Art Is Worship: A Painter's Question in London

Among the many visitors who came to see ‘Abdu’l-Bahá in London in September 1911 was a painter. He had come, as so many came, with a small private question; he was wondering whether what he gave his days to was worthy of his soul. He was wondering, in plain English, whether art was a worthy vocation.

The Master answered him in three words.

Art is worship.

The painter, the records suggest, did not need anything else. Three words had reordered his life.

Behind the painter, an actor was waiting. He asked next about drama. ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s reply expanded.

The drama is of the utmost importance. It has been a great educational power in the past; it will be so again.

He then drew on a memory from His own boyhood in Persia. He had watched, as a child, a Mystery Play — the ta‘zíyih, an enacted account of the betrayal and passion of Imám ‘Alí — and the performance had affected Him so profoundly that He had wept openly and lain awake for several nights afterwards. Story, presented in the body of an actor, had taken hold of Him in a way no recited sermon ever had.

The conversation widened to include the company of disciples and visitors. The Master’s point was unhurried but exact: any genuine art — the canvas, the chisel, the song, the play, the line of verse — can be worship, and ought to be. Not in the sense that the artist must paint religious subjects, but in the sense that the work itself must come from the same place in the soul that prayer comes from. Done so, art does what worship does. It teaches. It awakens. It carries hearts further than argument can carry them.

The painter went away to paint. The actor went away to act. The sentence stayed.

Source: 'Abdu'l-Bahá in London, conversations of September 1911. Public domain text from Project Gutenberg eBook #19250.

'Abdu'l-Bahá. (1912). *'Abdu'l-Bahá in London*. Bahá'í Publishing Trust. https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/19250