The Spiritual Journey of Seyyed Hossein Nasr

Ramin Jahanbegloo

G.K. Chesterton wrote: “There are two main moral necessities for the work of a great man: the first is that he should believe in the truth of his message; the second is that he should believe in the acceptability of his message.” Seyyed Hossein Nasr has both. An Islamic philosopher of rare exemplarity, he has also been all through his life a man of dialogue with different faiths and diverse cultures. Not only has Nasr heralded a renaissance of Islamic sciences but he has also been the agent and mediator through whom, in our day, the perennial philosophy has found a second birth. An unrelenting opponent of religious fundamentalism in all its forms throughout his career, Nasr presents his critique of modernity as a vision rooted in a traditional Muslim understanding of the world which respects both nature and human dignity. For Nasr, the traditional world was based on a tremendous sense of the Sacred and the Absolute, whereas the invention of modernity involved precisely the dissolution of that awareness, resulting in what Max Weber would call the “disenchantment of the world.” Nasr's critique of modernity, while being a severe condemnation of secularism, is not a call for regression. Like his inspirers of the Perennial School, Rene Guenon, Ananda K. Coomaraswamy and Frithjof Schuon, Seyyed Hossei Nasr provides his reader with a rigorous definition of what he understands by the term tradition.  Nasr considers tradition as the principal milestone for spiritual authenticity and an infinite source of grace.  Tradition, as described by Nasr, is the whole structure of thought which articulates the concepts embodied in the world of myth and symbols.  This is why, according to Nasr, there has always been in history of mankind, before the rise of modernity an esoterivc aspect to all traditions which reached to God and understood all things in God. But since the secularization of the Christian tradition and the techno-scientific domination of the world by the Western world in the last 100 years, other traditions have been also undergoing secularization. Actually, Nasr’s critique of secularization in the modern world is far from being an obscurantist attempt to ideologize tradition. On the contrary, his attempt to reestablish the esoteric tradition has created new grounds for a genuine comparative work on religions. One begins too see here how much of Nasr’s work has to do with tradition as something alive and a ceaselessly renewed insight. Nasr would be the first himself to recognize that tradition is an ever renewed vision of life. Nasr is in a sense himself a remarkable product of the living traditions of Iran and Islam. Therefore, unlike his perennial predecessors, he closely identifies himself with a unique religious tradition which is Islam, while being an active member of the Iranian society in the years before the revolution. As such Nasr subscribed all his life to Meister Eckhart’s formula: “If you want the kernel, you need to break the husk.”  Unlike his master Frithjof Schuon, Nasr’s point of departure has been Islam and not Advaita Vedanta. However, like Schuon he believes in the multileveled structure of the Divine Will. As such esoterism is for Nasr nothing less than the most comprehensive grammar of the Self. Nasr’s understanding of Schuon’s notion of “quintessential esoterism” finds its true universalistic perspective in the latter’s readings of famous Sufi thinkers like Ibn Arabi or Rumi. In his Tarjuman al-Ashwaq, Ibn Arabi sings: “My heart is open to all winds, It is a pasture for gazelles,And a home for Christian Monks,A temple for idols,The Black Stone of the Mecca Pilgrim,The table of the Torah,And the book of the Koran,Wherever God’s caravans turn,The religion of love shall be my religion,And my faith.”  Following the paths of Ibn Arabi, Meister Eckhart, Rumi and others, Nasr’s opus is a quest for the “essential elements of communality” among religions and a demonstration of the "transcendent unity of religions" based on an inter-faith dialogue. His philosophical work is indeed both a metaphysical and erudite demonstration of such communality at the summit of the great religious traditions and a strong response to the predominant relativism in today’s world. Another relevant aspect of Nasr’s outlook is his spiritual journey toward sacred art. Actually very few authors have covered, in the manner and style of Seyyed Hossein Nasr, the highlight themes of traditional art, architecture, calligraphy, poetry and prose literature in Islamic lands. Nasr treats Islamic art as a manifestation of the unity of Islam. As in the cases of Islamic sciences, Islamic art , according to Nasr, came into being from a wedding between the spirit that issued from the Quranic revelation and the existing arts which were developed in the Islamic civilization. Therefore, arts and sciences in Islam are based on the idea of unity, which is the heart of the Muslim revelation. To understand the Islamic arts and sciences in their essence, therefore, requires an understanding of some of the principles of Islam itself. Therefore, Nasr shows us in his work that it is necessary and reasonable to see Islam in a positive light despite the atrocities committed in its name, like all other religions, has contributed many positive things to humanity. Nasr is certainly aware of the deviations and corruptions of Islam and other traditional religions in the modern world. However, he seems to place a greater emphasis on the spiritual essence of traditions as a solution to the crisis of the modern world.

Each tradition, Nasr affirms, has a wealth of knowledge. The resuscitation of this knowledge, he argues, would allow religions all over the globe to enrich each other and cooperate to heal the wounds of the secularization of the world. In his work, Nasr traces the historical process through which Western civilization moved away from the idea of nature as sacred and embraced a world view which sees humans as alienated from nature and nature itself as a machine to be dominated and manipulated by humans. Thus, he argues that the devastation of our world has been exacerbated, if not actually caused, by the reductionist view of nature that has been advanced by modern secular science.  As a result, his goal altogether is to negate the totalitarian claims of modern science and to re-open the way to the religious view of the order of nature, developed over centuries in the cosmologies and sacred sciences of the great traditions. In addition to his natural sensibility to the beauty and majesty of nature, Nasr invites his readers to reexamine the traditional ideas and values in order to be able to tackle the contemporary predicament of the environmental crisis. In other words, one cannot analyze Nasr’s contribution to the world of the spirit without taking into account his contribution to a new ecological vision. Nasr’s work is, therefore, an organic whole which covers a plurality of dimensions like science, metaphysics, art, religion etc. A prolific writer and a gnostic thinker, Nasr remains above all an encyclopedic mind who combines in a masterly manner his own Islamic tradition with that of the East and the West. To put it another way, Seyyed Hossein Nasr inherits his Islamic scholarship but also perennial and comparative spiritual identity from a long and prestigious line of remarkable thinkers and wise men that provided him with a coherent and cohesive religious and civilizational framework. Through them he learned that having a real religious dialogue depends on acquiring an open mind and an open heart. Dialogue is, therefore, for Nasr, not only a pursuit of truth, but also a challenge to spiritual responsibility in a secular world heading for a forced uniformity imposed by a single set of values. Nasr is quite aware of the fact that the world of the 21st century is standing at a critical edge. Civilization to him, as to Gandhi, Tagore, and many other sage figures of the 20th century, is not equivalent to progress in science, technology and industry. For Nasr, a civilization is like a living organism, it grows and changes and adopts itself to the ever-changing environments. In this process, the central core of a civilization is capable of resisting historical changes. This is how in its own unique way it offers its members paths of self-transcendence. In other words, a true dialogue among religious traditions is a universalistic outlook that enables people of different faiths to transcend their differences and arrive at a unity.