The Moral Revolution leading to the Lawh-i-Aqdas
By John Taylor; 2008 Feb 19, 13 Mulk, 164 BE
One thing you notice right away like a slap in the face when encountering the New Atheists is an attitude of overweening arrogance. They are proud, and consider it demeaning for anybody to believe in an Almighty God; the teaching of religion is nothing more than a set of instructions in how to be slavish. The moral outlook of faith is unworthy of free men. In spite of their name, 'new' atheists, their attitude is not new; it has been around as long as power was centralized, as long as too much civilization corrupted those who led it. It was born as soon as a few came to lord it over the many, and it continues today, in a time when the numbers of downtrodden has grown from mere millions to more than a billion souls. In the time of the Roman Empire by some estimates three quarters of the population were slaves. The proportion of rich to poor today is, in spite of vast increases in wealth, far worse. Iniquity, thy name is Western Civilization! So little wonder the anti-theists are bold and brash, they are on top and nothing but a Deus ex Machina has a hope of bringing them down.
Today I pass the Badi Blog off to my betters, first to Jesus, specifically the first thing He said in His Sermon on the Mount, the nine Beatitudes. Then the baton goes to Patrick Glynn, whose wonderful explanation of the revolutionary moral significance of the beatitudes came as a revelation to me. Here I thought I knew the first thing about Christianity. I had not realized how diametrically opposed the beatitudes were to the moral outlook of the Greko-Roman world. What a forceful reminder of why Baha'u'llah called His own tablet addressed to Christians His "Holiest Tablet," (Lawh-i-Aqdas), and why it ends with a set of twenty-one – our age of majority -- beatitudes of His Own.
Now when he saw the crowds, he went up on a mountainside and sat down. His disciples came to him, and he began to teach them saying:
Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.
Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.
Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.
Blessed are the merciful, for they will be shown mercy.
Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.
Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called sons of God.
Blessed are those who are persecuted because of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are you when people insult you, persecute you and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of me.
Rejoice and be glad, because great is your reward in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you. (Matt 5:3-12, NIV)
Such is the great surprise as the twentieth century turns into the twenty-first: The very logic of human inquiry is compelling a rediscovery of the realm of spirit, of God and the soul. This process has both a positive and a negative thrust. In the first place, we see the mounting evidence for the existence of a spiritual dimension of reality. Along with this new evidence has come a growing recognition of the severe limitations of science and reason as tools for understanding the ultimate truths.
A MORAL REVOLUTION (pp. 152-155)
But as free as philosophical universalism might have been from cultural prejudice, it was deeply hierarchical in its view of the human being, when it came to class and gender as well as intellect, beauty, and other qualities and talents. It divided human beings not so much by culture as into categories of "high" and "low." Citizenship in the ancient world was more in the nature of a privilege than a right, something that differentiated a "gentleman" from inferiors; women were, of course, denied political participation, and slaves were legally defined as property or chattel. (Notably, crucifixion was a form of punishment generally not suffered by Roman citizens and normally reserved for slaves.) In the doctrine of the Greek philosophers, perhaps not surprisingly, the philosopher was understood as the highest and best man who had a "natural" right to rule over his less intelligent fellow citizens.
Even more important, the classical philosophers' ideas of virtue, as is well known, were radically at odds with those of Christianity. They viewed compassion as a sign of weakness and humility as the embodiment of contemptibility. The most "virtuous" man, according to Aristotle, was the man with a "great soul" who "thinks he deserves great things and actually deserves them." Modesty and humility were far from virtues; they indicated mikropsychia) or a "small soul":
"A man who underestimates himself is small-minded [that is, literally, "small-souled"] regardless of whether his worth is great or moderate, or whether it is small and he thinks it is smaller still."
For Aristotle and the Greek philosophers generally, the "worth" of a human being could be ranked; some people were simply worth more than others-notably the intelligent, the beautiful, the proud, and so forth. Moreover, after philosophy, or intelligence, pride was the core virtue of the classical philosophical outlook, the "crown of the virtues. " (Richard McKeon translates Aristotle's notion of "big-souledness" simply as "pride." See Richard McKeon, ed., The Basic Works of Aristotle, New York: Random House, 1941, p. 992)
When Jesus begins the Sermon on the Mount with the statement "Blessed are the poor in spirit" (Matthew 5:3), he is flying in the face of this classical worldview and, of course, of the views of "this world" generally. Indeed, as the atheist philosopher Nietzsche recognized, the essential logic of classical virtue was radically this-worldly, not surprisingly, since it was based purely on reasoning about the material and human world. In the classical understanding, the strong, the beautiful, the intelligent, the rich were not just better off but morally better than the weak, the poor, the meek, the downtrodden.
That is why Nietzsche, in some ways the embodiment of the Satanic voice in modern philosophy (even by his own definition!) (As Nietzsche wrote, "Goal: the sanctification of the most powerful, most fertile and most excellently infamous forces, to use the old image: the deification of the devil." Quoted in Liliane FreyRohn, Friedrich Nietzsche: A Psychological Approach to His Life and Work, tr. Gary Massey, Zurich: Daimon, 1989, p. 191), identified the rise of Christianity in the ancient world as a fundamental moral revolution and the triumph of what he called "slave morality. "
All of our most modern ideas about humaneness, kindness, and charity, about ethnic, cultural, and religious tolerance, and about the essential dignity of the human being -- regardless of race, gender, abilities, or station -- originated in the New Testament. This is not to say that they are the exclusive preserve of Christianity -- or even that they have been practiced by Christianity or Christians more than by other religions or peoples. Such values lie at the core of every major religion. (As Gandhi said, "If a man goes to the heart of his own religion, he has reached to the heart of the others, too." (Robert Ellsberg, ed., Gandhi on Christianity, Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1991, p. 12)
But as a purely historical matter, the New Testament is the point where these values entered the bloodstream of human history, where the vision appeared with a wholeness and emphasis capable of transforming the nature of human societies. That this transformation has taken two thousand years and is still far from complete should not be surprising, given what we know about the nature of human beings, given what a scientist might attribute to biology and a Christian to "sin."
Western philosophy is like the prodigal son of Jesus' parable, at the end of his long quest for freedom. So untenable are his circumstances that even pride must eventually surrender. And pride is precisely what he must surrender before he can return to the Father. But will not the call of the Father eventually prevail? Patrick Glynn, God: The Evidence, p. 147)
Note that the New Testament makes the opposite' claim: All public goodness is based on private goodness. Indeed, Jesus' most radical assertion is that we are what we think in our inmost private thoughts: A married man who desires another woman has already committed adultery (Matthew 5:27-28). The human evils we see in the world originate in the evil thoughts of human beings.
"But the things that proceed out of the mouth come from the heart, and those defile the man. For out of the heart come evil thoughts, murder, adulteries, fornications, thefts, false witnesses, slanders" (Matthew 15:18-19).
Examples of Jesus' message of tolerance, from GOD: The Evidence, p. 151
The message of tolerance, of the irrelevance of cultural, ethnic, and even religious divisions, pervades the New Testament texts.
When Jesus is asked to define the concept of loving one's neighbor, he tells the story of the good Samaritan, who helps a man who has been beaten by the roadside, after a priest and a Levite pass him by (Luke 29: 25-37). The priest and the Levite belonged culturally to the "holiest" rank in first-century Jewish society. Samaritans were viewed as an "unclean" race, literally Untermenschen. (Jews and Samaritans had feelings for each other resembling those of today's Serbs and Croats, only more intense.) In the gospel of John, Jesus converses with and accepts a drink from a Samaritan woman at Jacob's well. This is a violation of the religious taboo against sharing a vessel with a Samaritan woman, who was regarded as unclean. The woman registers surprise: "How is it that You, being a Jew, ask me for a drink since I am a Samaritan woman?" His disciples are similarly "amazed" to come upon him in the midst of this conversation with an untouchable (John 4:5-42). Jesus' attitudes toward women were notably "modern" and advanced, a point also illustrated in the synoptic gospels.
In the story of the sisters Mary and Martha, Mary is portrayed as absorbed in Jesus' discussion of spiritual matters, while Martha plays the traditional role of preparing an elaborate supper. When Martha complains of her sister, Jesus reproves Martha, indicating that there was no reason to prepare an elaborate meal ("only one thing is necessary"), that this was her choice, and that her sister Mary had "chosen the good part, which shall not be taken away from her" (Luke 10:38-42).21 (Jesus' attitudes toward women were also a good deal more advanced than Paul's, whose culturally saturated views of women's subordinate role in public worship prevailed in Christian thinking for most of the past two thousand years.)
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