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 playing the same game those philosophers were playing. He isn’t. Once we allow ourselves to put aside past ideas and just listen to what Baha’u’llah says, then a brand new idea emerges — a challenging and unexpected one: the idea that “theosophy” describes Baha’u’llah’s philosophy far better than any of the usual labels.
Two selves, and a border reason can’t cross
Classical systems share one assumption, whatever they disagree about otherwise: reason is the instrument of knowledge. You reflect, argue, and analyze your way to the truth about reality. Plato, Aristotle, and Ibn Sina disagree about plenty, but not about that.
Lepain points out that Baha’u’llah doesn’t share this assumption because it doesn’t fit with the way human beings have been created. Humans operate on two levels of reality, not one. There is the lower self, which is essentially a nature rooted entirely in the natural world. Reason — in the sense of analysis, investigation, and logic — was built for investigating nature, and works on this layer perfectly well. But there is also the higher self whose reality is spiritual, existing in a transcendent world that nature doesn’t contain. Reason, which is great for investigating the natural world, has no jurisdiction there. It isn’t that the spiritual self is irrational, for it has its own kind of reasoning. It’s just that the spiritual self is outside the territory that reason was ever equipped to survey.
This is not a claim that rational thought is unimportant, or that ideas don’t matter. It’s a claim that reason has no jurisdiction in a transcendent world at all — not that it gets partway there and runs out of road, but that this is simply not its territory to enter.
What theosophy actually is
This is where Lepain’s word comes in, and it’s worth being precise about what he means by it, since “theosophy” gets used loosely elsewhere. He means it in an older, technical sense: a system built from three elements, working together, that are suited to the self that reason can’t reach.
The first is gnosis, by which he means a spiritual knowledge that comes about not through study but through a person’s own inner transformation. You don’t get closer to it by learning more facts. You get closer to it by becoming a different kind of person. The second is a hermeneutic or interpretation of things, including the Word of God. This does not refer to a scholarly textual analysis of what a passage means. It refers to a mode of reading where scripture only opens up in proportion to the reader’s own spiritual condition. The same verse can stay closed to one person and open completely for another, and the difference isn’t intelligence. The third aspect to theosophy is a philosophy of nature that reads the physical world not as raw material for science, but as a sign of God. The heavens, the sun, the ordinary architecture of the sky, speak directly to the onlooker, rather than simply existing for people to measure.
None of these three stands on its own. A theosophy doesn’t ask “what exists” and then separately ask “how do we interpret scripture” and separately again ask “what is nature.” It treats all three as facets of a single inquiry, each one incomplete without the others. Together, they’re the instruments suited to the spiritual self specifically — the self classical philosophy was never built to reach.
Isn’t this just subjectivism?
A natural worry arises for Baha’i readers: doesn’t personal interpretation open the door to everyone deciding scripture means whatever they want it to mean?
Baha’u’llah himself seems to have anticipated this, and he built in real limits. He explicitly walls off two domains from personal interpretation altogether: the station of the Prophets, and the laws he revealed. Those aren’t up for private reinterpretation by anyone. And even within the narrower territory that remains open — writings like the Hidden Words or the Seven Valleys, which speak to inner states rather than laws — he adds a second safeguard. A personal reading carries no authority over anyone else. Lepain gives the example of Baha’i “deepenings,” informal gatherings where everyone reads a passage from the Hidden Words aloud and each person shares what it opens up in them, without the group debating or contesting each other’s readings.
A person’s private encounter with a verse is never in competition with the authority that governs law and collective affairs, because it is not the same kind of activity. One is a claim about what’s true or binding for a community. The other is not a claim at all — it’s an event that happens inside a person, answerable to no one, on the same level as their private grief or joy.
Legitimizing the inner spiritual life
If, as Lepain is suggesting, Baha’u’llah’s system of thought is more a theosophy than a classical philosophy, then doctrine, law, and rules for community life were never meant to constitute the whole of a person’s religious life. Baha’u’llah built, deliberately, a protected space for something else — a private, inner register of engagement with his Word that answers to nothing but the state of the person having it. That space isn’t a lesser, unofficial version of belief, tolerated while the real business happens elsewhere. It’s the core mechanism designed to drive a person’s entire religious experience, in this world and in the transcendent world we also inhabit.
That’s worth deep consideration, especially for anyone who has quietly assumed their spiritual life is measured entirely by their visible participation in the community. Baha’u’llah, on this account, wanted something else for you too — something no one else can see, no one else can grant, and no one else can take away.
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Material in this post is drawn from chapter 8, “Hermeneutic and Theosophy of the Divine Worlds,” in Jean-Marc Lepain’s The Archeology of the Kingdom of God, pp. 151–170.