/lit/ - Literature

>In declaring, "The Intelligence is one with eternal Time," Nasir Khosrow is also slating the secret of the speculative Ismaili cosmology: the eternal birth of the pleroma from the Ibda (eternal Existentiation), formed of archangelical hypostases originating in the first among them. This world is not of an immutability and immobility presenting a simple contrast to the perishability of sensuous things; there are Events in Heaven, archetypal Events preceding the Creation of things, and these Events are the very genesis of being. This ontological mystery is circumscribed by Nasir in three words (azal ازل, azaliyat ازلیت, azali ازلی) the nuances of which we should have some difficulty in translating if the author, even though writing in Persian, did not relate them to Arabic paradigms. Thus we have an eternally-being (azal) as nomen agentis (present participle fa'il فاعل); an eternal actuation of being (azaliyat) as nomen verbi (noun of action, fi'l فعل); an eternally being made-to-be (azali) as nomen patientis (past participle, maf'ul مفعول). The text is marvelously abstruse, but it discloses the following: by being eternally, the eternally-being (azal) actuates precisely its own being-that-has-become —its being which has eternally been— that is to say, which is eternally made-to-be by its own act of being. We must bear in mind that in terms of Ismaili philosophy the eternally-being constitutes the supreme godhead, absolutely unknowable and unpredicable. But what this godhead is eternally in actuating its being, in revealing it, is the first archangelical hypostasis (al-mobda 'al-awwal المبدع الاول), its eternal Personification, its very Ipseity, the Only One forever being revealed. This Archangel is the Deus Determinatus (al-Lah الله) to such a point that all the predicates which the exoteric religions would focus on the supreme godhead should actually be applied to this divine Epiphany within the First Intelligence ('Aql awwal عقل اول).

just in awe of this gnosis lads

Oblomov