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 found in a norm [that is] exterior to the work; it is not found even in the work itself as a whole, but is unceasingly redefined in relation to each text… There is a meaning for every enquirer…, a meaning for each spiritual state which the enquirer is destined to traverse.” Archeology of the Kingdom of God, p. 10.
Many readers struggle with this idea. If meaning is “unceasingly redefined,” then Baha’u’llah’s writings cannot be approached as a closed system of definitions. They cannot be reduced to a single, exhaustive interpretation. And yet this is precisely what many readers expect.
Why?
Because most of us were raised inside a worldview that quietly trains us to feel small. We inherit a picture of the universe in which we are accidental, and consciousness is incidental. Meaning becomes something we arbitrarily project onto the world. This produces a quiet but powerful emotional stance: I am tiny; the universe is enormous; nothing about me is cosmically significant.
Inside this posture, the idea that we might influence meaning — that the text could speak differently to us depending on our inner state — feels implausible, even presumptuous. It contradicts the emotional training of modernity, which insists that the universe is indifferent and that we are incidental.
Baha’i Cosmology: The Human as Purpose
Baha’u’llah reverses this modernist posture entirely. He describes a universe in which creation exists so that a being capable of knowing and loving God can appear. Baha’u’llah writes that God “chose to confer upon man the unique distinction and capacity to know Him and to love Him.” (Gleanings, XXVII) In this view, meaning arises out of the relationship between the Creator and the one capable of recognising Him. Consciousness is not an accident of matter but the axis around which we can understand reality.
Jean-Marc Lepain, in chapter 8 of his Archeology of the Kingdom of God, discusses the concept of the anthropic principle (p. 153): the idea that the universe is knowable because human consciousness exists, not the other way around. From this perspective, the human being is not a negligible speck in an indifferent cosmos. The human is the very reason the universe has meaning at all. As Lepain puts it: if man did not exist, the universe would be impossible, because without consciousness, there is no knower and therefore no known — no relationship, no revelation, no meaning.
Once we understand this anthropic cosmology, the hermeneutic consequence becomes clear. If consciousness is the axis of reality, then meaning cannot be fixed in advance or sealed into a single definition. Meaning must be relational — something that unfolds in response to the one who seeks it. Seen in this way, Baha’u’llah’s language is a mirror: it reflects the reader’s state, not because meaning is arbitrary, but because the universe itself is structured for recognition.
Living Within Relational Meaning
The difficulty many readers have about seeing meaning as relational is due to worldview. We tend to approach the Writings with assumptions shaped by a universe imagined as indifferent and impersonal — a universe in which consciousness is accidental and meaning is something we impose on reality. Within that frame, the idea that revelation might speak differently to us at different stages of our inner life feels foreign. It asks us to inhabit a cosmos that is responsive, relational, and oriented toward recognition.
Baha’u’llah invites us into precisely such a cosmos. His vision assumes that the universe is not a backdrop but a reality shaped so that a being capable of knowing and loving God can appear, grow, and unfold. If this is true, then meaning cannot be a fixed deposit waiting to be extracted. It must be something that meets us and changes as we change. It must be abundant because the soul is in motion.
Seen in this light, Lepain is not proposing a radical new hermeneutic. He is simply taking Baha’u’llah’s cosmology seriously. A universe created for recognition will not offer a single, exhausted meaning. It will offer meanings that open and deepen as the seeker matures. It will offer a text that behaves like a mirror of inner state — not because truth is subjective, but because the relationship between the knower and the known is alive.
Perhaps, then, the real challenge is not accepting that Baha’u’llah’s words are inexhaustible. The real challenge is accepting that we are the kind of beings for whom inexhaustible meaning is possible. To read Baha’u’llah in the spirit Lepain describes is to accept a different understanding of ourselves. We are not incidental observers in an indifferent universe, but participants in a cosmic dialogue unfolding since the beginningless past.