'Abdu'l-Baha’s answer: This is a usage of the people of the East;
it is of Islam. Their purpose is that in every matter the commencement should
be in the Name of God (i.e., everything we do must begin with the Name of God).
As to its observance in the divine tablets, the purport is this: The reality of
the Divine Entity is holy above comprehension, beyond definition, and far from
the reach of imagination, for that which is imagined is finite, of man, and
thereto man is infinite; and certainly the infinite is greater than the finite.
Therefore, it is made evident that what is imagined is a creation and not the
Creator, for the Essence of Divinity is beyond human imagination.
Now all people worship an imagination, for they have created
a God in the realm of imagination and him they worship. If you ask a soul, when
he is praying, who art thou worshiping? He will say, God. Which God? The God of
my conception. When, in truth, what he imagines is not God. Hence, all people
are worshippers of imaginations and ideals. Consequently, there is no pathway
or escape for man except the Holy Manifestations, for, as we said the Essence
of Divinity is pure, is holy and cannot be brought into the world of ideas.
That which can be brought to ideation are the Holy and Divine Manifestations. Further
than this, man has no other point for concentration. If he exceed that bound,
it will be an imagination.
Therefore, the purpose of the word "He is God" is
this: That visible Majesty (the prophet) is the Promised Beauty of the Sun of
Reality, the Manifestation of the mysteries of Divinity and Deity, the Revealer
of the mysteries of the Merciful, the Origin of the signs of singleness. And I
begin with His Blessed Name.
~ ‘Abdu’l-Baha (From a table talk in Akka in 1907, notes
taken by Corinne True; ‘Notes Taken at Acca’, booklet published by Baha’i
Publishing Society, Chicago 1907)
