A Garden of Many Flowers: 'Abdu'l-Bahá in Paris

A retelling built around 'Abdu'l-Bahá's address "Beauty and Harmony in Diversity," given in Paris on 28 October 1911 and recorded in Paris Talks. The sentences in quotation marks are His own words as preserved in that book.

In the autumn of 1911, after long decades of imprisonment and exile in the Ottoman East, 'Abdu'l-Bahá came to Paris. He was nearing seventy, His health worn by a lifetime of captivity, and yet He gave Himself without rest to the seekers who crowded to His door — French and English, rich and poor, the curious and the heartbroken. Each day He spoke to them, often in a quiet drawing-room filled with people of many nations, on the great themes He had crossed the world to proclaim. And of all those themes, none was nearer to His heart than the oneness of the human family.

The men and women who gathered before Him belonged to a world that was sure of its divisions. Europe in those years was certain of the importance of nation against nation, of class above class, of one race over another — certainties that would soon drag the whole continent into the abyss of war. To people schooled in such fears, the differences between human beings looked like walls, and walls looked like the natural order of things.

On the twenty-eighth of October, 'Abdu'l-Bahá set that whole way of seeing gently on its head. Do not look at our differences as causes of strife, He told them. "Let us look rather at the beauty in diversity, the beauty of harmony, and learn a lesson from the vegetable creation." And then He gave them an image so simple that a child could hold it, and so deep that the wisest in the room could not exhaust it. He asked them to picture a garden.

"If you beheld a garden in which all the plants were the same as to form, colour and perfume," He said, "it would not seem beautiful to you at all, but, rather, monotonous and dull." It is precisely the variety that makes a garden lovely — the reds beside the whites, the tall beside the low, the rose beside the violet. "Each flower, each tree, each fruit," He continued, "beside being beautiful in itself, brings out by contrast the qualities of the others, and shows to advantage the special loveliness of each and all." Take away the differences, and you take away the beauty. The garden is glorious because its flowers are not the same.

Then He turned the image toward His listeners themselves. "So it is with humanity," He said. "It is made up of many races, and its peoples are of different colour, white, black, yellow, brown and red — but they all come from the same God, and all are servants to Him." The colours of humankind, He was telling them, are the colours of one garden, watered by one rain, warmed by one sun, sprung from one Source. They were never meant to be a cause of pride or of shame. They were meant to be beautiful, the way a garden of many hues is beautiful.

But He did not soften the truth of how men had betrayed that design. "This diversity among the children of men has unhappily not the same effect as it has among the vegetable creation, where the spirit shown is more harmonious," He said. "Among men exists the diversity of animosity, and it is this that causes war and hatred among the different nations of the world." The flowers of the field do not despise one another for being unlike; only human beings have taken the very thing that should have adorned them and turned it into a reason to wound. The remedy He set before them was not to erase the differences — that would be to ruin the garden — but to bring to them the one thing that was missing: love. Where love enters, diversity becomes harmony, and the human family stands forth in its true beauty.

That afternoon in Paris there was no decree, no movement, no founding of anything. There was only an aged Prisoner, lately released from a fortress across the sea, holding up before a room full of Europeans the picture of a garden. But it was the very beauty the Feast of Jamál is named for: the beauty of the human family when its many colours are seen at last not as a threat but as a glory — one garden, of one Gardener, made lovely by its differences.

This is a retelling. For the full address, see "Beauty and Harmony in Diversity" in Paris Talks by 'Abdu'l-Bahá.

'Abdu'l-Bahá. (1912). *Paris Talks*. Bahá'í Publishing Trust. https://www.bahai.org/library/authoritative-texts/abdul-baha/paris-talks/