The Tablet of Wisdom: Bahá'u'lláh on Philosophy

Among the Tablets of Bahá'u'lláh's later 'Akká period treated extensively by Adib Taherzadeh in the fourth volume of The Revelation of Bahá'u'lláh is the Lawḥ-i-Ḥikmat — the Tablet of Wisdom — addressed by Bahá'u'lláh to Nabíl-i-Akbar of Khurásán, the great learned Bábí scholar then resident in Egypt.

The Tablet was composed in the late 1870s or early 1880s. Its principal subject is the proper relation between divine Revelation and the inheritance of human philosophy. The Tablet was occasioned by a question Nabíl had submitted regarding the place that the Greek and Persian philosophical traditions should occupy in the intellectual life of the believers.

Bahá'u'lláh's response is substantial. He surveys the principal figures of the ancient philosophical tradition — Empedocles, Pythagoras, Hippocrates, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle — and treats each with careful attention. He notes that the philosophers of Greece received their illumination, in His reckoning, from the prophets of Israel — the historical sequence by which philosophical inquiry in the ancient Mediterranean world was nourished by exposure to the prophetic tradition of the eastern Mediterranean.

The Tablet's treatment is not a simple ranking of revelation above philosophy. It is, in Taherzadeh's commentary, a more nuanced account of the cooperation of the two faculties. Revelation furnishes the soul with the principles that philosophy alone cannot derive. Philosophy, working from the principles received, develops the implications and applications that revelation does not exhaustively detail. The two faculties are partners, not rivals.

The Tablet then addresses the specific question of the divine philosophy — the philosophy that, in Bahá'u'lláh's framing, the Bahá'í community is being asked to develop in the post-revelatory period. This divine philosophy will, in time, integrate the inheritance of the ancient and medieval philosophical traditions with the fresh principles of the Bahá'í Revelation. It will produce, across centuries, the comprehensive intellectual culture that the Bahá'í Dispensation is destined to bring forth.

Taherzadeh devotes substantial attention to the Tablet's treatment of the question of the eternity of the universe. This had been one of the great disputed questions of medieval Islamic philosophy. Bahá'u'lláh's treatment in the Tablet reframes the question by distinguishing between the necessary eternity of the divine creative activity and the contingent particularity of any given created world. The framing draws from the philosophical tradition while transcending its earlier categories.

The Tablet closes with a benediction on Nabíl-i-Akbar himself and a brief practical exhortation. The recipient is asked to undertake the work of teaching the Cause among the educated classes of the Persian and Egyptian communities to which his learning gives him natural access. The cultivated minds of the era, Bahá'u'lláh observes, will be brought to the Cause by patient intellectual exposition more than by emotional appeal. Nabíl is identified as one of the principal instruments of that exposition.

The Tablet has been, in subsequent Bahá'í intellectual life, one of the foundational documents for the community's engagement with philosophy and with the intellectual inheritance of the human race. It is read often by Bahá'í scholars and by interested non-Bahá'í academic philosophers as a singularly substantial example of a religious revelation engaging seriously with the philosophical tradition.

Paraphrased from The Revelation of Bahá'u'lláh, Vol. 4 — Mazra'ih and Bahjí 1877-92 (Adib Taherzadeh, George Ronald, 1987); see original for full text.

Taherzadeh, A.. (1987). *The Revelation of Bahá'u'lláh (Vol. 4 — Mazra'ih and Bahjí 1877-92)*. George Ronald.