The Need of an Educator: 'Abdu'l-Bahá on Why Humanity Cannot Self-Civilise

In Chapter 3 of Some Answered Questions — one of the early chapters in the Part on the Influence of the Prophets — 'Abdu'l-Bahá takes up a question that had quietly underlain the philosophical thinking of the nineteenth century. The Western seekers Laura Clifford Barney was bringing to His door had been formed, many of them, by the Romantic conviction that human nature was essentially good and that, given the right conditions, it would by its own light flower into civilization. The Master gently disagreed.

He did not deny that human beings were capable of greatness. He denied that they were capable of greatness by themselves.

If left under the rule of nature, man becomes lower than an animal — whereas if he is educated he becomes an angel.

The sentence is sharper than the Western philosophical taste of 1904 was used to. The Master meant it. The animal, He pointed out, lives by instinct. The instinct keeps the animal within the limits its nature requires; the lion does not destroy more than the lion eats; the bird does not, by the conduct of its own bird-life, ruin the world. The human being, by contrast, is not governed by instinct alone. The human being has the capacity to act far above the animal — to compose music, to heal, to give one's life for a cause beyond oneself. The same capacity, however, allows the human being to act far below the animal — to plot, to torture, to wage war on a scale no non-human predator has ever achieved.

The freedom that lifts the human being above the animal is exactly the freedom that, when wrongly used, sinks him below it.

What disciplines that freedom toward its higher possibility? The Master answers: education. Not formal schooling alone, though that is part of it, but the larger and slower training of the soul that brings the human capacity into its proper exercise.

He then makes the move that drives the chapter. There are two kinds of educators. There are special educators — the parents, the schoolmasters, the philosophers — who train one soul or one school of souls. And there are universal educators — figures of an entirely different order — whose teaching reorders whole civilizations across centuries. Moses educated a slave people into a nation. Christ educated a scattered band of Galileans into a movement that converted the Roman empire. Muhammad educated the warring tribes of Arabia into a world religion. Bahá'u'lláh, the Master continues, has been sent in this age to educate the entire human family into the unified order toward which all preceding revelations had been pointing.

These universal educators, He concludes, are the Manifestations of God. They are the indispensable instrument by which humanity is lifted out of the rule of nature and into the condition of the angel.

The chapter is short. The argument it carries is enormous. It removes from human history the Romantic theory of self-improvement and replaces it with a theology of revelation: the great moves forward in the human story have not been undertaken by humanity unaided. They have been gifts.

Source: 'Abdu'l-Bahá, Some Answered Questions (recorded by Laura Clifford Barney, 1904-06), Chapter 3 on the Need of an Educator. Public domain text from the Bahá'í Reference Library.

'Abdu'l-Bahá. (1908). *Some Answered Questions*. Bahá'í Publishing Trust. https://www.bahai.org/library/authoritative-texts/abdul-baha/some-answered-questions/