18. Enlightening Fire (1)

He said, “I cause My punishment to fall on whom I will. And My Benevolence embraces everything.” (Q7:156)

قَالَ عَذَابِي أُصِيبُ بِهِ مَنْ أَشَاءُ وَرَحْمَتِي وَسِعَتْ كُلَّ شَيْءٍ

As I have said before, the Names of GOD are only various ways of describing what is ultimately a single Reality, one that we are unable to grasp in any way other than partially. Qualities such as Merciful, Knowing, and Powerful, however different their meanings for us, are actually coextensive and coincident, for there is no variety or division in the Unicity of GOD.* So when we come to the kindled Fire of GOD, which represents His Wrath, we are really talking about His Mercy, but in a form that terrifies and pains us for as long as we do not accept it as Mercy.

And so it is that the parable (likeness) of Light in (Q24:35) begins with His Light but ends with fire . . . a progression I have followed in elaborating on GOD as Light in Chapter 2 and arriving here, at the end of Part II, with Hell as Enlightening Fire. Just as GOD’s Mercy precedes and overcomes His Wrath, so does His Light come before and then subsume His Fire. His Benevolence embraces everything, and His Light, likewise, illuminates the heavens and the earth, i.e., all created things, including Hell. Fire itself is a form of Divine Light, and embodies both luminescence and warmth, the latter of which serves for many as their first experience of Love. Darkness is the absence of light, as evil is the absence of good, but Hell is neither itself evil nor completely dark. It is, rather, where the wrongdoers come to say absarna, i.e. we have seen (Q32:12). Their first sight of Hell, insufficient though it proves to be, is illuminated by its flames.

Before discussing the parable directly, we need to remember that the Light referred to here is supersensory Light. The physical light that appears in various forms in the parable is the symbol of a higher, more refined reality that we ‘see’ with our hearts and minds, not our eyes. GOD makes this clear at the end of the same verse:

يَهْدِي اللَّهُ لِنُورِهِ مَنْ يَشَاءُ وَيَضْرِبُ اللَّهُ الأَمْثَالَ لِلنَّاسِ وَاللَّهُ بِكُلِّ شَيْءٍ عَلِيمٌ

GOD guides to His Light whom He wills. And GOD makes parables for mankind. And GOD is Knower of all things. (Q24:35)

In other words, His Light is the Knowledge by which He comprehends all things, and which He shares with mankind by His Guidance, conveyed through analogies and symbols.

*To help conceptualize this paradox of how we perceive GOD’s Absolute Oneness through a variety of names and descriptions, and finally in the divine aspect of every created being, consider a solar system in which planets revolve around the sun, symbolizing God, at various distances. At ground zero, i.e. the sun’s own location, there is no distance from the light, no perspective, and hence no difference. Now imagine at each interval in a planet’s orbit around the sun, the view changes, but the difference in perspective is not recognized as such, but instead attributed to the sun itself. A planet close to the sun has a more ‘accurate’ view of the sun and, because its orbit is smaller, has fewer ‘perspectives’ to report. The denizens of a distant planet, on the other hand, with an attenuated view, greater interference in the light emitted by the sun because of the greater distance, and a larger variety of perspectives over the course of a longer period, will tend to see the sun as more multiform and have more detail to describe. The details actually reflect the ‘experience’ the planet’s people are having rather than the true nature of the sun. Observers on distant planets will also give more notice to the presence of other stars, since their horizons are not dominated by sunlight to the same extent as planets further in with tighter orbits.

In the same way, each Name of GOD represents the aspect of Him we experience at a certain point in our circumambulation around Him, the Centre of our existence. We attribute to Him the Names we use because of our diverse perspectives. These Names help us keep our attention focused on His Light. But that Light is an Indivisible Unity, which He has enabled us to safely enjoy at length and in various hues and intensities, each according to his or her distance from His Essence. At this time, in our present state of unpreparedness, if we were to approach too closely in our orbit, we could be annihilated.