Baha’i philosophers keep returning to one question: where does Baha’u’llah’s thought belong? Is he closer to Plato or Aristotle, or to the Islamic philosophers such as Ibn Sina (Avicenna)? Jean-Marc Lepain, in his study The Archeology of the Kingdom of God, argues that this debate is asking the wrong question because it assumes Baha’u’llah is…
Category: Lepain Study
Lepain Study gathers all website material, such as blog posts and links, related to Alison’s ongoing study of Jean-Marc Lepain’s groundbreaking examination of Baha’u’llah’s philosophy, titled “Archeology of the Kingdom of God.” All documents related to Alison’s study are held at her Patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/c/AlisonElizabethMarshall.
Lepain Chapter Summaries and Essays
This page gathers summaries of the chapters in Lepain’s Archaeology of the Kingdom of God. The summaries are written sequentially, chapter by chapter, for readers who wish to follow the structure of the book closely. Both these summaries and their accompanying essays use technical language where needed, with definitions provided throughout to support readers new…
Lepain Section Essays
This page gathers short essays on the ideas in each section of Lepain’s Archeology of the Kingdom of God. The essays are titled by chapter, section, and paragraph, and written for a general audience. Readers seeking full chapter summaries will find these in the Lepain Chapter Summaries and Essays collection, where the material is presented…
Extracting Baha’u’llah’s Hidden Originality from Traditional Terminology
Why Baha’u’llah cannot be interpreted through an inherited lens In the introduction to The Archeology of the Kingdom of God, Jean‑Marc Lepain argues that scholars have misunderstood Baha’u’llah’s use of classical terminology. Many assume that when Baha’u’llah employs the vocabulary of Islamic philosophy and mysticism, he is using those terms with their inherited meanings and…
The Emergence of the Imaginal World and the Creative Imagination
Some ideas change the way we understand revelation, the life of the soul, and the nature of meaning itself. The imaginal world and the creative imagination are two such ideas. Chapter 4 of Jean‑Marc Lepain’s Archeology of the Kingdom of God explores their emergence, and this post offers a simple introduction to the fascinating history…
Reading in a Universe That Reads You Back
Living Within Relational Meaning Across recent blog reflections, I’ve returned to one central idea: Baha’u’llah’s meaning is not fixed, static, or singular, but unfolds according to the spiritual state of the reader. Jean-Marc Lepain sets out this position in the following way: “The definition of the metaphysical and mystical terms utilized by Baha’u’llah is not…
Two Ways of Seeing Reality: Being and Meaning
In chapter 1 of Archeology of the Kingdom of God, Jean-Marc Lepain reframes three key terms: ontology, hermeneutics, and cosmology. In this post, I explain how he combines them into two complementary ways of understanding the divine worlds or two ways of seeing reality. Finally, we consider why this matters for reading Baha’u’llah’s writings. Three…
Infusing Civilization from Within: A Mystical Prelude to Social Order
In answer to the question, “How do we help God?” Baha’u’llah offers an unusual response. He says we must first become virtuous people, and only then seek to move the hearts of others through the all-pervasive power of his words. He forbids his followers from contending over worldly concerns, pointing out that the world isn’t…
The Hermeneutics of Spirit: Baha’u’llah’s Symbolic Approach to Meaning
The Hermeneutics of Spirit. What does it mean to read a text spiritually—not just for information, but for transformation? In my blog, A Landscape of Light: Understanding the Kingdom of Abha, I introduced my new project exploring Jean-Marc Lepain’s study on Baha’u’llah’s philosophy: Archeology of the Kingdom of God. I began the project with chapter…
A Landscape of Light: Understanding the Kingdom of Abha
Over the past few years, I’ve begun a contemplative study of Jean-Marc Lepain’s Archeology of the Kingdom of God, a philosophical work that explores Baha’u’llah’s metaphysics in depth. It’s a complex and thoughtful book that examines the architecture of spiritual reality and the soul’s unfolding within it. Rather than summarizing the entire work, I’ve decided…