Rosa Celeste: Dante and Beatrice gaze upon the highest Heaven, The Empyrean

It is common for religious and spiritually minded individuals to decry the corrosive rise of Materialism. In the Baha’i writings, the rise of Materialism is repeatedly criticized as a major ill in our society. For example, it is described as:

“ …rampant and cancerous..undermining the fabric of human society alike in the East and in the West, eating into the vitals of the conflicting peoples and races inhabiting the American, the European and the Asiatic continents..” — Messages to the Bahá’í World: 1950–1957

Materialism has many faces: from a philosophical view Materialism represents a reduction of humanity and all things to the chance operation of matter following mindless physical laws. From the point of view of social relations, it involves valuing material objects or wealth over human values such as mercy, kindness and love. The rise of Materialism is often linked and blamed on the growing authority of rational scientific thought. Yet a more careful study shows such a materialist view is not a ‘given’ consequence of rational scientific thought. Although science is based on objective and testable material facts, the materialistic view is not a foregone conclusion and idealism in fact remains a growing and compelling description of nature. The core premise of idealism is that material existence is ultimately founded upon mind or nonphysical abstractions, contrary to the materialistic view. The most popular and clearest expression in the West originates with ancient Greek philosophy in particular Plato’s Theory of Forms.

What is rarely considered is the role of religious ‘Materialism’ which might rightly carry far more blame for the rise of philosophical and social Materialism. It’s role in this process rests on the apparent hard split between science and religion which manifested itself most clearly by the middle of the 19th Century. It was at this time when the new theory of evolution and geological sciences cast profound doubt on the literal understandings of the scriptural account of creation, particularly the age of the earth and origin of humans. Of course, it is common to cast the rise of scientific materialism and the theory of evolution as the primary cause of the split between science and religion, but one might also argue that religious ‘materialism’ shares far more blame. In religious theology, the materialistic premise rests on the insistence of the physicality or materiality of things which properly are metaphysical or spiritual.

So for example Heaven, Hell, angels, resurrection and the narration of creation are taken as physical facts instead of their obvious metaphysical, spiritual or idealistic understanding. It could be said that mainstream religions’ insistence on the materialistic understanding of these ideas made belief completely untenable for rational scientific thought. Thus, the rejection of idealism in both religious and scientific thought made reconciliation between the two an absolute impossibility.

This literalist materialistic view of religion is common in all the Abrahamic religions. In Christianity it takes the form of the insistence that the Heaven which Christ ascended was the physical Heaven or that angels are creatures which fly around in the physical world, or the seeing, hearing, death, life and the grave which are discussed as metaphors in scripture are in fact common physical things. In Islam a similar tendency developed, such that Paradise and Hell, the day of Judgment and resurrection were understood in gross literal terms. So that Paradise represented the simple deferment of physical pleasures to the afterlife, where all lusts would be satisfied. Such a view did not pass without criticism. For example, the famous Persian poet and mathematician Omar Khayyam in The Rubaiyat, observed the moral bankruptcy of avoiding these lusts to simply indulge in them the imagined afterlife.

Yet it doesn’t take that much depth of perception to understand these metaphors and allegories in scripture. For example, in Christianity, any meaningful read of the letters from the Apostles or even how these terms were employed in the Gospels makes it abundantly clear that the Heaven which Christ spoke of was not the physical heaven above one’s head and the bodies which would be resurrected are not the material bodies of ‘flesh and blood’ as Paul states clearly (1 Corinthians 15). In Bahá’u’lláh’s seminal work “The Book of Certitude” he delineates and clarifies the metaphorical meaning of these misunderstood terms, such as “Clouds”, “Heaven” and “Stars” in the sacred Abrahamic scriptures.

This insistence on the literal and physical understandings of scripture in lieu of the clear idealistic or spiritual one, cast religious thought as superstitious nonsense. Thus, the natural rejection of religious materialism often led to the embrace of philosophical materialism. Religious scholars and intellectuals who rightly should have championed idealism as the core of religious belief instead insisted on a nonsensical materialistic understanding of their scripture. The death of idealism in religion really meant the death of religion itself. Its rebirth can only be realized when religion is rid of these materialistic dogmas and idealism returns to its proper place in religious thought.

‘Abdu’l-Bahá the son an appointed interpreter of the Bahá’u’lláh’steachings observed over a century ago: