Reading With or Against the Book, or the Avoidance of Interpretive Chaos
First presented at the Irfan Colloquia Session #2
Bahá'í National Center: Wilmette, Illinois, USA
March 25–27, 1994
(see list of papers from #2)
In the Kitáb-i-Íqán, Bahá'u'lláh quotes the following saying: "The most grievous of all veils is the veil of knowledge" (180). And yet one of the fundamental principles of the Bahá'í Faith is the independent investigation of truth. This seeming paradox is readily solved. That knowledge that enables the individual along his or her path to God is to be valued, and knowledge that impedes the way of the seeker is to be avoided. While this seems manifestly clear, the actual application proves more complex. This paper looks specifically at the case of Bahá'í scholarship as it relates to scripture (the Bahá'í Writings) differentiating between those cases which enable readers' passages into the Book and those other cases where reader entry is impeded.
The situation whereby Bahá'í theology and scholarship (referred herein as the book) enable a readers approach to the Book is described geometrically in terms of the triadic semiotic relationship between a sign, the object it represents, and that relationship defined by the point of interpretation (or interpretant). Relying primarily on the Writings of Baháíuílláh and 'Abdu'l-Bahá, the interrelationships between the Book of God (Bahá'í Scripture), the book (Bahá'í theology and scholarship), and the individual are geometrically portrayed as a means of demonstrating the primacy of the relationship between the Book and the individual believer with the prescribed place of the Bahá'í scholar/theologian clearly depicted in its subsidiary, yet meaningful, role.
The problematic situation where the scholarship or theology obstructs the individual believer's access in/to the Book is described in terms of contemporary chaos theory. Chaos theory is "the qualitative study of unstable aperiodic behavior in deterministic nonlinear dynamic systems" (Kellert, 2). This theory, which originated in the domain of physics and currently finds applications in fields as diverse as mathematics, computer science, chemistry, astronomy, psychology, economics, and literary criticism, proves to be a useful heuristic for those cases that diverge away from order and into chaos. Baháíuílláh writes, 'it behooveth no man to interpret the holy words according to his own imperfect understanding" (KI, 182). Such interpretation is depicted in this paper as the initial condition that leads to problematically chaotic results for those readers who rely on such (mis)interpretations for their own (mis)understandings of the Book. In contrast to the case of true Baháíí scholarship, the geometric depiction of this "other' scholarship/theology clearly delineates the difficulties attendant upon those scholarly readings of the Book that read against the Book rather than with the Book.
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