The Need for a Sacred Science OTHER WORKS BY IN ENGLISH Three Muslim Sages Ideals and of Islam An Introduction to Islamic Cosmological Doctrines Science and Civilization in Islam An Annotated Bibliography of Islamic Science (3 vols.) Man and Nature: The Spiritual Crisis of Modern Man Islam and the Plight of Modern Man Islamic Science: An Illustrated Study The Transcendent Theosophy of Sadr al-Din Shirazi Islamic Life and Thought Knowledge and the Sacred Islamic Art and Spirituality Traditional Islam in the Modern World The Islamic of Science Sufi Essays The Essential Writings of (editor) Shi‘ism (editor) Expectation of the Millennium (editor) Islamic Spirituality—Foundations (editor) Islamic Spirituality—Manifestations (editor) The Need for a Sacred Science

Seyyed Hossein Nasr Paperback edition First published in the United Kingdom by Curzon Press Ltd. St John’s Studios Church Road Richmond Surrey TW9 2QA This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” ISBN 0-203-99059-5 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN - (Adobe eReader Format) ISBN 0 7007 0281 4 (Print Edition)

All rights reserved © Seyyed Hossein Nasr 1993 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A CIP record of this title is available on request from the British Library Contents

Introduction 1

Part One —The World of the Spirit—A Metaphysical Context for the Cultivation of Sacred Science 1. God is 5 2. Self-awareness and Ultimate Selfhood 9 3. Time—The Moving Image of Eternity 14

Part Two —The Unity of the Divine Stratosphere— The Diversity of the Human Atmosphere 4. One is the Spirit and Many its Human Reflections— Thoughts on the Human Condition Today 24 5. The Philosophia Perennis and the Study of Religion 28

Part Three —Science: Traditional and Modern 6. Western Science and Asian Cultures 37 7. The Traditional Sciences 49 8. The Spiritual Significance of Nature 60

Part Four —Tradition, Sacred Science and the Modern Predicament 9. Sacred Science and the Environmental Crisis— An Islamic Perspective 65 10. The Concept of Human Progress through Material Evolution: A Traditional Critique 74 11. Reflections on the Theological Modernism of Hans Küng 79

Postscript—The Need for a Sacred Science 86 Index 88 Bismi’Llāh al-Ra mān al-Ra īm Introduction

Our Lord! Thou Embracest all things in mercy and knowledge! (Quran XL.7)

The very term ‘sacred science’ may appear contradictory to those for whom ‘science’ is identified with that particular mode of knowledge which has come to monopolize almost completely the term science since the seventeenth century in the West. Science, thus understood, has by definition nothing to do with the sacred, a term which is meaningless in its worldview, while what is called sacred, to the extent that this category still possesses meaning in the contemporary world, seems to have little to do with science. Even if the term sacred science is used from time to time, it is in relation to ancient civilizations and bygone days. It appears, therefore, even more strange that one should speak of the need for a sacred science in a world where not everyone understands what is meant by sacred science and fewer still are aware of its absence and therefore have a conscious sense of need for such a science. And yet there does in reality exist a profound need for a sacred science in a world which, having lost such a science, is groping in the dark for many false substitutes and also suffers grievously from the lack of such a science even if it remains unaware of the causes for this suffering. We have had occasion to deal extensively with the relation between knowledge and the sacred in several of our other writings1 and do not wish to repeat here the metaphysical principles which relate knowing and being as well as knowing and the sacred which is the direct manifestation of Being in becoming, of the Eternal in the temporal. What we wish to do here is to discuss what we mean by sacred science before delving into the various aspects and branches of sacred science in itself and in its relation to modem thought. There is first of all the Supreme Science or , as understood traditionally, which deals with the Divine Principle and Its manifestations in the light of that Principle. It is what one might call scientia sacra in the highest meaning of the term. It is the science which lies at the very center of man’s being as well as at the heart of all orthodox and authentic religions and which is attainable by the intellect, that supernaturally natural faculty with which normal human beings of an intellectual bent, whose inner faculties have not become atrophied by the deformations caused by the modern world, are endowed.2 This principial knowledge is by nature rooted in the sacred, for it issues from that Reality which constitutes the Sacred as such. It is a knowledge which is also being, a unitive knowledge which transcends ultimately the dichotomy between the object and the subject in that Unity which is the source of all that is sacred and to which the experience of the sacred leads those who are able to reach the abode of that Unity. The term sacred science is of course nothing other than the English translation of the Latin scientia sacra; yet it is used in this and certain other works not as metaphysical knowledge itself but as the application of metaphysical principles to the macrocosm as well as the microcosm, to the natural as well as the human worlds. Sacred science is science as the term is used today to the extent that it too deals with various domains of nature in addition to the psyche of man, his art and thought and human society. But it differs drastically from science as currently understood in that it has its roots and principles in metaphysics or scientia sacra and never leaves the world of the sacred in contrast to modern science whose very premises, immersed in empiricism and rationalism, have their nexus severed from any knowledge of a higher order, despite the fact that the findings of modern science, to the extent that they correspond to an aspect of reality, cannot but possess a meaning beyond the phenomenal. But those meanings cannot themselves be understood and interpreted save in the light of metaphysical principles and the sacred sciences, including the science of symbolism, which derive from the Supreme Science. For all intents and purposes the sacred sciences are none other than the traditional sciences cultivated in traditional civilizations,3 if these sciences are understood in the light of their cosmological and metaphysical significance and not as either crude and elementary background for the rise of the modern quantitative sciences or as superstitious old wives’ tales to be relegated to the domain of historical relics or occultism. Today, precisely because of the thirst for other modes of knowledge and in the light of the fact that only one science of nature is officially recognized in the mainstream of Western 2 THE NEED FOR A SACRED SCIENCE modern thought, many of the traditional sciences are avidly cultivated in a truncated and often mutilated fashion which makes them veritable superstitions. And yet the very proliferation of the remnants of the traditional or sacred sciences, ranging from various schools of medicine to geomancy, usually without regard for their cosmological principles and the sacred worldview to which they belong and within which they alone possess meaning, is itself proof of the present need for a veritable sacred science. The essays which follow seek to present certain aspects of sacred science, or one might say some but not all of the different sacred sciences in the context of not one but many spiritual and intellectual traditions and with references to civilizations as far apart as the Chinese and the Western. In part one we return to first principles to begin with two essays concerned with the nature of God and the Spirit, essays which technically belong to scientia sacra as defined above. These essays are followed by a study on Eternity and time, a subject which again belongs to the domain of metaphysics but also concerns any science dealing with the domain of contingency and change. These studies are followed in part two by two essays which consider the basic question of the multiplicity of sacred forms and religious universes. This consideration is necessary both because the traditional religious boundaries have lost their old meaning to a considerable degree and have gained another significance today as a result of the advent of modernism, and also because one of the important branches of the sacred sciences in the contemporary context is precisely the science of forms and symbols as understood in a global and multireligious context. Comparative religious studies can succeed in avoiding the pitfalls of relativism and secularism and the danger of destroying the sacred through the very process of studying it only if comparative religion is itself practiced as a sacred science, rooted in metaphysical principles and aware of that Divine Empyrean where alone the revealed forms and symbols of various religions can be seen in a harmony which cannot be observed and experienced in the purely human atmosphere. Part three turns to the discussion of traditional or sacred sciences especially as these sciences have been cultivated and preserved in non-Western civilizations, which have naturally not suffered as greatly from the effects of secularism and a purely secular science as has the West, where modernism was first born and where it had its period of incubation and growth before spreading to other continents. Here the tension between Western science and Asian cultures where the sacred sciences are still alive to some extent is brought out, as is the spiritual message of nature which the traditional cosmological sciences bear and in fact convey to those able to understand their full import. Finally, three chapters are devoted to the confrontation between the traditional worldview and the modern predicament, the first dealing with the very timely and crucial issue of the environmental crisis, which is viewed here from the point of view of the sacred study of nature within the more specific context of the Islamic tradition. This discussion is followed by a traditional critique of the idea of progress through material evolution so avidly supported by most of the exponents of modern science if not proven by the findings of modern science itself. This part concludes with an essay on theological modernism, which represents the penetration of secular science into the very realm of the sacred, into the domain of theology, which was considered the “queen of the sciences” in traditional Christian civilization. Our study concludes with a return to the theme of sacred science itself and the need for its cultivation and understanding in the contemporary context. Our goal in this book has not been to simply criticize modern science, which is legitimate if kept within the boundaries defined by the limitations of its own philosophical premises concerning the nature of physical reality as well as its epistemologies and methodologies. Our aim has been to present at least some elementary notions concerning the sacred sciences and the meaning of such sciences in the contemporary world. But this endeavor itself requires opening a space for such a science in the present-day intellectual climate and hence criticizing the totalitarian claims of modern science or at least that scientism and positivism which claim a monopoly upon knowledge. Many of the essays presented in this volume were printed earlier in various times and climes, some in the West and others in the East. In most cases they have been thoroughly revised and in many cases rewritten, while certain of the essays appear in print for the first time here. We hope that their presentation in this volume and as an organic whole will make them more readily accessible and that the work will be a humble contribution to a better understanding of the traditional and sacred sciences so much needed by the modern world, lost in the maze caused by its forgetfulness of the traditional and perennial wisdom of which these very sciences are applications and depositories. But ultimately God knows best. wa’Llāhu a‘lam. Seyyed Hossein Nasr Bethesda, Maryland June 1991

Notes

1. See especially our Knowledge and the Sacred (Albany, N.Y., 1989). 2. All human beings, by virtue of being human, possess the intellectual faculty but in most cases this faculty is in a virtual state and most often eclipsed by veils of passion which present it from functioning wholly and fully. INTRODUCTION 3

3. Throughout this work we use the term tradition and traditional as refering to principles of Divine Origin along with their transmission and applications within a particular world, which for that very reason is called traditional. See our Knowledge and the Sacred, chapter two, “What is Tradition?” pp. 65ff.