feu (de l’enfer)

Fire (of hell): Many people today think in such terms as these: “either God exists, or He does not; if He exists and is what people say He is, then He will recognize that we are good and do not deserve punishment.” This means that they are prepared to believe in His existence provided He conforms to their own imaginings and recognizes the value they attribute to themselves. This is to forget on the one hand that we cannot know the standards by which the Absolute judges us, and on the other that the “fire” beyond the tomb is after all nothing but our own intellect^? which actualizes itself in opposition to our falseness; in other words, it is the immanent truth breaking forth into the full light^? of day. At death man is confronted by the unimaginable expanse of a reality no longer fragmentary but total and then by the norm of what he has pretended to be, since that norm is part of Reality. Man therefore condemns himself; according to the Quran, it is his members themselves which accuse him; once beyond the realm of lies, his violations are transformed into flames; nature, out of balance and falsified, with all its vain assurance proves to be a shirt of Nessus. Man burns not only for his sins; he burns for his majesty as an image of God. It is the preconceived idea^? of setting up the fallen state as a norm and ignorance as a pledge of impunity which the Quran stigmatizes with vehemence – one might almost say by anticipation – by confronting the self-assurance of its contradictors with the terrors of the end of the world . . . The human state, or any other analogous central state, is as it were surrounded by a ring of fire: in it there is only one choice, either to escape from the current of forms upwards, towards God, or else to leave the human state downwards through the fire, the fire which is like the sanction of the betrayal on the part of those who have not realized the divine meaning of the human condition. If “the human state is difficult to obtain,” as is held by Asiatic believers in transmigration, it is – by reason of its centrality and theomorphic majesty – equally hard to leave. Men go to the fire because they are gods and they come out of the fire because they are but creatures: God alone could go to hell eternally – if He could sin. Or again: the human state is very near to the divine Sun, if we can at all speak of proximity in such a connection; the fire is the possible ransom – in reverse – of that privileged situation, how privileged can be gauged by the intensity and inextinguishability of the fire. From the gravity of hell we must infer the grandeur of man, and not conversely infer from the seeming innocence of man the supposed injustice of hell. [GTUFS: UIslam, The Quran]