Sometimes what is the most evident is also the least expressible or understood. This could be said of Suhrawardi’s description of light: “Since there is nothing more evident than light, there is nothing less in need of definition”1 Light, for Suhrawardi, brings everything into appearance, so it is immediately apparent to anyone who senses it. Rather than being understood through definitions, light must simply be perceived to be known.
Suhrawardi takes the concrete phenomenon of light as the basis for Illuminationist philosophy. Instead of relying on abstractions originating in the human mind, he invokes an element that by its own nature seems to move between concrete and abstract. Light is the starting point for Suhrawardi’s thought because it can be immediately known, and is itself a medium of awareness. He suggests that perception and knowledge are forms of light, an inner illumination identified with the soul.
The continuity between inner and outer light starts to undo the separation between mind and world that philosophy so often struggles with, revealing a relation of presence. This continuity extends to the objects of the world, since Suhrawardi considers them to be darker degrees of light, or dusky substance. And since light radiates from divine realms beyond the material world, it creates a bridge between mundane and transcendent realities. In this way, Suhrawardi presents a cosmology composed entirely of gradients of light.
These gradients allow for a range of intermediate mixtures and movements to emerge, from the transcendental, to the imaginal, to the virtual, to the material. One phenomenon that appears on the ambiguous border of inner and outer is the image. As Jean Baudrillard writes, in words that could have been written by Suhrawardi: “To rediscover the image as point of convergence between the light from the object and the light from the gaze”2 An image forms in the in-between space where reflective light from an outside medium and projective light of an inward soul mix.
A virtual world is an image which immerses us in the element of vision-light. This is why it is so intriguing to imagine, as Eshraq does, what Suhrawardi would make of the virtual. And like Illuminationism, the virtual is often experienced and conceptualized in terms of presence. These correspondences stem from the fact that light moves fluidly across boundaries, and presence, unlike more fixed concepts such as reality, is able to move with it. In Suhrawardi’s thought, presence is the effect of light, and light is the vehicle of presence, to the extent that they could almost be identical.
If Illuminationist presence is the mixture of inner and outer light, what quality of light is it? And what does it illuminate? Perhaps unexpectedly, it is not a universal or transparent light, in that it does not lay bare the real. It is more like a translucent light, which reveals the world through its encounters with the soul. At the same time, it is a mysterious substance that seems to flicker beyond the edges of the mundane world. It is evident yet mystical – a medium of sensation and knowledge that surrounds our thought and interfuses with it, forming an elemental image.
A light like this may seem more like the light of a mythic lantern than the electric light of a screen. A light that does not delineate outlines but gradually unravels them, including through its interplay with darkness and shadows. Such a light may already seem to be rendered imperceptible, overpowered by the harsh light of the real. This raises the question, can the virtual become a medium for generating mystical light? While it might not be capable of this on its own, virtual worlds like Eshraq can aspire to open channels of contact with a luminosity that exceeds materialist forms of reality and technology.
Where gradients of light become a continuum of presence across boundaries of inner and outer, it may lead to the dissolution of the enclosed self. However transient, this ekstasis corresponds with a loosening of the bounds of reality, along with the anonymous appearance of the image. Like light, the presence of this image is evident while not being fully expressible or understood. Perhaps it could be described as a virtual climate between worlds, where souls unravel and begin to entwine with other elements. Or perhaps it must simply be felt as that mystery of light and presence hinted at by the words divine love.