Peace Is Light, War Is Darkness: At the New York Peace Society

On the evening of May 13, 1912, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá was the guest of honour of the New York Peace Society at a reception in the Hotel Astor. The Peace Society — founded in 1906 — counted in its membership some of the most distinguished American civic figures of its day; the Astor banquet was one of the high social occasions of the spring season.

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The Master’s talk that evening, preserved in *The Promulgation of Universal Peace,* opens with a sentence that would become one of His most quoted in the West:

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> Peace is light, whereas war is darkness. Peace is life; war > is death.

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The bluntness of the diction was deliberate. He was speaking to a society that had professed peace as a high ideal; He was asking them to recognise it not as one ideal among many but as the actual condition without which human civilisation could not survive. Modern warfare, He noted, had grown a destructive capacity altogether beyond anything the ancient world had imagined. The choice between peace and war was therefore now, unprecedentedly, a choice between life and death for the species.

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He grounded the moral vision in the Bahá’í doctrine of human unity. He invoked Bahá’u’lláh’s image of the human family as a single tree:

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> Bahá’u’lláh, addressing all humanity, said that Adam, the > parent of mankind, may be likened to the tree of nativity > upon which you are the leaves and blossoms.

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A single tree cannot wage war upon its own branches. The image re-frames every patriotic and racial division as the absurdity it actually is.

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The Master closed with a prophetic charge for the new century that had begun only a dozen years before:

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> The twentieth century was the century of lights, the twentieth > century was the century of life, the twentieth century was the > century of international peace.

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That the twentieth century, in fact, became the century of two world wars and dozens of smaller ones does not nullify the naming. The naming was offered as a possibility and an invitation. The American peace movement of 1912, in the room that night, received both. The work of making the naming true remains, the Master would have said, the work of every century in which the same question is still being asked.

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