By the gift we mean Jesus, the Spirit of God, from Gabriel’s saying to Mary, “That I may bestow upon you a pure boy” [Maryam 19:19]. A report relates that the Messenger of God, God’s blessings and peace be upon him, was asked, “Where was our Lord before He created His creatures?” The Messenger of God, God’s blessings and peace be upon him, replied, “He was in a Cloud, with no air above it and no air beneath it.” We have previously mentioned the report of the Cloud, and that the forms of the world opened within it.
What proof establishes is that everything other than God is newly originated: it was not, then it was. Proof thus denies anything other than God being within the being of the Real, who is necessarily existent through His Essence. Bringing into existence belongs perpetually to God Most High, and passive reception belongs perpetually to possible things. Possible things are the world. Generation thus continues perpetually, and entities appear perpetually. The void’s extension therefore continues without end, because the entities of possible things come into existence without end, and through their entities they inhabit only the void.
By our earlier statement, “The world has inhabited nothing but the void,” we mean that it cannot inhabit a plenum, because the plenum is what inhabits, and so does not inhabit within a plenum. There is nothing but plenum or void. The world is therefore forever being renewed, and the Hereafter has no end.
(This World, the Hereafter, and the Duration of Residence)
Without us, neither “this world” nor “Hereafter” would be said. One would simply speak of possible things that have existed and will exist, as the matter actually stands. But when we, among created possible things, inhabited particular places for an appointed term from the time our entities appeared—we being forms among the forms of the world—we called that setting the Abode of This World,
Notes
Translator’s note: The Arabic mā in the Cloud report permits a negative reading, “no air above or beneath it,” or a relative reading, “what is above and beneath it is air.” The negative reading is used here without resolving that ambiguity.
