postmodernist tissue of lies called moral relativism. This is the idea that personal morals, like the kind of cell phones we use, are subject to constant change, revamping and improvement. We learned from our region's learned Auxiliary Board Member for protection, Shakar Arjomand, that the opening paragraphs of the Kitab-i-Iqan are designed to rule out from the very start this unfortunate perversion of relativity theory. From what little I understand of events leading up to this discussion, a young man in Toronto area attended Ruhi sessions and proposed to join the Baha'i Faith in order to reform it. By "reform" he meant changing moral tenets that we regard as unchanging aspects of godliness.

It is a strange thing that although the spirit of our age, and indeed the Kitab-i-Iqan itself, are utterly seeping in relativity and contextual knowledge, at the same time the very idea of one God demands that there be large pastures of life and morals that are untouchable, that will never alter or change. Their nature is defined by their being the right way, the shortest distance between two points. Plato in the Cratylus demonstrates why moral relativism is untenable. An absolute is required for relativity; this is of the very nature of whatever is right, true and natural.

Soc. Nor will you be disposed to say with Euthydemus, that all things equally belong to all men at the same moment and always; for neither on his view can there be some good and other bad, if virtue and vice are always equally to be attributed to all.

Her. There cannot.

Soc. But if neither is right, and things are not relative to individuals, and all things do not equally belong to all at the same moment and always, they must be supposed to have their own proper and permanent essence: they are not in relation to us, or influenced by us, fluctuating according to our fancy, but they are independent, and maintain to their own essence the relation prescribed by nature.

Her. I think, Socrates, that you have said the truth.

Soc. Does what I am saying apply only to the things themselves, or equally to the actions which proceed from them? Are not actions also a class of being?

Her. Yes, the actions are real as well as the things.

Soc. Then the actions also are done according to their proper nature, and not according to our opinion of them? In cutting, for example, we do not cut as we please, and with any chance instrument; but we cut with the proper instrument only, and according to the natural process of cutting; and the natural process is right and will succeed, but any other will fail and be of no use at all.

Her. I should say that the natural way is the right way.

Soc. Again, in burning, not every way is the right way; but the right way is the natural way, and the right instrument the natural instrument.

The existence of a moral absolute, the true and the good, is implied by the very word "God." Conversely, the necessity of a God is shown by persistent commonalities in nature. These are necessary for us to understand anything. One of the founders of modern law and government, the Baron de Montesquieu, dealt with this at the beginning of his masterwork, the Spirit of the Laws, in a section called, "Of the Relation of Laws to different Beings."

"Since we observe that the world, though formed by the motion of matter, and void of understanding, subsists through so long a succession of ages, its motions must certainly be directed by invariable laws; and could we imagine another world, it must also have constant rules, or it would inevitably perish. Thus the creation, which seems an arbitrary act, supposes laws as invariable as those of the fatality of the Atheists. It would be absurd to say that the Creator might govern the world without those rules, since without them it could not subsist. These rules are a fixed and invariable relation. In bodies moved, the motion is received, increased, diminished, or lost, according to the relations of the quantity of matter and velocity; each diversity is uniformity, each change is constancy."

The creative lawmaking of God brings unity in diversity and diversity out of unity, like a wheel going around. After this, Montesquieu recognizes that things get much more complicated when constants are applied to the world of intelligent but flawed human beings. But even here there are elements that never change. It will never be a good thing to murder or steal or commit violations of love. God is love, and love is not to be affronted. The fact that there are rare exceptions, for example when authorities exercise capitol punishment or expropriate private property, does not alter these sacred and universal moral truths.

In the end Montesquieu discerns one constant always canalizing and regulating human nature. Human nature, according to the direction it chooses, can be the best of the best or the worst of the worst, but in either direction it still strives after what it perceives as good and avoids what seems bad. This is a constant: the universal desire to seek the pleasant and avoid the unpleasant. In other words, both good and bad people seek their own kind of reward and punishment and are malleable and susceptible of influence. Any authority that wishes to nurture the good and reform the bad must alter the rules forming their rewards and punishments. Upon this simple premise Montesquieu builds his entire Spirit of the Laws. Nor does Baha'u'llah, in His great instauration, cast it aside. In this Great Being statement He states:

"The Great Being saith: The structure of world stability and order hath been reared upon, and will continue to be sustained by, the twin pillars of reward and punishment." (Tablets, Lawh-i-Maqsud, 163)

It is true that He does not explicitly say that justice depends upon reward and punishment, only that order and stability are held up by those pillars. But since Baha'u'llah elsewhere defines justice as turning aside from imitation and idle fancy, as discerning with the eye of oneness God's holy handiwork and as looking into all things with a searching eye it is clear that none of these activities could thrive in an unordered, unstable edifice. Law and order go together like a horse and carriage.

From here divine law and human law part ways. In divine law "each change is constancy," which is to say that love, forgiveness and justice are not separated. Human law bifurcates, dichotomizes, lobotomizes. For example, recently Canadian courts have half-heartedly attempted to introduce restorative justice rather than the usual brute punishment alone, which is being recognized in many cases as counterproductive. Tossing a young offender into prison only offers him more training in gang culture and improves his crime committing skills. But the law is a blunt instrument; what is the alternative? Judges are very much in the position of a doctor who can only counsel patients to adopt a better lifestyle. The judge is sentencing a youth raised in a brutal, abusive home and neighborhood that flouts the basics of love, mercy and justice at every turn. The constants of daily lifestyle are too subtle. Warring and disordering are infused into people's thinking, as evidenced by the ubiquity of profanity. Most of what makes us healthy and fair rest beyond the power and expertise of doctors and judges. Indeed there is an uncertainty principle that limits our understanding of what is good for us. In a passage we looked at recently, `Abdu'l-Baha explained why it is that wild animals know what their bodies need by natural cravings and people usually do not.

"Since man's attention is not confined to one interest, his negligence is greater; while his comprehension is greater than that of all other creatures when it is focused and fixed on one subject." (Mahmud, 84)

The law of God, is aware of this fundamental blind spot of beings blessed and cursed with the faculty of reason. His law leaves nothing outside its field of expertise. The law of God is Logos, reason itself, and it is more than reason. It is knowledge itself, and recognizing it infuses an attitude of due humility in all who learn it. In this way it takes in even the unknowns, the hidden bounds of knowledge. In this way it expunges in matters great or small any possibility of abuse, violence or injustice.

"For of all kinds of knowledge the knowledge of good laws has the greatest power of improving the learner; otherwise there would be no meaning the divine and admirable law possessing a name akin to mind (Nous is Greek for mind, Nomos for law)." (Plato, Laws)

Choosing this divine law to rule over our heart is, spiritually if not materially, a matter of life and death. Note the close identity in the following passage, the original formulation of the covenant of Moses, among reward and punishment, life and death, love and justice and obedience and prosperity.

"I call heaven and earth to record this day against you, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing: therefore choose life, that both thou and thy seed may live: that thou mayest love the Lord thy God, and that thou mayest obey his voice, and that thou mayest cleave unto him: for he is thy life, and the length of thy days: that thou mayest dwell in the land which the Lord sware unto thy fathers, to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, to give them." (Deut 30:19-20, KJV)