Light Upon Light: The Hotel Plaza Talk on Education

On May 3, 1912, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá took the platform of the Hotel Plaza in Chicago and laid out a sustained argument about education that would be remembered for years afterward. Marzieh Moss took the notes that survive in The Promulgation of Universal Peace.

The Master began by acknowledging the philosophers’ thesis: education accounts for the difference between the civilised peoples of Europe and America and the peoples of Africa kept from its advantages. He did not dispute the importance of education. But He drew a distinction the philosophers had missed.

The Prophets of God are the first Educators. They bestow universal education upon man and cause him to rise from the lowest levels of savagery to the highest pinnacles of spiritual development.

The philosophers, He said, are educators too — but their work is limited to themselves and a small circle around them. They have been incapable of universal education. No philosopher has lifted a whole nation from one moral condition to another. The Manifestations of God have done so repeatedly across history.

He then made a careful concession on individual capacity. Even when ten children are taught in the same school by the same teacher with the same food and the same opportunities, the result is separate and distinct degrees of capability. Capacities are not equal. But the capacity for education belongs to every human being without exception.

To certify the moral fruits of one such universal Educator — Christ — the Master called as His witness an unusual figure: the second-century Greek pagan physician Galen. Galen, He reminded the audience, was no Christian, but he had written that the followers of Jesus the Nazarene were truly imbued with moral principles which are the envy of philosophers, striving day and night that their deeds may contribute to the welfare of humanity. A pagan doctor’s testimony, the Master said, weighs more on this point than a thousand sermons by their own bishops.

He then named the deformation that had followed:

The forms and superstitions which appeared and obscured the light did not affect the reality of Christ.

Christ said, Put up thy sword into the sheath — yet the Crusades, the inquisitions, the persecution of scientists were all conducted in His name. The light of the original teaching is not annulled by what later generations did with it. But it is obscured. The remedy is to return.

The Master closed by recommending Bahá’u’lláh’s Hidden Words as exactly such a return:

The preface announces that it contains the essences of the words of the Prophets of the past, clothed in the garment of brevity, for the teaching and spiritual guidance of the people of the world. Read it that you may understand the true foundations of religion. It is light upon light.

Source: 'Abdu'l-Bahá, The Promulgation of Universal Peace, talk of May 3, 1912 at the Hotel Plaza, Chicago. Notes by Marzieh Moss. Public domain text from the Bahá'í Reference Library.

'Abdu'l-Bahá. (1922). *The Promulgation of Universal Peace*. Bahá'í Publishing Trust. https://www.bahai.org/library/authoritative-texts/abdul-baha/promulgation-universal-peace/