An intimation: how God created creation

…rational, then the matter is only as you have heard: the existence of His essence is wisdom itself, and the purpose (gharaḍ) is for His own essence. So do not be of the heedless.

An Influx (wāridah): How God Brought Forth Creation

It is among the primary propositions (al-qaḍāyā al-awwaliyyah) that a leap (ṭafrah) is impossible — that is, your coming to be in a place in which you were not cannot happen by a leap, which is to say without traversing a distance, in whatever manner, from the place in which you were to the one in which you were not; otherwise it would follow that there is no distance, and that you were in it before you were in it. And so it is with everything that has a beginning and an end: the terminus cannot be reached save by traversing the intermediate degrees — and of this sort are subtilization and densification, fewness and manyness, absoluteness and delimitation, and the like; for manyness cannot be realized except by the realization of its units. Something so self-evident will not escape you; at most, the traversal varies in speed and slowness. The ascent, then, from the degree of absoluteness to the furthest degrees of delimitation requires of necessity the traversing of the degrees of delimitation until it reaches the furthest of them; otherwise it would follow that there are no degrees, whereas their existence is the very supposition, as you have learned from the establishment of a starting-point and a terminus. And since it has become clear to you that the existents (al-akwān) are the modes (shuʼūn) of Being, the degrees of its descent and its phases, know that its descent to the utmost limit of delimitation from the degree of utmost absoluteness requires of necessity the traversing of the degrees of the delimitations that lie between the starting-point and the terminus. So the self-disclosure (tajallī) fell upon the degrees of descent — the subtler, then the subtle, and so on to the last of the degrees of descent, which is the hylic, natural world. All the degrees prior to this world are those we name the angels and the enclosing veils (sarādiqāt); some of them we call intellect and some soul. And thus each degree is a talisman (ṭilsam) for the one before it, and the one before it is its reality and its inward, and that which sustains it, on up to the Reality of realities. The nearest of them to Being is what is called the Intellect, since it stands before all the determinations (taʻayyunāt) and is the meeting-place of their overflow from the First Principle; and in the words of the divine Sage — God bless him and grant him peace — “The first thing God Most High created was the Intellect.” The remaining degrees before the human realm (nāsūt) are the universal souls; and their rays, diffused from them into the accidental degrees, are the particular souls. This is what is called the world of the immaterial beings (ʻālam al-mujarradāt).

Then, according to what our reflection has attained and what has come down to us from the Presence of the divine Sage: the universal souls that nurture the world of the human realm, appearing in it in the manner its degree in the descent requires, are four souls. They are the bearers of the Lord’s Throne, which is this world, namely: (a Mīkāʼīlian soul), which is that which compounds every atom of the atoms of existence with another according to what it requires — and this is the universal sustenance (rizq), whence come the general attractions obtaining among the atoms of existence; (an Isrāfīlian soul), through which life comes to be in every atom of the atoms of existence, and from which is the general outpouring of life; (a Jibrāʼīlian soul), which bestows perception upon every atom of the atoms of existence; (an ʻIzrāʼīlian soul), which withdraws the spirit of life from certain atoms of existence for some reason requiring it — that which dissolves some parts from others and vacates some degrees of what had belonged to them, all of this in each thing according to its own measure. Then, just as this takes place among the particular atoms, so does it among the composites: hence the withdrawing of the life of animals by the ʻIzrāʼīlian soul, their sustenance by the Mīkāʼīlian, their life by the Isrāfīlian, and their perception by the Jibrāʼīlian.

As for the Jibrāʼīlian degree: just as instruction proceeds from it to universals and particulars, so too may outward instruction proceed from it, as happened to certain of the sanctified, such as the prophets. This degree is mentioned often upon the divine tongues, and especially upon the tongue of our Prophet — God bless him and grant him peace — for it is reported that he saw him, and he had filled the horizon. This is nothing but a symbol of what we have established and an allusion to what we have made plain. Do not hold such thoughts far-fetched: a people have spoken of the electric fluid in the world, of which nothing appears but its effects, and their speech is true and demonstrated. So do you, for your part, speak of the spiritual fluid in the world.

These degrees are not disjoint, separated one from another; rather, everything is in everything — and the word “in” is a strait expression. Let us return to completing what we are about, and say:

When the degrees of self-disclosure had reached the world of the human realm — and you already knew that the descent is nothing but an expression for Being’s passage through the phases, and that you apprehend nothing of it but motion, though you do not know its modality, the inward being the reality of the outward and the outward its self-disclosure — then all the intelligible things came forth in sensible things in this sensory world, in the manner the degrees of self-disclosure require, and the modeless motion became a motion having a modality. So this world came forth as a single simple thing, in which there was no division