The Mystery of God: The Titles of 'Abdu'l-Bahá

A retelling drawn from The World Order of Bahá'u'lláh by Shoghi Effendi, whose letters set forth the station and titles of 'Abdu'l-Bahá. The narrative is retold in our own words; passages in quotation marks are preserved from Shoghi Effendi's writings.

There is no figure in religious history quite like 'Abdu'l-Bahá, and there is no set of titles quite like the ones His Father bestowed upon Him. They are worth dwelling on, one by one, because together they form one of the most remarkable chapters in the whole subject the Feast of Asmá' — the Feast of Names — invites us to contemplate: how God, through His Manifestation, confers names that disclose a station.

He was born in Tihrán in 1844 — on the very night, the histories note, that the Báb declared His mission in distant Shíráz — the eldest son of Bahá'u'lláh. From boyhood He shared every hardship of His Father's life: the Black Pit of Tihrán, when He was a child of eight and went to gaze upon His chained Father through the prison gloom; the bitter winter march into exile in Iraq; the further banishments to Constantinople, to Adrianople, and at last to the prison-city of 'Akká. He grew up in exile and confinement. And He grew up, in the eyes of all who met Him, into something the world could scarcely account for.

Bahá'u'lláh began to confer titles upon Him. In the Tablets of the years of exile, and supremely in the writings surrounding the Covenant, His Father named Him the Most Great Branch — Ghusn-i-A'zam — distinguishing Him from all others and marking Him as the One around whom the unity of the Cause would gather after His own passing. He named Him the Master — Áqá — the title by which the believers, and at length the whole of 'Akká and Haifa, came simply to call Him. And in a designation more mysterious than any of these, Bahá'u'lláh called Him Sirru'lláh — "the Mystery of God."

It is this last title that most repays reflection, and Shoghi Effendi, the appointed interpreter of the Bahá'í teachings, took particular care to explain it. 'Abdu'l-Bahá, he wrote, is "the Mystery of God" — "an expression by which Bahá'u'lláh Himself has chosen to designate Him." Why a mystery? Because the station 'Abdu'l-Bahá occupied could not be captured in the ordinary categories of either prophet or ordinary man. Shoghi Effendi explained that the title "indicates how in the person of 'Abdu'l-Bahá the incompatible characteristics of a human nature and superhuman knowledge and perfection have been blended and are completely harmonized." He was not a Manifestation of God — that He firmly insisted upon, all His life. Yet He was no ordinary mortal either. In Him, Shoghi Effendi taught, the human and the perfect met and were reconciled in a way the mind cannot wholly grasp. And so the only honest name for the station was a name that pointed to a mystery.

Shoghi Effendi gathered the other facets of that station into language of unsurpassed beauty. 'Abdu'l-Bahá was, he wrote, "the stainless Mirror" of Bahá'u'lláh's light — "the perfect Exemplar of His teachings, the unerring Interpreter of His Word, the embodiment of every Bahá'í ideal, the incarnation of every Bahá'í virtue." Each of these is, in its way, a name: the Mirror, the Exemplar, the Interpreter, the Centre of the Covenant. To be the Mirror is to add nothing of one's own and to reflect perfectly the Light that falls upon one. To be the Exemplar is to be the living pattern of how the teachings are to be lived, so that the believers need not wonder, in any circumstance, what faithfulness looks like — they could look at Him. To be the unerring Interpreter is to be the one authorised voice that could say, without error, what Bahá'u'lláh's words mean. No previous religion had ever provided for such a figure: a successor who was not a new prophet, yet whose interpretations carried binding authority, and around whom the unity of the whole community was explicitly bound by the written Covenant of the Founder Himself.

Here, then, was a Person upon whom had been conferred a constellation of titles without parallel — the Most Great Branch, the Master, the Mystery of God, the Centre of the Covenant, the Exemplar of the Faith. By every measure, the names heaped upon Him were the loftiest that could be given to any human being in the Dispensation. And it is exactly here that the deepest lesson of His names is found — not in the titles He was given, but in the one He chose.

For when Bahá'u'lláh passed away in 1892, His eldest Son stood at the head of the Cause, and could, in the eyes of the world, have borne any of those exalted names. He set them all aside. He asked the believers to know Him by none of them. He chose for Himself a single, humble title of His own making: 'Abdu'l-Bahá — "the Servant of Bahá," the Servant of the Glory. It is the name by which the whole world has come to know Him. The One whom His Father had called the Mystery of God called Himself only a servant.

This is the heart of the matter, and it turns the Feast of Names inside out in the most illuminating way. We tend to think of a great name as something we would grasp if we could — a title to be wanted, displayed, defended. 'Abdu'l-Bahá was given the greatest names a human being could be given, and He reached past every one of them for the lowest. He understood, as perhaps no one else has, that the loftiest of all stations is servitude — that to be the servant of God and of His servants is itself the crown. The titles His Father bestowed described what He was. The title He chose declared what He loved. And in choosing "servant," He showed that the truest meaning of every exalted name is, in the end, service.

He lived that chosen name without interruption for the rest of His life. Through the long years that He remained a prisoner, He made the poor of 'Akká His daily charge, going Himself to the bedsides of the sick. When freedom came, He carried the message of His Father across Egypt, Europe, and North America, an old man worn by decades of confinement, refusing rest, speaking in churches and homes and meeting-halls, treating the humblest soul as a treasured friend. When famine struck the Holy Land during the First World War, He organised the growing and storing of grain and fed the hungry of every religion, and was offered a knighthood for it — a title He accepted without ceremony and quietly set aside, for the feeding of the hungry, not the honour, had been the point. Everything He did was the living-out of the one name He had claimed.

The Feast of Asmá' teaches that the names of God are qualities we are each meant to reflect, however faintly. In 'Abdu'l-Bahá the teaching reaches its summit and its surprise. Upon Him were conferred names so high that one of them could only be uttered as a mystery. And He, possessing them all, asked to be remembered by the lowest: a servant. The names given to Him reveal the heights to which a human soul may be raised. The name He took for Himself reveals the only door by which anyone climbs there. He was the Mystery of God; He called Himself the Servant of the Glory; and He showed, once and for all, that the two are the same thing seen from two sides.

This is a retelling. For the fuller account of His station and titles, see The World Order of Bahá'u'lláh by Shoghi Effendi, especially the section known as "The Dispensation of Bahá'u'lláh."

Effendi, S.. (1938). *The World Order of Bahá'u'lláh*. Bahá'í Publishing Trust.