A Summons to the See of Peter: Bahá'u'lláh's Tablet to the Pope

A retelling based on The Revelation of Bahá'u'lláh by Adib Taherzadeh, a comprehensive study of Bahá'u'lláh's Tablets and ministry, which describes the Lawḥ-i-Páp, the Tablet addressed to Pope Pius IX. Short phrases in quotation marks are titles or words preserved in that history.

Among the rulers of the nineteenth century, not all wore crowns of gold. Some wore the keys of heaven. Of these the greatest was the Pope in Rome — in those years, Pius IX, who occupied the See of Peter longer than any pontiff before him, and who commanded the spiritual allegiance of many millions of Catholics across the world. He was, moreover, a temporal sovereign as well as a spiritual one: he ruled over the Papal States in central Italy, with their cities, their treasuries, and their armies, from a magnificent palace in the heart of Rome. He was, by every measure the world uses, one of the supreme powers of his age — the visible head of Western Christendom, seated upon a throne that had endured, in one form or another, for more than a thousand years.

And it was to this man, from the prison-city of 'Akká, that Bahá'u'lláh addressed one of the most remarkable of all His Tablets to the rulers of the earth: the Lawḥ-i-Páp, the Tablet to the Pope.

Adib Taherzadeh, in The Revelation of Bahá'u'lláh, places this Tablet within the great proclamation that Bahá'u'lláh made during these years to the kings, the emperors, and the ecclesiastics of the world. To the political sovereigns — the Sháh, the Sulṭán, Napoleon, the Czar, Queen Victoria — He had announced the dawning of the Day of God. But He did not stop at the holders of secular power. He turned also to the leaders of religion, the men who claimed to speak for God to the peoples, and He summoned them as well. The Tablet to the Pope is the crown of these messages to the religious leaders of the West, for it is addressed to the highest of them all.

What is most striking about the Tablet, Taherzadeh observes, is the nature of the summons it contains. When a man without means writes to a man of immense wealth and power, the world expects one of two things: either flattery, hoping for favour, or a plea, hoping for relief. The Lawḥ-i-Páp contains neither. It is, instead, a call to renunciation. Bahá'u'lláh, who Himself possessed nothing — a Prisoner stripped of homeland, of fortune, and of freedom — summoned the Pope away from his possessions. He called upon the Pontiff to arise in the name of God, to leave the seat of his earthly splendour, to abandon the palace in which he dwelt, and to dispose of the costly ornaments of his office for the sake of God, distributing their value rather than hoarding it. The summons, in other words, was not to riches or to rule, but away from them — toward the detachment and the simplicity that the Day of God required.

This is the heart of the matter, and it is why the Tablet speaks so directly to the theme of Sovereignty. The Pope held both kinds of worldly power at once: the temporal dominion of a king and the spiritual prestige of the head of a church. Bahá'u'lláh held neither. Yet it was the Prisoner who addressed the Pontiff from above, and the Pontiff who was called to come down. Bahá'u'lláh did not write as a subject petitioning a great prelate; He wrote as One announcing the return for which that prelate's own faith had taught its followers to watch and pray. The Pope's church had, for eighteen centuries, awaited the promised return of the Christ in the glory of the Father. Bahá'u'lláh's Tablet announced, to the very head of that church, that the long-awaited Day had come — and called him to recognize it, and to lead his flock toward it rather than away from it.

Taherzadeh notes the tenderness mingled with the majesty of the appeal. The Tablet does not rail; it invites. It reminds the Pope of the example of the Christ Himself, who had had no place to lay His head, who had walked the earth in poverty, and who had taught His followers to lay up treasures not on earth but in heaven. The call to leave the palace and the ornaments was, in this light, simply a call to follow Christ in deed as well as in name — to let go of the very things that had grown up around the office over the centuries and that the Founder of the faith had never possessed. It was a summons to the See of Peter to remember the Galilean fisherman from whom it claimed its authority.

The Pope did not respond. Like the other rulers to whom Bahá'u'lláh wrote, he let the summons pass. The message of an obscure Persian prisoner, conveyed from a fortress town on the edge of the Ottoman Empire, can have seemed to the court of Rome no more than a curiosity, if it was noticed at all. The Pontiff continued in his palace, amid his treasures, secure — to all appearances — upon the ancient throne of his temporal dominion.

But that dominion was already passing. Within a very few years of the Tablet's revelation, the long process by which the Papal States had been absorbed into a newly unified Italy reached its conclusion. In 1870 the forces of the Italian kingdom entered Rome itself; the temporal sovereignty of the Popes, which had lasted for more than a thousand years, came to an end; and Pius IX, who had ruled as a king over central Italy, found his earthly kingdom dissolved. The crowns and the cities and the armies that had belonged to the See were gone. The palace remained, but the temporal power it symbolized had vanished from the earth. The very thing Bahá'u'lláh had called the Pontiff to relinquish for the sake of God was, within a few years, taken from him by the tide of history.

The contrast that Taherzadeh draws is the same that runs through the whole of Bahá'u'lláh's proclamation to the mighty. On one side stood the Pope: master of a great church, sovereign of a temporal realm, dweller in a palace, surrounded by the accumulated wealth and grandeur of centuries — and yet, within a few years, shorn of his earthly kingdom. On the other side stood Bahá'u'lláh: a Prisoner behind the walls of 'Akká, owning nothing the world could measure, His movements watched, His exile decreed to be perpetual. And it was the Prisoner's Cause that went out from that prison into the world, spreading at length into every country the Pope's church had reached, and into many it never had. The sovereignty that wore the keys and the crown proved to be of this world, and shared this world's impermanence. The sovereignty of the Word proved to be of another order entirely.

This is why the Tablet to the Pope belongs so fittingly to a Feast of Sulṭán — Sovereignty. It teaches, with great force, that true authority is not measured by what one possesses but by what one can summon others to renounce; that the highest station the world can confer is still a borrowed and a passing thing; and that detachment from worldly power is most searchingly demanded of precisely those who hold the most of it. Bahá'u'lláh asked the supreme prelate of the West for nothing. He offered him, rather, the one thing that endures — the recognition of the Day of God — and He asked him to lay down, for its sake, the very things that the world would have thought made him great.

A Prisoner who owned nothing wrote to a Pontiff who owned almost everything, and told him to give it away and arise. The Pontiff kept his palace and lost his kingdom. The Prisoner kept nothing and gave the world a Faith. The summons of the Lawḥ-i-Páp still stands, addressed in spirit to every soul that holds power, or wealth, or station, and is tempted to mistake these for greatness: leave the palace, it says; the only throne that lasts is not made of stone.

This is a retelling. For the fuller account, see The Revelation of Bahá'u'lláh by Adib Taherzadeh.

Taherzadeh, A.. (1974). *The Revelation of Bahá'u'lláh (4 volumes)*. George Ronald.