Nature: The Composition and Decomposition of All Things

In the autumn of 1904 a young American Bahá'í named Laura Clifford Barney arrived in 'Akká with a long list of questions. She had been invited by 'Abdu'l-Bahá to take down, in writing, His answers to whatever His Western pilgrims most wished to understand. She would remain on and off in the city, with her notebook, until 1906. The book that resulted — Les Leçons de Saint-Jean d'Acre in the original French, Some Answered Questions in the English translation — opened with the most basic question Laura could think to ask.

She asked Him, simply, what nature was.

The Master's first answer is one of the briefest and most characteristic in the entire book.

Nature is that condition, that reality, which in appearance consists in life and death, or, in other words, in the composition and decomposition of all things.

The compression is striking. In a single sentence the Master sets out the entire material order as the visible appearance of two perpetual movements: things coming together — composition — and things falling apart — decomposition. Birth is the meeting of elements; death is their parting. The seed sprouts: composition. The leaf falls and rots: decomposition. The seed of that leaf sprouts again: composition once more. The entire physical universe, He continues in the chapter that follows, is the ceaseless working of these two motions, and they are not separable. What appears as life is composition; what appears as death is decomposition; the same single process, seen at different moments, gives the whole of what we ordinarily call nature.

The teaching is at one level only a careful philosophy. At another level it is an enormously consoling theology. The death that frightens us, the Master is saying, is not a violation of the natural order. It is part of the natural order. The falling-apart of one composition is the freeing of its elements to enter another. Nothing is finally destroyed; what is described as ending is, viewed at the larger scale, only being re-composed.

The chapter goes on to argue that this whole motion — composition and decomposition together — is not random. It is governed by one universal law. The order observable in the smallest cell is the same order observable in the most distant galaxy. The recurrence of seasons, the symmetry of the elements, the mathematical regularities of the heavens — all bear witness to a single legislating intelligence behind what science observes as mere mechanism.

Laura wrote it down. She filled, over the next two years, a notebook from which she would later assemble Some Answered Questions. Many other questions would follow — about the soul, about the prophets, about Christ, about the future of humanity. But the book opens with this one. The simplest question. Asked by a young American woman in a foreign city. Answered by a man who had lived His whole life in prison. The answer has held its place at the head of one of the great Bahá'í texts ever since.

Source: 'Abdu'l-Bahá, Some Answered Questions (recorded by Laura Clifford Barney, 1904-06), Chapter 1. Public domain text from the Bahá'í Reference Library.

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