Angels Made of Light in Illuminationist Cosmology

Where Peripatetic philosophy populated the space between God and the material world with a strict, linear chain of ten separate intellects, Suhrawardi replaced that architecture with a cosmology built entirely out of light, graded by intensity rather than arranged in a fixed sequence of discrete beings. At the summit sits the Light of Lights, pure and self subsisting illumination from which every other light in existence derives, growing progressively dimmer and more differentiated the further a given light stands from that source, with ordinary material bodies understood as the point where light has become most obscured by darkness. The intellects of Peripatetic cosmology reappear in Suhrawardi's system as a vast horizontal array of what he called the lords of species, archetypal lights he explicitly identified with the angels of Zoroastrian and Quranic tradition alike, each ordinary kind of thing on earth answering to its own governing light above it, a deliberate fusion of pre-Islamic Persian angelology with the philosophical vocabulary falsafa had inherited from the Greeks. Human knowing, on this picture, is itself a kind of illumination: the soul is a fragment of light temporarily obscured by its attachment to a body, and mystical experience is what happens when disciplined practice thins that obscuration and lets the soul's own light apprehend other lights directly, knowledge by presence rather than knowledge assembled from definitions. Suhrawardi presented this entire architecture as a recovery of an ancient wisdom he believed had passed from the sages of Persia through the Greeks and into Islamic philosophy, rather than an invention of his own.