A Letter to a Scientist: 'Abdu'l-Bahá's Tablet to Auguste Forel

A retelling based on the text of 'Abdu'l-Bahá's Tablet to Auguste Forel, which was published in Star of the West, the early American Bahá'í magazine, and on the accounts preserved there and in the histories of the Faith. Short phrases in quotation marks are words preserved in that record.

Among the last great Tablets to flow from the pen of 'Abdu'l-Bahá is one addressed not to a believer, nor to a king, but to a scientist who did not, at the time, believe in God at all. His name was Auguste Forel, a Swiss of international renown — a physician and psychiatrist, a pioneering student of the brain, and one of the foremost naturalists of his age. He had spent his life in the patient observation of the visible world, and the habits of that life had left him, by his own account, without faith in any reality beyond what the senses and the instruments could reach.

Yet Forel was too honest a thinker to let the deepest questions rest unasked. Late in his life, having heard of 'Abdu'l-Bahá and of the Bahá'í teachings, he set down the matters that pressed most heavily upon him and sent them to the Master in the Holy Land. He asked, in effect, the questions that an unbelieving man of science would ask: Is there a God at all? If there is, what can be known of Him? And what of the human soul — has a being made of matter any reality that outlasts the body?

'Abdu'l-Bahá answered him. The reply, revealed in Haifa in 1921 in the final months of His life, is a sustained and closely reasoned letter — one that the believers would treasure and that found its way, in time, into the pages of Star of the West, the early Bahá'í magazine in America, so that the whole community might read what the Master had written to the scientist. In it 'Abdu'l-Bahá meets Forel on Forel's own ground. He does not begin with scripture or with appeals to authority. He begins with the world Forel had spent his life studying, and reasons from it: from the order and interdependence of creation, from the way the parts of the universe are knit into a single coherent whole, He argues that such a reality bespeaks a Cause beyond itself. The existence of a "universal organization," He observes, points unmistakably to a Mind that organized it.

From the question of God He passes to the question that a man of medicine would feel most sharply — the nature of the human reality. 'Abdu'l-Bahá distinguishes, in this Tablet, between the body, which belongs to the world of matter and is subject to its laws, and the rational soul, the "human spirit," which is of another order altogether and is not dissolved when the body fails. The powers of the mind — its capacity to grasp abstract truths, to discover the laws of nature, to reach beyond the present moment in memory and foresight — are not, He argues, the mere secretions of the brain; they are the signs of a spirit that the brain serves but does not contain. The reasoning is unhurried, scientific in temper, addressed precisely to the doubts of the man who had raised it.

What is most moving is not the argument itself but its effect. The Word reached him. Auguste Forel, who had written as an unbeliever, was so deeply persuaded by what 'Abdu'l-Bahá had set before him that, near the end of his life, he embraced the Bahá'í Faith and acknowledged the truth of its teachings — the renowned scientist won, at the last, not by pressure or by spectacle, but by a reasoned Word that answered the honest questions of his own mind.

This is why the Tablet to Auguste Forel belongs to a Feast of Words. It shows the transforming power of the revealed utterance reaching into the one territory the world supposes most resistant to it — the mind of a sceptical scientist — and reaching it on its own terms, with patience and with proof. The Cause of God, the Tablet quietly demonstrates, does not ask the seeker to set aside his reason at the door. It meets the reason, and satisfies it, and so opens the way for faith. A man had asked his hardest questions in good faith; the Word answered them; and a life that had closed itself to God was opened.

This is a retelling. For the fuller account, see the text of 'Abdu'l-Bahá's Tablet to Auguste Forel, preserved in Star of the West and reprinted in later Bahá'í collections.

Editors, S. O. T. W.. (1924). *Star of the West*. Bahai News Service. https://bahai-library.com/star_of_the_west_volume_1