Washing Up

Taking time out to wash up

By John Taylor; 2007 Dec 16, 5 Masa'il, 164 BE

Our topic of late is the principle of justice applied to the investigation of reality. We went over what this meant for certain Ancient Greek philosophers and the Jewish Torah, and the past two essays were devoted to the Christian teachings on justice and search. Our next destination on this journey is the Revelation of Muhammad. However, before we leave Christianity I want to note a new book, published in October, that I have begun reading called "The Dirt on Clean, An Unsanitized History," by Katherine Ashenburg (http://www.thedirtonclean.com/excerpt.asp), which points out some interesting historical points that I had not realized.

According to Ashenburg, in virtually every other contemporary religion washing was central. You did not talk to God unless you washed. Soap is a relatively recent invention, and the expression "the unwashed masses" described what was quite literally the case. The poor and outcasts did not have access to clean water and were always grungy and smelly. Having a clean body was a mark of nobility. Washing was basic to courtesy, and was a social as well as religious ritual. When there was a death or other great grief, the custom everywhere was to intentionally cover oneself with dirt and dust, implying that joy and good times are wrapped up in being clean. The family always washed the body of those who died, which has no practical purpose other than, presumably, to prepare them to meet their Maker. The Greeks washed not only before praying but also at the end of a journey, before talking to a person they respected, when they arrived to stay at someone's home, and on and on.

This, surprisingly, was not true of Christians.

Apparently, Christians wanted to distinguish themselves from other faiths, or perhaps they misunderstood the incident where Jesus refused to allow his disciples to wash His feet, and instead insisted that He wash their feet personally (the standing custom was to have a servant or daughter of the house wash guests, not the master). Instead of taking it as an example of humility and service, they apparently understood him to be saying: do not wash your own body. Whatever the causes, the leaning to dirtiness was minor in the first few centuries but when the faith was corrupted by asceticism and monasticism, body odor became a sign of piety.

"Medieval Christians proved their holiness by not washing. A monk came upon a hermit in the desert and rejoiced that he smelt the good odour of that brother from a mile away."

The dark ages continued this trend, though the ancient institution of public bathhouses remained, in spite of their association with another meaning of what we call "dirty," that is, illicit sex.

"Because so much sex went on in the public baths of the middle ages, the term stew or stewhouse, which originally referred to the moist warmth of the bathhouse, gradually came to mean a house of prostitution."

Then came the Black Death, the most destructive epidemic in history (it killed a third or a half of the population, depending on the region). Because one or two medical experts pointed their fingers at the bathhouses as the plague's cause, for several centuries Europeans were terrified of having their bodies come into contact with water. This became wrapped up with the sexual dirtiness of stripping down to wash, and many Europeans in these times lived their whole lives without seeing their own naked body or that of their spouse. They would change their shirts daily, and keep an immaculate house, but they never washed. When the lice became irksome they shaved their hair and wore dusted wigs to keep the itching down. This custom persists in places like Bavaria and in the Czech Republic (I am speaking from direct experience), though today the advertising of soap and deodorant companies is making inroads at last.

Throughout this time Muslims, whose religious law requires them to wash and pray five times daily, looked upon their Christian neighbors as filthy, and not without good reason. Indeed, may it not be that God, seeing the dirt in which the Christians were rolling, issued this law as a corrective? If the balance swings way out of whack, sometimes you have to put a really heavy stone on the other side just to get the two sides to even out. Our Baha'i law, coming after the Muslim one, is less severe in most ways but we still wash face and hands (but not feet) before praying. Why? Philosophically, it may have to do with what George Townshend calls the "self-Manifestation" of God. The Godhead is fond of creating, but also of purifying Its creation. So it creates the Manifestation of God, and the rejection of Him by most of us shows how easy it is to, as it were, enter into His presence without washing. That is, we fail to clean away all our preconceptions and offer Him the basic courtesy of letting Him speak for Himself in His own terms. As Baha'u'llah says, the greatest proof of the sun is the sun itself. We get a suntan by exposing ourselves to direct light.

What is the result of all this emphasis on cleaning in the religion of God? I think that a big part of it is to realize how utterly dependent we are upon the Manifestation of God. If the lens of the mind is dirty and unfocussed, we look for light and heat from celestial bodies other than the sun. There is only one sun, and we need to turn to that, or like a plant turning away from the source of sunlight, we will wither and die. That is where the Qu'ran starts its teaching, as we shall see soon. But first I want to underline this point by citing what I think is the most important passage from George Townshend's "The Promise of All Ages." Then next time we go on to the Qu'ran.

The Principle of God's Self-Manifestation

"Baha'u'llah represented -- in full agreement with the Christian scriptures -- that the unfolding of God's design is dependent not on the conscious good will of the multitudes but on the concerted efforts of a succession of Great Souls especially appointed and empowered for the task. These Great Souls, who are men and yet more than men, are the key figures of history: it is they who inspire the onward movement of mankind and determine the manifold phases of human progress and enlightenment.

"For the development of civilisation does not proceed in a manner parallel to that which science discovers in the evolution of material life. Humanity does not advance in wisdom, virtue and happiness through the inward urge of some anonymous force or the uplift of some original inborn power of its own. Far otherwise. For all that raises him above the level of a human animal man depends upon a new and special principle that is not found on the lower stages of being. This principle is a part of the creative process, and is the cause of all that is noble and gracious in life. It is active today as it has been active since the time of Adam, and men depend on it now for their well-being as completely as they have done throughout the past.

"This is the principle of God's Self-Manifestation in the human degree of existence." (George Townshend, The Promise of All Ages, George Ronald, Oxford, 1948, pp. 29-30)