Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-nr4z6 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-05-23T14:19:32.391Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Chapter Two - The Healing and Poisonous Fruits of the Unity of Religions

from Part I - Paradigms of Unity and Plurality

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 July 2019

Get access

Summary

Be as one spirit, one soul, leaves of one tree, flowers of one garden, waves of one ocean.

— ‘Abdu'l-Bahá

Unity is the keyword of the Bahá’í story. Yet what is the meaning of “unity” in the phrase “unity of religions”? In Bahá’í thought and in the reflection on its sources, the vast sea of Bahá’í scriptures, scholars have found several meanings implied in the proposition of “unity.” In summary, one can detect three pervasive motifs. One motif arises from the conviction of scriptural Bahá’í literatures right away, namely, that all religions are emanating from the same divine or ultimate source. They are manifestations, revelations, selfcommunications of Reality itself, of the apophatic Beyond that is undefined, but mirrors its Self in the multiplicity of revelations constituting the essence of diverse religions— as this self-manifesting process of Reality is also the mirroring of its infinity in an infinity of things, events, organisms, societies and universes, emanating from this source as its creation. This motif is, of course, no stranger to many traditions, insofar as they understand themselves constituted not only by human impulses, but also by an active presence of God or ultimate Reality itself. What is new and exciting, here, is that the mirror of divine self-manifestation is not exclusively contained in one occurrence or a restricted chain of occurrences (of revelations and religions), but fundamentally distributed as through a prism into a multiplicity of appearances (of revelations and religions). This resonates with the assumption that, although apophatically transcendent, this source is immediately connected with the diversity of world phenomena and not in need of symbolic walls securing its unity from dissipation into the infinite variability of the world. While both the infinite variability of phenomena as divine mirrors and the direct immanence of the One in the many was not unknown to earlier traditions— for instance, in eastern monisms such as Advaita and Dharmic nondualism and western theological speculations on the decentered universe as in Nikolas of Cusa— the “emanation” into diverse religions with equally valid truth claims was often not understood as an immediate implication of this metaphysical and cosmological trajectory.

Type
Chapter
Information
The Ocean of God
On the Transreligious Future of Religions
, pp. 21 - 28
Publisher: Anthem Press
Print publication year: 2019

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×