The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly

[This is my just-posted two star Amazon review of Seyyed Hossein Nasr's "Knowledge and the Sacred."]

Seyyed Hossein Nasr, now 85 is an Iranian professor emeritus of Islamic studies at George Washington University. Nasr’s educational background is impressive--BS in physics and MS in geology and geophysics from MIT, and a Ph.D in the history of science and learning from Harvard. Nasr, who has authored over fifty books, specializes in elaborating Traditionalist school’s ideas on metaphysics, Islamic science, religion and the environment, Sufism, and Islamic philosophy.

Per Wikipedia, “The Traditionalist School is a group of 20th- and 21st-century thinkers concerned with what they consider to be the demise of traditional forms of knowledge, both aesthetic and spiritual, within Western society. The principal thinkers in this tradition are René Guénon, Ananda Coomaraswamy and Frithjof Schuon. Other important thinkers in this tradition include Titus Burckhardt, Martin Lings, Jean-Louis Michon, Marco Pallis, Huston Smith, Hossein Nasr, Dragoš Kalajić, Jean Borella, and Julius Evola. A central belief of this school is the existence of a perennial wisdom, or perennial philosophy, which says that there are primordial and universal truths which form the source for, and are shared by all the major world religions.”

Because I hope to someday write a book on the perennial philosophy, this book was of particular interest to me. But because I’m not a fan of the Traditionalist POV--I have low regard for Fritzjof Schuon, whom Nasr adores--I knew I was not going to vibe with all of Nasr’s beliefs and arguments.

There is a lot to like in this book, which I’ll call the Good. Nasr, rightly IMO, criticizes what he describes as “the secularization and profanation of the very act and process of knowing.” Man is more than “the rational animal,” but because gnosis has been all but expunged from modern education, while episteme has been apotheosized, man as the anthropos has been reduced to man as the materialist.

Nasr writes, “The eclipse of natural theology has also been accompanied by casting into oblivion of the essentially sacred character of both logical and mathematical laws, which are aspects of Being itself and one, might say, the “ontology of the human microcosm.’” This desacralization of knowledge, the loss of the sapiential dimension of intellection, has had wide-ranging negative sociocultural ramifications, which he elaborates.

I particularly like Nasr’s description of the relation between the mind and the spiritul heart. He writes: “What tradition opposes is not the activity of the mind but its divorce from the heart, the seat of intelligence and the location of the “eye of knowledge,” which is none other than the “third eye” of the Hindu tradition. It is this eye which transcends duality and the rational functioning of the mind based upon analysis and which perceives the unity that is at once the origin and end of the multiplicity perceived by the mind and the mind’s own power to analyze and know discursively. That is why the Sufis chant: ‘Open the eye of the heart so that thou wilst see the Spirit so that wilst see that which cannot be seen.’”

Nasr also provide some inspiring quotes, such as this one by Rumi: “The result of my life can be summarized in three words; I was immature, I matured and I was consumed.”

Now the Bad in Nasr’s exposition. Nasr displays a lack of a deep understanding of religions other than Islam. Here is a world-renowned professor, purportedly an expert on the esoteric commonality of the Great Spiritual Traditions, and he hasn’t “cracked the code” regarding Judaism, Buddhism, Christianity, or Hinduism. For example, regarding Kabbalah, in his notes, he writes: “Jewish esotericism also speaks in an erotic language when discussing the three Sefiroth, Chachma, Binah, Da’ath, together abbreviated as Chabad, which are wisdom, understanding, and knowledge in both the principal, Divine Order and in the human microcosm considered in its totality. Chachma is considered as the father, Binah as the mother, and Da,ath as the son born of their union.” The cognoscenti reject this analysis. They understand that the ‘knowledge” that stems from Da’ath is a result of its union with Kether, the real “Father.” Regarding Buddhism, he writes, “At the heart of Buddhism, therefore, lies knowledge that was to lead to the elaborate metaphysics of the Void which is the foundation of the whole of Buddhism and which was championed by Nagarjuna.” Unbeknownst to Nasr, the Buddha rejected the Void as Nirvana; and Nagarjuna, the great subverter/perverter of original (Pali) Buddhism, never elaborated a metaphysics of the Void, but only described all things as empty. Moreover, if all things are empty, then no thing is sacred, meaning that Nagarjuna’s Madhyamika Buddhism diametrically opposes the “doctrine of the sacred” propagated by Nasr and his fellow Traditionalists. But Nasr, egregiously, fail to consider this. Regarding Christianity, Nasr doesn’t even mention the Holy Spirit, and he displays no real understanding of the Trinity. He writes: “If a Christian sees God as the Trinity or Christ as the Logos and holds to to this belief in an absolute sense, this is perfectly understandable from the religious point of view while, metaphysically speaking, these are seen as the relatively absolute since only the Godhead in its Infinitude and Oneness is above all relativity.” Unbeknownst to Nasr, the Trinity, which never enters spacetime, is the Godhead, and is simply a three-Dimensional explanation of it. Regarding Hinduism, Nasr has nothing to say about tantricism, which is sad, because its antinomianism, like Zen’s, challenges Traditionalist ideas of sacredness.

Another Bad in Nasr’s book is his one-dimensional dissing of Promethean Man, which he does while elevating Pontifical man. He writes: “The concept of man as the pontiff, pontifex, or bridge between heaven and earth, which is the traditional view of the anthropos, lies at the antipode of the modern conception of man which envisages him as the Promethean earthly creature who has rebelled against Heaven and tried to misappropriate the role of the Divinity for himself. Pontifical man, who, in the sense used here, is none other than traditional man, lives in a world which has both an Origin and a Center. He lives in full awareness of the Origin which contains his own perfection and whose primordial purity and wholeness he seeks to emulate, recapture, and transmit…Promethean man, on the contrary, is a creature of the world. He feels at home on earth, earth not considered as the virgin nature which is itself an echo of paradise, but an artificial world created by Promethean man himself in order to make it possible for him to forget God and his own inner reality.”

Nasr continues: “From an intellectual point of view the main stages in the process of the disfiguration of pontifical man into the Promethean can be traced to the late Middle Ages because they include the excessively rigid Aristotelianization of Western thought in the thirteenth century identified by some with Averroes. This” exteriorization” of Christian thought was followed by the secularization of the science of the cosmos in the seventeenth century, itself a result of the “naturalization” of Christian man as a well-contented citizen of the world.”

No friend of the Renaissance, Nasr writes: “The other elements which brought about the destruction of the image of pontifical man and helped the birth of that Promethean rebel with whom modern man usually identifies himself were mostly associated with the phenomena of the Renaissance itself and its aftermath or had its roots in the late medieval period. These factors include the destruction of the unity and hierarchy of knowledge which resulted from the eclipse of the sapiential dimension of tradition in the West.”

Nasr’s father, an Iranian doctor, sent him, at the age of 13, to the U.S. to receive an education that was unavailable to him in Iran. Why couldn’t a traditional Muslim country provide him with a higher education on par with that in the Promethean West? The bottom line, which Nasr fails to grok, is that the Promethean world of the West, while providing the best in “non-sapiential” education, in no way obstructs the availability and propagation of sapiential wisdom. But the fact is that relatively few are open to this wisdom, and even fewer are capable of intelligently communicating it. The truth, which Nasr fails to acknowledge, is that traditional religions throughout history and even today have censored and obstructed the advancement and propagation of secular knowledge that does not accord with their so-called “sacred” doctrines. And what’s really Bad is that these “sacred” doctrines are NOT sacred at all, but are created by flawed humans with limited understanding and often less than “Godly” motives.

The Bad in Nasr’s book segues into the Ugly when Nasr makes it clear that he considers Shariah Law as “Divine Laws brought by prophets and the Divine Law which govern creation.” He considers Muhammad to be the Divine prophet of Muslim, and he doesn’t have a single thing to say about the abominable aspects of Quranic Islam--that it advocates terrorism and is incompatible with secular forms of government, human (especially women’s) rights, and freedom of thought.

To sum: The Bad and the Ugly outweigh the Good in this book. The dogmatic flaws of the Traditional School are on full display in Nasr’s text, and though part of me, because of my disdain for Islam, would like to give the book just a single star, I’m giving it two because of the Good it offers.