# The Inner Dimensions of Revelation

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> Source: Bahá'í Library Online (bahai-library.com), curated by Jonah Winters. Used by permission of the curator. Original citation: Ross Woodman, The Inner Dimensions of Revelation, bahai-library.com.
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> 
> The Inner Dimensions of Revelation
> 
> Ross Woodman
> 
> Love Me that I may love thee.
> If thou lovest Me not,
> My love can in no wise reach thee.
> Know this, O servant.
> When Hájí Mírzá Siyyid Muhammad, the eldest maternal uncle
> of the Báb, suggested to Bahá’u’lláh that his familiarity with the
> human person of his nephew stood in the way of his recognition of
> Him as the long-awaited return of the Hidden Imám, Bahá’u’lláh
> reminded him of far greater human obstacles placed in the way of the
> recognition of earlier Prophets. ‘Consider’, Bahá’u’lláh declares,
> how He hath suddenly chosen from among His servants, and
> entrusted with the exalted mission of divine guidance, Him Who
> was known as guilty of homicide, Who, Himself, had
> acknowledged His cruelty, and Who for well-nigh thirty years
> had, in the eyes of the world, been reared in the home of
> Pharaoh and been nourished at his table. Was not God, the
> omnipotent King, able to withhold the hand of Moses from
> murder, so that manslaughter should not be attributed unto
> Him, causing bewilderment and aversion among the people? 1
> ‘Likewise,’ Bahá’u’lláh continues, ‘reflect upon the state an
> condition of Mary’, who, lamenting her plight, wishing she had never
> been born, carried in her womb what those around her thought to be
> an illegitimate child. ‘How,’ Bahá’u’lláh asks the uncle, ‘could she
> claim a Babe Whose
> 
> father was unknown had been conceived of the Holy Ghost?’ ‘O
> sister of Aaron!’ the villagers cruelly chastised her. ‘Thy father was
> not a man of wickedness, nor unchaste thy mother’ [Qur’án 19:28].2
> Insisting that the Báb’s uncle reflect upon these ‘grievous’ tests
> (the obstacles in relation to the station of the Báb that he was still
> unable to resolve after 18 years), Bahá’u’lláh in the most emphatic
> manner pointed out ‘how contrary are the ways of the Manifestations
> of God, as ordained by the King of creation, to the ways and desires
> of men!’ ‘As thou comest to comprehend the essence of these divine
> mysteries,’ Bahá’u’lláh assures the uncle,
> thou wilt grasp the purpose of God, the divine Charmer, the
> Best-Beloved. Thou wilt regard the words and deeds of that
> almighty Sovereign as one and the same; in such wise that
> whatsoever thou dost behold in His deeds, the same wilt thou
> find in His sayings, and whatsoever thou dost read in His
> sayings, that wilt thou recognize in His deeds. Thus it is that
> outwardly such deeds and words are the fire of vengeance unto
> the wicked, and inwardly the waters of mercy unto the
> righteous. Were the eye of the heart to open, it would surely
> perceive that the words revealed from the heaven of the will of
> God are at one with, and the same as, the deeds that have
> emanated from the Kingdom of divine power. 3
> Bahá’u’lláh is inviting the Báb’s maternal uncle, who had thus
> far seen his nephew only with his physical eye, to open the eye of his
> heart and to look again. Implicit in this invitation is the Revelation
> of Bahá’u’lláh, a Revelation that for the maternal uncle still lay
> hidden within an apparent contradiction between word and deed, the
> purpose of which was to separate the righteous from the wicked.
> ‘How often hath the human heart, which is the recipient of the light
> of God and the seat of the revelation of the All-Merciful,’ Bahá’u’lláh
> elsewhere declares,
> 
> erred from Him Who is the Source of that light and the Well
> Spring of that revelation. It is the waywardness of the heart that
> removeth it far from God, and condemneth it to remoteness
> from Him. Those hearts, however, that are aware of His
> Presence, are close to Him, and are to be regarded as having
> drawn nigh unto His throne.4
> Bahá’u’lláh invited the Báb’s uncle into His presence in Baghdad
> because He recognized in him a closeness to God that had so agitated
> his soul that he now had to resolve his perplexity concerning his
> nephew. In extending this invitation, Bahá’u’lláh was, though still
> unknown to the Báb’s uncle, drawing him ‘nigh unto His throne’. In
> opening the eye of his heart to the station of the Báb, Bahá’u’lláh was
> at the same time opening his inner eye to His own as yet undeclared
> Revelation.
> ‘Consider, moreover,’ Bahá’u’lláh writes (always inviting us to
> ‘consider’, to ‘ponder’, to ‘meditate’),
> how frequently doth man become forgetful of his own self,
> whilst God remaineth, through His all-encompassing
> knowledge, aware of His creature, and continueth to shed upon
> him the manifest radiance of His glory. It is evident, therefore,
> that, in such circumstances, He is closer to him than his own
> self. He will, indeed, so remain for ever, for whereas the one
> true God knoweth all things, perceiveth all things, and
> comprehendeth all things, mortal man is prone to err, and is
> ignorant of the mysteries that lie enfolded within him … 5
> The ‘providence’ hidden within the ‘calamity’ of choosing a
> murderer as the Divine Guide lies in God’s desire to restore man 6 to
> the reality of ‘his own self’, a reality of which he is all too ‘forgetful’
> because the remembrance of it depends finally upon his forgetting all
> else save God. The knowledge of the reality ‘enfolded within him’,
> Bahá’u’lláh explains, is ‘the same as the comprehension of Mine own
> Being’.7 In the Kitáb-i-Íqán, Bahá’u’lláh is liberating the
> 
> Báb’s uncle from his literalist, sense-bound doubts both about his
> own spiritual nature and the spiritual nature of his nephew. In the
> recognition of the latter resides the ground of the former. The
> ‘mystery’ immediately confronting the uncle is not only the spiritual
> fact that his own identity resides in his recognition of his nephew as
> the Báb but, beyond that, it resides in his recognition of the one but
> for whom neither the Báb nor any other Prophet would have
> appeared in the world. The one who now directly addresses him is
> closer to him than his ‘own life-vein’,8 closer even than his blood ties
> to his nephew, ties which had ironically stood in the way of his
> recognition of Him as the Báb.
> Having revealed this astonishing proximity, which nevertheless
> is infinitely distant from God Himself, Bahá’u’lláh is quick to explain
> that this closeness does not imply that ‘the Divine Being … is, under
> any circumstances, comparable unto men, or can, in any way, be
> associated with His creatures’.9         ‘Everything besides Him’,
> Bahá’u’lláh asserts, ‘is as nothing when brought face to face with the
> resplendent revelation of but one of His names, with no more than
> the faintest intimation of His glory—how much less when confronted
> with His own Self.’10
> Clearly, then, one purpose of God’s choice of a murderer and
> One ‘known amongst the people as fatherless’ is to reduce to
> nothingness ‘the ways and desires of men’,11 which blinded the Báb’s
> uncle to the reality conferred upon his nephew. Only when those
> ways and desires are obliterated can he (along with other members of
> his family, including the Báb’s own mother) awaken to a knowledge
> of his true self, a knowledge which was identical with his recognition
> of the Báb and Bahá’u’lláh.
> Were God to submit to the literal Shí‘í conditions which the
> Báb’s uncle, in the form of four written questions, 12 brought to his
> audience with Bahá’u’lláh, God, by joining partners with him, would
> have denied His own transcendent Being, His own ‘I am that I am’.
> Horrified by such a
> 
> blasphemous joining, His Pen ‘trembl[ing] with a great trembling …
> sore shaken at the revelation of these words’, 13 Bahá’u’lláh writes:
> Such an error hath been committed by certain foolish ones who,
> after having ascended into the heavens of their idle fancies, have
> interpreted Divine Unity to mean that all created things are the
> signs of God, and that, consequently, there is no distinction
> whatsoever between them. Some have even outstripped them
> by maintaining that these signs are peers and partners of God
> Himself. Gracious God! He, verily, is one and indivisible; one
> in His essence, one in His attributes. 14
> The epiphanic encounter between Bahá’u’lláh and Mírzá Siyyid
> Muhammad intimately and dramatically enacts the relationship
> between the Manifestation of God and the creatures to whom He
> reveals Himself. The subtlety of thought by which the Báb’s maternal
> uncle is brought to a recognition of the station of the Báb and
> Bahá’u’lláh—a subtlety that at once bewilders and dazzles the English
> reader unfamiliar with the refined complexities of the Persian
> language which Shoghi Effendi has captured in his translation—
> exposes the reader to a knowledge of his or her own self that only the
> Manifestation of God can unveil.         ‘Whatever duty Thou has
> prescribed unto Thy servants of extolling to the utmost Thy majesty
> and glory’, declares Bahá’u’lláh
> is but a token of Thy grace unto them, that they may be enabled
> to ascend unto the station conferred upon their own inmost
> being, the station of the knowledge of their own selves. 15
> In the Kitáb-i-Íqán, Bahá’u’lláh personifies this unveiling within
> the human heart of the spiritual station of the human being as
> identical with his or her knowledge of the Manifestation as the
> unveiled ‘mystic bride of inner mean-
> 
> ing enshrined within the chambers of utterance in the utmost grace
> and fullest adornment’.16
> This hermeneutic approach to the Kitáb-i-Íqán in which the
> language of revelation contains within it a hidden reality that is
> unveiled when the reader approaches it as the lover of the Word (in
> the same way that the lover approaches the beloved) is called the
> ta’wíl, a spiritual exegesis practised, as Henry Corbin points out, ‘by
> all the Spirituals of Islam’.17 Ta’wíl, Corbin explains, is ‘that
> perception which grasps the object not in its objectivity, but as a sign,
> an intimation, an announcement that is finally the soul’s
> annunciation of itself’.18 With reference to the revelation of
> Bahá’u’lláh, ‘the soul’s annunciation of itself’ is the annunciation of
> Bahá’u’lláh’s revelation of the Word hidden within all the world’s
> sacred scriptures, an annunciation whose ultimate home is the
> sanctified human heart (‘Thy heart is My home; sanctify it for My
> descent’19). The recognition of Bahá’u’lláh, that is, is identical in this
> Day with the soul’s affirmation of itself. ‘O My servants!’ Bahá’u’lláh
> declares. ‘Could ye apprehend with what wonder of My munificence
> and bounty I have willed to entrust your souls, ye would, of a truth,
> rid yourselves of attachment to all created things, and would gain a
> true knowledge of your own selves—a knowledge which is the same
> as the comprehension of Mine own Being.’ 20 The conscious
> affirmation both of Bahá’u’lláh and the human soul in its coming of
> age is a recognition of what Bahá’u’lláh calls the unique greatness of
> this Day. ‘Great indeed is this Day!’ Bahá’u’lláh writes:
> The allusions made to it in all the sacred Scriptures as the Day of
> God attest its greatness. The soul of every Prophet of God, of
> every Divine Messenger, hath thirsted for this wondrous Day.
> All the divers kindreds of the earth have, likewise, yearned to
> attain it.21
> The soul’s conscious recognition of itself in its recognition
> 
> of Bahá’u’lláh repeats in the infinite human mind what Coleridge
> calls ‘the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM’ 22 as that eternal
> act is progressively renewed by the Prophets and, in the revelation of
> Bahá’u’lláh, is brought now to its earthly completion.
> ‘I have summoned the Maids of Heaven’, Bahá’u’lláh writes, ‘to
> emerge from behind the veil of concealment, and have clothed them
> with these words of Mine–words of consummate power and
> wisdom.’23 ‘Let the future disclose the hour’, He writes again in the
> Kitáb-i-Íqán, referring to His own Revelation, ‘when the Brides of
> inner meaning, will, as decreed by the Will of God, hasten forth,
> unveiled, out of their mystic mansions, and manifest themselves in
> the ancient realm of being.’24 ‘How many the huris of inner meaning
> that are as yet concealed within the chambers of divine wisdom!’ He
> further declares. ‘None hath yet approached them;—huris “whom no
> man nor spirit hath touched before”’ [Qur’án 55:56]. 25 The ravishing
> beauty residing in the nuptial metaphoricity of the Word quickens
> the believer’s sanctified heart to facilitate, as the huris of inner
> meaning, the lover’s union with the Beloved, which is to say the true
> believer’s union with the Manifestation.
> Presiding over these ‘Brides’, ‘huris’, ‘Maids of Heaven’ (who are
> metaphorically the feminine component of the Word of God in their
> spiritual union with the masculine Logos) is Bahá’u’lláh’s chosen
> ‘Maid of Heaven’, His mystical consort who first appeared to Him in
> what He called ‘those infrequent moments of slumber’ while in the
> ‘stench-filled’ Síyáh-Chál in Tehran, burdened by the ‘galling weight’
> of chains. In these ‘infrequent moments of slumber’, Bahá’u’lláh
> declares,
> I felt as if something flowed from the crown of My head over My
> breast, even as a mighty torrent that precipitateth itself upon the
> earth from the summit of a lofty mountain. Every limb of My
> body would, as a result, be set afire. At such moments My
> tongue recited what no man could bear to hear. 26
> 
> The time of unveiling, that is, had not yet come. ‘Erelong,’ the
> Maid of Heaven declared to Him in a dream, ‘will God raise up the
> treasures of the earth—men who will aid Thee through Thyself and
> through Thy Name, wherewith God hath revived the hearts of such as
> have recognized Him.’27 ‘Turning My face,’ He writes on another
> occasion, describing again His own inner awakening to the station
> conferred upon Him by God and initially announced to Him by the
> Maid of Heaven,
> I beheld a Maiden … suspended in the air before Me. So
> rejoiced was she in her very soul that her countenance shone
> with the ornament of the good-pleasure of God … Betwixt earth
> and heaven she was raising a call which captivated the hearts
> and minds of men. She was imparting to both My inward and
> outer being tidings which rejoiced My soul, and the souls of
> God’s honoured servants.28
> The full planetary scope of this mystical intercourse with the
> Maid of Heaven is embraced in the Maid’s later auditory and
> imagistic association with Carmel. As Carmel, the inner meaning of
> the feminine component of the Word becomes in its unveiling the
> establishment of the Kingdom of God on earth. Carmel, now united
> with Bahá’u’lláh after her long separation, has been ‘made the foot-
> stool of thy God, and been chosen as the seat of His mighty throne’. 29
> The union with the Maid of Heaven occurs in what Bahá’u’lláh
> calls ‘both My inward and outer being’. It is not, therefore, merely
> the projection or personification of a subjective or inner state; it
> belongs equally to the outer world which participates in the same
> reality, the inner and the outer becoming one. Revelation, as
> Bahá’u’lláh initially describes it in its inward visionary dimension,
> contains as its ‘outer being’ a new ensouling of the world, which is to
> say, the calling ‘into being a new creation’. 30
> The feminine soul of the Manifestation as Bahá’u’lláh
> 
> personifies it in the Maid of Heaven is at the same time the
> personification of the world soul (anima mundi’) that encompasses
> the entire creation. Indeed, as Bahá’u’lláh explains, in the ‘moments’
> prior to His Revelation of Himself to humankind as distinct from the
> Maid’s Revelation of Himself to Himself in the Síyáh-Chál, the entire
> creation passed away, leaving God alone, a Creator without a
> creation. ‘Consider the hour at which the supreme Manifestation of
> God revealeth Himself unto men,’ Bahá’u’lláh writes.
> Ere that hour cometh, the Ancient Being, Who is still unknown
> of men and hath not as yet given utterance to the Word of God,
> is Himself the All-Knower in a world devoid of any man that
> hath known Him. He is indeed the Creator without a creation.
> For the very moment preceding His Revelation, each and every
> created thing shall be made to yield up its soul to God. 31
> Bahá’u’lláh’s amanuensis, Mírzá Áqá Ján, coming out of
> Bahá’u’lláh’s tent on the outskirts of Baghdad on the fifth day of
> Naw-Rúz (1863), chanted the Tablet of the Holy Mariner. Though
> largely unknown to those to whom the Tablet was chanted,
> Bahá’u’lláh was Himself announcing in that Tablet ‘the very moment’
> preceding His public Revelation as a sign of which ‘each and every
> created thing ‘had ‘been made to yield up its soul to God’. In the
> Tablet of the Holy Mariner, the Maid of Heaven summons one of her
> handmaidens and commands her to ‘descend into space from the
> mansions of eternity’, to unveil what the Bábís had ‘concealed in the
> inmost of their hearts’. Upon her return, not finding among the ‘idle
> claimants’ to the successorship of the Báb ‘the breeze of
> Faithfulness’, she fell ‘upon the dust and gave up the spirit’. 32
> The spiritual evolution from ‘the infrequent moments of
> slumber’ in the Síyáh-Chál, when the Maid of Heaven first appeared
> to Bahá’u’lláh in the final months of 1852,
> 
> to His public declaration in the Garden of Ridván in 1863 unveils a
> hidden dimension of Revelation that expands our human
> consciousness to embrace previously untapped regions of the human
> mind. These regions encompass not only our consciousness of our
> human oneness but also our consciousness of the oneness of the
> planet itself. Bahá’u’lláh names this new consciousness of oneness
> ‘Carmel’, planting and erecting there the Arc of His Covenant.
> In the Book of Revelation, the final book of the Bible, the
> coming to earth of the Kingdom of God is prophetically personified
> as ‘new Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven, prepared
> as a bride adorned for her husband’ (Rev. 21:2). Viewed in its inner
> dimension, apparelled in the garment of metaphor, the Revelation of
> Bahá’u’lláh is the consummation of their marriage. This marriage—
> the marriage of Heaven and Earth—is a ‘new creation’. The old one,
> which Bahá’u’lláh describes as ‘the Prophetic [or Adamic] Cycle’, has
> ended; in Bahá’u’lláh’s union with the Maid of Heaven, the ‘Eternal
> Truth’ has now come.33 Jerusalem, sacred to Jew, Christian and
> Muslim, becomes Haifa, which, as the site of Carmel, is now the ‘new
> Jerusalem’.
> 
> It is towards a metaphorical34 understanding of this ‘new
> creation’—what John of Patmos, the visionary author of the Book of
> Revelation, calls ‘the wedding supper of the Lamb’ (Rev. 19:9) to
> which all the Sons of God are invited—we shall now turn as
> Bahá’u’lláh unveils what in all previous Dispensations had remained
> hidden.     Essential, however, to some understanding of this
> metaphorical unveiling is an understanding of the nature of
> metaphorical language, an understanding of which Bahá’u’lláh,
> interpreting a single biblical verse describing Christ’s return, devotes
> in the Kitáb-i-Íqán some 25 pages.35
> Because, Bahá’u’lláh explains, the Christian divines ‘clung to the
> literal interpretation of the words of Jesus’, they deprived the
> Christian community not only ‘of the streaming grace of the
> Muhammadan Revelation and its
> 
> showering bounties’,36 but also, as was immediately evident in the
> burial of the Báb’s maternal uncle in the literalism of the Shí‘ís, from
> the Revelation of the Báb. ‘Once more hath the eternal Spirit
> breathed into the mystic trumpet, and caused the dead to speed out
> of their sepulchres of heedlessness and error unto the realm of
> guidance and grace,’ Bahá’u’lláh declares, Himself the second ‘mystic
> trumpet’ now raising the dead uncle to life. ‘And yet,’ Bahá’u’lláh
> continues, severing by His very words the uncle from the community
> to which he, like his nephew, had belonged,
> that expectant community still crieth out: When shall these
> things be? When shall the promised One, the object of our
> expectation, be made manifest, that we may arise for the
> triumph of His Cause, that we may sacrifice our substance for
> His sake, that we may offer up our lives in His Path? 37
> The language of Revelation issues directly from spirit rather
> than matter. Apparelled as it is in the images of sense which renders
> visible what otherwise remains invisible, the apparel itself is, as veils,
> transparent to the invisible. It is as metaphor characterized by what
> Coleridge, describing sacred Scripture, calls ‘the translucence of the
> Eternal through and in the Temporal’. ‘It always’, he further
> explains, ‘partakes of the Reality which it renders intelligible; and
> while it enunciates the whole, abides itself as a living part of that
> Unity, of which it is the representative.’ Mirroring in the reflecting
> images of sense the eternally uncreated Logos known only to God as
> God’s knowing of God (‘I am that I am’), the Manifestation’s
> metaphorical     language     becomes      what      Coleridge38     calls
> ‘consubstantial with the truths, of which it is the conductor’.
> Buried in the literal understanding of the divines, however, the
> language of the Manifestation is drained of its living metaphoricity
> and reduced to inert matter. Far from remaining translucent to
> spirit, language bound to the
> 
> senses become increasingly opaque, a sepulchre burying Revelation,
> as, for example, the Christian divines buried the Revelation of
> Muhammad in what Bahá’u’lláh calls ‘their sepulchres of
> heedlessness and error’. The language of sense becomes, in the
> words of Shelley, ‘clouds to hide, not colours to portray’. 39
> Bahá’u’lláh Himself daily witnessed this burial of Revelation
> among some of the disciples of the Báb. As a result, they failed to
> recognize in Him the one whom the Báb had invoked. The inner
> meaning of the Báb’s Revelation was denied so that the Maid of
> Heaven’s chosen handmaid, a ‘Bride’ of its ‘inner meaning’, was, as
> already noted, rejected by the Bábí community. ‘And as they beheld
> her state and comprehended a word of the tale told by the Youth,’
> Bahá’u’lláh metaphorically continues in His ‘Tablet of the Holy
> Mariner’, referring to the betrayal of the Báb’s revelation,
> they bared their heads, rent their garments asunder, beat upon
> their faces, forgot their joy, shed tears and smote with their
> hands upon their cheeks, and this is verily one of the mysterious
> grievous afflictions …40
> 
> The ‘mysterious grievous afflictions’ were those which, at the
> hands of the Bábís, had befallen Bahá’u’lláh. The animating spirit of
> Revelation, which is the Holy Spirit personified as the Maid of
> Heaven as she was now operating within Him, was largely hidden to
> the demoralized remnant of the Bábí community in Baghdad. Since
> His return from His chosen withdrawal into ‘a life of complete
> solitude’,41 Bahá’u’lláh told the uncle of the Báb:
> Two years have elapsed during which Our enemies have
> ceaselessly and assiduously contrived to exterminate Us,
> whereunto all witness. Nevertheless, none amongst the faithful
> hath risen to render Us any assistance, nor did an one feel
> inclined to help in Our deliverance. Nay, instead
> 
> of assisting Us, what showers of continuous sorrows, their
> words and deeds have caused to rain upon Our soul!42
> Metaphor, as that which seems to contradict the literal by
> transforming it into another order of meaning that is different from,
> though analogous to, the literal, directly invokes the operation of the
> soul upon the body. The failure to recognize its operations exposes
> the entombment to which the soul is subject when it remains bound
> to the literal. To awaken the Báb’s uncle to the redeeming power of
> metaphor by confronting him with the apparent moral contradiction
> inherent in the literal is, Badí’u’lláh suggests one reason why God
> chose in Moses a murderer to be the liberating Prophet of His people.
> More immediately, however, Bahá’u’lláh confronted the maternal
> uncle with what must have seemed to him an even greater
> contradiction:      Bahá’u’lláh’s condemnation of the very Bahá’í
> community that in his recognition of the Báb the uncle was about to
> join. The resolution of this apparent contradiction lay, of course, in
> the spiritual fact that the divinely-appointed 19-year Dispensation of
> the Báb was now drawing to a close as Bahá’u’lláh as the Mustagháth
> (‘He who is invoked’ by all the Prophets) gradually unveiled what still
> lay partially hidden within Him.
> Bahá’u’lláh metaphorically describes the Manifestation’s
> unveiling of the Logos in images of sense as the gradual nuptial
> removal of the veiling garments adorning the Maids of Heaven who,
> at the bidding of the Word, rush forth from the Courts of
> Concealment that yet forever remain ‘unsearchable and high above
> the praise of men’.43 The Maids of Heaven, ‘Brides of inner
> meaning’, cannot, therefore, in their unveiling of the multiple
> meanings of the Word (‘seventy and one’), be reduced to the fixed
> and endlessly repeated metaphors of ritualized worship; they are,
> rather, the animating feminine power that opens the human heart to
> the reception of the polymorphous Word even as the beloved opens
> herself to the multidimensional
> 
> lover. They are the inner, naked, animating power of the Word
> which perpetually transforms Revelation into the speech of the
> Beloved ‘guiding the lovers to the seat of sanctity and to [the
> Manifestation’s] resplendent Beauty’.44 The Maids of Heaven are,
> then, in the nuptial metaphors of the apocalypse of Bahá’u’lláh, not
> only the consorts of the Word but also the consorts of the true
> believers who have completely surrendered their will to the revealed
> Word. The true believers are those to whom the ‘Brides of inner
> meaning’ have, in the chambers of their sanctified hearts, unveiled
> themselves.
> In His parable of the wise and foolish virgins, Christ describes
> His return as their final unveiling in the marriage chamber of the
> soul. Comparing His return to the Bridegroom Who comes at
> midnight (Behold, the bridegroom cometh’), Christ as Bridegroom
> takes with Him into the marriage chamber the wise virgins whose
> lamps (bodies as the temple of the spirit) are filled with spiritual oil
> (and they that were ready went in with him to the marriage; and the
> door was shut’ [Matt. 25:6–10]). Darkly concluding the Kitáb-i-Íqán
> in a manner that recalls Christ’s rejection of the foolish virgins (and
> the door was shut’), Bahá’u’lláh writes:
> We perceive none, however, amongst the people of the earth
> who, sincerely yearning for the Truth, seeketh the guidance of
> the divine Manifestations concerning the abstruse matters of his
> Faith. All are dwellers in the land of oblivion, and all are
> followers of the people of wickedness and rebellion. God will
> verily do unto them that which they themselves are doing, and
> will forget them even as they have ignored His Presence in His
> day.45
> Clearly identified as the wise virgin taken into the marriage
> chamber, Quddús, at the moment of his martyrdom in a public
> square before a frenzied multitude, declared: ‘Would that my mother
> were with me, and could see with her own eyes the splendour of my
> nuptials.’46 To his mother, who
> 
> had long desired to witness her son’s wedding, Quddús had
> observed:
> The day of my wedding is not yet come. That day will be
> unspeakably glorious. Not within the confines of this house, but
> out in the open air, under the vault of heaven … before the gaze
> of the multitude, there shall I celebrate my nuptials and witness
> the consummation of my hopes.47
> The unknowable source of Revelation, writes Bahá’u’lláh,
> resides in ‘the Ancient Being’ Who at the ‘moment preceding His
> Revelation’ remains ‘the Creator without a creation’, 48 veiled as He is
> in His ‘immemorial being and in the ancient eternity of [His]
> essence’49 knowing His love for His creation though not acting upon
> it, not, that is, having yet ‘summoned the Maids of Heaven to emerge
> from behind the veil of concealment’ and ‘clothed them with … words
> of consummate power and wisdom’.50 ‘There can be no doubt
> whatever’, Bahá’u’lláh writes again, ‘that if for one moment the tide
> of His mercy and grace were to be withheld from the world, it would
> completely perish.’51
> 
> The act of creation, metaphorically (i.e. spiritually) understood
> is the emergence of the Maids of Heaven ‘from behind the veil of
> concealment’. To view the creation as the nuptial realm of its
> unveiled inner meaning is to enter the creation as ‘the seat of His
> mighty throne’.52 It is to experience it as the revelation of divine love
> as that love informs and inhabits the soul.
> Metaphorically describing the generating power of the Word as
> ‘Brides’ or ‘Maids of Heaven’, Bahá’u’lláh declares that ‘Every single
> letter proceeding from the mouth of God is indeed a mother letter,
> and every word uttered by Him Who is the Well Spring of Divine
> Revelation is a mother word, and His Tablet a Mother Tablet’. 53
> Illustrating their mothering power, which is metaphorically the
> feminine aspect of Revelation as it remains wedded to the masculine,
> Bahá’u’lláh focuses upon such words as ‘Fashioner’:
> 
> ‘Through the mere revelation of the word “Fashioner”, issuing
> forth from His lips and proclaiming His attribute to mankind,’
> Bahá’u’lláh writes,
> such power is released as can generate, through successive ages,
> all the manifold arts which the hands of man can produce. This,
> verily, is a certain truth. No sooner is this resplendent word
> uttered, than its animating energies, stirring within all created
> things, give birth to the means and instruments whereby such
> arts can be produced and perfected.           All the wondrous
> achievements ye now witness are the direct consequences of the
> Revelation of this Name.54
> Contained within the masculine word ‘Fashioner’, one of the
> Names of God, resides its feminine ‘animating energies, stirring
> within all created things’, energies that ‘give birth to manifold
> creations. This union of the masculine and feminine as one of the
> inner dimensions of the Revelation of Bahá’u’lláh means that all that
> is now actualized on earth through the discovery and invention of
> new means and instruments mirrors its divine source in the Word
> itself. The inner marriage between the Word and its ‘animating
> energies’ is now, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá declares, giving birth, for those whose
> eye of the heart is open, to the Kingdom of God on earth, God’s Will
> now being done on earth as it is done in the heaven of God’s Will.
> The one that hath eyes to see the inner reality of His Revelation, as
> Bahá’u’lláh Himself unveils it, will see in the creation itself the
> Kingdom come. Revelation is the Word become act, or, as
> Bahá’u’lláh explained to the Báb’s uncle:
> Were the eye of the heart to open, it would surely perceive that
> the words revealed from the heaven of the will of God are at one
> with, and the same as, the deeds that have emanated from the
> Kingdom of divine power.55
> For the Manifestation, supremely in the case of Bahá’u’lláh,
> 
> to be brought ‘in moments’56 ‘face to face with the resplendent
> revelation of but one of [God’s] Names’, He must first, as a human
> being, be reduced to that state of ‘utter nothingness’ out of which,
> Bahá’u’lláh declares, God ‘hath created the reality of all things’. 57
> Thus Bahá’u’lláh writes:
> Were the eye of discernment to be opened it would recognize
> that in this very state, they have considered themselves utterly
> effaced and non-existent in the face of Him Who is the All-
> Pervading, the Incorruptible. Methinks, they have regarded
> themselves as utter nothingness, and deemed their mention in
> that Court an act of blasphemy. For the slightest whisperings of
> self within such a Court is an evidence of self-assertion and
> independent existence.58
> 
> ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, in His own written comment on the Tablet of the
> Branch, echoes Bahá’u’lláh in describing His own station of
> servitude:
> I affirm that the true meaning, the real significance, the
> innermost secret of these verses, of these very words, is my own
> servitude to the sacred Threshold of the Alpha Beauty, my
> complete self-effacement, my utter nothingness before Him.
> This is my resplendent crown, my most precious adorning.”
> Further explaining the ‘blasphemy’ of any ‘slightest whisperings
> of self’ in the Court of Revelation, Bahá’u’lláh identifies it with the
> delusion that ‘sheer nothingness’ has ‘the worthiness and capacity to
> emerge from its state of non-existence into the realm of being’.60
> The ‘sheer nothingness’ to which Bahá’u’lláh is reduced is, therefore,
> paradoxically, at once a direct and immediate awareness of a Creator
> who, independent of everything save Himself, creates ex nihilo, and,
> at the same time, as the very condition of this awareness, a complete
> annihilation of any independent sense of self which, particularly in
> the West, constitutes
> 
> what we think of as our human identity. One of the defining
> characteristics of the Manifestation is, therefore, the momentary
> extinction of any independent existence—an extinction beyond any
> human ability to fathom—in which He becomes, relative to self,
> nothing at all. Bahá’u’lláh in His ‘nothingness’ is momentarily alone
> with God in a manner entirely beyond the reach of our human
> understanding. In His aloneness with God resides the God who
> veiled in ‘immemorial Being’ and the ‘ancient eternity’ of ‘Essence’,
> knows in Bahá’u’lláh ‘My love for thee’.61
> Momentary extinction confronts in what appears to be the
> human station of the Prophet what also appears to be the Prophet’s
> human resistance to revelation that, like the apparent imperfections
> of Moses and Jesus, serves to reveal the absolute self-sufficiency of
> the God who admits of no partners. The Prophet, that is, does not
> choose to become a Prophet. The divine station cannot be sought as
> a reward for initiative or exertion. The Prophet does not prepare
> Himself for this exalted station as, say, an athlete prepare herself or
> himself for the Olympics. Nothing in His human nature can of itself
> prepare Him for the overpowering confrontation with what has been
> described as the Wholly Other.
> Moses pleaded with ‘the angel of the Lord’ who ‘appeared unto
> him in a flame of fire out of the midst of a bush’. Ordered to
> approach, ‘Moses hid his face; for he was afraid to look upon God’.
> When the Voice commanded Him to deliver His people ‘out of the
> hands of the Egyptians’, Moses replied, ‘Who am I, that I should go
> unto Pharaoh … I am not eloquent … but I am slow of speech, and of
> a slow tongue.’ ‘And the anger of the Lord was kindled against
> Moses,’ Exodus continues. Finally, however, Moses submitted. ‘And
> Moses took his wife and his sons, and set them upon an ass, and he
> returned to the land of Egypt’ where, as Bahá’u’lláh explained to the
> uncle of the Báb, He was wanted for ‘manslaughter’ (Ex. 3:2–22;
> 4:1–20).
> Embraced by the angel Gabriel, whose presence encom-
> 
> passed the entire horizon, Muhammad, Who could neither read nor
> write, was commanded to recite. ‘I am not a reciter,’ Muhammad
> replied. Gabriel now embraced Him even tighter so that He felt as if
> all the breath was being squeezed out of his body. ‘Recite,’ the angel
> repeated. Muhammad this time sensed that the breath was no longer
> His own, that His breath, His human breath, had been taken from
> Him. Yet again, however, Muhammad managed to refuse. Again
> Gabriel embraced Him, this time so fiercely that Muhammad felt that
> His life had been extinguished. And the Lord God formed man of the
> dust of the ground,’ Genesis records, ‘and breathed into his nostrils
> the breath of life, and man became a living soul’ (Gen. 2:7). This
> ‘breath of life’, which is the breath of the Holy Spirit, Gabriel’s
> embrace breathed into Muhammad. At that moment, issuing from a
> divine breath no longer His own, Muhammad found the first words
> of a new scripture pouring from His mouth:
> Recite in the name of thy Sustainer, who has created—created
> man out of a germ-cell! Recite—for thy Sustainer is the Most
> Bountiful, One who has taught [man] the use of the pen—taught
> him what he did not know.62
> 
> Explaining what initially appears as a kind of incoherence from
> the human point of view, Seyyed Hossein Nasr writes of the Qur’án:
> The text of the Quran reveals human language crushed by the
> power of the Divine Word. It is as if human language were
> scattered into a thousand fragments like a wave scattered into
> drops against the rocks at sea. One feels through the shattering
> effect left upon the language of the Quran, the power of the
> Divine whence it originated. The Quran displays human
> language with all the weakness inherent in it becoming suddenly
> the recipient of the Divine Word and displaying its frailty before
> a power which is infinitely greater than man can imagine.63
> 
> ‘What else can my pen recount?’ ‘Abdu’l-Bahá asked one of His most
> trusted and eminent followers during the early days His ministry, as
> the entire creation exploded in his ear with the deafening roar of its
> new vibrations
> So loud is the call that reverberates from the Abhá Kingdom that
> mortal ears are well-nigh deafened with its vibrations. The
> whole creation, methinks, is being disrupted and is bursting
> asunder through the shattering influence of the Divine
> summons issued from the throne of glory. More than this I
> cannot write.64
> 
> ‘Abdu’l-Baba, that is, is not a Prophet. His divinely assigned
> task was to infallibly interpret rather than reveal the Word.
> Commanded by the Ancient of Days to ‘Speak, and hold not thy
> peace’, Bahá’u’lláh initially remained silent. His Pen could not move.
> Methinks that thou hast halted and movest not upon My Tablet.
> Could the brightness of the Divine Countenance have
> bewildered thee, or the idle talk of the froward filled thee with
> grief and paralysed thy movement? … Preferrest thou to tarry
> when the breeze announcing the Day of God hath already
> breathed over thee, or art thou of them that are shut out as by a
> veil from Him?65
> Assuring the Ancient of Days that He had allowed ‘No veil
> whatever … to shut [Him] out from the recognition of the glories of
> [His] Day—the Day which is the lamp of guidance unto the whole
> world, and the sign of the Ancient of Days unto all them that dwell
> therein,’ Bahá’u’lláh explained that His ‘silence is by reason of the
> veils that have blinded Thy creatures’ eyes to Thee, and my muteness
> is because of the impediments that have hindered Thy people from
> recognizing Thy truth’.66 Though God had spoken, the blindness of
> the world momentarily silenced Him. (‘Who hath made man’s
> mouth? or who maketh the dumb, or deaf, or the seeing, or the
> blind? have not I the Lord’ [Ex 4:11], de-
> 
> clares Yahweh to Moses when Moses complained He was ‘slow of
> speech, and of a slow tongue’.) God’s behest, that is, had not yet
> completely overwhelmed and overruled Bahá’u’lláh.           If Thy
> overruling and all-compelling behest should ever reach me,’
> Bahá’u’lláh thus explains, ‘it would empower me to revive the souls
> of all men, through Thy most exalted Word, which I have heard
> uttered by Thy Tongue of power in Thy Kingdom of glory.’67
> Although Bahá’u’lláh heard God’s ‘most exalted Word’ in His
> ‘Kingdom of glory’, He appeared not yet to be utterly extinguished as
> a human being before it. ‘Canst thou discover any one but Me, O
> Pen, in this Day’, the Ancient of Days now asks as, relative to our
> human understanding, the apocalyptic moment of extinction
> approaches, an extinction that announces the release of vibrations
> operating at a previously untapped level of frequency.
> What hath become of the creation and the manifestations
> thereof? What of the names and their kingdom? Whither are
> gone all created things, whether seen or unseen? What of the
> hidden secrets of the universe and its revelations Lo, the entire
> creation hath passed away! Nothing remaineth except My Face,
> the Ever-Abiding, the Resplendent, the All-Glorious.68
> Aware of the depths of Bahá’u’lláh’s apparent bewilderment that
> may remind some of the bewilderment of Moses and Muhammad,
> the Ancient of Days addresses Bahá’u’lláh as a loving father
> addressing his son: ‘We have heard the voice of thy pleading, O Pen,
> and excuse thy silence. What is it that hath so sorely bewildered
> thee?’ To which Bahá’u’lláh now replies: ‘The inebriation of Thy
> presence, O Well-Beloved of all worlds, hath seized and possessed
> me.’ The Ancient of Days now calls upon Him to ‘Arise’ and proclaim
> the Day of God. ‘We have chosen thee’, He declares, ‘to be our most
> mighty Trumpet, whose blast is to signalize the resurrection of all
> mankind.’69
> 
> In this state of divine inebriation which brought Bahá’u’lláh to
> the point where His Pen could again no longer move, a point where
> He boldly concludes His Tablet with the words ‘No God is there but
> Me, the Most Exalted, the Most Powerful, the Most Excellent, the All-
> Knowing’,70 the masculine Word of the Ancient of Days is fully
> apparelled in the garments of the Maids of Heaven who, ‘from the
> heights’ of the ‘loftiest chambers’ of Paradise, cry out and shout,
> Rejoice, ye dwellers of the realms above, for the fingers of Him
> Who is the Ancient of Days are ringing, in the name of the All-
> Glorious, the Most Great Bell, in the midmost heart of the
> heavens. The hands of bounty have borne round the cups of
> everlasting life. Approach, and drink your fill. Drink with
> healthy relish, O ye that are the very incarnations of longing, ye
> who art the embodiments of vehement desire!71
> The Maids of Heaven invite the longing hearts that are ‘the
> embodiments of vehement desire’ to the wedding supper celebrating
> the descent of New Jerusalem as a bride adorned to meet the
> bridegroom.     The consummation of their union is, in the
> metaphorical language of the soul, the Revelation of Bahá’u’lláh.
> In addressing Carmel in this language, much as the Maid of
> Heaven had in the Síyáh-Chál earlier addressed Bahá’u’lláh, one can
> perhaps discern the emergence of the full majesty of the masculine
> Word to which the Ancient of Days had awakened Bahá’u’lláh, an
> awakening from which issued the unparalleled outpouring of Tablets
> to the leaders of the world which began in Adrianople. In this
> outpouring, the lineaments of a new creation are at last delineated as
> the spiritual gratification of human desire.
> With the exchange between Bahá’u’lláh and Carmel, which
> unveils the inner dimension of Bahá’u’lláh’s revelation, this essay
> ends. In the exchange, one may finally note
> 
> the way the Tablet of Carmel brings to its consummation the
> essentially masculine exchange between Bahá’u’lláh and the Ancient
> of Days,72 in contrast to Bahá’u’lláh’s initial encounter with the Maid
> of Heaven in the Síyáh-Chál. There, in the Síyáh-Chál, Bahá’u’lláh
> ‘turning [His] face’, ‘beheld [her] … suspended in the air before
> [Him]’.73 In the encounter with Carmel, Bahá’u’lláh addresses
> Carmel as her Lord who now appears before her face, cheering her
> eyes as earlier the Maid of Heaven in the Síyáh-Chál had cheered
> His, her ‘countenance [shining] with the ornament of the good-
> pleasure of God’.74 Carmel, coming before Bahá’u’lláh, is led by the
> light issuing from Bahá’u’lláh which fills her ‘with transports of
> joy’.75 She has harkened to His call, even as earlier Bahá’u’lláh had
> harkened to the call of the Maid of Heaven. She has been quickened
> by the voice of Bahá’u’lláh’s Pen, even as earlier the Maid of Heaven
> was herself the quickener.
> ‘May my life be a sacrifice to Thee,’ Carmel exclaims,
> inasmuch as Thou hast fixed Thy gaze on me, hast bestowed
> upon me Thy bounty, and hast directed towards me Thy steps.
> Separation from Thee, O Thou Source of everlasting life, hath
> well nigh consumed me, and my remoteness from Thy presence
> hath burned away my soul. All praise be to Thee for having
> enabled me to hearken to Thy call, for having honoured me with
> Thy footsteps, and for having quickened my soul through the
> vitalizing fragrance of Thy Day and the shrilling voice of Thy
> Pen, a voice Thou didst ordain as Thy trumpet-call amidst Thy
> people.76
> ‘No sooner had her voice reached that most exalted Spot,’ writes
> Bahá’u’lláh, ‘than We made reply’:
> Render thanks unto Thy Lord, O Carmel. The fire of thy
> separation from Me was fast consuming thee, when the ocean of
> My presence surged before thy face, cheering thine eyes and
> those of all creation, and filling with delight
> 
> all things visible and invisible. Rejoice, for God hath in this Day
> established upon thee His throne, hath made thee the dawning-
> place of His signs, and the day spring of the evidences of His
> Revelation.77
> Bahá’u’lláh then commands Carmel, as earlier the Ancient of
> Days had commanded Him, to
> call out to Zion … and announce the joyful tidings: He that was
> hidden from mortal eyes is come!               His all-conquering
> sovereignty is manifest; His all-encompassing splendour is
> revealed. Beware lest thou hesitate or halt. 78
> No previous Revelation, it is suggested, has unveiled so
> completely what may perhaps be called the spiritual dynamics of the
> inner metaphorical masculine and feminine components of the
> Prophet’s divinely seized and possessed soul. While these dynamics
> as Bahá’u’lláh metaphorically unveils them should not and cannot
> explain the miraculous act of divine creation which is known only to
> God, they can perhaps, as Bahá’u’lláh Himself metaphorically
> suggests, open the heart of the believer to the Beloved who there
> finds His home. The mystery of His closeness to us—closer than our
> ‘life-vein’—is contained within the paradox that He remains at the
> same time infinitely beyond the prescribed limits of our
> comprehension, even, indeed, as does the station of the
> Manifestation.
> What, as divine revelation and in mystic communion with the
> Maid of Heaven, Bahá’u’lláh has enacted in the human heart
> sanctified for His descent is the long-concealed and long-promised
> Face and Voice of the Promised One. ‘Verily, I say,’ Bahá’u’lláh
> declares,
> this is the Day in which mankind can behold the Face, and hear
> the Voice, of the Promised One. The Call of God hath been
> raised, and the light of His countenance hath been lifted up
> upon men.79
> 
> The unprecedented greatness of this unveiling, the inner
> dimensions of which this paper has, however inadequately,
> attempted to explore, can finally only be described, as indeed it can
> only be enacted, by Bahá’u’lláh Himself. ‘Great indeed is this Day!’
> Bahá’u’lláh declares.
> The allusions made to it in all the sacred Scriptures as the Day of
> God attest its greatness. The soul of every Prophet of God, of
> every Divine Messenger, hath thirsted for this wondrous Day.
> All the divers kindreds of the earth have, likewise, yearned to
> attain it.80
> 
> In the sanctification of that yearning a sanctification that
> protects the soul from attachment to idle fancies and vain
> imaginations—resides now the soul’s long-awaited, heartfelt spiritual
> consummation, a consummation the inner dimensions of which
> Bahá’u’lláh’s Tablets—particularly what might be called His marriage
> Tablets—metaphorically enact.
> 
> Bibliography
> Armstrong, Karen. A History of God: The 4000 Year Quest of Judaism,
> Christianity and Islam. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993.
> Báb, The. Selections from the Writings of the Báb. Comp. Research
> Department of the Universal House of Justice, trans. Habib
> Taherzadeh. Haifa: Bahá’í World Centre, 1982.
> Bahá’í Prayers. Wilmette, Ill.: Bahá’í Publishing Trust, 1985.
> Bahá’u’lláh. Epistle to the Son of the Wolf. Wilmette, Ill.: Bahá’í Publishing
> Trust, 1988.
> _____ Gleanings from the Writings of Bahá’u’lláh. Wilmette, Ill.: Bahá’í
> Publishing Trust, 1983.
> _____ The Hidden Words. Wilmette, Ill.: Bahá’í Publishing Trust, 1990.
> _____ Kitáb-i-Íqán. Wilmette, Ill.: Bahá’í Publishing Trust, 1989.
> Balyuzi, H. M. Bahá’u’lláh: The King of Glory. Oxford: George Ronald,
> 1980.
> Coleridge. Samuel T. Biographia Literia. J. Engell and W. J. Bate (eds.). 2
> vols. Bollingen Series 75. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983
> 
> _____ Lay Sermons. R. J. White (ed.). Bollingen Series 75. Princeton:
> Princeton University Press, 1972.
> Corbin, Henry. Spiritual Body and Celestial Earth: From Mazdean Iran to
> Shi‘ite Iran (trans. Nancy Pearson). Bollingen Series 91:2. Princeton:
> Princeton University Press, 1977.
> Drewek, Paula A. ‘Feminine Forms of the Divine in Bahá’í Scripture’, The
> Journal of Bahá’í Studies, vol. 5, no. 1 (1992), pp. 13–23.
> Nabíl-i-A‘zam. The Dawn-Breakers: Nabíl’s Narrative of the Early Days of
> the Bahá’í Revelation. Trans. Shoghi Effendi. Wilmette, Ill.: Bahá’í
> Publishing Trust, 1974.
> Nasr, S. H. Ideals and Realities of Islam. London: Allen and Unwin, 2nd
> edn. 1975.
> Shelley, P. B. Shelley’s Poetry and Prose. D. H. Reiman and S. B. Powers
> (eds.). New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1977.
> Shoghi Effendi. God Passes By. Wilmette, Ill.: Bahá’í Publishing Trust, rev.
> edn. 1974.
> _____ The World Order of Bahá’u’lláh. Wilmette, Ill.: Bahá’í Publishing
> Trust, 1991.
> 
> Notes
> 1.  Bahá’u’lláh, Kitáb-i-Íqán, pp. 55–6.
> 2.  ibid. pp. 56–7.
> 3.  ibid. pp. 57–8.
> 4.  Bahá’u’lláh, Gleanings, no. 93, p. 186.
> 5.  ibid.
> 6.  Following Shoghi Effendi’s translation of Bahá’u’lláh’s texts, I
> use the term ‘man’ in its non-gendered generic sense in order to
> incorporate the actual words and phrases of Bahá’u’lláh into my
> own sentences. Needless to say, the term ‘man’ embraces both
> sexes.
> 7. Bahá’u’lláh, Gleanings, no. 153, p. 327.
> 8. ibid. no. 93, p. 185.
> 9. ibid. no. 93, pp. 186–7.
> 10. ibid. no. 93, p. 187.
> 11. Bahá’u’lláh, Kitáb-i-Íqán, p. 57.
> 
> 12. ‘It is not permissible to ask questions from Him Whom God will
> make manifest, except that which well beseemeth Him,’ the Báb
> declares in the Persian Bayán. ‘Should anyone desire to ask
> questions’, the Báb continues, ‘he is
> 
> allowed to do so only in writing, that he may derive ample
> understanding from His written reply and that it may serve as a
> sign from his Beloved. However, let no one ask aught that may
> prove unworthy of His lofty station … Unacceptable would be
> the questions of the highest-ranking people of the world in His
> presence, except such words as He Himself would utter about
> Himself in the Day of His manifestation’ (The Báb, Selections, p.
> 101).
> This is a résumé of the four written questions which the
> maternal uncle of the Báb presented to Bahá’u’lláh:
> 1. The Day of Resurrection. Is there to be a corporeal
> resurrection? The world is replete with injustice. How are the
> just to be requited and the unjust punished?
> 2. The twelfth Imám was born at a certain time and lives on.
> There are traditions, all supporting this belief. How can this be
> explained?
> 3. Interpretation of holy texts. This Cause does not seem to
> conform with beliefs held throughout the years. One cannot
> ignore the literal meaning of holy texts and scripture. How can
> this be explained?
> 4. Certain events, according to the traditions that have come
> down from the Imams, must occur at the advent of the Winn.
> Some of these are mentioned. But none of these happened.
> How can this be explained? (Balyuzi, King of Glory, pp. 164–5).
> In answering these questions, Bahá’u’lláh brought to them ‘such
> words as He Himself would utter about Himself in the Day of
> His Manifestation’. The ‘hidden’ text, that is, was partially
> unveiled.    Precisely in this bounteous unveiling lay the
> seemingly indirect method of Bahá’u’lláh’s answers, an indirect
> method which brought the Báb’s uncle face to face with the
> outpouring of a divine Revelation in which God is finally
> answerable only to Himself. The supreme subtlety of the levels
> of discourse in the Kitáb-i-Íqán resides in the station of
> Bahá’u’lláh, which is simultaneously revealed and concealed.
> 
> 13. Bahá’u’lláh, Gleanings, no. 93, p. 187.
> 14. ibid.
> 15. ibid. no. 1, pp. 4–5.
> 
> 16. Bahá’u’lláh, Kitáb-i-Íqán, p. 140.
> 17. Corbin, Spiritual Body and Celestial Earth, p. 12.
> 18. ibid.
> 19. Bahá’u’lláh, Hidden Words, Arabic no. 59.
> 20. Bahá’u’lláh, Gleanings, no. 153, pp. 325–6.
> 21. ibid. no. 7, p. 11.
> 22. Coleridge, Biographia Literia, vol. 1, p. 304.
> 23. Bahá’u’lláh, Gleanings, no. 153, pp. 327–8.
> 24. Bahá’u’lláh, Kitáb-i-Íqán, pp. 175–6.
> 25. ibid. pp. 70–1.
> 26. Bahá’u’lláh, Epistle, p. 22.
> 27. ibid. p. 21.
> 28. Bahá’u’lláh, quoted in Shoghi Effendi, God Passes By, pp. 101–
> 2.
> 29. Bahá’u’lláh, Gleanings, no. 14, p. 30.
> 30. ibid. no. 14, p. 29.
> 31. ibid. no. 77, p. 151.
> 32. Bahá’u’lláh, in Bahá’í Prayers, pp. 225–9.
> 33. Bahá’u’lláh, Gleanings, no. 25, p. 60.
> 34. Metaphor, as the Kitáb-i-Íqán makes clear, is the natural
> language of the soul. Indeed, at its point of origin in the Logos
> or Word all language is metaphorical. Separated from its
> original in the Word and bound to the world of sense, language
> thus reduced renders its essential metaphoricity a fantasy of
> sense rather than the spiritual reality of sense.
> 35. Bahá’u’lláh, Kitáb-i-Íqán, pp. 24–49.
> 36. ibid. p. 26.
> 37. ibid. pp. 26–7.
> 38. Coleridge, Lay Sermons, pp. 28–31.
> 39. Shelley, in Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, p. 535.
> 40. Bahá’u’lláh, in Bahá’í Prayers, p. 230.
> 41. Bahá’u’lláh, Kitáb-i-Íqán, p. 250.
> 42. ibid. pp. 251–2.
> 43. Bahá’u’lláh, Gleanings, no. 1, p. 5.
> 44. Bahá’u’lláh, Tablet of Ahmad, in Bahá’í Prayers, p. 210.
> 
> 45. Bahá’u’lláh, Kitáb-i-Íqán, p. 256.
> 46. Nabíl, Dawn-Breakers, p. 413.
> 47. ibid. p. 183.
> 48. Bahá’u’lláh, Gleanings, no. 78, p. 151.
> 49. Bahá’u’lláh, Hidden Words, Arabic no. 3.
> 
> 50. Bahá’u’lláh, Gleanings, no. 103, pp. 327–8.
> 51. ibid. no. 27, p. 68.
> 52. ibid. no. 14, p. 30.
> 53. ibid. no. 74, p. 142.
> 54. ibid. no. 74, p. 141.
> 55. Bahá’u’lláh, Kitáb-i-Íqán, pp. 57–8.
> 56. Bahá’u’lláh, Gleanings, no. 22, p. 55.
> 57. ibid. no. 27, pp. 64–5.
> 58. ibid. no. 22, p. 55.
> 59. ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, quoted in Shoghi Effendi, World Order, p. 138.
> 60. ibid. no. 27, p. 65.
> 61. Bahá’u’lláh, Hidden Words, Arabic no. 3.
> 62. Qur’an 96:1. trans. Muhammad Asad, quoted in Armstrong,
> History of God, p. 137.
> 63. Nasr, Ideals and Realities of Islam, pp. 47–8.
> 64. ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, quoted in Shoghi Effendi, World Order, p. 112.
> 65. Bahá’u’lláh, Gleanings, no. 14, pp. 27–8.
> 66. ibid. no. 14, pp. 27–8.
> 67. ibid. no. 14, p. 29.
> 68. ibid.
> 69. ibid. no. 14, pp. 30–1.
> 70. ibid. no. 14, p. 35.
> 71. ibid. no. 14, p. 32.
> 72. Paula Drewek compares the Tablet of Carmel to ‘a courtship
> dance with feelings of separation and longing for reunion
> followed by movements ever closer culminating in a
> consummation recalling the divine marriage of heaven and
> earth, a theme to be found throughout the Western religions’
> (‘Feminine Forms of the Divine in Bahá’í Scriptures’, p. 18).
> 73. Bahá’u’lláh in Shoghi Effendi, God Passes By, pp. 101–2.
> 74. ibid. p. 102.
> 75. Bahá’u’lláh, Gleanings, no. 11, p. 14.
> 76. ibid. no. 11, pp. 14–15.
> 77. ibid. no. 11, p. 15.
> 78. ibid. no. 11, p. 16.
> 
> 79. ibid. no. 11, pp. 10–11.
> 80. ibid. no. 11, p. 11.
>
> — *The Inner Dimensions of Revelation (Used by permission of the curator)*