Religion and the Order of Nature

Abstract

Even by his own exceptional standards, this new book by Seyyed Hossein Nasr is a remarkable work destined to be a classic in the field of religious studies of nature. Professor Nasr brings together a breath-taking depth of knowledge in a single volume-he covers the fields of metaphysics and comparative religion, traditional cosmology and modem philosophies of nature, as well as the history of science and the rise of secularism and humanism. The book is especially relevant to this issue, which is dedicated to economics as applied ethics, for Professor Nasr argues that the environmental crisis is an external reflection of modem man’s spiritual crisis. While others naively believe that a more clever use of technology will avert the impending environmental calamity, Professor Nasr demonstrates that what really needs to be addressed and remedied is modem man’s misguided search for the infinite in a finite world. Rather than satisfying his yearning through religion and spirituality which leads to the Infinite, modern man pursues material objects in an external world divorced from its spiritual significance as a sign of God. The result is internal dissatisfaction, giving rise to insatiable appetites and the environmental crisis. While Professor Nasr documents this work with a wealth of data and detail, the reader is never allowed to lose sight of the essential. As one of his admiring readers noted, “The book has the form of academic research but the substance of metaphysical insight; the penetrating acuity of the logician is combined with the spiritual sensibility of the contemplative.” For Professor Nasr, the contemplative appreciation of the world of nature is essential to avert an environmental catastrophe and does not detract from objective science, rather it is a fulfillment of it. Indeed, the intelligence is objective to the extent that it accurately registers, not only that which is, but also all that is. In this sense, true objectivity requires one to know things as they are in divinis, corresponding to the hadith of the Prophet in which he asks God to show us things as they really are. Objectivity does not consist in denying the qualitative dimension of nature as symbols leading man to God, and taking its quantitative dimension to be the only reality. Professor Nasr relates this incomprehension of the spiritual significance of nature to the environmental crisis and denial of man’s spiritual needs. He points out that this quantitative approach is to take a part to be the whole, and is evidence of partiality rather than objectivity. For those who recognize that the current environmental crisis cannot be understood, much less solved, without a wider spiritual approach, Professor Nasr’s book will be both enlightening and a source of consolation. Based on his 1994 Cadbury Lectures delivered at the University of Birmingham, England, this book complements an earlier classic, Knowledge and the Sacred. Whereas his earlier book focused on the desacralization of knowledge in the modem West, his new book is concerned with the desacralization of nature. At the root of both errors is an attitude which creates an internal world of reason cut off from both the intellect and Revelation, and an external world cut off from its spiritual significance as a sign from God ...