Burning cold in the fallen matter

Meaning

The inflected phrase describes the fallen matter’s paradoxical condition without light. It would have continued to coagulate and harden, the narrator says, had God not restored a ray of divine light and moderated its moving sharpness. The supplied edition retains the paradox as part of the speculative cosmogony. It should neither be silently corrected to burning heat nor treated as an already established modern physical state.