Post #8017

And then the astonishing sentence on love and fire: were all things to taste His love, the mention of fire would not be made. Because some did not prostrate, fire was constituted according to what is in it and upon it. Otherwise all, tasting His love, would be light from light in light unto light upon light. This is magnificent. Hell itself is re-read not as primordial vengeance but as derivative privation of tasted love. Fire is ontological opacity where prostration fails; light is the native element of those who taste the Beloved. This could almost be read as an Ishrāqī transmutation of eschatology into degrees of luminosity. “Light from light in light unto light upon light…” here the Quranic lamp of the Light verse becomes metaphysics. Not ornament, but ontology. Degrees of existence are degrees of Light intensified through participation. Wahid Azal, Commentary on the Exordium of the Persian Bayan