All this address can proceed from Him only insofar as He is a lover. Its like proceeds from those who love Him, exalted is He. The lover is under love’s ruling, not the beloved’s ruling. As for One whose attribute is His very Essence, His Essence rules over Him, nothing additional, so there is no deficiency. Its effect in creatures, however, is dissolution when it becomes firmly established, because the creature admits dissolution. For this reason the cosmos varies in forms. It is in a form, and when love within it becomes excessive, unbeknownst to it, and self-disclosure occurs from where it does not appear, that form dissolves and another form appears within the entity. This form too is like the first in its ruling and returns to Him. The affair continues so perpetually, without ceasing. From here comes the error of one who says that the cosmos must dissolve, and that God’s knowledge of the cosmos has an end, since He described Himself as encompassing them in His knowledge.
It belongs to His generosity, glory be to Him, that He made this reality flow through every possible entity characterized by existence and coupled it with a pleasure above which there is no pleasure. The cosmos’s parts thus loved one another with a restricted love from the reality of unrestricted love. It is said, “So-and-so loved so-and-so,” or “So-and-so loved a certain affair.” There is only an appearance of the Real in one entity loving an appearance of the Real in another entity, whatever it may be. The lover of God does not reproach a lover for loving the one he loves, for he sees no lover but God in some locus of manifestation. One who does not possess this
