Wisdom Untaught: The Young Nobleman Who Embraced the Cause

A retelling based on A Traveler's Narrative by ʻAbdu'l-Bahá, His own account of the early history of the Faith, which records the noble birth and youth of Bahá'u'lláh and His espousal of the Báb's Cause. Short phrases in quotation marks are words preserved in that history.

Among the many accounts of the early life of Bahá'u'lláh, one carries a special authority, because of who wrote it. A Traveler's Narrative was set down by ʻAbdu'l-Bahá Himself — His own telling of the episode of the Báb and of the rise of the Faith. And when ʻAbdu'l-Bahá comes to speak of His Father's youth, He remembers two things above all: a wisdom that owed nothing to the schools, and a heart that, the moment the new Cause arose, gave itself to that Cause without reserve. The Holy Day of His Birth remembers the Child of 1817; ʻAbdu'l-Bahá's narrative shows us the young Man, and what was already shining in Him.

The first thing is the wisdom. Bahá'u'lláh was born into a house of high station — a family of ministers and notables, honoured at the court of Persia — and a boy of such a house might have been given over to the long training of the learned, to the colleges and the teachers and the endless commentaries that produced the scholars and divines of that age. He was not. He did not pass through the schools of the learned. He was not the pupil of the great teachers of His day. By the ordinary measure of that society, He had no formal education in the sciences and the religious learning that men spent their lives acquiring.

And yet — and this is the wonder that ʻAbdu'l-Bahá's narrative preserves — His wisdom and knowledge were such that they astonished all who came near Him. Untaught in the schools of the learned, He possessed a wisdom before which the learned themselves fell silent. Men of deep training, accustomed to dispute and to the subtleties of their craft, found in this young Nobleman an understanding that went past their own, a clarity that did not argue so much as illumine. They came sometimes to test Him, and went away taught. It was not the knowledge that is gathered from books and masters; it was a knowledge that seemed to rise from some inner spring, native to Him, present from the beginning. The very thing the colleges existed to produce, and so rarely did, was simply there in One who had never entered them.

This is a sign the Faith has always treasured, because it points beyond mere cleverness to the nature of the One in whom it appeared. The Manifestations of God, ʻAbdu'l-Bahá teaches, do not derive Their knowledge as others do — by study, by instruction, by the slow accumulation of learning. Their knowledge is innate, a light they bring with Them, not a lamp lit for Them by others. And so the untaught wisdom of the young Bahá'u'lláh was not an oddity to be explained away but a token of His station, glimpsed by those around Him long before they could have understood what they were seeing. They knew only that here was a young Man whose understanding surpassed that of the most learned, and who had come by it none knew how.

The second thing ʻAbdu'l-Bahá's narrative remembers is the swiftness and completeness with which Bahá'u'lláh embraced the Cause of the Báb. When the Báb declared His mission in Shíráz in 1844 and the call of the new Day began to spread through Persia, many who heard it hesitated. The learned weighed it against their books; the cautious waited to see which way the powerful would turn; the comfortable feared what allegiance might cost them, for the new faith was despised from the first and soon to be cruelly persecuted. Bahá'u'lláh did none of this. The moment the Cause reached Him, He recognized it, and He gave Himself to it entirely.

There was nothing to gain by it, and everything to lose. He was a Nobleman of rank and wealth and an honoured name; the company He was joining was an obscure and proscribed sect, hated by the clergy and watched with suspicion by the state. To embrace it openly was to set His whole worldly position at risk. Yet He embraced it openly, and more than embraced it — He arose to serve it. ʻAbdu'l-Bahá's narrative records how Bahá'u'lláh became at once one of the chief supporters and champions of the new Cause, lending it the weight of His name, the power of His eloquence, and the shelter of His care. He did not stand at the edge of the movement as a sympathetic well-wisher; He went to its heart, and threw the whole of Himself into its defence and its spread. The Nobleman who had refused the offer of high office, and who was beloved among the poor as their protector, now poured that same fearless devotion into the cause of a persecuted faith.

In this the two things ʻAbdu'l-Bahá remembers are revealed to be one. The wisdom that owed nothing to the schools and the heart that embraced the truth at once sprang from the same source. A soul whose knowledge was innate did not need to be argued into recognition; it knew. Where the learned hesitated, weighing and doubting, the One whose wisdom surpassed theirs saw the truth plainly and acted on it without delay. The untaught wisdom and the instant, wholehearted embrace were two expressions of a single inner reality — the reality of One who had come into the world already bearing the light He would one day pour out upon it.

So ʻAbdu'l-Bahá, telling the story of those early days, lets us see His Father as the people of Persia first saw Him: a young Nobleman of mysterious wisdom, untaught yet wise beyond the wisest, who, when the Day dawned, did not delay but gave Himself to it at once and became its champion. The believers who keep the Holy Day of His Birth remember a Child cradled in a noble house — and, in that Child, the One whose knowledge was His own from the beginning, and whose heart was ready, when the hour came, to know its Lord and to serve Him.

This is a retelling. For the fuller account, see A Traveler's Narrative by ʻAbdu'l-Bahá.

'Abdu'l-Bahá. (1886). *A Traveler's Narrative Written to Illustrate the Episode of the Báb*. Bahá'í Publishing Trust.