The Questions of Laura Barney: How a Book of Knowledge Was Gathered

A retelling based on Some Answered Questions, the table-talks given by 'Abdu'l-Bahá in 'Akká between 1904 and 1906 in answer to the questions of Laura Clifford Barney, and first published by her in 1908. Phrases in quotation marks are words preserved in that book.

Among all the works that carry the voice of 'Abdu'l-Bahá, one came into being in a way unlike any other. It was not a public address taken down by a stenographer, nor a Tablet penned in answer to a letter. It was a book built question by question, across three years, by a young woman who simply would not stop asking.

Her name was Laura Clifford Barney. An American Bahá'í living in Paris, she made her way more than once to 'Akká — the walled prison-city on the coast of the Holy Land where 'Abdu'l-Bahá was still held a captive of the Ottoman state. The conditions were not those of a quiet study. The Master's days in those years were crowded with the burdens of His confinement, the affairs of a watched and harassed community, and a stream of pilgrims and petitioners and the poor. Yet into that pressed and difficult life Laura Barney brought her questions, and at His table, between His many other labours, He answered them.

She asked about the great matters that have puzzled thoughtful people in every age. She asked about the existence and nature of God, and about the soul and what becomes of it after death. She asked about the prophets — how They differ from other human beings, and why God should send Them at all. She asked about the hard passages of the Bible and the Qur'án, about free will and fate, about good and evil, about the relationship between religion and science. And the answers came, day after day, in language plain enough for an ordinary mind and deep enough to occupy a lifetime.

Laura Barney did the second half of the work. She gathered the answers, had the original words preserved and set in order, and in 1908 published them under a title that has stayed exactly true to what the book is: Some Answered Questions. It has been a doorway into the Faith for countless seekers ever since. And it exists for one reason: a single person cared enough about the truth to ask, and to keep asking, until the answers were written down.

One chapter sits at the very heart of the Feast of 'Ilm, for it asks the question beneath all the others: how can a human being know anything for certain at all? 'Abdu'l-Bahá's answer was as bracing as it was clear. "There are only four accepted methods of comprehension," He said — four ways by which "the realities of things are understood."

The first, He said, is through the senses — what the eye, the ear, the tongue, the nose, and the touch report to us. The philosophers of Europe, He noted, considered this the surest path to knowledge. Yet He showed at once how it deceives: the sight "sees the mirage as water," sees small things where large ones stand far off, and "believes the earth to be motionless and sees the sun in motion." A faculty that errs so plainly, He said, "we cannot trust."

The second is reason — the method of "the ancient philosophers, the pillars of wisdom," who "proved things by reason and held firmly to logical proofs." But the proof of reason's weakness is the philosophers themselves: they "differed greatly, and their opinions were contradictory." They would prove a thing for twenty years and then disprove it. Were reason perfect, He observed, "all ought to be united in their ideas and agreed in their opinions" — and plainly they were not.

The third is tradition — the text of the Holy Scriptures, "for people say, 'In the Old and New Testaments, God spoke thus.'" Yet even this, He said, is not by itself sure, "because the traditions are understood by the reason," and the reason can err. He gave a striking image: the reason "is like a balance, and the meanings contained in the text of the Holy Books are like the thing which is weighed. If the balance is untrue, how can the weight be ascertained?"

So three of the four roads by which human beings seek to know the truth — the senses, the intellect, the inherited word as each mind privately construes it — can each go astray. "Therefore," He concluded, "there is no standard in the hands of people upon which we can rely." Only "the bounty of the Holy Spirit gives the true method of comprehension which is infallible and indubitable… and this is the condition in which certainty can alone be attained."

This is the lesson the Feast of 'Ilm holds before us, and Laura Barney's labour made it possible to hold. Knowledge is good and the search for it is sacred — but the seeker who leans on sense alone, or cleverness alone, or even the letter of Scripture as he himself reads it, leans on something that can give way. The surest knowledge is the gift of a humble heart turned toward God. A young woman's willingness to ask, in a prison city, has let seekers ever since receive that answer.

This is a retelling. For the fuller account, see Some Answered Questions by 'Abdu'l-Bahá, compiled by Laura Clifford Barney.

'Abdu'l-Bahá. (1908). *Some Answered Questions*. Bahá'í Publishing Trust. https://www.bahai.org/library/authoritative-texts/abdul-baha/some-answered-questions/